The Besties - Spoiling the Heck Out of Elden Ring

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Look, we told you we'd be talking about Elden Ring for a very long time, and here we are, doing just that. We're going to be talking about the game's first half, and then, after a brief interlude, the second half! And then we're gonna talk about it less in the future, probably!Other media discussed: Sonic 2, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Old Enough, Perfect Tides, Minx  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!

I was working on a song about Elden Ring before, while I was waiting for you guys to get on the call. Did you make any progress? Well, it's kind of, it's, I, it's like, Elden Ring, Elden Ring, this is the hunt for the Elden Ring. It's a quest that you'll undergo. that you'll undergo don't be too scared to go below because in the caves

where the treasure hides you never know what you will find so pick up your axe and pick up your stave don't forget to behave in the quest for the

Elden Ring Elden Ring this is the quest for the Elden Ring. Elden Ring, this is the hunt for the Elden Ring. Grab your sword. Grab your shield. Head out onto the battlefield. There are orcs. There aren't orcs. But there are zombies aplenty that you will discourse with.

Talk to them about their lives. Do they have lovely zombie wives? Then chop off their head and take their runes. You won't be the buffoon in the hunt for the Elden Ring. Elden Ring. This is the hunt for the Elden Ring! Elden Ring! This is the hunt for the Elden Ring! My favorite part of that whole thing was that you had the opportunity to say,

don't forget to be brave, but instead you said, don't forget to behave. And I don't know in my, and I guess we can start the spoiler cast here. I don't know that I was a particularly well behaved denizen of the lands between. I don't know that I would get good marks from my teacher.

I did bow and curtsy quite a bit. So I guess that's fair. And then I killed every God. A six out of 10. For the song, not the game my name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the year. My name's... Yeah, probably. I'm sorry. I'm Griffin, and it's the same. I feel the same.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I never became an Elden Lord. Aww. That's sad, but predictable. My name is Ross Froschek, and I know the best game of the week also sad but predictable hi welcome to the video game club the besties just by listening you my friend are a member

and I want to do a preamble here if you have not completed Elden Ring or if you have completed Elden Ring but there's things that you are worried you didn't see and do in Elden Ring that or if you have completed Elden Ring, but there's things that you are worried you didn't see and do in Elden Ring that you plan on checking out, then

this may not be the episode for you. Well, well. Unless you don't care. Well, well, so we're splitting this episode into two parts. The first. I can't guarantee that. I will try, but I don't know. I think we can do it. I have faith in us. Well, we're going to try to keep the first half before the Grand Dectus lift.

Oh, Jesus Christ. What a bookmark to use. You know, for the big elevator that you take. How about before everything that defeating General Radon? Everything before that? Because it's not even that. It's impossible. It's the Royal City, Laendel.

The elevator is the closest we can get. I put a lot of thought into this. I don't remember what happens. What comes after the elevator is Laendel, the Royal Capital. So let's set that as a halfway point. There's a very clear mid-game bookmark right there. I will try. I will attempt.

But no promises. Yes. So this is the episode where if you don't care about Elden Ring, we're gonna try and not talk about it constantly for the rest of the year by just kind of getting it all out of our systems now. Right. You're free to move on. We've already got your downloads, sucka.

That's not true at all, too, because I still have to play the entire second half, so I'm gonna be talking about this game all year. I'm sorry, baby. We are going to talk about this game elden ring we're gonna say everything there is to say about it everything and we're gonna do it all after the break brush did you come up with the idea for the structure of this episode yeah a little bit well just i i came up with the breaking up so i'm gonna i'm gonna be really clear about how we're gonna break this up uh because in case you don't remember the grand dectus lift which is a giant elevator but you could technically not even use it and get to the last area i never use it

we're going to talk in the first half are limb grave which is the starting area uh la la yearnia which is the like lakes area to the west of limb grave um caled which is the, like, lakes area to the west of Limgrave. Caelid, which is the, kind of the east of Limgrave. It's like the weird buggy place with dragons and... I just had this image of Russ greeting you as you walk through the gate into the game. Like, what if Russ was the first NPC?

And he's like, oh, hey, hey, hey, let me give you a little land. So, okay, you're in Limgrave. There's also the Weeping Peninsula, which you can definitely not go okay, you're in Limgrave. There's also the Weeping Peninsula, which you can definitely knock out. That's part of Limgrave, though. I mean, it's kind of its own thing. Yeah, it is.

If somebody lives in the Weeping Peninsula, they're going to take huge offense to that, okay? It's very much its own thing. They really just call it the peninsula, too. You don't need to say weeping if you live there. I bet you the people living in Limgrave also see the Weeping Peninsula, folks, as the real bridge and tunnel crowd because i'm pretty sure you do have to cross a bridge and go through a tunnel to get there uh boy can we so i there's so much

to talk about in this game that i don't want to focus too much on effusive praise so to like frame that i am curious because we are all to varying degrees, familiar with FromSoftware's body of work. How does this stack up against the other FromSoft games for you all? Number one with a bullet, baby! Yeah, easily number one for me. Russ? Yeah, unquestionably not even close. The best they've done.

For me, Bloodborne still edges it out just barely, but that's because of my own sort of proclivities and the fact that Bloodborne scratched every dark itch that I ever had. I love the aesthetics of Bloodring. Or, sorry, Bloodborne are still edged out for me. Like, I really love the way that world looks and operates and the gothic touches there. But, like... What is interesting to me about elden ring is it's like

from soft like completely taking the limiters off so if you look at like a sekiro in sekiro like there are no cheat there's no cheese there's no short shortcuts really so to speak like you just had to like learn the systems and master them and then in an elden ring they said fuck that like we are going to fill this world with all these different kinds of like advantages and techniques so that you can always have like an easier time getting past the roadblock that you're stuck at which is like antithetical to sekiro and for for me like i this is an incredible game and almost definitely gonna be my game of the year but i feel like the way that bloodborne kind of walks the line between those two is is is why it still edges it out yeah i'm gonna talk about one specific aspect of that so you know people have talked about the

fact that oh you get stuck in a boss you can go elsewhere but the the interesting thing is that elsewhere is not like meaningless like cruft or fodder no like you would find like here's a randomly generated whatever in skyrim for example it's like all meaningful and narratively driven and so the example that springs to mind is like uh castle morn which is on the weeping peninsula it's like the southeast tip i guess somewhere around there um and it is not at all required there's no like major there is a boss there but not like a major required boss and as you approach it there's like this amazing story that sort of unfolds where the people they they had sort of like had these creatures that were serving the uh owners of the castle and the creatures rebelled

and when you get there it's like in the middle slash at the end of the rebellion where almost all of the people that live there are slaughtered except for a couple and you're sort of just uncovering this horror show right um and again this is all optional and easily missed there's like a lot that i missed in limb grave because i ended up sort of just skipping past it almost accidentally um and so coming back to that stuff and seeing it later in the game even though it becomes a little bit easier to get through i still have like a narrative connection to it um in that case there was like this really like heart-wrenching story of a uh a woman who sends you in to find her father and you find the father and the father you know begs you to like go bring

a note back to her or something like that and you get back to her and she's dead and the father's like weeping over her and it's just this this brutal gut check thing that is so, again, so easily missed, and there's so much of that throughout this game, and that might seem like a fault, but it's actually thrilling because it means you're constantly stumbling upon these stories that you've never seen before. And you get a Game of Thrones sword.

