The Besties - Waking Up Early with the Boys

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

This week on The Besties, the gang is diving into some incredible Early Access games, including Teardown, Ender Lilies, Subnautica: Below Zero and Everspace 2. They also introduce a brand new listener appreciation segment that truly stretches the definition of music. 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!

You know how when everybody's done working on this side of the games industry, they go work on the other sides of the game industry. Have y'all already figured out what sort of cushy position you're thinking about landing in? Because I've been talking to some folks about Fortnite 2, and it's looking very promising. They want me to design some of the new dances. And I said, I don't know if I'm ready to give up my credibility yet. Because once I do that, there is no going back.

I have not ruled out coming back to Polygon or Kotaku or IGN or Yu-Gi-Oh or whatever is around. Are you going to show us some of those dances? I mean, do you need to see some of them? Yeah. So this is called the new flossing. And you have to do that on your hands? That seems like it's going to cut out a lot of people um yeah no it's gonna hurt it hurts really bad every time you do it but it's funny when you see

the video game guys doing it in fortnite too i like that do you have another one uh yeah sure this one is called uh backpack kid which i think is just flossing again So what did you think of that one? I like that one, but do you have to use a towel? You need the towel, and it's a special item you find in Fortnite, too, that helps you wipe away the blood. I had a dance. In Dance Central 3, there's a move called the Time Belt that's based on a low-budget children's educational sci-fi movie that I starred in. It's called the Time Belt belt it's in dance central three so i've already kind of got my foot in this the cushy did you get a big for that what did you

get like a percentage yeah what'd you get off off the top yeah what'd you get what kind of juice they actually let me make fuser which i thought was nice yeah let me pick all the tracks and like kind of make it myself it's not a big deal. Nice game. Yeah, man. Thanks, man. I noticed how Chris and Russ aren't answering because they don't want to incriminate themselves. That's true. They're already playing both sides.

Russ is, Russ is, Russ is the Dovahkiin. He just saw him in it. Russ, admit you're the Dovahkiin. Fine. Russ,

Russ, sick. Russ, Russ, dick. It's Russ, Russ, thick.

Russ, thick. Dovahkiin is Russ, Russ, thick. My voice is my instrument, so I really can't stress it, Rush Rush Dick Rush Rush Dick It's Rush Rush Dick Rush Rush Dick Bill Vah Keen Is Rush Rush Dick Look my voice Is my instrument So I really can't Stress it But when needed

Give me one Foost Give us just You don't even have to Do the whole thing You gave me just the Foost I don't need Rhoda Just Foost Just Foost

Okay let me Fa fa fa Fa fa fa Fa pa pa pa You got it Foost You got it. First. The listener can't see it, but it looked like he was going to let out the stinkiest burp.

Yeah. It was good. my name is justin mccroy and i know the best game of the week my name is griffin mccroy i know the best game of the week no wait let me do mine again my name is justin mccroy and i know the best game of the future i i also revised my statement my name is christopher thomas plant and i know i i still know the best game of this week because that's when i played it dogs okay yeah fair hey you know what i'm not gonna yell anymore wow god preserve instrument but i am going to say this with confidence i know the best game of the week who are you sorry what's your name what's your i don't know you didn't say my name is ross i'm not

gonna yell anymore okay you still say you can still say your name wait let me let me do it again i wrote the book on podcasting so you gotta say your name at the beginning sure sure yes my name is ross froschdick and i know the best game of the week. Confidence. It's a new era for Russ. No more yelling, the beard looking good, still. I think we can all agree on that. Beard still looking good. Twitter agreed. Beard looking good. And we're going to talk about the future of video gaming, because it's today. The future begins today with some early access gems that we've been checking out to see, you know, what the future of gaming is going to look like. Now, of course, those lines are becoming increasingly blurry as early access games just sort of sneak into full release.

But hey, there's never a bad time to talk about video games. And I did say bad instead of bad but that's life i guess welcome uh to the besties we are the four of us no matter what our names are we'd like to welcome you to the besties the best of friends the best of games uh we're going to be talking about the the early access i'm a pro i protest this i don't like this new tagline. I will always be here on the outskirts, a fucking rebel without a cause, just shouting from the rooftops, this is still a video game book club for video games.

