The Besties - A Heist Game Starring Robot Pirates? Yes, Please!

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

SteamWorld Heist 2 is one of the year’s best surprises. The turn-based tactics shooter builds on its 2015 predecessor in practically every way, transforming into a rich mishmash of story, adventuring, and thrilling shootouts. In the back half, The Besties make progress on emptying the mailbag with a lengthy AMA. 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!

Yeah, I'm a little stressed out right now if I'm being honest with you. Okay, you you've promised us this is neither gross Nor involves a special guest. No, it doesn't i'm stressed out because I should be very happy I'm on the eve of one of the greatest concerts I might ever see. Oh shit, but I'm worried I'm worried that the concert might not happen at any moment because- Oh, because of Spirogyra. Because I'm seeing Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. And I feel like- Yeah, man, you are running out the clock.

You know, like every minute I get closer to being able to see them. There was actually one more person joining that duo, little guy named Father Time. So just watch yourself. I am excited for you, Chris, getting in this buzzer beater of a concert. I mean, it's gonna shred though, man.

Listen, they've hung on for so long for you, Chris. This may be their unfinished business for all that we know. Even talking about- Wait, are they ghosts already? Even talking about this makes me so sad. Makes me so bummed. Either one of them just makes me so bummed out, Chris. Here's what I'm gonna say.

The counterpoint is what if they just live forever? What if they do? I saw Willie Nelson perform about six months ago. He was dynamite, it was great. He sat through the whole thing, which, bless him, he deserved it. Right. But he brought it.

Sounded like Willie Nelson, it was great. He can plant it. Plant it, I don't need him to do a fucking death drop on stage, he's Willie Nelson, he can plant it. He can park and bark for all I care. They have brought some young guns, like John Cougar Melellencamp, who is. Ha ha ha!

Think 78? The rookie, coming in. I've always wondered, do you guys think Willie Nelson's song, Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die constitutes a living will? I have to have talked about this before. You know, I don't know that you have, but I do think it does,

because he's gonna be right there. At least it doesn't need to be all of him. You don't need to make a six foot joint. He's gonna be right there, it's not how any legal process works for a will. And the song. And the song is pretty explicit. It is true.

I think it just says, roll my body up in a big blanket and huff me down is I think the lyrics of this Of the healthy song. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Blanket can't even think about this guys to to to gnarly and Jimmy Carter is gonna be there, too Stop you're you're you're wishing a rule of threes situation in two existence. Yeah, we've just mentioned all three of them. Jesus. ["Spring Day in the Garden"] My name is Griffin Macor. I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Froschek, and I know the best game of the week.

Justin fell in a toilet, and he's gonna be there for, he told me, at least a week. And this is the Besties, a show where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive inter-game meant it's a book club for games of the year and you get to be a member by listening. Started doing greatest hits of our intros over the years because I wasn't sure which one we still do. Hey, this week we're gonna talk about a little game in a surprisingly prolific franchise.

We're talking about Steam World Heist 2. Chris Plant, what's Steam World Heist 2? Steam World Heist 2 is kind of two things. It's a continuation of the Steam World series, which is a whole bunch of different genres that are just done very well by one developer and have a steam punk robot aesthetic and the world heist to part of it is what do you call this genre tactical base tactical base tactic yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah also also let me correct you and say all those games are not by one developer I'll mention specifically steamworld build was made by the station the developer you're probably talking about is Thunderful. They do make a bunch of the core SteamWorld games, but not all of them. I thought it was Image and Form, wasn't that the developer?

Oh, God. Now I'm really confused. Yeah, you are. You're so confused. But you won't be confused, dear listener, at the end of this segment. I bet we'll get our ducks in a fucking row and talk about SteamWorld Heist 2 after this short break. Okay, so that was a short break for the listener, but we did take three weeks to figure out everything To figure out who the fuck made these games Okay, so image and form international AB was a Swedish video game developer based in Gothenburg in 2020

Image and form was integrated which sounds a little grim, into ThunderFold development. Yeah, it was integrated with Zoink. So just a lot of fun words being folded into this one game company. Okay, SteamWorld Heist 2 really surprised me. Yeah? I did not, yeah, the SteamWorld games are a bit of a mixed bag for me.

Oh, really? Yeah, I love SteamWorld Dig, I love SteamWorld Dig 2. Those are for me the kind of like highlight of the bunch. Sure. The offshoots from that have left me a little bit cold. I actually don't think I played SteamWorld Build. A lot of people didn't and it was generally considered to be the weakest of the SteamWorld games.

Okay, I tried, Steam World Quest, which was like the deck building RPG. It was like a card based RPG. Yeah, that one didn't really click for me. And the first Steam World Heist, I enjoyed, but it never got it's hooks in me. I didn't find there to be enough crunch there for me to really sink my teeth into.

I wonder, just curious, did you play the original SteamWorld Heist on a PC or did you play it on a handheld? I think I played it on a Switch, maybe? Or PlayStation Vita even, maybe? Oh yeah, I think I put it on a Vita. For what it's worth, I got obsessed with that, but I think the only reason, part of the reason,

was because it was a handheld game, and I think this game, both games, really the reason was because it was a handheld game. And I think this game, both games really are like, feel very much designed for handheld games. Yes. Steam World Heist 2 adds a lot to the mechanics of Steam World Heist. It's still, you have a team of rusty steam powered robots that you're sailing the ocean blue

and you are trying to take on the Navy, basically, the evil robot Navy with your scrappy submarine and your crew of extraordinarily customizable robot sailors. And for me, it is the extent to which you can customize these robot sailors that has really kept me coming back for more. Because there is a lot of ways that you can

sort of change how they operate in a mission and those ways that you change them are super meaningful and not like, well, this one gets an extra 1.6% to his melee. It's like you get extra options, you get extra maneuvers that you can do, extra tactics that you can deploy in each level based on what you equip them with or what skills you unlock for them

or what classes you assign to them. I think before we go too deep into the customization, because I agree that's one aspect that is insanely strong. The core loop of the game is basically, if you didn't play the first one, it's a 2D side scrolling turn-based tactics game. If you've played XCOM, if you've played...