Yeah. So huge. Very touching, but you also get a Game of Thrones sword. And we love that. it's made of more swords did i mention that i was improvising the lyrics to the song because we figured that out yeah okay yeah i didn't i i don't want it i i've seen the skyrim comparison a bit and i do want to say one thing i do not like about elden ring is that there are anytime you get into a

uh i forget what they're called like burial sites or something or uh catacombs or something yeah the catacombs and then anytime you get into a mine those were indistinguishable for the most part uh from each other where like if you're in a catacomb you're gonna fight a bunch of fucking skeletons and then you're gonna get to the boss at the end and it might be like a black knife assassin uh usually that's like what it's gonna be and then at the end of every mine there's the crystallarians or whatever they're called and sometimes they're red and sometimes there's two of them it felt uh that was about as uninspired as from soft gets which is only notable because like this is a developer who prides itself on like extremely

memorable boss fight and the game's like 180 hours long right well let me let me counter the the comment i agree with you visually i think you know basically all of the those underground tunnel-y things look basically the same and the catacombs look basically the same to one another from a level design standpoint they do some of the most interesting things in those levels because some of them i did one where intentionally they were having you feel like wait i've been here before and the only way i was able to kind of feel myself around was through like player notes and like oh i actually had to go underneath this elevator

to get to the second level that was essentially near a near duplicate of the level i was just in intentionally to get me turned around to try to like feel my way through so they actually do a lot of really clever stuff in that even though visually they look very similar one another i think my bigger frustration with them was because of how labyrinthine they were if you died it was tough to like they're a lot more linear than most of the of the game so it's like it there i did end up in a lot of slogs where it's like okay i gotta fight my way through all these idiots to get back to to where i was but like the crystallarian bosses in particular like uh once you have a blunt weapon you break break their stature once, and then Hulkamania just runs by. They're very easy bosses once you know how to beat them.

And I fought, not a joke, maybe eight different versions of them at some point across it, which is like, in any other game, it would not even register as a thing. But in a game made by the best boss makers in the business right now, it just struck me as a little bit what is it he says on in the 99 floors of fright they can't all be winners

i mentioned uh castle morn were there other areas that like like side areas that stood out to you guys i mean windmill town with the fucking dancing with the fucking midsummer that is a part two ladies that's a part two thing no i thought that was in kayla oh you're definitely not flawed it's definitely i can tell you i know this map really well i can tell you the system of the structure i i like this i the what fresh did is he somehow hacked into my steam deck and figured out exactly where i was at at 80 hours yeah this is basically like everything I've played, except for, here's a fun thing,

haven't played General Redon because my game literally won't load that fight, and it is what is keeping me from moving forward. Is that a silly Steam Deck issue? No. No. I think I know actually how to trigger it now. No, there's a trigger you haven't done yet.

No, no, no, I did that too, Frosh. I've done basically everything the game has to offer in this area, but I think I have an idea of why it's not triggering. So in the first 80 hours, were there any areas that you guys particularly enjoyed? Yes. Well, before I give an area, I do want to go back to the Sekiro versus this thing because Sekiro is the game that I bounced off just right away right and I think it's kind of hilarious in hindsight that Activision was like hey we want to work with FromSoftware to get them to make a game and FromSoft said okay we're going

to make our most difficult and potentially like unapproachable game with you it still sold a trillion copies so i'm sure it worked out for activision but i think it's kind of hilarious that that game is i mean you have to get good right that is the get good game for this one it was wild playing with fresh because fresh is better at games than i am i will admit it right here on the show and two even though your skill with games is a measure of your masculinity as we can all Because Fresh is better at games than I am. I will admit it right here on the show. And two. Even though your skill with games is a measure of your masculinity. As we can all attest. That's true.

And you know. I'm just not a big boy like him. And he was further in the game. But because this game is so big. When we played together. There were a number of places that he helped me with but there was still areas where i was able to help him and that felt awesome because that's the thing that i can't get from you know bloodborne or any of these other games once i was behind i was just behind

and i immediately felt like well i'm never going to be good as everybody else but to have even if it's one or two spots that i am the best at that feels great to answer the question that was proposed though i'm going to say the first time you go down an elevator and you're in uh river the fucking coolest the fucking cool it's the first time you go down an elevator and it's like oh there's a whole nother strata of this of this it was the exact moment where i thought i got a pretty good handle on the the size and scale of this and it's like there's a cave where there are stars in the sky it's so fucking big yeah it is yeah i mean that moment i was like this is probably a little side like dungeon area that i found and it just kept going bigger

and bigger they do this very smart thing that i wish more games would do where when you open the map up the first time uh the area that you you're currently in so in this case limb grave basically takes up the entire map so it's like oh there's the entire map and there's no like empty space on the corners you scroll to the edges and it just stops with the area that you can see as you explore more of the map you basically can scroll more and it begins to really actually reveal the scale so when i was first started playing i was like oh i've made it to caitlin i've been playing like 50 or 60 hours and the map is basically full so that you know i must be getting pretty close to the end and it turns out i was not even halfway which is great because it allows you to keep focusing on the area that you're in rather than

just like you know sprinting towards the end right um yeah i actually like intentionally did not progress so that i felt like okay i cleared a large chunk of this area it's so it's so smart because you say intentionally not progress and i think that that's like it is there's obfuscation right on like Unlike how progression, like how you will progress, like what the progression is of the main, like if you're talking about a critical path, right? But I think what they've done where that's not uncommon, I think for a FromSoft game, but I think what's so smart about it

and the way they've sort of weaponized it in Elden Ring is to reinforce that like, this is the game like the the things that you're doing these small encounters that you're having the the the castles and dungeons and all that like that's the experience it don't worry so much about whether or not you have you know you're getting another piece of the fucking triforce like this is the this is the moment that you're in right now like it doesn't you don't need to sweat the the main uh narrative flow because it'll just kind of work itself out like it'll just kind of get there and the way they do that is by having major chunks of the game i mean namely the is it ronnie is that how it's pronounced yeah ronnie like ronnie's quest you have to stumble upon it like this huge huge aspect of the game and it's one of many like this where you you are not directed directly into

whatever comes next whatever the main thing that you need to do is you mean even the major boss fights right and that that reality makes everything feel equal in a certain way. Does that make sense? Yeah. My understanding is that you only need to beat two, quote, major bosses to get to the end of the game. Yeah. Based off the six or seven minute speed run that is available right now. Yeah.