No, you said it was a video game club. This is a video game club. This is a voice-only video game club. this is a voice only video game club we made our membership cards out of fruit strap wrappers so we're talking about early access games this week is an early access special are all of our games on steam early access or are any of them not like on other platforms they're all on steam early access yeah okay that is that and you know what they're they're work in progress but i think in the case of all of these unlike some other early access games these are actually games you could buy them and not feel bad the last time we talked about an early access game i believe was rogue legacy 2 yeah which i would actually be

kind of curious to dip back into but it only had sort of one area to explore and felt pretty early access, if you ask me. But yeah, I don't know about y'all, but my game felt pretty good. Pretty beefy. Who wants to start? Griffin, you can start. Go for it. Okay. Yeah, my game is on Steam.

It is overwhelmingly positive reviews there. On Steam, it is overwhelmingly positive reviews there. It's called Inderlily's Quietus of the Nights, which is... That is a bad start. It's not great. It is a Metroidvania that... Oh! Yeah, it kind of has a Hollow Knight-like vibe. Although...

And I keep expecting this, I feel like from from games like this that come out now it doesn't necessarily have that sort of dark souls-y risk reward loop of you know if you die you drop your shit and then you have to get back to it before before it disappears um i don't know i think i just keep expecting that because i feel like every metroidvania that comes out now has to have that like i don't know maybe i'm just thinking of hollow knight and like sultan sanctuary and stuff like that but this is a more i would say traditional metroidvania game you play a a priestess named lily who explores this world that has been destroyed by blight and this world and and the whole game

is just gorgeous it looks like a um this may be reductive but i also feel like it's huge praise it looks like a vanilla ware game like everything is is illustrated and gorgeous um the the music is amazing i forget the music is from like a known composer i'll i'll try to look it up and figure out who that is uh before the end of this episode it the production value is just like out of this world the animation of like these gorgeous illustrated characters is is out of control in terms of like like is it like futuristic is it like fantasy setting it's gothic it's a goth dark gothic setting where this uh blight rain has rain has destroyed the world and turned everything into these grotesque monsters.

So in that sense, it feels kind of souls-y. And does it have a hook to set it apart, or is it just really good? It's just really good. They do a really good job of building out the lore the lore of, of the world through like little journals that you pick up. But every time that you defeat a boss, the bosses are like former, like friends of yours. They're like former protectors of the church or former like guardians of,

you know, these, these priestesses. And so whenever you defeat them and you, you purify them, you get like a really gorgeous cut scene that shows like their sacrifice for you. So it's one of those feels games, but it handles kind of unlocks and progression in a way that I'm just kind of wild about. the more recent castlevania games like after aria of sorrow and uh what dawn of souls and uh bloodstained you collect these these creatures and turn them into powers for yourself so you have

a sweep of yeah so lily is like kind of like defenseless lily does none of the fighting you can equip three of these spirits at a time and these spirits are like former you know they're dead people they are blighted souls uh and so the first one you have is like this knight who used to defend you that's just a basic sword attack um but then as you go on like you purify these these blighted souls and turn them into uh this is this is a character with a mace that just they swing around and this is like a magical attack. And the effect is really cool. Cause you know, you combine them to X,

Y, and B. So you create basically a palette of three spirits that go along with you. And whenever you press like X to attack this ghost with a sword appears in front of you and attacks with it. Like you don't do anything. And that like visual effect is really, really,

really dope. There's some really nice hooks in like, there are resources you collect that like visual effect is really really really dope there's some really nice hooks and like there are resources you collect that you can then upgrade those spirits to make them a little bit more potent and yeah there are artifacts that you can find to like give yourself little boosts that you can equip kind of like the what the badges system or whatever they're called in in hollow knight i'm i am a i feel like a harsh critic of like rpg mechanics in games like this and i feel like this this game has a actually really compelling a really compelling sort of hook there um do you have a sense of like how close it is to

being quote i believe what i've read is that uh i think i'm nearly finished with what is there. There are three like big areas to explore out of, I believe what will be eight of totally, but yeah, I, I, I find myself with early access games. Like once I've played enough to kind of understand like what it is they're going for.