Mario and Luigi, or what is it? Mario... Rabbids? Rabbids. Yeah. Imagine that, but in a 2D environment, and really what that manifests as, a lot of the game is focused on doing these, like, insane ricochets where you're bouncing a bullet

off three walls to, like, nail a headshot across the room, and comboing these abilities together with a squad of, let's say, two to four different robots. Yeah. A lot of cover, a lot of cover mechanics that say, two to four different robots. Yeah. A lot of cover mechanics that you have to take into account because it is also a game where if you play it too fast and too loose and too aggressive without building towards that,

you will get absolutely shredded. Yeah. There's also the big differentiator here comparing to like an XCOM game. There's no chance to hit. No. It's entirely based on like where you're aiming. So if you have, for example, there's like a sniper that has like a giant laser beam showing you

where you're aiming, it'll be very clear, but maybe you're using a guy with a shotgun that doesn't have a laser scope. So you kind of have to guess, but it is really based on like where your gun is. It does have a little bit more randomness in that the damage dealt can be within a range. Yeah, there's some crit chance stuff. But it also, every time you are taking a shot or doing any attack or using any ability,

it always shows you a window showing you this is how much damage it can do. It really surfaces that stuff, because it is one of those games of like small numbers of like an enemy has three hit points. And so like your gun will do too, unless you can ricochet this shot off that ceiling, off the wall and hit them in the back, then it will do one extra damage. Like it really, really, not since like into the breach,

have I felt like, okay, this is a math problem as much as it is sort of like a geometric puzzle and it is really, it is really, really just super satisfying. There's another element to the game where like your ship, your submarine, you are piloting around these sort of like world maps going to these different missions or going to these different missions or going to different like shopping hubs.

You can outfit that submarine with like machine guns or thruster boosters that make your ship go a little bit faster. And then if you get in range of an enemy ship, you engage them in a sort of like auto fire sort of. Like a real time. Sort of, but it's not tactical. It's like scow and bones, if you will.

It is not tactical at all. That element of the game is more like vampire survivors, like get your thing close to the thing and it'll shoot. It is a wee... That part of the game feels a little bit like a half measure to me, because it's so... I love it. So, I agree.

It's very, very, very simple. But something I enjoy about this game, and we're going to talk about Konetsugami, I think, it's very, very, very simple. But something I enjoy about this game, and we're gonna talk about Konnetsugami, I think next month at some point. I know, we're talking about on Resty's. Yes, but like weeks later from now. Yeah. But something that both these games do

is they understand that like, hey, with these tactics games, you have to vary it up. That just having a series of levels that feel the exact same does not work. And there are really, I think, three phases at least to every day in this game, because there is like a day night cycle, effectively. And the way that works is you start your day, you talk to all the people on your ship. God, this sounds so boring when you describe it like this.

No, it's a really good. It's it's. You're right. you're right. You're right. It's an accurate description, but it... I have so much more fun when I'm doing it. Not thinking of phases, but go ahead. But, okay, so you wake up,

you get to chat with all your buds, I'm gonna try to make it fun. You're just clashing some bruisers with a whole bunch of robots, and you're putting massive weapons on your cool ship. And then you go out onto the map, and you go around and you're putting massive weapons on your cool ship. And then you go out onto the map and you go around and you like sabotage

a whole bunch of ships of your enemies. And you basically have like points as in the characters that you can use that you can spend on these different missions. So if you go into a mission, it's like, hey, you need two people and you have five people on your crew. You can use two people for that

and then you could use three more on a three person mission somewhere else and then you'll have to go to sleep. Yeah, every character can only do one mission a day and so you are trying to decide like, well, if I use my flanker here on this mission then, or my sniper on this mission, then I'm not going to have them for the next one. So is this where I want to use them or not? Yes. And at first it feels like,

oh, well it doesn't matter, just go to sleep and reset, but as the game goes on, there are kind of incentives to make the most of it every day. That's what I think is so special about this game, I get the boring sound of it, but there is so much strategy of different ilks here, and they layer it on so carefully that it doesn't feel like a 10 hour tutorial.

Yeah, to connect the dots a little bit, your ship also repairs at the start of each day. So the damage that it takes is cumulative. So basically, you spend each day thinking like, okay, if I can do this mission, this mission, and also sneak in this, maybe this one person mission, and go around the map and blow up a bunch of enemy ships, and then go home to end my day

and bank all the points that I've earned, then I can unlock these different reward tiers. But if you just go out and do one mission, come back and sleep, you can use those guys again, but you won't be able to get as many rewards because you didn't bank. But I've also had times where I've done a bunch of missions and then been like, I think I can sneak one more in there

and then got fucking blown up and lost it all. So there's a huge risk reward. You are right, that is where this loop makes sense of the auto combat sort of seafaring stuff. It's also kind of amazing because in the first game, essentially none of this. I mean, there was not essentially none of this. I mean, there was a little, there was a little bit of a meta game where there was like a world map and you were flying

your ship on these like pre-determined paths to enter missions. And sometimes you'd have like little mid mission things where a ship would attack you. But it was so underdeveloped compared to this, which is like, this feels like a fully imagined thing, which is such a really cool, just a pace changer as Plank was alluding to this, which is like, this feels like a fully imagined thing, which is such a really cool, just a pace changer, as Plank was alluding to.

You need something, a palette cleanser, between constant turn-based missions. And even a game like XCOM doesn't really have that. It kind of does where you're doing base management stuff, but it's so light. This feels much more robust and interesting than that. Yeah, so the vectors of customization in this game are bonkers. There's a lot of different resources,

some of which you spend at these shops that you can use to recruit new bots or buy equipment for your bots. There's a currency that lets you upgrade your ship, either to increase stats for all your characters across the board or unlock new terminals that you can use to further customize your characters. There's a terminal that lets you unlock special abilities for each character. There's a terminal that lets you upgrade abilities that each class has.

But I do want to mention, as far as I'm aware, only two currencies that you really need to worry about, which is great, because a lot of these games get drowned in currencies. And this is really just like, if you're buying weapons or gear, it's gonna be gallons, which is like a water currency. And if you're buying permanent ship upgrades, it's gonna be these gems.

And that's really all you need to worry about. It's really parsable, and it really rolls it out in a way that is not overwhelming. It rolls it out in a way that is not overwhelming. It rolls it out in a way that feels very much like anytime one of these systems unlocks, it's like, oh shit. Like I actually, I was thinking it would be actually more helpful if this character, this melee focused character had like a more defensive ability

and this is how I get that, great, awesome. There's six classes, I think, in the game and each really feels very differently. There's like an engineer that can build cover if they need it. There's like a boomer that posts insulting stuff on Facebook. No, that like is all about explosives.