Somebody cracked it under it was so funny because i think polygon wrote a story yesterday that was like holy shit somebody beat it in under 10 minutes and then that same day that person beat it under seven minutes yeah they just like shaved three fucking minutes off of the the time yeah i mean i will say that is not obviously it doesn't even look like they're using every butchery of course imaginable but i will say that is not obviously it doesn't even look like they're using every butchery imaginable but i would say like for people that are playing it normally you really technically only need to i think beat two bosses and because of that you know i think people get a little bummed it's like oh i missed this storyline or i missed this character like rant the randy quest plants right the randy quest is

like an enormous quest it's a lot of content but if you miss it there is no impact to your experience i mean you'll unlock more stuff that you missed you just wouldn't know like it i mean i barely understood the story even doing all these quests so it's fine like beat the game and then watch the 45 minute lore explainer on youtube um and then understand what the fuck is going on because otherwise you just like no one is smart enough to play this and understand it at the same time every empyrean needs a shadow and a consort in order to approach the title of health and lord you see uh i don't really want to talk anymore no it's it's a bad idea there's a great

youtube video that we can link that there's lots yeah there's better lore than a bunch of people who dove into it um but as long as we're about the first half of this game i think the first half of this game i think the whole game beats ass i think this game for it does a lot of things that are so impressive given the scale of the game and i think the most impressive thing is how progression feels uh like i never felt like an overpowered demigod maybe once i figured out the like you can chug the potion and shoot the beam forever like that that certainly helped me out to take down a few field bosses uh every now and then but like until i had discovered that and even honestly for a lot of the parts after it like i didn't feel overpowered i didn't

feel underpowered which may just be like because i've played so many of these games and i kind of understand like oh you have to you know uh sometimes you have to grind out some of the materials you need to upgrade your weapons and etc cetera, et cetera. But for the size of this game to always kind of- The balance is wild. Yeah. It's so good. And maybe it depends on what kind of build you go for, right? Like I can't imagine not having some sort of magic

or at least like ranged weaponry on it. Like there's some boss fights that I can't imagine doing it just with melee. But I've seen people like, um so but i've seen people like you know i've seen people do it on youtube i watched a soul level one playthrough of the game on youtube and it was outrageous the really cool thing is they give you so many tools to abuse every system in the game intentionally and then you can like really like make short work of it i'd recommend trying to play it without doing that because it really does like play the you know in some cases play the game

for you but i think they really wanted you to like use your ingenuity and make i do i will say this i think that if i have one uh not one i I have issues with Elden Ring, obviously, but something that I think falls a little short in this opening half. When you start playing and they sort of open the world to you, there's definitely like nudging you in a sort of direction. I have now, including myself and two other people, Dad and Travis, who started playing Elden Ring, got to that point where it's like, after you get the ability to level up and you're sitting outside the gates and there's the little, I think it's Stormgate,

and then there's the gatefront ruins nearby. There is definitely this sense of like, well, what do I do? Like, what do you want me to do? What should I do? And I don't think they do. I don't think they teach the lesson early enough that like, I don't know, just do what, I mean, do what you feel like doing.

Like, just go wherever you feel like going. Because they're kind of hinting that there's a right way to go with the, you know, golden rays coming off of the, the points of grace. Yeah. Um, I, I wish they had like reinforced that lesson a little bit earlier or found a way to like teach you that this is going to be more self-guided than you

might be. They are subtle about it. The, the closest version of that that I can find is like at vendors, they'll sell you notes. And if you read the notes it'll be like hey you might want to check out this random corner of the map that might have something interesting there and that was what got me exploring more than anything else because

you're right like otherwise i was just sort of making my way to the castle because what else am i going to do right i think you do everyone that plays the game eventually will learn that lesson because you're just constantly swamped in interesting things to run into. But I agree, like early on, it can feel a little overwhelming. You just have to remind yourself, like, again, no right way to play. You will find dope shit in any direction that you run in. I also love that you, like, no matter how powerful you get, it's sort of like there are still areas where it's like oh fuck i don't want to be here like i don't like this this isn't this isn't it's like you the um uh the the gross the lake of rot is not in this half but um there are areas like that where i mean

think about caleb is like a very awful looking area Kaled's terrible and like you go there and it's like it kind of reminds you like you think about the strongest healthiest most capable person in the world if there's a volcano they're still not gonna be like eh let me fuck with it real quick let me get in there real quick and see so it keeps that sense

of like I don't like it here I really don't want to be here much longer I would like to go please even when i was like level 100 and i would go to caleb it looks like it wants you to leave it would like you to go this is not for you i have i have a question for y'all if if the game was everything that we've talked about so far and the capital and then the the final boss fight was like right after the capital so basically again this first half would that have been enough game for you i'm not saying 150 percent yeah i god it's hard to say i would have really i don't think it would have been for the like deep in the pocket souls people maybe but like for me if i've been from i would have done like chapter one chapter

two yeah 2022 2023 made twice the money that's what i'm kind of surprised that they didn't because it really does feel like they made two games and then just gave a gave the second one to us for free which i mean no complaining i love it Thank you. I'm just kind of surprised. Yeah, it's enormous. As I said, I thought I was getting to the end of the game when I was exploring the Caelid Tower, and I was like, well, this has got to be it. And it just keeps going.

I don't, you know, whether you think that's a fault or not is sort of a question, but it's important to remember that most most souls games your first time through it griffin you you would know better than me 50 hours 45 50 hours around there uh yeah i would say 50 to 60 for nothing remotely close to the length of this like easily this is double the length of any souls game or triple or triple Can we talk bosses real quick in this section? Any of the... Radon is one of the best boss fights I've ever done.

Ranala? Radon. Ranala was fucked up too in like a genuine Akira way. Let's just remind people who... Sure. Let's talk about Ranala of the Full Moon. Ranala of the Full Moon. Okay.