I am, I usually want to stop so that that i don't you know spoil myself or anything like that for when the full game comes out and i hit that point with ender lilies like after i explored the first big area and defeated the first boss uh but i keep coming back to it and playing it just because like i don't know it feels really good and it looks really really good and these rpg mechanics are really tight and i i I get the impression I get the feeling uh of what it must have felt like to play like early Hollow Knight like before it it hit 1.0 or um you know Cave Story like I feel pretty confident that once this is like fully out there it is going to be a another kind of uh defining game of of the genre like that is that

is how good a first impression it makes um awesome so yeah it's 20 bucks which is you know a uh kind of a steep asking price i guess for a uh early access game like this but it is polished and smart and great in a way that i was not really expecting um yeah um i'll i'll go next uh a good segue because my game is also 20 on steam it is called teardown you might have seen it on the twitch channels uh because a very a variety of other uh streamer folks have been playing it uh but the gist of teardown is that you are dropped into these like medium-sized environments like a marina or like a construction site stuff like that and each of these maps uses uh it kind of looks like minecraft but like a more high high resolution minecraft uh i guess uh more detailed the box that like cubes are much much smaller so you can like make out more detail but broadly speaking it's not realistic it's just

a bunch of cubes it's a cool effect like there are voxels all over but then there's like hyper realistic water effects it's like a fusion of it's it's not like minecraft where everything is you know a block right exactly so so there is that element but the real hook of the game and i really don't think that i've played anything like this in a very long time it is the best destruction game that i've played since red faction gorilla which I absolutely loved. Red Faction Guerrilla, you went to Mars and you just like knocked down giant towers and it was super, super fun. And the spirit of this game is entirely about destruction. Every single block can be destroyed.

You can knock entire buildings down. You can break holes in walls. You can drive cars into buildings you can do all sorts of like crazy stuff like that and that's cool like if you just wanted a sandbox like fuck shit up like that's a pretty good sandbox but what's really cool is that they actually found a way to make that into an actual game so while you are introduced to it and you can just fuck around slowly but surely they turn it into a heist game where there are multiple items across the map and the second that you steal one

a timer starts and you've got 60 seconds to grab all the other ones and then escape and so what you do is slowly but surely heist heist game ever created too which i think is like worth emphasizing which i think is kind of brilliant about it is they they they don't try to make sense of the fact that you are this is not oceans 11 this is like you just being an absolute terror for 60 seconds yeah and and there's no like enemies to worry about there's no real stealth to worry about all you're worrying about is making the most direct line from you stealing the first thing to stealing everything else and then escaping so it allows for a lot of freedom in terms of problem solving in one situation there was like a boat and on the boat was like the thing i needed to steal so i could just like take the boat instead of taking

the thing and then drive it right next to the exit so that when I steal the other things, oh, I know, oh, that boat is right there. Okay. You can do more complicated stuff like that where I was driving a crane and I would essentially like lift a safe to move the crane in the air right above where I was going to drop it down to exit the level. And again, like that requires no time at all. But thinking outside of the box and saying, okay, I can use this crane to crush this rooftop, grab the safe, pull it back out, and not have the timer start is like a big part of the strategy.

And I'm like constantly kind of blown away at how many ways you can approach a level with various tools and gadgets that you acquire as you progress through the game. I love this game. I hope that they make the controls a little more merciful in the future. That was my struggle too.

There would be times where I had the cool idea like there was a big vault in the second floor of a building and I was going to take the safe out of the second floor big vault in the second floor of a building, and I was going to take the safe out of the second floor and drop it into the bed of a truck. So I get the truck, and I back it up. But in doing that, it's kind of hard to drive,

and I break the truck a little bit. And then I push the thing out the window, and there is no really easy way to get it in the truck. And I felt like the version of this game that i want is one in which i have the ideas and then i can achieve them not i have the ideas and now i have to kind of try it 15 or 20 times for it to kind of work out the way i want it to um which is tricky because to have the entire world and everything be destructible everything is is very delicate like everything yeah um so i i often found that my plans were undermined because i basically