There's the sniper that gets like the super long you know, beam that lets you at laser sight. I would say like the classes are pretty familiar if you've played any turn-based tactical game. They have a representation in all of them. What is cool is as you play those classes, you upgrade them and you get access to these different skills,

but you can also switch your character's classes at any time and then you pick and choose abilities from the other classes so you can have a subclass sort of system that blows the whole thing wide open. You can multi-class into literally every other class in the game so you could have a perk or a skill from every other class in the same character, which is not recommended because they probably won't jive as well, but if you've got like say you mentioned the sniper earlier

and you mentioned the ability like the flanker, which is like a fast moving shotgun type, gets the perk of, oh, you deal bonus damage when you're firing from behind. If I'm using the sniper and I know I can ricochet that shot, I'm getting that bonus damage. You can take the flanker class and get all these extra movement abilities

and then give them to the reaper class, whose main thing is that if they kill an enemy, they get to take another shot right away. So now all of a sudden, I have this angel of death that just warps around the map blasting people, and it's so good, it's so good and so fun, and I keep, I did not think this game was going to hook me as much as it has, but my mind keeps reeling with like,

well shit, wait, actually, if I take my engineer and I give them these melee abilities, then I can, the combinations are endless. And then there's a whole system of, there's accessories that give you different abilities in combat, there's different weapons that do pretty dramatically different stuff,

even within the same classes. I found a sniper rifle guitar that you don't need to reload after a turn, but it fires in an arc shot. So it still reflects off walls, but it does an arc shot instead of a straight line. Yeah. The range of the sorts of guns that you find is truly wild.

I got a sniper rifle that shoots an electric bolt, and it does slightly lower damage, but it pierces through enemies. And when I unlocked that weapon, my turns started to take way longer, because I no longer was satisfied with like, I can shoot that guy. It was like, well, if I bounce it off here

and hit that guy and bounce it off that box, it'll hit that other guy and that other guy. And it started to become like, how many guys could I get with a single sniper? Turns into like pool. It really does. It's a virtual pool. Yeah.

I, I, I really adore this game to go back just into like the, the nitty gritty of the play. The, just the system when you were in a level. So you go into the stage, right? And you have your team of two to four, and your your goal will be like, go and kill these three mini bosses inside the stage and then get to the exit. The basic of doing that and then having the alarm system, which I like, did you

know, we didn't really go into it. I mean, do you want to explain like how the alarm was? Sure. Yeah. Basically it's a way to ensure that you're not like taking two steps forward, firing two steps forward, like playing super safe, because the longer a mission goes,

the more the alarm will go up. So after like 10 turns, for example, it'll go to alarm level one, and now every single turn, guys are gonna be spawning out of doors. There's also loot that will only be on the map for a set number of turns, which incentivize, because if you did play this game where it's just like,

I'm gonna turtle up, I'm gonna just hide here and take sniper shots, and you can play it that way, but the game really rewards you for pushing your luck. And I don't know that you can succeed on the standard difficulty. I don't know that you can succeed doing that because the the ads that come in once the alarm thing goes so high enough just will in their incentives to get all the loot. So what I found often was like I am making an escape by the skin of my teeth every time maybe I can complete the goal pretty easily.

But if I am then like sprinting to every piece of loot and get to the exit, by the time I get to the exit, I have one person fending off an entire horde that is coming in through the back door. The accessibility of this game is also great because it does this thing that I feel like we've seen a lot, weirdly this year, a lot of completely customizable difficulty,

of sliders for like ship combat difficulty or enemy accuracy or like you can really tweak it to a degree that feels really, really good for however you like to play the game. If you find that you are pushing your luck a little too much and being punished for it in a way that doesn't feel good, you can make the game be what you want it to be, which is... Yeah, by default, as I'm playing through these missions,

I feel like if you're on the default setting, it feels like the game will make you lose units. There's no way to not have people die. Not permanently, it just means they're knocked out for the day, which is like, if you finish the mission, they are also knocked out for the day. So it is not a huge source. Right.

They also earn like less XP and you get fewer stars for completing it. It does feel by default that the game is designed for you to go back and play old missions once you have better gear to like do them perfectly. But if you don't have that patience to like do that and you want to get it right the first time, you could tweak the difficulty Yeah to get closer. I played on standard difficulty and I just turned down enemy accuracy a little bit Yeah, I give myself a little bit of grace a little wiggle room here If I like really fuck up and get posted up in a bad spot

then yeah, maybe I'll be able to make it because and the game is like very You know pulls it forward those settings and gives you like a text box, hey, if you're frustrated or you feel like it's too hard or even too easy, make sure you tweak this stuff because otherwise you won't have as good of an experience. So they want people to mess with this stuff. I think this is the best game they've ever made. I think this is the... Yeah, that's probably true.

I love SteamWorld Dig, that genre I am absolutely into, but the amount of polish and just frankly cleverness in these systems that I've not seen in another sort of turn-based tactics game is really fucking impressive. The vibe is also great. There's lots of different, you have to go to these different hubs

that are like where you go to rest for the day and shop for new stuff and recruit new guys. And each one has like a house band that plays a different like sea shanty or like there's also a weird sort of jazz fusion element to with like the world map music. The music across the whole game is just so good. Yeah, it's exceptional, runs great on Steam Deck. I don't know what other platforms it's on.

I think it's on everything. I would definitely recommend if you can play it on a handheld, like a Switch or a Steam Deck, definitely recommend it. It's turn-based, obviously, so you don't have to worry about performance necessarily. But playing it in as high of a resolution as possible is recommended just because it looks fucking gorgeous. They do amazing work on the art.

And I think that's what's so amazing about this team, is that they seemingly pretty quietly continue to put out games that are not only like, from a design standpoint, really interesting, but also just from a presentational standpoint, like through the roof, gorgeous. They remind me a bit of the Hades team in that way. Just like they are taking on these genres

that maybe don't get this sort of love, or at least get targeted for a different audience. What I like about this is like it pulls in people who do not typically like this sort of game. Yeah, it's telling that all three of us really love it. That I think it will be a big piece of our end of the year discussion. Yeah, I do worry a little bit though, because I know with the lack of success, specifically with SteamWorld Build, they kind of went through an acquisition phase

as a lot of companies did around 2020. And I know that they're starting to think about selling off some of those studios that they bought. So my hope is that they realize that they have this core team that's very strong, but diversifying too much is kind of gonna result in a weaker product. So like you're saying they focus on like one of these SteamWorld offshoot?