She's at the top of the academy. Raya Lucaria. Raya Lucaria. And she's one of the main bosses that you have to beat two of in order to progress through the game. And it's two phases. In the first phase, she's carrying a little womb, and she has a room filled with small versions of her,

like tiny little ponios, just kind of like chilling. And then every once in a while, one of them will like sing and you have to find the one that's singing and hit them three times to like weaken her. And then the second fight like turns into a, the second phase is just a like absolutely brutal gauntlet of dodging incredibly powerful one hit hit kill most of the time magic

spells and just trying to get in there and get as many hits on her as you possibly while she calls in like dragons and also yeah like everything shoots the moon at you yeah that fight is that that fight's neat sort of just like conceptually the radon fight is the one that takes place on a huge island he's a big fucking boy and he has all these like crazy wide sweeping attacks and gravity spells but you can summon in virtually every npc from the game and so you're just running around this battlefield trying to stay alive as you jump from like golden spawn point to spawn point just like get in here alexander fucking like uh uh patches patches i you're a fucking piece of shit but please god i need every head get in here it's all hands on deck please yeah you you sort of chill in the back and you watch

16 guys like wail away at him and i was just like kind of casting occasional spell hoping the aggro wouldn't point at me very very cool fight i did get one shot more than any other fight in that absolutely one of the hardest like a brutal thing but but what made up for it was when i realized that radon huge though he is is actually riding a little tiny normal sized horse right so the lore the lore of radon if i can talk one lore thing it's my favorite thing radon is kind of a sweetheart he loves his horse like that's the lore of radon is he loves his horse and he loved riding his horse and then he like got these elden ring powers that made him too big to ride the horse and it tortured him and so he learned and mastered gravity magic so that he could make himself light enough

to ride his horse again. Fuck that's funny. That's so good. And it only gets sadder for Adan from here. Yeah, because then he gets cursed with the Crimson Rot but can't die, so his body is just constantly in agony, but he just wants to be light enough to ride his horse. He's one of the all-time best bosses in any

from soft game um yeah that was a great that was a a great fight and i and it's one of those that i like where it's like you play it so many times that things that would be devastating become sort of like just part of the pattern like oh i got it okay giant arrows coming past me okay got past that like uh it's it fantastic. I love that fight. Yeah. I know we're talking bosses, but I'm going to talk just an individual enemy. Just a normal enemy you face.

Not a real challenge, but one of my favorites. It better be a bird. It's not a bird. Oh. It's worst birds. The albanerics. Oh, man.

These are little frog people. They live around Raya Lucaria town, the academy. The flooded town they are amazing they they sort of march around with their like stabs and stuff and when they see you instead of running at you they just start doing cartwheels and it's fucking spectacular and i love them and you can dress up as them later and it's so great. There's so many individual mini enemies that just really stand out to me. All birds suck. All birds are the worst. All birds are the worst.

I like the bird that throws fire or spits fire at you. They have like helmets and they have giant blades taped to their feet. They know that the birds are annoying so they decided, well, if they're annoying,

we might as well make them funny. Yeah. Which I respect. I also like how, speaking of that same area that Fresh mentioned, up until that point, everything was like scary, you know? Even the birds,

as funny as they were, were scary. And then you come across dudes who are like you know what let's build a giant car and put a giant head on it and then put a flamethrower coming out of its mouth and like yeah that seems like a great idea and then it doesn't it like feels completely out of place in the the game up until that well. Well, the tone shifts. Like, environment to environment, like, you're right, feels like a night and day change. From Limgrave to Laernia to Caelid

look like they're in three different games, which is honestly great from a pacing standpoint because if you were just in Limgrave the whole time, it'd be kind of boring. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it is amazing. I just loved that castle in general was just so wonderful.

As somebody who was already focusing on casting, it was so labyrinthian, and there were so many incredible rewards behind hidden walls and down various massive ladders and spires. There was a great moment where I was talking to Russ because we were both kind of doing casting builds, and he was like, like oh did you get the thing that makes the casting speed faster and i was like no did you get the thing that uh makes the spells cause less he's like no and we just kind of like compared notes like oh you got to jump off the roof here and then roll off to this

side and yeah you think that the dungeon though like i think they call them legacy dungeons or whatever they're called um you think that they're linear and they do feel much more linear than anything else in the game but i beat raya lucaria and missed a good third of the areas in that dungeon because it was just like off the beaten path and you had to jump off the right ledge and there was everything in front of you and like that magic the fact that it persists in the dungeons as well as in the open world is so hard to pull off and they just it really doesn't feel like they left anything on the table from soft is the only like one of the only developers i can think of that does really solid like level design jokes like really actually like set up punchline like you see some weird like

little alcove and you follow it for five minutes and fight a bunch of dudes and then at the end of the bit you're back where you started yeah like oh okay so you just i could have just jumped down the ledge okay great great thank you thank you thank you all right excellent the other one is i this is uh a small like this is from the latter half obviously because it's did you guys start a new game plus no holy shit okay real quick if you start a new game plus you are extremely powerful obviously right so you wipe uh the boss like the first boss you come up with i still had all my spells and my staff and all my gear right so like fuck this guy i one-shotted him the first boss is supposed to kill you right because that's how oh yeah yeah this is like that literally the first boss when you create your character in a minute

yeah yeah so i kill him one shot i'm like yeah fuck yeah and then there's this gate off to the right i'm like all right well let's see let's what's up so i'm following the path and it's just like leading out to a um just sort of like a a perch and like a a large a big stone uh perch and i keep walking i go out to the edge of the perch and i'm looking around like well where does this go now oops it collapses and kills you. That's how they get you. That's how they're like, oh, very good. Very, very good. You beat our guy.

Check this out. The ground just randomly collapses beneath you. There's no like preamble. There's no reason. It's just like, now you're dead. That's so great. The old Kingsfield games that they, were like the first games that they made,

were basically very, very, very rudimentary Souls games in first person with like PS1 era graphics. And they're so slow and not great. But all of them start out with you walking down a road and the road just collapses and you die apropos of nothing. First thing. Hi, welcome to Kingsfield. Fuck you. You're dead. Now don't step on that spot anymore.

Okay, now you know. Let's jump to Kingsfield. Fuck you. You're dead. Now don't step on that spot anymore. Okay, now you know. Let's jump. Let's make the jump. Okay. We're going to take a break first, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Let's take a break.

We'll come back to talk. We'll take the lift. We're waiting for the lift to descend while you listen to commercials. And then once you're here, we'll have ascended. Okay, so it should be noted the reason i picked this was it kind of felt like halfway through the game but you can reach it's called the altus plateau you can reach it without taking this lift if you take a side dungeon which is one of the my favorite dungeons in the game i forget what the name of it is but it's this amazing climb up the side of the cliff so you can skip the lift entirely but um yeah we found ourselves in the altus plateau and it is home to liandel the capital city of uh

i guess the lands between and one of my probably just from a level design standpoint the most complicated level i've ever played in my entire life so which one land out the whole royal capital is like the royal capital is architectural sort of triumph uh which you don't think about uh that much in video games but this is a big city and you can go through a lot of it. Before we get there, I just wanted to mention the first sort of area that you end up in once you take the lift. I mean, you can end up in different places, but there's sort of a, what would you call it? A ravine? A sort of like the mirage area.