wasn't save scumming enough right yeah i had an instance with the crane where my first attempt at it i grabbed the safe i started backing out the crane and the crane ran directly into a giant bushy tree and so all the voxels from the tree fell around the crane and it made my exit much harder so then i reloaded my save knocked the tree out of the way used the crane to move the tree so it wasn't blocking my way and then i had a clear exit i think that like i get a lot of satisfaction out of like min maxing a run like that and like working through all the like little things that go wrong but i realized that some people might want a more immediate kind of the smallest of complaints in the grand scheme of

things this is one of the most inventive games i've played other than like shipbreaker is right alongside this yeah of stuff that just really stands out uh and it's the type of thing i love seeing in early access because just just one level of it is so unusual and different from everything else on steam that i can play it over and over and over again yeah it's kind of infinitely expandable too i'm really excited to see what they add to it yeah uh i will jump into my thing uh y'all okay here it is ready you're playing destiny 2 you know like when you're like zipping to a planet in your in your cool spaceship but then you like land in the planet what if you just never landed the video loading screen for the whole game you've chosen yeah that sounds like terrible

no what if what if you so what if you got control and you started like shooting stuff right chris you understand that there have there have been video games where you control the spaceship before that you could have no so okay so let me frame it again what if it was destiny in space no what if okay what if you're a spaceship but also destiny? How about that? Is that closer? No. No, I get what you're saying.

You're a spaceship. You're a spaceship, but you're an RPG spaceship. Imagine a space combat game, right? Right. And this, again, Everspace 2, you are zipping around, and it feels just super good. Moment-to-moment feel, similar to shooting in Destiny, just feels great.

You can zip around in every direction it feels very arcade driven but then there's colorful loot that you can add on and effectively special powers like shooting lightning whenever you want or just going ultra fast um it's destiny it is like the core loop of destiny but now you're in a spaceship and it looks like that spaceship loading sequence does that did you say close you say the name of the game yet i've said it like three times ever space two it's a sequel to ever space one yeah sure ever space if you played it was more like a like a roguelike type of space game it was very cool this one they have more money i would assume so they're trying to make a campaign which i'm mixed

on as somebody who liked the original because the original has a really good feel i think a campaign will expand the audience for sure um but the writing and i don't know if it's on purpose or not is has major ps2 vibes like the story is like it's a lot of uh the cut scenes are i don't know if this is temporary or not but like static images like motion comics and it's like, who are you? Ah, I'm another guy who's in space. I also was a prisoner. Are you on my side? Well, yes, I won't turn on you. Like, it's just very rigid.

I know I'm being unfair. There is more to it than that. But I usually don't skip cut scenes. And after like a couple hours of this, I just like please mercifully let me get back to the shooting um that's the fun part can you skip the cut scenes i i started to after that okay well at least you can you can yeah um that said like who knows it does feel like it could be placeholder to some degree um and maybe there's like a version of this that it is intentional i really couldn't tell like

how brutal would that be if you're the voice actor western this is like man no no and honestly the voice acting itself isn't even that bad it's just like yeah is that a decision though is it like i think it could be it has the whole game has like a spaceman spiff thing yeah yeah throwback energy and i think it might be one of those things that as they polish it that'll become more the intentionality will be there um but right now it is the thing that feels early access about this game the actual gameplay the look and feel and the moment to moment stuff feels like it's finished and they're selling it for 39.99 on steam so it might as well be finished there's still some more to go um but if you are like craving as somebody who like grew up with descent

that kind of like 360 space combat vibe um but now in like more open areas or if you'd like star wars squadrons but want something even more arcadey, I super recommend this. It's a gorgeous looking game. It's incredibly addictive. And the cut scenes are skippable. Skippable? If you lust. Skippable.

Justin, what have you been playing? Well, my friend, I have taken a trip back down underneath the beautiful Briny Sea in Subnautica Below Zero. I'm not going to go too deep into what Subnautica was, mainly because we talked about it extensively. And also, this is very much an evolution of that original game, which came out in 2018. which came out in 2018. Much like that one, you are dropped in a escape pod in the middle of the sea

with a fabricator, which is like your workbench, if you will, and some storage and your human lungs and the best of intentions. And that's how you begin the game. And basically it is, much like its predecessor, begins as a game about trying to become a more competent explorer. I think more than a lot of these games, the real joy of Subnautica and Subnautica Below Zero is exploring and discovering new locations and finding weird

things in the world. And this is a whole new world like that to explore. As the name suggests, ice and temperature is a much bigger consideration here, in much the same way that your oxygen has to be managed when you're exploring the underwater parts. your oxygen has to be managed when you're exploring the underwater parts, your temperature has to be managed when you're above the sea. Oh, so there's like a lot more outside of the sea stuff in this? Yeah. So you're like outside the sea and you have to find ways to keep warm.