I mean, no, no, no. I like the fact that they're doing different genres. I just like, I don't know that you can put out one a year, which is kind of the pace that they've been doing. It is a crazy pace, yeah. There is a third person co-op shooter that they've been working on It is a crazy pace, yeah. There is a third-person co-op shooter that they've been working on forever. I think it's called SteamWorld Headhunters,

or something like that. Headhunters, yeah. I think that one's on hold. I feel like they- That definitely seems like the most ambitious one they've done so far, but they keep crushing the 2D stuff, and I just wanna see them like, whatever, take on more genres.

It's cool with me. Yes, they announced in February that the game was, had been put on hold. Yeah, okay. Well, this game rules, definitely recommend it for literally anyone that likes these sorts of games. It's definitely one of the best of the year so far. Yep.

All right, well, we're gonna talk more about ourselves after the break. We have so much mail to get through. We have so much mail, we're gonna dip right into it. So don't touch that dial, it's got jam on it. Ama! Chris and Russ, ama! I'm Griffin McElroy, 37, from the besties.

Ama! That's how that's pronounced actually. You're supposed to say it like that. It's an AMA. We're here. We have questions from y'all. Some of these questions are a little bit older from, I think it's a mix of the Patreon and the newsletter,

but we're coming back to them. We like them and we're going to jump in right now with the first question. This comes from Nick. What's a game that you played when you were younger, absolutely loved, but don't want to revisit because you don't think it'll hold up? Mine are Mystical Ninja 64 and Shadow of Memories,

which I've never heard of Shadow of Memories. Sounds familiar. Mystical Ninja 64, definitely, probably. Honestly, most 64 games, I think, are not, not great in the modern era. Yeah. I mean, Mystical Ninja Legend of Goemon 64 games I think are not great in the modern era. Yeah. I mean, Mystical Ninja Legend of Goemon loved that game.

I agree. Is that the SNES one? Well, I think they're both called that, but Mystical Ninja 64 is like the thing. Anyway, I agree. I do agree that all 64 stuff. Blast Corpse was the one that I experienced this with. Where I was like, I love that game, I'm sure it holds up. It in Body Harvest, I was like, how could it not hold up?

Is it Blast Corps? I think it's Blast Core. Blast Core. It's Blast Core. But as a child I said Blast Corps because I didn't know how the words were. Blast Corps, which sounds way cooler, yeah. That's true. But as a child I said blast corpse because I didn't know how the words blast corpse which sounds way cooler Yeah, that's much cooler. This was an in the 64 game about destroying things with big cars and trucks It's the truck your fucking yeah It was it was awesome was a rare game and then body harvest was kind of like a lead-in to 3d Grand Theft Auto made by Dma which would go on to make you know, I can't if that are doing everything. I remember

Watching when we were doing our best weapons bracket episode for patreon members looking at Clips from turr rock dinosaur hunter. Oh god, and it just a shock of my hair turned white from From shock and fear but also just from age Realizing like wow, this does not look like how I remember it looking. Yeah.

A lot of 60-40s. Justin recently mentioned Bayou Billy, and that's probably the game that I would be most afraid to go back to. But, yeah, okay. For why, why's that, Russ? No, a number of reasons, but I don't remember, I remember being fond of it, but only because

that was like one of two games that I had at the time on NES. There's a lot of NES stuff that I feel like has come back around to being not terrible to play, because it is so like of its era. Have you played Bayou Billy recently? I've not played Bayou Billy. I'm not vouching for Bayou Billy,

but I'm saying like, I don't know, man, like Rhygar. Oh yeah, Rhygar. Some of those games, like obviously, in the cold light of day in 2024, like there is a obvious clunk to their sort of like design and their feel that is just sort of, because that's a relic of the era. But they are also like not a relic of the era.

But they are also like not terrible to, you play Marble Manus and it's like, what the fuck am I doing? But it's also not miserable in the way that like, playing a Nintendo 64 game, I think because, you know, Turok Dinosaur Hunter vaguely resembles games that get made to, like vaguely resembles first person shooters and it's like, wow, holy shit. Like this is, but playing, you know, Marble Man today, like, vaguely resembles first person shooters. And it's like, wow, holy shit.

Like this is, but playing, you know, marble madness is like, I don't know. That is its own, its own era, its own thing. Saying that Turok resembles shooters today is like saying like a magic guy resembles, you know, Vincent van Gogh. Like, yeah, you have to really stare at it and squint your eyes. But I know what you mean. I think the problem probably is that, you know, when I've been looking at a lot of these like back catalogs for retro games, and when you have basically the same game but better in every way in a later generation, there's just like kind of no reason, like I would never play the original Game Boy version of Tetris. version of Tetris because of course I would play a more, you know, a better, maybe it's the DS version

or something like that, a more modern version. So I think that just happens a lot where the catalog just gets cold. Yeah. Well, and it's also like not so unusual for like all of art as people are figuring it out, right? Like, you know, are you gonna go back and watch the silent films?

Or are you gonna watch the ones where they figured out how sound works? Fuck you, fatty arbuckle. Um, it... I mean, there's a few exceptions, right? Every once in a while you gotta go back and you gotta see what Buster Keaton's up to. I think he holds up, by the way. But for the most part, yeah. For sure. You have that barn fallen.

Anyway. Um, what do we got next? We have a letter from David M. Hi gang, as far as handheld gaming phone tablet deck switch, etc What if anything do you do for stretching or? Arrogant omic posture to stave off the inevitable neck and shoulder stiffness that seems to inevitably happen when anyone is trying to see a screen 20 to 45 degrees below their sightline Thanks for all you do

You just play through the pain man. You build up the muscle. You gotta put in the work. You gotta put in the work to get those... Huge neck muscles. You're straight up just Goldberg over here. I mean, my lats, like, I don't know if you guys... I hide them. But my lats are fucking crazy, dude. Oh, I've noticed. I don't get this. Griffin says he hides them and they're popping through his t-shirt. I get it. You're being

modest. I don't get this very much. I mostly get like hand and wrist sort of stuff and less like, I mean my neck and shoulders are always fucked up, but I don't think it's because I, I'm looking at a screen. I think it's because I have a 60 pound head that is difficult to keep off of the ground. But yeah.

I mean that would cause a lot of problems. The heavier the head, the more you're leaning over and that causes a lot of problems. heavier the head the more you're leaning over and that causes a lot of problems I will say my tip for people because I have this is I Found pretty cheap online Cushions for the armrests of my desk chair Oh interesting so what I can do is I can lean back more in the desk chair and use the cushions And they're not like hard desk chair cushions and that lets me have a more level view of the screen.