There's this huge pit in the middle that's like forested. Did you guys do the Mirage Rise and the stuff in there? The Mirage Rise? Maybe? There were mirages that you had to track down inside this place that opened up an invisible tower that had mirage magic. Oh yeah, sure. That's one of the towers that give

you like magical powers and stuff, right? Oh, yes. Yeah, I remember. Is there a dog there? This is where you get invisibility magic. I think there are dogs. What are you chasing down, dogs?

Big armored slow dogs, you know? No. No, it's just sort of like mirages that you're trying to find. Did you try butthole? It's so funny every time. The use of, and this is, again, not entirely about the second half of the game, but this is the game that proved the concept of player messages as being genuinely transformative.

Because there were so many times where I would not have gotten where i got without like a message on the floor telling me there and sure a lot of it is like try rump but a lot of but even those i will say like they're funny really help with the they're funny but they also have this secondary purpose of like even when the game feels very insulated and and and isolated your experience can be so difficult when you see those messages it did give me a little bit of like sense of community yeah like you feel like yeah okay we're we this person got through this they what they experience is they're commiserating with me rather than like trolling me a lot that said i i wouldn't want to play it all this way

but i played uh you know probably like six or seven hours on flights to New York and back. And playing without that is nice every once in a while. The first time that point that Fresh talked about of climbing up the side of the cliff and then you come to the kind of like graveyard of trolleys? Like I don't know what they are. Carts? Yeah, they're like the caskets that they're pulling yeah and that that happened without being online and it was cool just to see this beautiful terrifying tableau with nothing all over it and yeah it's interesting i was talking

to a friend of mine who's playing through dark souls one for the first time right now and there was apparently some major hack that was going on with dark souls where you could like access people's like personal pc kernel like major major problems such that they shut the servers down so that anyone who's playing Dark Souls, I think remastered right now, cannot play online. So he's playing it entirely without notes. And I, like, it is transformative in the sense of like, I really think these games are designed with notes in mind,

such that there's so much that you would never, ever, ever think to try or look at unless there was a note there, short of like rolling into every fucking wall ever yeah um so i jump i it actually gives me a little bit of a worry for the future of these games if only because i it's bum it's a bummer to me to think that like 10 years from now if they shut

the servers down someone wouldn't have that experience um but i do think elden ring is better at that insofar as because of the you know npc spirits that you can summon and stuff like that i think it's a much more enjoyable game even if you didn't have the online but the online really does help the dream would be that you could download a full set of these right yeah there's some or like they they save like 30 or 40 static of these that randomize um the idea i uh the the castle took me so long which castle are you talking about the cap the capital you mean the capital took me so long that it felt like its own game it felt like once i left there i was like holy shit I thought I would be here forever. I thought that this was just my reality now.

It's so complex, but you really do get a sense as you play of like, okay, I kind of remember, I kind of know where I'm at. It's stunning. I mean, the skill of the design is absolutely unfathomable. Yeah, the part where you have to like climb a dragon that has been speared into the side of the castle you have to like climb his wing like a bridge it's it's so it's so incredible and then there's like a whole like dungeon of sewers that i didn't know was there uh until somebody was like telling me about it and so i like came back to check out the sewers and it led me down like a whole nother thing that took me probably like three or four hours just to

explore the the the you know infrastructure underneath the city uh yeah yeah the sewers blew me away i was like not expecting that at all the fact that they had this incredibly detailed dungeon nested within this already insanely detailed dungeon yeah um yeah i mean you know justin sort of alluded to it but just like ignoring the level design like mastery the fact that you can like weave through this map and it doesn't feel like you're being guided like it feels like you have a lot of control over how you go through it. While also being like jaw-droppingly stunning from an art design standpoint.

Like it looks, every minute looks like concept art, like brought to life. And it's not, you know, from a like technical standpoint, it's not the most advanced game we've ever seen. There's a reason it can run on last generation consoles or on this and on the steam deck for that matter is like it's not pushing every lighting effect or ray tracing or whatever but and and this remains true to all their games really they are so good at just art design in general that it sort of elevates what would

otherwise be maybe not the most detailed environments yeah into something that is just like something you want to spend dozens and dozens of hours in sure um what sorry go ahead i was just gonna say that the the we're focusing a lot on the royal capital there's a lot of other really cool shit that kind of opens up that is all feels sort of optional and and branching uh that literally yeah yeah the haggle tree i think is what it's called or how like telling tree how like tree yeah is like a weird alternate universe version of this big beautiful golden tree that you like have been looking at the whole time you've been playing the game only this one is like sick and fucked up and filled with some of the gnarliest enemies

in the whole game. And it's a level. I mean, it's a fully fleshed out area of the game, and it's a treat. Yeah, and then you reach the bottom of it, and you fight what is, I think, the hardest boss in the game? I couldn't.

It was the one I couldn't do. Oh, wow. I couldn't do it. Oh, wow. Millennium. I know. Yeah. I had to really tap into some deep, I put on the katana. I was like, all couldn't do it. Oh, wow. Millennium. I know. Yeah. I had to really tap into some deep.

I put on the katana. I was like, all right, I'm going to Sekiro this shit. I'm going to tap into the old ways. What boss was hardest for you? That one was the easiest for me, but I don't know about you guys. Because you haven't played it. Yeah. There is actually a, it's going around the on the internet right now apparently there's

someone that is putting a summon sign down that uh whose name is let me solo her and if you summon them they show up they're completely naked but for a pot on their head and they proceed to solo melania as a summon it's the most incredible thing. There's a video on YouTube. It's amazing. And that's the sort of community that is sort of fostered around. I mean, there's a lot of butthole jokes, but also like people being very clever about and just like fulfilling fun roles in the game.

Yeah, for sure. Using the tool set. Yeah, he beats, I watched the video. There's not a single hit that gets landed on this guy it's outrageous i am i did not love the snowfields no uh i don't i did not love that area it was hard to get around it was the only time where i felt outclassed by the enemies like i just felt like my spells weren't doing enough damage like i would use almost all my mana to take down like a small group of people and had to like re read,

you know, recharge my, my man at the, and I just didn't like the, I don't know the way it looked. That was the, the area that I probably enjoyed the least was the snow fields. Yeah.