There are like, for example, thermal plants that generate heat that you can like huddle near while you warm up and try to get to the next area before you freeze to death what do you do with your flippers walk badly i've tried walking yeah you have to walk backwards is the is the secret um there's uh so there's some some online stuff that is cool there are i'm about four hours in and i'm still sort of like getting towards the story but i will say that like uh if you didn't get super deep into Subnautica, there is, like in most sci-fi, a progenitor alien race architects. They actually specifically call them here.

And there is an architect that is an actual character in this game who sort of has a relationship with you uh and more of their technology is part of the ecosystem um so you're like finding alien tech and alien power sources and integrating that into your your own tools um when when i played the first subnautica like one of the things that i found gave me a lot more enjoyment was to turn off stuff like hunger. I left like oxygen on, but there were options to like turn off some of the management stuff.

Is that still in it? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, from the beginning, actually, it gives you the option of like, do you want to play survival or do you want to play, like I think they call it story. Yeah.

Fun mode. Yeah, enjoyable mode. Honestly, like I'm not gonna, I don't want to, I i think they call it story yeah fun mode yeah enjoyable mode honestly like i'm not gonna i don't want to catch i don't i have to eat in real life i don't want to swim around and grab fish and then take them back to and eat just cram raw fish to my helmet no thank you um so yeah i turn that stuff off which is weird because like here's i will say that you can turn that stuff off and i'm sure it was the same way in the predecessor, but those like chunks of gameplay are still in there. So like, you're still like encountering a lot of food and drinks that you have no use for. I have like outside my ship, this big pile of water bottles and food bricks, just like, I don't know, maybe I'll find something to do with them eventually.

But right now they're just littering the ocean. I will say I have struggled with the progression loop of Subnautica, especially by the time I played it, was very well honed. You were constantly being led to the next little thing. You had some idea of what you're trying to get to. I've struggled in Subnautica, which has been out, I mean, it's been playable for, I think,

a couple of years at this point. I think February of 2019 is when it first sort of peeked its head out into availability. But I struggled a little bit more with kind of knowing what to do and where to go next. For example, like knowing that I need to find the ingredients for a high capacity oxygen tank and having no real idea of like point you towards the minerals that you need and stuff like that. But there was, there would be big chunks are like, I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing now. I mean, that doesn't, if you're just interested in exploration, you know, that definitely you can still do that. And there's all kinds of cool stuff to discover. But a couple of like bigger story things, there were, you're really being led by beacons

a lot in the last one. You'd get like an alert that that this thing out here is happening. You should go check it out. And I'm not getting hardly any of those at this point. The two big story things that I found, I have just sort of stumbled on while swimming around, which is cool and organic, but can feel a little directionless if you have a half hour and get in one like a solid experience but um if you like subnautica if you got into that at all you you will dig this i think it's one of the best um you don't seem quite as much anymore but like in terms of like blending survival with like um a a pretty affecting like core gameplay loop and and the narrative of the first one i thought was terrific i really was not expecting much from a survival game but it actually goes in really

interesting places and this one is fully voiced now which is a recent development for the expansion um and uh the voice performer for the main character uh her name is robin is is very good um and uh so i i have been enjoying it and there's been some wild stuff it's still really and it's still really scary like to be swimming and have this sense of like oh my god this area is so big yeah my visibility is very limited i'm running low on oxygen my pockets are loaded with stuff i'll lose if i die and what is that noise i hear like there is a terrifying terrifying thing in my proximity somewhere uh so still very scary even if you're not you know worried about water and food but very cool so not a couple of zero i'm i'm highly enjoying it

can you take us to the uh bridge though of the bridge of the podcast yeah uh we're gonna take a quick break um and you may hear ads you may not i don't know i'm not a soothsayer but we will come back and uh sing so welcome back everyone um wanted to say how much we appreciate all of the new reviews that y'all have been leaving on the apple podcast app uh in favor of this podcast the besties and we've been thinking of ways to sort of shout some of them out and rachel our fantastic editor suggested that we sing a review to the tune of a classic video game theme song, and Plant has honorably put himself forth as the person to do that. I can't wait. Plant was so stoked.