Interesting, for me, especially with handheld, play at a desk and you can rest your elbows on the desk, and you can keep it closer to like face level. I definitely do hold it, I'm trying to, I have my Steam Deck right here, and I'm trying to I definitely do hold it up Look down at it cuz that would be shitty I definitely cuz that noggin. It's the noggin guys. It's really it's really outrageous. It's all about the noggin Kevin messages saying party game recommendation

Boomerang foo have y'all ever played this my kids came home from their cousin's house raving about this game on switch I looked it up $15 on sale for $8 right now I've never heard of it bought it with super low expectations within minutes The entire family was fully engrossed and a team battle royale Multiplayer up to six players dead simple to learn control is easy enough for my five-year-old Complex enough to hook me enough randomness to the level of the playing field best part of him I played in years could not believe I had never yeah it does look really good it's a top-down like okay it looks like a Mario

Party minigame but fun yeah no I mean it looks it there's a lot going on here it looks like there's different types of boomerangs and oh, someone just turned into a pot to hide in the environment and they did a sneak attack. This looks great. My current policy of my kids are at an age where I do need to let them win a lot of the time. Sure. And I worry I would reach levels

of like tower fall competitiveness here that would become an issue. It does look very intense. It's like a one-shot kill. Towerfall was the example, yeah, I thought of as well. And this shit came out four years ago. I've not heard of it. It's on Steam. I think on Steam it's like five bucks.

So if you have a setup to play multiplayer on PC, that's an option. But yeah, it looks really good. I don't know if there's online play. That would be the only concern. Thanks for the recommendation. If you don't have a bunch of people hanging out but That's fine for five bucks. If it's only local. That's a good deal We got this question from Brendan

What's the worst game you've played and loved? Oh god, Justin's not here because every week He has a terrible game to love. Yeah, I thought Justin could just do this worst game. I played and loved worst game I I played it loved Where has he played and loved? That's a tricky question because I don't believe in like guilty pleasures. I don't believe in the idea of yeah, I Love this, but it would probably like like would be like the clicker Realm right some sort of clicker game that I got obsessed with yes something that's taken something That's like really low calorie, which isn't bad. It's just like, it has... Idle games are definitely bad for me.

Mobile idle games that I will put a bunch of time into and then be like, what the fuck am I doing? I should be engaging with the world around me instead of just making this number go up. Yeah, I think for me it would be the Kyrosoft games. See, those are great. They made Game Dev Story. Game Dev Story, I agree for me it would be the Kyrosoft games. I think those are great. They made Game Dev Story. Game Dev Story, I agree, it's good.

But then when you're on your sixth Kyrosoft game, three months after playing Game Dev Story, you look back and you're like, why am I doing, you know, particular part of the world? Hard to feel good about that. Yeah, it doesn't feel great. Yeah, I can't think of a lot of like, yeah, the game sucks and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone,

but I adore it. I certainly have a lot of like, I don't know, games that I bring to you guys that go over like a fucking lead balloon. I feel like every time I talk about like Sea of Thieves on this show, you guys are like, uh-huh, uh-huh, all right. Happy for you. We're very happy for you. Yeah. Frost, you have one?

Yeah, I think it's probably some like dumb mobile game that I shouldn't be playing, but do. But honestly, I feel like I've culled a lot of that for my life. And now it's just like desert golfing, which I couldn't recommend more. Uh, it's, it's very rare that rare that I know something is shitty for me, and I'll continue to just throw time and energy into it. Yeah, I mean, we get a lot of questions about how we balance our time, right? And I think this is probably one of the key ones, which is,

if you do not like something, you don't stick to it. The math on this, since having two kids, has really changed for me. Where like, if I feel the slightest friction, I will put a game, I will play it to the point where I feel like, okay, I understand this and I can talk about it on the besties if we're doing that. I thought Steam World Heist 2 was going to be one of those games,

which is why I was so surprised when I was like, actually, I don't have much gaming time, but I'm gonna spend it playing but steamworld ice 2 yeah rules Yeah, you got another one this one not from Brendan from Brandon Why do you guys care so much about the distinction between triple a and indie games? Will you guys ever change your discourse to allow the generic term game? To generally and without caveat include games for any source instead of triple a by default That's a good question.

I have strong feelings. Yeah, let's hear it. So I'm, yeah. Uh, I mean, my, my big one is that I don't like going hard into the industry stuff for the average person because I don't think it's like super useful. You're here to hear about games, but I think if you're the type of person who listens to this show, you are invested in where games are going

and what you're going to get more of in the future, right? So in the same way that we talk about free-to-play games, if you hear us talking about free-to-play games a whole lot, you have an idea of where the market's going and what type of games are going to be landing on your computer or on your gaming console in the future. The same thing goes with like AAA and indie right now. We've talked a lot about AAA and how they're in this kind of death loop of needing to have bigger and bigger payouts,

thus creating bigger and bigger games, which in turn need to have bigger and bigger payouts. And they are effectively creating an artistic space, an entire aesthetic that is foundationally, just for it to exist, different than the rest of the video game industry. Literally by dint of their own need of survival. So I think that there may be a question here of like, should it be AAA games and then just games? Yes. As a separate thing, that would be fair. I don't think about these as like, hard, firm categories,

and I don't think about either one in the pejorative sense. I think maybe like back in the day, right? When like Xbox Live Arcade started to be a thing and like indie games started to become a thing, right? Like they started to become more of a factor and things that we wrote about in the press and things that we like covered. There was, you could make the argument

that like you're rooting for this, you're rooting for the little guy and you fight the system. I genuinely, I feel like I am pretty pragmatic about the way I think about games and talk about games. Obviously, I love when an independent creator gets out there and makes something that they're excited about and releases it and supports it.

Your Eric Barones, your Toby Foxes and what have you. But for me, at the end of the day, I don't hold a AAA games like sort of origin against it. And I also don't really feel like anymore. I play an indie game and I'm like really rooting for it by default if it's not like, if it's not something that clicks with me, if it's not something that I enjoy.