Yeah. I, I, I agreed level design wise. It wasn't. And also you also get the fire giant who is not, who is like a big sort of like, he's supposed to feel like a huge sort of gate or what's the gatekeeper boss of just like,

well, you gotta be, you gotta be this tough to, if you want to ride this ride. But he's just not ride uh but he's just not a very he's not a very like inspired boss fight he's a big fucking giant he's a big fucking giant that like throws fire at you it's like not the most exciting thing uh yeah it wasn't my least favorite area though that was crumbling pheromones oh i love i love i love that's why i

love that was so uh you know what i don't dislike. That's why I love it. That was so, uh, you know what? I don't dislike, I mean, like it looks amazing. It just like was so scary the whole time. Like it really felt like,

uh, for a little while you're trapped there. Yeah. It's just terrifying. Uh, there, there's a moment early on in the first half, Chris plant,

you could experience this. It's in the first half of the game. There's a, there's a location called Four Belfries, and each of the Belfries, as you unlock them using a special item, teleports you to a random spot somewhere in the map, and one of them teleports you to Farum Azul,

which is effectively the last level of the game, more or less, when you're level 20. Yeah. I think this might still be used as one of the skips so yeah there's a wrong warp you can do where you go to one of those you're supposed to warp to this like one little standalone part where you can take a sneak peek at the last level of the game but there's a way to kind of load in using some weird like you know saving and quitting

at certain points to like the actual last level of the game and you're still level six or whatever uh but i at when i had done that uh teleport i was probably like level 80 or so something like that and by that point i felt like okay i had more or less seen like the range that this game could offer and then suddenly i teleport in and there's a fucking tornado in the middle of a floating city. And it was like, where? I don't know how this is possible. The biggest fucking dragon I've ever seen just taking pot shots at you from a half mile away. Yeah. I love that area.

I mean, it was hard. It was really hard. But usually games kind of lose a lot of steam towards the end. And that felt like a big spike in excitement for me i also had been working with the the beast clergymen that's like oh yeah the death root collection quest right where like you are supposed to take down these very powerful undead bosses and then you bring them back and he teaches you all these super powerful incantations he's the one that d kind of like warps you to. And it's like one of the factions of the game.

And then you reach the end of Faramazula and he's the boss. And he's like, hey, I'm gonna fuck you up now. But then you fuck him up and he takes off his robe and he's like, by the way, I'm basically the god of death. And you're like, oh, okay, that actually makes a lot more sense. Like your whole thing makes a lot of sense now.

I do have to kill you, sadly, you big dog boy. But yeah. So is he not there anymore? No. Like, have you went back? I thought he was just disguised as the other guy. That's what I thought. I thought it was him.

Okay, anyway. He was, like, cloaking it. That's how I took it. Did you guys make much use of, like, the online features? Yes. Yeah, I played some with Fresh. Like, summoning in people to help you with bosses and stuff? Yeah, I definitely summoned a few people. Like, for Melania, I summoned. yeah i played someone fresh like summoning in people to help you with yeah i summoned i

definitely summoned a few people i've like for melania i summoned i i have no shame in it for there's a fight against reichardt which is like a giant snake man that lives in a volcano i summoned for that and i didn't regret it one bit because that fight you get a weapon that is basically unique to that fight it's a giant spear that shoots lasers and by summoning it basically turned into the last scene of fucking ghostbusters where four p three people were just like blasting away at this giant snake and it was incredible um i also get connected to to them i would like anytime i was struggling with the boss i would try to hit some of the signs and i kept getting errors like someone else had summoned them first.

Yeah, there is a weirdness to it where it was a little finicky in whether the servers were acting up or not. But once it worked, it generally worked consistently in that game. But I found those experiences to be really good. I also set myself to be summoned by other people when i was just like looking for something fun to do and that was a blast because i'd like get summoned into dungeons

that i had already beaten and knew really well and could like really help people that were struggling and that felt great is that geographically locked like is that like do you get pulled into places that are near you yeah it's it's a little bit confusing. There's a setting that you can do in the multiplayer menu that is very unclear. But basically, when you turn it on, it creates your summon sign anywhere in the region that you're in. So Limgrave is a region, or Laernia is a region, or the upper north, Laendel, etc.

But it's bridged by level. So if you over-level yourself to 100 and then try to get summoned in Limgrave, you probably won't. Maybe you'll get summoned by new Game Plus people, I'm not sure. But it is sort of banded in that way. So if you're looking to help people out, try not to totally over level yourself i was doing i was getting summoned in laernia around level 80 and consistently getting

summoned and it was a lot of fun i wanted to say i actually did not do a lot of other player summoning but that's because when you do that it disables the um spirit ashes which are like your summonable friends and once i would say the most broken thing in the game like the thing that if you once you find it it uh decreases the difficulty of the game i would say dramatically is the mimic tear ashes which essentially creates lets you summon a double of yourself like an ai controlled version of yourself with all your stats equipment spells all that and so for the right card fight i was i was having a tough time with it and then i realized like wait a minute and i equipped that serpent hunter spear or whatever like the special spear you're supposed to use and then i summoned my mimic and he had it too and so i just like took

off i took off all my spells i took off all the other shit that could give him options of things to do except use this special weapon. And so me and me fucked this big snake up royally and it was very satisfying. And I feel like that was, I think there's also some scaling that happens when you summon other players where the boss's health and damage

gets a little bit higher, but that does not happen when you use Spirit Ashes. So in a lot of ways- I the mimic tier once on a god free fight pretty late in the game and it made the fight so easy that i was like and so i intentionally like stopped using it just to like give myself a little bit more of an interesting fight in the game yeah um but i mostly yeah struggling the head i like leveled up the head whatever his name is the headless uh hunter spirit ash i like leveled them up first and foremost and so that was who i rolled with most of the time but yeah i used the crystal uh there's like crystal uh stone guys that you can summon the crystalline people yeah yeah

one of those was great and i I used Blackknife Tish. Yeah, she's brutal. Okay, can we talk endings real quick? Is that too far? No, no. Okay, the ending I got is my favorite thing about the game. So I did the whole Ronnie side quest. I did the whole thing, and it is a long side quest but the whole time she is this this

sorceress that is like telling you like this world fucking sucks and once i am put in control of this world and i have made the elden lord like i will introduce this equality that will disrupt the golden order and blah blah blah blah blah blah and i'm like yes that rules all this shit you got going on here worshiping the moon i am loving it so i did the whole quest and then i think i married her at the end of it and i was like yes ronnie me and you are going to change this whole place so fast forward 30 hours and i'm exploring the sewers underneath of uh the royal capital and i reach the bottom and there's a boss in this like church and i'm like okay and i fucked him up and then i was like running around looking for you know secrets and

drops and other items and this um this big like uh table moves aside and opens a hole in the floor i'm like oh okay let's see what this is and so I go down it and it's just this deep, deep, deep, like burial grounds where you have to do like all this crazy, very intricate platforming that took me, no joke, 20 tries maybe to get to the bottom of it without falling off because it's a lot of like very, very, very tight jumps. I reached the bottom of it and all that's down there is a big glowing red door. And I was like, okay, that's weird. And then there was a player message written in front of the door that I forget what the message was,

but it had like an avatar doing an emote, and the avatar was naked. And it said something in the message about like try unarmored, et cetera, et cetera. Something like intimating, like take your clothes off. And so I stripped down and then it kicked off a cut scene where the door opened and this three fingered hand,

not a two fingers, three fingers hand that is kind of on fire wraps around me and brands me with the frenzied flame. Yep. My eyes are now on fire. My eyes are glowing red. I have red crackling skin. And the next time I go to a point of grace to rest,

I get a visit from the, our maiden, what's her name? Something with an M. Yeah. She's like, hey, you have fucked up now.