Plant was like, don't worry, I got this. I know the song. Now I'm worried. Let's hear it. And we should preface by saying he's not going to tell us what the theme is. We're going to have to guess. We're going to guess it. Okay. Nier Autom to have to guess. We're going to guess it. Okay.

Nier Automata. Damn it. Okay, I'm going to do a different one. Should I tell you this is from Ness McG? Thank you, Ness McG. It's a five-star review. And if you're going to leave a review, make it five stars. Yeah, we're not going to sing a one-star review.

Yeah. Here we go. Love. Good start, good start. Okay, here we go love good start good start okay here we go are you ready yeah love this podcast and a light mix of humor and genuine interest in well-rounded takes i'm always amazed by how much time they find to research and play games each week. They never seem to phone it in. Also appreciate that they each have individual tastes and don't agree all the time. Wow.

That was, it was fantastic, Chris. You really did a good job because it wasn't quite the Super Mario Brothers theme song, but it was exactly the Super Mario Brothers Super Show theme song. Swing your hips from side to side. From side to side. From side to side.

From side to side. To the Mario. That was Ness McG. Yes. Go that. That was fantastic. That was fabulous. I'm very impressed.

That was really good. I was not expecting it to go as well as it did. No. Yeah, I thought we would all get a hand on the ball and pass off, but I think that's it. I think that that's the... I got one. Okay. Go. um yeah i thought we would you know i'll get a hand on the ball and pass off but i don't i think that's it i think that that's the i got one okay i've been listening to the besties for five years through its many ups and downs and hiatuses and where twist of fate and i am not into video game podcasts at all. This one, though, is great.

It's the podcast that got me excited about playing video games again. That was good. There's more to the review, but you ran out of song. There's more to the song, baby. Here we are. That was from... No, yes. It was Katamari.

It was from Halivai798. Love that review. Thank you. And I'll do this one from Bancho78910. Cool. Okay. This is the best video game on the podcast on the internet. If you're not listening to the besties, you should start.

That was one winged angel. Well done. Thanks. Yeah. You cut a very important part of that review. Also, you should sign my petition to bring back New York giraffe. I think I want to make,

that was so fun. I want to make that a regular feature of the besties. Uh, where we'll sing a review. Yeah, I think that'll come back. Maybe not every week, but I'd love to get every week.

Maybe Russ could get a hand on the ball next time. That'd be nice. Uh, anybody else been playing anything else? Y'all I'm, I'm, I'm going to talk about death stranding one more time, but I swear it's not, i'm gonna talk about death stranding one more time but i swear it's not i'm not talking about death stranding i'm talking about a book

so even better for russ fresh dick so i finished death stranding again everybody should be playing it it's a perfect game for the moment but right after it i i started listening to Into Thin Air, the audio book. And one, hey, Jack Krakauer, pretty good. You know, I think he's on to something. I think that guy's got talent, even though he's not going to write any books anymore. But also... It's about, for what it's worth, you should tell people what the book is about.

Thank you. It's about this really terrible botched climb of Everest in 1996 where Krakauer was actually one of the people who climbed and reached the peak and the summit. And then a number of people died tragically. It's very sad, but it also spends a lot of time explaining how high altitude climbing works and how you like why lines matter and why rope is so precious and how you how it's so important to actually collaborate with people and the danger of everest is that often the people who are climbing everest are just rich people who don't know how to climb and climbing when done well you need to all have kind of a bond um and it it made me appreciate death stranding even more because there is a lot in the game that is pulling from real climbing and hiking and i didn't appreciate that especially how um