I think that like at the end of the day, if there is a something that clicks with me, if it's not something that I enjoy. I think that at the end of the day, if there is a distinction that I would draw between those two sort of categories, is like Chris said, a lot of AAA games have creative decisions formed for financial reasons, formed for this has to make a buck, this has to have a certain ROI. And so that influences the creative side of things,

it influences sort of like what the end product ends up being, and I think we've seen time after time after time after time again that it's like poisoned the well and turned games into things that they shouldn't necessarily be. Whereas on the indie side of things, that force isn't, obviously they have to get their money back but it's not this, oh, it's not casting this huge

fucking shadow over the whole thing. The other thing is how many AAA games get released versus non-AAA games? It's like a billion indie games for every one sort of AAA game that gets released at this point. So I agree that the distinction doesn't matter anymore, but I do think when you're talking about the market forces that influence this gargantuan game developer

and publishers' decisions of what goes into their game, I do think it is a useful shorthand. It's just not, I don't think about it in like, well, I only like indie stuff. Like I don't think anybody really does that. The problem is indie. As a, of these two, the word indie is the problem because you're trying to put a label on things

that aren't AAA. AAA are now the, like 20 or 30 games a year at max. And then indie, as Griffin said, was everything else. are now the 20 or 30 games a year at max. And then indie, as Griffin said, was everything else. If your game's being published by Devolver, that's a sizable company. Yeah, but it's not Activision. Even SteamWorld, we just talked about SteamWorld, and compare that with a game

that's made by two or three people. Griffin, are you playing Mini-Shoot Adventures? I'm gonna talk about it later in this episode, yeah. Okay, but yeah, I think there's a comparison there between those, like SteamWorld versus Mini-Shoot Adventures, those are two different business models and two different expectations. I worry, I don't worry, I know for a fact

that there are a lot of people who have a lot of thoughts about how we operate, like how game developers think about games, or game journalists talk about games and think about games. It really is not my experience that there is this firm divide of like, well, I only like indie games. I only like, like if a triple A game comes out and like fucking beats ass.

I mean, Elton Ring is a AAA game. Elton Ring is a AAA game, fucking, you know, Tears of the Kingdom is a AAA game. Like these, you're not firmly against one or firmly for the other, like if the game is great, that's all that really matters, it's just that sometimes you can feel the invisible hand of commerce sort of like gripping one category more than the other.

And also as cultural there are good and bad AAA studios, there are good and bad indie developers. So it's like it really does equalize that way. Anyway I want to move to next question but that's a really good question Brandon. Thank you for sharing that one. Next up, we've got this one from Ryan. Do you feel like there may be too many games? I've been wondering lately if there's too many releases nowadays, and would like to know your thoughts on if this creates an industry

where there's just too many things going on for people to sit back and properly enjoy their experiences before dropping them for the next big thing. For our purposes as a media podcast that you enjoy, it's the best. Fuck no! This is their only thing! Please don't take this away, this is it! Please don't take this away. If you're a game developer and you're trying to make money in this business, I would certainly be concerned about the number of games that are coming out on a daily basis, because it is astonishing how many very high quality games have like

no audience whatsoever on Steam and why they failed, hard to say. I mean, why they failed could be as simple as, you know, this huge game developer surprise. I mean, okay, this again is going to kind of get into the last conversation we're having, but I remember saying, I forget who it was, but there was some indie developer

who worked on this game for years and published it on the same day that, what is it, Supermassive put out the Hades 2 early access. Just like a, oh no, they bumped it. They had to move it a couple weeks because they're like, our game is too similar to Hades 2. Gonna get swallowed up. But the number of times that that's happened

because some AAA game developer announced during E3, and it's available now, and everyone's like, well, fuck, no one's gonna play this game I worked on for a million years. I can see that being really, really, really bad. But I don't know. But there's no way to stop more games from coming. People are continuing to jump in.

I think it's an issue of expectations and what people think the market is. And I think that goes for the player in terms of like, yeah, you're just not going to play everything and you have to be okay with that. That's part of the, why we do these podcasts, right? Is so that you can hear about things that you won't play, but you can still kind of appreciate them. It's why I listened to a lot of sports podcasts. I will say that like, it's the way I play games now, which is like squeezing it into fairly

narrow windows of time, really having to make space for playing games because my schedule doesn't have like huge open slots in it anymore. I never feel like when one of those windows comes around, like I don't have anything to play. There's nothing out right now. Like I always feel like there's fucking like 15 games that I could be dipping into at any given time. And that's like, that's cool. And that's exciting. That makes me feel like, well, okay, this hobby of mine is going to be my hobby for the rest of my life, because it seems like there's plenty to dive into. There's always something. Yeah, just to wrap on this one, in terms of expectation setting, the other half of that is the developers. And I think if you're a developer, you have to know what you're getting into. This is not the Xbox 360, Xbox arcade era, where like, if you could score a deal and get published with a decent sized publisher as an indie game, you're going to be a major hit. Like you could get partnered with Anna Perna right now, and that doesn't mean

your game's going to be a wild success. Um, but you have kind of as good a shot as anybody that I, I wrote a piece for polygon that isn't live yet. Maybe it'll be live by the time that this, this airs, but I think this is much worse for the AAA studios because effectively what we have now is YouTube as a distribution model. We have core place, maybe Steam, the core place that anybody can be on. And you have the exact same little triangle or not triangle, you have the exact same little rectangle promoting your game as every other game. And if you're an indie, great.

That's like pretty equalizing. If you are the latest Star Wars game. And you cost $70. Yeah, yeah. Not as in your cram between four games that cost free or a $1.99 and have overwhelmingly positive reviews from 50,000 people, that's not super great for you. And I'm not saying that like good or bad,

it's just the reality of it. And I think that is what, again, is causing a lot of this problem that we talked about previously. I also think though on the consumer side, like it just means it takes a little bit more work for you to like stay abreast of the stuff, right? Like even if you only listened to our podcast,

which is outrageous, like we don't cover remotely everything. You probably have specific interests that we don't even touch on, right? Like entire genres that the four of us don't have in our sort of like areas of expertise. So you have to find, you know, the steam page for fans of that genre. Hint at visual novels.

Hint at visual, I mean, Chris, I love you so much. Sometimes you bring stuff in that vicinity enough that I do feel like we could check that one off the list. Maybe it's already counted. Yeah, I think it takes a little bit more work, but again, I don't think it's reached this critical mass where we're not in the video game crash of 1987. I don't know, I feel like you can stay up on this stuff.

It just takes like a little bit more work to focus on that. I got I got one last question that's in this vein before we wrap. And this one's from Tokyo. Has your time in the industry changed how you view games? And if so, how? Yeah. Yeah. It'd be fucked up if the answer was no, I feel like. Yeah, no, for sure. I think it's just more familiarity with the process of making games. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily make me like certain games or dislike certain games, but it does make me understand why, for example, a bad game that had millions and millions of dollars shoveled at it came out and was still bad.