I cannot be your road dog anymore. This is profane what you have done. And if I ever see you again, I'm going to have to kill you. Peace out. And then she dips. And I have to let, I can level up still like on my own, but she's gone. And at the end, there's a point where you have to ignite this very bad fire. And I had just talked to Justin, who you had suggested that she sacrifices herself

to light this fire, and then she's gone that way. Only I didn't have to do that because I'm already the frenzied flame, and so I set this big, crazy fire. And then I reach the end of the game, and I don't become the Elden Lord. I don't ascend in any way. I burn the whole world down.

I introduce basically the apocalypse, which from as far as i can tell is the bad ending and it ends with our the maiden showing up at the end and she's like a little bit older and way more badass and she's like well now i have to find you and bring to you your destined death and i will hunt you across the world until and i will not rest until you are dead cut to black show credits george rr martin did it again uh i didn't and i found out that there was a ronnie ending that kind of beats ass that's kind of like super cool but i didn't get it because some player message was like hey take your fucking clothes off there's this whole side quest where the people talk about the frenzied

flame uh it's the guy like in caleb who's like find me a golden needle and use it on this maid and like basically just sort of uh they they sort of start to suggest like hey you should burn the whole fucking world down hey you should destroy the whole world wouldn't that be cool yeah i didn't do any of that shit i just saw one player message that was like take off your clothes bro and i did that and destroyed my entire game like it destroyed the whole planet and that is to me the funniest and most like i i like it's symbolic from software thing where it's like i did all this work and the one tri-finger butt hole destroyed the entire fucking planet it was so funny it was so good uh and a little disappointing that i didn't it was a tri-finger butthole it was a tri-finger yeah sure

of course did you get the ronnie one then russ so i i did the same thing you did i touched the door i got naked i touched the door and after i did that i read a note on the ground that was like regret yeah and i was like oh no what have i done and it turns out i talked to a buddy of mine who said there is a way to actually reverse the frenzied flame and get your endings back um if you want to do that so So I was like, I'm going to beat it as Frenzy Flame, but I'm going to back up my save and see the other endings. So that's what I did. And the quest to reverse the Frenzy Flame is awesome.

It's worth doing. Okay. Super, super cool. Yeah. But, yeah, I think the endings, I mean, A, they don't make a whole lot of sense. Frenzy Flame makes sense because you just blow up the earth the other ones including the ryan one even though it looks really cool doesn't make a ton of sense I would also say I was a little bit bummed to find out that

most of the endings are like very very similar to one another yeah um including like the dung eater ending man ending where the dookie man is like I want to give everyone my dookie disease will you help me yeah and you go through the game collecting like dookie pods and bring them back to me he's like yes yes this is very good make sure when you take the elden ring that you make a special wish upon a star that everyone gets my dookie disease and then everyone gets the dookie disease and you're like everyone just gets all dookie town uh i wish they were a little more involved but uh but overall i think it's probably the best game i've ever played and i don't know what else to really i i just is i i can't think of another game that i would enjoy playing more i started playing it again and it just immediately was so

fun i didn't want to stop playing i spent fucking i don't know 80 to 100 hours on it before and then i started you know what's great you get a new game plus and you're right back in these areas but like and it's areas that were really scary before and it these are while some areas never get like that um they're the early areas just feel like hey everybody it's me i i know how to make meteors from my asshole and honestly all i want all i wanted to do i mean i haven't started it yet but once i do all i want to do is do a completely different playthrough with like a completely different class and i'll do all melee instead of almost all ranged and like

just like try something completely different because the game is so smart about like the way it makes every play style fun to play as sure it. It's sick. It's a great game. You should play it. Play it. I've played... The only thing that I don't like about this game, and it's not the get good thing, it's the pressure to finish this awesome game

in a month and a half. You don't have to. No, I'm not going to. But I feel like... I mean, it wouldn't matter. I am not the only person i've seen where it's like i love this game it's a hundred and some hours long why does it feel like i have to keep chris plant it wouldn't matter i could give you five years and you wouldn't beat the game so realistically

speaking wrong or right nag nag nag no but is it false? Have you beaten Breath of the Wild? What? Have you beaten Breath of the Wild? Oh, he's beaten Breath of the Wild. That game's been out forever. No. Oh, never mind then. You want to know the irony? I quit playing Breath of the Wild to play this. That's bad, because those games came out about five years apart from each other.

That's what I'm saying. It doesn't matter how long. I mean, it's fine. I get the Chris Plant wants to try a lot of different things, and I get it. So, like, I don't knock him for that. But if you think that's a bad thing, you should remember that, like, whatever. Who cares if you beat the game or not?

Oh, no. Like I said, I'm not. I'm saying the culture around it. This has nothing to do with the game. I just think that there's, like, a, like, tacit pressure to, like, beat games fast. And I think it's especially brutal with this game i think so i think so too i saw a great tweet and i forget who it's from i apologize uh where somebody was

like actually elden ring is not as hard as people make it out to be what makes it hard is this the the pressure from people who have played these games before where it's like well if you do if you summon spirit ashes then you're not really getting the full experience of the like there are ways you can twist this game to a point and customize yourself to a point where you can get through it i genuinely feel like anybody who is competent at action games can get through it what but there's this guilt that is that folks try to associate with that. And that is what makes it sort of, you know. Man, letting go of that was the best.

Like I found this really cherry farm spot and I just like went whole hog. And it was like, I just turn on podcast zone out and then kill this giant crow over and over and over again. And I was loving it. It was grand. I, and then,

you know what? After I did it a bunch, I gained like 20 levels, and I whipped everything's ass. And it was very good, and I liked it. Very quick before we end. Did any of y'all see the New York Times piece that went up this week about Elden Ring?