how the game focuses on uh storing your your energy that felt more like a mechanic to me and actually understanding that people who climb mountains like this it's like if you're not using bottled oxygen you get three or four steps and then you literally need to sit down and rest um well yeah they're not using monster is the problem they're yeah they need they need to piss in their monster bottle and um keep the great circle of life going is there a bit in the book about how to avoid ghost whales that want to kill you and blow up the whole world no no they don't get to that part okay i did a little bit i i busted out the old uh vr headset uh the oculus quest which i put on and i was like man this looks shitty what's going on and i realized that there was a film of dust that had accumulated on the eye the eye pieces that i then had to scrub off

and it looked better after that uh but i've been wanting to i kind of fell off of supernatural which was was that what that game was called the workout game yeah um i i enjoyed my time with that but uh much rainier and I were actually talking about that I miss seeing you out there I miss seeing those big numbers I put up Rainier is Griffin and my favorite Supernatural trainer And we really missed having Griffin around

But I preferred Beat Saber back when you could It was very easy to put custom songs On Beat Saber For those who don't know Beat Saber Is the VR rhythm game Where you cut the blocks with the red and the blue saber was very easy to put custom songs on beat saber for those who don't know beat saber uh is the is the you know the vr rhythm game where you cut the blocks with the red and the blue saber to music and dodge around and it's very very fun uh but it's it's and this is their prerogative i feel

i guess maybe a little conflicted talking about this but like it's very much a walled garden where it's it's um uh they release songs kind of wildly and frequently and then even then it's like here is the imagine dragons pack and it's like i don't fucking care about that uh so there's not like a ton of songs on there that i wanted to play and they they released an update that kind of decimated the custom the ability to play custom songs on it but over the last i guess you know year or whatever since i've played it uh people have it but over the last i guess you know year or whatever since i've played it uh people have figured out how to sideload you know that that stuff back on and there's like a very huge active community of people making custom beat saber maps

so um i've been getting back into that it's a it's a fun fun little workout and you know there's a lot of a lot of good jammers on there bubble pop hyuna is on their juice oh yeah that's a lot of good jammers on there. Bubble Pop, Hyuna is on there, Juice. Oh, yeah. That's a fun one. Unsurprisingly, there's a great deal of K-pop. A lot of KDA in the mix, which is- I'm not going to abandon Rainier. I actually, it's really, I got back into Supernatural.

Oh, did you really? Yeah, it's still very good. I very briefly wanted to mention There Is No Game. It's actually, the one I've been playing currently is there is no game wrong dimension by draw me a pixel. Um, I, uh, it's one of like a, a, a very cool sub genre of games that I have always loved, but have not like, I don't know that there's a way of talking about these but like meta games where the mechanics of whatever device you're playing it on is being explored um there's one like uh one called progress to 99 on the iphone um that is very much about like uh uh using your

phone to um like for instance you'll be playing a game that requires you to use your volume buttons to like move forward. Or like you have to make a call and that using the call button will progress you forward in the game. That's a progress to 99 thing. There is no game is, uh, basically you start and there is a narrator telling you that there, there isn't a game here and there's nothing that you're going to play, and here's the exit button. And sorry about the confusion, but you can go ahead and hop out now. And as you continue to poke around, you discover, like, oh, wait a minute. This thing's loose.

If I tap on this, oh, this thing fell down, and there's a key behind it to the locked door that the guy set up he's like oh no you're not supposed to find that okay never mind and you open the door and help like friend and well like at one point he uh makes a progress bar that is very clearly made out of paper that fills up halfway and then doesn't fill up anymore and the narrator's like well that it seems to be glitched i'm sorry you're going to have to go but if you tilt your phone to one angle the progress bar continues to fill because it's fake and then that challenge is passed so you're like finding different ways of uh at one point there is a lock that does not work and the way that you um you unlock the game the uh if you pull out this little drawer you'll see there's a gear missing in this sort of like lock device uh and you go back into the menu

and there's a little gear icon for settings and you can take that gear off and bring it back to that screen and use that gear to make the lock work. That kind of stuff where you're like constantly trying to outthink it. It sounds so charming. It's so cool. It's so fun. It came out on iOS December 16th. There is a sort of a precursor to this. That's just called.