Like, I understand how that would happen. And honestly, I'm shocked it doesn't happen more often that like, AAA games come out and they're like, fully unplayable because the logistics of getting a game from zero to out is so impossibly difficult that I'm surprised that more often than not, they kind of reach a certain barrier of quality. I think it's good and bad. There's good and bad stuff to how this has changed for me. I agree with Russ. I love when a game makes a choice that I understand what that choice is and how bold it is that it was made.

For me, there is a level of, I don't know, authorship that is visible to me that was not when I started in the industry. I would just play games and enjoy them, which I still do, but I also feel like I enjoy understanding games as much as I enjoy playing them. But there's also an element of, we talk about a new game on this show every week.

And so like my, I'll tell you like, I used to love open world games. That used to be like my favorite genre. And I would really go whole hog on every fucking Assassin's Creed game that came down the pipe. And that's not the case anymore because I can't, I can make room in my life for maybe one big game that

like eats up my time at a time and then some other stuff that, you know, we talk about on a weekly basis, but I can't, I just do not really like sort of time suck uh, games as much anymore. Um, which is not the worst thing in the world, but it is a way that like the way I do this job has very, in a material way, changed the types of games that I enjoy playing. Do you think you would still, if we weren't doing this podcast,

do you think you would play more of those games, or do you think it's more of a life situation that is keeping you away? I don't know, I think that it's hard to say, right? Like we've been doing this show for, how long? 12 years, something like that? So like, obviously my life from a 25-year-old man to a 37-year-old man has changed pretty dramatically,

so it's hard to separate those two things out. I am glad that I play games the way that I do now. I don't really, it's not like I'm looking at the latest Assassin's Creed game and being like, oh man, I wish I had time to dip into this. Like I am glad, honestly, it's like weeks like this, I would not have played Steam World Heist 2 if I was only playing Destiny 2

and Diablo 4 every day, right? Like Diablo 4 is one that I feel like it really bit the dust for me because like, I just, I can't with you. I don't have the time for you anymore. But as a result, like I get to play stuff that I normally wouldn't can't with you. I don't have the time for you anymore. But as a result, like I get to play stuff that I normally wouldn't probably elect to play. And some of my favorite games that I've found on this show have been games that I

did not see coming and probably would not have sought out on my own. And so I, it has changed, but I'm pretty grateful for it. What about you, Chris? I think the biggest difference is that I don't just like something purely on like an emotional or gut feeling anymore. And like it's kind of easier for me to talk about this like using movies as an example. Like I feel like there's a lot of like you go to a action movie and it's brainless and you see it and people are like, I loved it.

I can't believe the critics hated it. What was wrong with them? And the reason that is, is because as a critic, or as somebody who thinks about this endlessly, you start to incorporate every other factor. You think about, you know, like, well, I've seen 20 of these, this thing this year, and like, did this really do anything different? Or you start to think about like, the sound or the way that it like challenges structure conceptions or the way it pieces into like a larger uber whoever was making it there's all of these other factors

and they start to impact how you receive like the object on its own and on some cases that's like great because i think it can make things that are smaller or weirder or messier You can end up showing in a lot of grace because you're thinking about right as part of like a holistic thing But there are times where like I do have to remind myself Hey ask what did this team set out to do and did they do it and how did they do it? and I think that is often at how like and did they do it and how did they do it? And I think that is often at how like the typical person experiences it.

We're like three Rick Rubens, where we feel very confident in our taste now because of four Rick Rubens. Justin's also a Rick Ruben. I do agree with you. If you put our beards together, it might be as long as Rick Ruben. Equals one Rick Ruben, yeah. I'm also just so glad that we do this show

and that I have gone through this because everything I like now. For sure. I would have just never tried. I would have never discovered, discovered current me, if not for this show and playing this many games. Because I, I mean, if people have been listening to the show can probably go back six, seven years in trashing or trash is like pretty much everything I love today.

Yeah. seven years in trashing our defense forces. Pretty much everything I love today. Yeah, yeah. That one's been consistent from the beginning because it's just that good. Can we do honorable mentions? Yeah, let's do it. I have a few things to talk about. One, I did dip into Mini-Shoot Adventures

and it's got its fucking hooks in me, gang. You were 100% right. This is my maybe biggest one of the year of like, what the fuck was I waiting for? This is a twin stick bullet hell Zelda game, like a fucking of course man, this is absolutely my shit. It is so Griffin, incredibly Griffin. So I got that on my Steam, I've been touring a lot lately,

I'm about to travel tonight to go to Gen Con, and I have this bad boy on my Steam deck just ready to fucking rip. I finished The Boyfriend, which I've talked about on this show already, which is what, eight dudes in a house falling in love with each other, very Terrace House vibes.

It's only 10. Do they boot people out and it gets narrowed down? People leave of their own volition if they are not finding love or if they're being jilted. It's so good, gang. It's really fucking great and I will be heartbroken if it does not get more episodes made, but everything about it just really works.

There are some, everyone's very in touch with their emotions and there's frank conversations about that that you do not get on other sort of reality shows in this vein. I don't think there's a lot of reality shows in this vein, if I'm being honest. I think it is a really, really great show that has really, really been great.

Of these Japanese reality shows, is there like the match that actually happened and stuck and like people always point to them as like the success story? I mean, Saina and Noah from Terrace House, what is it, opening new story. I'm thinking like Boston Rob. I mean, say Noah from a Terrace House, what is it, opening new doors, I think, from that season. They got married, had a kid.

It was absolutely amazing. I also dipped into Sea of Thieves, season 13. All right, listen, let me pitch Sea of Thieves season 13. Here's the new thing. They got this new ship, this Flameheart ship. It's a world event. Captain Flameheart is like the big boss of Sea of Thieves. Oh, you don't need to tell me who Captain Flameheart is.

It is a huge ship. It's massive. And it has like a dragon face on the front of it that shoots fire out of it that will just fuck up your ship if you get in front of it. It spawns in and it's got a skeleton crew literally. And you go in and it's like this big fight to take over Flameheart's ship. Once you take it over, it's got a skeleton crew, literally, and you go in and it's like this big fight to take over Flameheart's ship.