No. Oh, my gosh. The New York Times has really outdone itself. Oh, boy. They make comparisons to Don't Look Up which is great there is a line in it that's like let me see if I can find it really quick it's difficult to imagine Elden Ring

succeeding in any other era in year three of the pandemic yada yada it goes into a whole pandemic spiel the footage of the game is captured with a smartphone on a TV. That's good. Holy shit.

It is wild. My favorite part, though, is they reached out to Miyazaki, the game's director, for comment, and he turned down the New York Times. Oh, bless that. What a fucking rock star he is. It's so good. You guys been playing anything else uh not a ton but i am

watching something else and it's a show that i know at least one of other one of you has been watching yeah and it's called old enough on netflix uh old enough this is uh this it's like the remake of the japanese show right or is it yeah so there's a there is a, it's like the remake of the Japanese show, right? Yeah, so there is a Japanese show. I understand it is still running. It's been running for about 30 years, and it's called First Errand. Yeah. And the premise of the Japanese show is that you,

it's a reality show where they send two, three, four-year-olds out into a village to complete various, like, tasks. So, like, hey, you need to go buy fish for your mom or you need to go buy a medallion at this nearby shrine and they follow the kids with a film crew that is like in disguise as like painters and gardeners and various other things and their cameras are like in disguise as like watering cans and so they get like genuine footage of these very very very young kids trying to like do normal everyday things and it's fucking fantastic each episode is like 10 to 15 minutes long uh i've watched five of them i am majorly addicted Episode three involves like a very tense moment with a cabbage that is just spectacular.

It's probably my favorite reality show of all time. So do yourself a favor. It's called Old Enough on Netflix. I saw a movie in a movie theater. Well, I saw two. I'm gonna say Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I don't know if it's as good as the first. I loved the first one.

I loved the first. And maybe it's just because it was so much better than I was expecting. I had a lot of fun with Sonic the Hedgehog 2 I don't know if it's as good as the first I loved the first one I thought the first and maybe it's just because it was so much better than I was expecting I had a lot of fun with Sonic the Hedgehog 2 I had a good time there's a lot of good action sequences in there and uh some moments that are they're pretty badass I had a good time with it but the movie I really want to recommend that I saw with Rachel and like the first like time we've gotten away from the the baby in a long time was uh Everything Everywhere All at Once which is like what we walked gotten away from the baby in a long time was Everything Everywhere All at Once, which we walked out of it saying like, well, that's one of my favorite movies

I think I've ever seen. It is the hardest I've laughed in a theater, I think is that a joke that is so well executed in this film and it comes back to it so many times and every time I was like getting self-conscious like am i laughing too loud at this deal uh but it says it involved pixar yes there's badass fight scenes throughout like really very very good martial arts fight scenes uh that are also very very funny and then also like it made me cry at the end. It hits some family stuff that actually hits so right.

It has a little bit of everything for everyone. It's one of the best movies I think I've ever seen. And I have been recommending it to everybody that I meet because I think it's a very special film. And I think that everybody should see it. I saw that in RRR on the same evening and it was one of the best film moments of my life but i both those are only in theaters right now um so i'm going to recommend a game to uh perfect tides have you all heard about this no oh justin especially

what if i told you there is a point and click adventure with kind of that like early 2000s ms paint fan art aesthetic and you play as a uh young girl in the like northeast who is a emo scene kid and it is just about your like kind of day-to-day life uh uh all that sounds pretty bad no it's so good it is so i'm wrong my impression of this is incorrect even though that sounds unpleasurable it actually is very it's very i oh i think you would like it i think oh i don't know about that i i think you should give it a check I think you will like it did you say the name of the game? perfect tides

perfect perfect tides perfect tides what's the aesthetic like? well like that kind of like shockwave art MS paint art I don't know a good way of describing it somewhere between that and the like maniac mansion point and click adventure art

it's wonderful i'll try it i'll try it i'm i'm i'm skittish because i've tried to play norco three times oh this and i just can't yeah so the the vibe of this one norco i i like norco but i understand why people bounce off of it that i think the writing is quite purple at times though i think that is intentional this is much more pleasant to be in it is just a it's just a good hang okay what have you what about you hoops i mean cash solitaire obviously kind of second job at this point like like making so many buckets. Nobody can take me down on the king, except when I lose, in which case I deleted the app many times. The other stuff, let's see.

Finish Tunic. It's fucking brilliant. If you haven't played Tunic, go play Tunic, obviously. Two great television shows to recommend to you all uh one is old one is new uh the old one is atlanta which i am like i did not watch even though everybody says it's outrageously good and it turns out it is outrageously good it's only like 22 minutes for each episode and it's on hulu and everybody in it is great licky stanfield's great and don glover's great everybody's great and it's on Hulu and everybody in it is great. Lakeith Sandfield's great.

Donald Glover's great. Everybody's great. And it's funny and tense and emotional. And watch the first one. If you don't like it, I'll be shocked because it is imminently watchable. I didn't know what I was expecting, but it was not something that was as fun and pleasant to watch.

The other one that's in the same vein is Minx, which is on HBO Maxbo max you guys watch minx plant you would like minx did you watch minx no um it is a oh is this about the it's about the like kind of like play girl type of thing sort of yeah it's about a woman who's a a feminist who starts the um this one started magazine called the matriarchy, uh, awakens. And she meets a pornographer played by Jake Johnson, who I love in everything,

obviously, because he's hysterical, but he's a pornographer that likes what she's doing, but thinks it could use a little something extra. So he brings her into his, um, basically pornography empire to let her run this magazine, provided that it has naked dudes in it, because he thinks that that's like that could be a big thing. She examines feminism from a reverse perspective of like she is struggling with the fact that she's basically objectifying dudes.

And by reversing the gender roles and exploring some of these like feminist ideas, it gets it really interesting like conclusions about them, or at least that was my my read on it. Obviously, I'm not a classically smart person, but I did find it very fascinating. And it's really, really funny. I feel like very, very kind of sex positive. And Jake Johnson is great, as always. And it's just fantastic. I really, really enjoy it. It's called Minx, and it's on HBO Max. While I was describing that, my internet died.

And so I lost the other three. So it's just me here now. Isn't that fun? I think that's fun. It's my show now, so you should absolutely review our show on Apple Podcasts

or wherever you get your podcasts. We really have done that recently, so thank you. We really have done that recently. So thank you. It really helps us out. Oh, thanks to Ryan, Parker Moon, George S., Jake Wesserek, and Bobaloo for reviewing the show. We appreciate you. Recapping the games discussed.

Well, it was Elden Ring. Griffin saw everything everyone wants at the same time. Chris Plant played Perfect Tides. Russ suggested Old Enough on Netflix. And that's going to do it for us for this episode. Be sure to join us again next time for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties. Besties!