There is no game jam edition that you can find on iOS. If you want to get sort of an idea. One of my favorite running gags in both of these games is there's a very early sort of like faint where you play a block breaker. And then after you're done, the narrator continues to reference that great block breaker he let you play and remember all the fun you had playing the block breaker and can't that be enough for you why does there have to be another game beyond that i didn't make a game i'm really really sorry um but the entire thing is built around especially in the ui is built around trying to get you to leave trying to get you to quit the

app trying to get you to do anything else um sounds like it's got like a stanley parable vibe as well yeah exactly stanley parable um what was the remember this sort of like do you guys play that ios game it was like a tree what the game game by mom what was that called hidden my game by mom oh yeah that's not yeah that's actually not a bad like comparison where it's sort of like using uh all the different like permutations of this one um this one idea but it's uh it's it's really cool i i like a lot it's called there is no game cool um mine real quick is uh down well on switch uh i picked it up on sale like a while ago and whenever i kind of run out of like bigger to play, it's like my total fallback game. It is a very hard but satisfying roguelike

where you're constantly falling vertically down. I think we've talked about it on the show previously. It's really just spectacularly made. And I had initially played it on iPhone and managed to do really well despite playing it on a touchscreen a touch screen but being able to play it with controls on switch is delightful and uh really strongly recommend it if you're into like hard roguelikes that don't require like a huge investment i feel like a lot of roguelikes

the run could last like 45 minutes but in downwell each run is at most like 10 minutes um it's really all consuming like the runs are short but that is like that is my down well i haven't heard that name in years when i was in that game i was in that game um i want to share a few uh early access recommendations from our listeners really quick before we wrap just because we we had some good recommendations here um holly and a number of folks recommended ooblets uh which is a farm animal crossing pokemon s game uh daniel similar to freshick recommended teardown a bunch of people recommended everspace too there's some games that i hadn't heard of um carson recommended vault of the void and says it's like a more complex version of slay the spire and was made by only one person which seems

like a justin game uh scott and an active what's it called vault of the void vault of the void scott titles pure cruelty here uh said uh does neptune's pride 3 by iron helmet games count uh for folks who haven't played uh neptune's pride it is a game designed to ruin friendships yeah and uh zachary uh recommended caves of cud quad it's qD one of the deepest games I've played and I feel like it gets bigger, cooler every time I open it thanks to regular dev updates oh, sorry, one more Josh recommended Dyson Sphere Program

which is kind of a factory game I don't know if you've all seen this but it is like blowing up right now and I have a feeling it will be one of those games that we circle back to at some point later in the year as it becomes more fleshed out yeah, it's been on the top of steam charts for like the last few weeks it's crazy yes so thank you all uh for sharing those we will check some of those out uh and soonish hopefully caves of cut is like a and i may not be pronouncing that right

either but i remember seeing stuff about it it It kind of looks Dwarf Fortress-y, kind of like ASCII, Ultima top-down, like lo-fi RPG, but it's also got some roguelike elements. I've been wanting to check it out. It looks pretty cool. Griffin, have you tried Hot Dogs,

Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades? We have Jack and Jake. Oh, God, a long time ago. Is that still in early access? I guess so, but a few people recommended that as the thing that we need to try out in VR. Yeah, it kind of put me off a little bit just because I don't really dig gun sims,

which I feel like it kind of was being a little bit. That was one of the first games I remember where people were like, it really feels like you're reloading an automatic weapon and it's like okay that's that's not what i go to vr for but i'll but there is some there is uh i from what i understand it has only gotten zanier from there so that's good um this vault of the Void's looking good guys alright might be on my alley alright wow I can't believe we did it what are we doing next week

so next week we're going to be doing Little Nightmares 2 which is a scary game alright with little creatures that jump out at you and scare you I wish you'd just consult me before you make these unilateral decisions. I mean, it's in the production schedule. It is in the production schedule.

Yeah, but who's looking at that? Nobody's looking at that. Come on. Super Mario 3D World is the following week. Switch edition comes out next Friday, but we're not going to be able to get all of us to get our hands on that before. So that'll be the week after.

Yeah, we'll do that the following week for sure. I'm very excited. Take us home, Juice. All right. He's playing Vault of the Void right now. Like he's actively playing it. I'm into it. I got a bunch of mana, I bet.

That is going to do it for us for this week. Thank you for listening. Please leave your reviews so we can sing them because that's a thing we're doing now. It's a treasured,

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