Once you take it over, it's yours and you pilot it, but it also shows up on the map for everyone else. You have these different objectives that spawn when you're in charge of this ship, but basically you become the boss fight of the server. That's cool. And so like I played this the other night with a couple of friends and it's fucking crazy

because you're in this ship trying to do your business while every other ship in the server. I was in a four way fight like the other day and it's always great in that game when you have these sort of like alliances that form between ships that could just as easily blow each other out of the water and seeing the kind of like politics of like,

don't you worry little sloop, I got your fucking back, let's get in there, let's take this guy down. Because once you take the ship over, nobody else can take it over, they can only sink you and take your treasure. So it becomes like a player versus player boss battle. And it's really fucking fun. How do they decide if you're fighting,

like if you got like four teams fighting the ship, how is it determined who gets the ship? Whoever gets it and gets in there and gets the final kill, I suppose. There are some issues of, we had to hop around servers a lot to try and even find one. And I also had some experience with griefers in that game,

which has not been, like people, there was one time where someone got the ship and just sailed it out of bounds and it sunk immediately and just like got rid of the world event, which was really fucking annoying. But yeah, man, I mean, every time I dip into that game, I am never disappointed.

It's wild that it's stuck around for as long as it has. I know, man. Cool, I wanted to talk about, I've been playing Diablo 1, which I never played. What the fuck? I owned it on CD, didn't play it a ton, but there is a version on Port Master that allows you to play the original version

on like various handhelds. It's called Devolution X is the port master version, but you need files from the original CD to actually get it running. And it's really kind of fun in a very like rough, sketchy kind of way. It's much slower than Modern Diablo. The whole thing is like-

Well, unless you're playing what? Like the Sorceress with like the crazy teleportation. I've seen speed runs of that game that made me want to barf. Right, but I have to play it with a controller because it's on a handheld. Oh yeah, I guess so. So I'm playing it with the Archer character,

Rogue, whatever they are. And it's like, I like it just because it's, I miss the days when Diablo was like, you're fighting three guys and that's kind of a challenge. Yeah. And Diablo has long since moved away from that. Even Diablo 2 didn't have a ton of that that and this feels like a little more nitty-gritty interesting And when you get like a rare or magical weapon like it actually feels like a meaningful moment, right?

So it's been like a nice kind of trip through history that I've been enjoying Well, you know pooping and things also, I watched this essay by Thomas Flight, which just went up a few days ago called, Why Does Acting Feel Different Now? Basically diving into the origins of like what people consider to method acting and, you know, the Daniel Day-Lewis,

Robert De Niro kind of vibe versus like old timey 1940s acting. And what is method versus not? It's just a really well-put-together explainer essay that I enjoyed quite a bit. What about you, Chris? I've been playing this game called Thank Goodness You're Here.

Oh, shit. Is that out? You have a code for it. Oh, shit. You got to go play it. Yeah. I'm curious what you'll think, because I don't think of you as a big British comedy person.

You like the British comedy. You like Taskmaster. Are you? It depends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. It's very silly. I won't say like straight up like Monty Python silly, but it's very silly. Who's in it?

There's like a name on it, right? Matt Berry. Yeah. Is in it. And it is delightful. Basically, it looks like a 2D animated kind of Saturday morning cartoon. You're in Northern England at a small town. You have a job to talk to a boss and at the very beginning of the game you just leave the boss's office, start walking around town and start

punching people in the nuts. There is only one way, so far that I can tell, to engage with the world as a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little man, and that is to punch. You can punch trash, and you poke holes in it. You can punch a geese, and that geese gets mad. You find a guy, and you punch him in the nuts, and he's like, hey, how you doing? What's up? I got my arm stuck in this vent. Can you go get something to lube it up? And you're like, yeah, I'm going to go to the butter shop, and I'm going to go punch around there. You're just going around like a little point and click adventure, but instead of having to click on everything, you get to punch it,

which let me tell you, they solved the big problem of point and click adventures. It sounds like Tiny Terry's Turbo Trip. I mean, almost exactly what you described just then was Tiny Terry's Turbo turbo trip like you start with the boss and then you punch people Kind of but okay more point adventure than like 3d open world, you know rare game It is very clever and very very point-and-click adventure in that The thing is to just go around and punch at everything as you kind of gradually figure out what it is you're even supposed to do. And then like, oh, how do I solve this?

I need, you know, I need the very beginning of the game. So this won't spoil anything. It's like, there's a guy who has his arm stuck in this grate. I need something to- I mean, you already spoiled it. It's butter. To glue up the arm. Yeah.

And it's butter. And I need to get into the butter shop, but it's locked. So I need to find the locksmith who's drunk at the pub. And I need it like- It's like a mousetrap thing. One of those, you know, you're, yes, exactly. But the way that everything goes about is just so weird. So wonderfully absurd.

I think it is an acquired taste of a game, but if you're the type of person who liked um, um, a goose game, I think if you like Duntunnel Goose Game, I think you'll like this. And if you like British comedy at all, I think you will really like this, especially if you're older and like have a love for the stuff of like the late seventies through the early nineties. Uh, amazing. Thank you all so much for listening to the besties this week. especially if you're older and have a love for this stuff of the late 70s through the early 90s. Amazing. Thank you all so much for listening

to the besties this week. Chris, what did we talk about? Can you tell me what we talked about, please? Oh no, we talked about SteamWorld Heist 2. We answered a ton of awesome questions. We talked about Diablo 1 Devolution X on Port Master. We talked about Thank thank goodness you're here in Mini-Shoot Adventures and Sea of Thieves.

We also talked about The Boyfriend on Netflix and a YouTube essay by Thomas Flight called Why Does Acting Feel So Different Now? We will have all of those up on the newsletter this week along with Jeremy Parrish's deep dive history of the adventures of Bayou Billy on the Nintendo Energy Unit system. Hey, we've got a Patreon, and if you like our show,

there's so much more of it that you can get on the Patreon, including all the episodes of the Resties and our monthly bracket battle episodes over at patreon.com slash the besties. Yeah, we've actually got, oh yeah, the next bracket battle episode's gonna be up this coming Tuesday, so keep an ear out for that. It is for the best sidekick, as voted on by y'all,

and we had a very fun time recording that one, so. Yeah, thank you to the following Patrons. I never get to do this part. KayoNashi, RedRedBlue, Rainbows, and Puck. Next week, World of Goo 2. Keep it, a lot of 2s here on this show, as a rule. Many 2s. So join us again next week for the besties,

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

Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties!

Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties! Besties!