The Besties - Let's Save Cats From Oblivion!

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

The Besties talk about the brand new, ultra indie immersive-sim Skin Deep. Then they revisit the world of Oblivion. But none of this matters because Plante got a CRTV to play Promise Mascot Agency. 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!

This is the first time I feel like in quite a while we haven't had to lead off with a reboot. Maybe the past few times it's been a little bit better. Is that in my imagination or does it seem to be what your power of all- The power of all four of us being here together. Yeah, I mean I'm on that fucking Pentagon crunchy pipes shit.

Like what? You know what's hard is sometimes I forget the way we do with the cold open in this show and sometimes I feel like I'm talking to my brother and then all of a sudden I'm talking to Griffin McElroy. And it's like, do you know what I'm saying? I didn't realize. I thought I was talking to a human being.

Just to demonstrate the difference, because this would be useful for me when I'm out in the world and people see me. So give me that again. That was clearly Griffin McElroy, the internet persona trying to keep us. Right, because you were like. Yeah, so give me that question again,

I'll do it like normal style. Okay. What was the question? I was like, has your internet gotten a little bit faster? Oh yeah, Griff, I feel like your internet has gotten a little bit better, is that in my imagination? Yeah, baby!

Go and see. Zoom, zoom, zoom. That's what I'm. You know the problem is that once you, once I realize I'm talking to Griffin McElroy, I melt away and Justin McElroy's there. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So I'm, we're already in that entertainment locus. It's like a Severance situation. Yeah, exactly. It is very, very much a Severance. Exactly. Have people actually ever heard the real Justin? I don't think so. I don't think Justin is air, he's very careful

not to put that on the air. Should we invite him onto the mic? I think that's the right place to do it. Yeah, I mean, I can just say, have you been messing around with more Linux stuff, man? Fuck yeah, dude, you know what I actually did? I accidentally hacked my neighbor's WiFi with this little fucking flippers here

I gotta put out a little sniffer PK. That just sounds like Justin if I'm being honest. That's the same guy, that's what we're saying. He's the same guy on and off. So I'm the only one who wears a mask. Yeah. Persona. Frusher is a fucking giraffe from New York half the time.

Yeah, it's very clear in these switches. I just don't realize, you know the difference? I can't remember the last time my brother tried to make me happy. But Griffin McElroy, All the time. Tries really hard all the time. Griffin McElroy is very amusing.

Yes. Yes. Put it on the back of the butt. Diplomatic. That's what the AI Google search says when you look me up. Popular banana eater. My name is Justin McIlroy and I know the best games of the week. My name is Griffin McIlroy and I know the best games of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best games of the week.

My name is Rusty. I know the best games of the week. Yeah, your ears did not deceive you. That's those four besties back together again. The fearsome force of- I got so excited. They haven't lost a beat, they still know how to do it. They haven't lost a step.

They're exactly as good as they've always been. This week, this video game club that we are a member of, and you are a member of just by listening, we're gonna be discussing the remaster of the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion and Skin Deep. Chris Plant, what is the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion remaster in Skin Deep? Such a great question.

Describe those two things in a sentence, please. One is a remaster of a very old game, one is a new game that is very inspired by old games. Got it. And we are going to be talking about both of those right after this, so don't go away. Okay, I'm really worried that I'm gonna forget to say this. I'll just tell you guys right now. You know that big, you know that big IV that they put up

to hype the press conference for the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion? Yes. Okay, I absolutely saw that image and absolutely parsed it as VI. So like, the whole day I was like, here it goes! Here we go! I forgot your Roman numerals.

And then I saw the story go up a polygon about the Oblivion Remastered, and I'm like, dang, Oblivion Remastered and Elder Scrolls 6 in the same day? Todd, you've done it again. Todd, you shouldn't have, and we shouldn't have, I shouldn't have, let off with that. I should have said, it's also been 10 years

since I've been wanting to play this new game, Skin Deep. That's right. Can someone give me a brief history of Blindo's sort of body of work? Because it's quite singular. That's all Justin. That has to be Justin, right? Yes, so it is singular, and it is a suite of games that really I think about as like,

when I was in game journalism professionally, because these were very much like games I think of as joystick games. These were, and like early polygon games. These were like the ones we would get fixated on. They're not directly connected, most of these. And the ones I'm thinking of here are like 30 Flights of Loving, Gravity Bone.

There are a couple of Blindo games, Flotilla and Flotilla 2, that are a little bit more like strategy type things. Quadrilateral Cowboy was the last one, but these are like first person, first person action adventure games, where the sort of hallmark of them, besides the, the technically they get a lot deeper as, as they go forward. There's like an editing style that is consistent throughout these games.

It's a sort of an aesthetic, like sort of blocky aesthetic. And this idea of like editing where you wouldn't necessarily expect it in video games. Like it's a little bit disconcerting, I think, the first few times it happens if you're not used to it, but it's interesting to see that sort of like aspect come back. What does that mean, editing? Oh, so like if you picture a movie,

when you're watching a film and somebody is talking and then snap, you cut and you're in a different scene. Oh, sure. And that's like not your brain is just used to moving from scene to scene that way. When you're playing a video game and you're walking and you're moving towards what you think is a goal and bam, snap, there's a cut and you're suddenly somewhere else pursuing a different goal.

It feels really strange. Jazzpunk painted with that particular brush quite a bit. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a good example. I would say the thing that unifies all their games is these are PC gamer ass games, no matter where they go. So they might be, yes, hardcore strategy. The first person games, you know,

their origins are in Quake mods. And then at the same time, they are us games, because Justin, you mentioned Gravity Bone, like that used in the mood for loves music, the one car why movie, like they're very heady weirdos, they seem to love both like 1950s through 1970s tackiness and then also love like modern art house stuff. There's another facet to these, I think a lot of these games where they feel sort of like barely together, like they're barely holding together.

There's a certain, it almost feels like they've been suited in that I'd like the games are barely sort of like stuck together with tape and cardboard It's like a DIY aesthetic that I feel like is it permeates all and silly, right? We haven't really talked about it, but totally like their games tend to be very like almost Monty Python silly almost You know, that's well, let's be careful where we throw around the Monty Python, especially in this room. We have some real critics. I could not want to talk about that less.

Okay, so, skin deep, I feel like goes, I mean. Close to skin deep, specifically. Yes, what the name suggests, it actually, I think, is levels beyond the sort of immersive stuff they've done. Heads above, you might, you know? Cause there's a lot of heads in the game. There's a lot of heads. You gotta do a lot of stuff with heads.

Yeah. Skin Deep is an immersive sim. The gameplay mimics games like Bioshock, System Shock, things like that. And the idea is you are a insurance agent that's sent in to save various cats from various spaceships that have been attacked by pirates. And the way you do that is by sneaking around those spaceships, hacking devices, opening vents, and clearing out rooms using stealth and thrown objects, things like that, to

basically get the upper hand on what is otherwise a very overpowering number of enemies. So if you've played any of those games, you're going to feel pretty familiar ground here, but there are some very, very specific differences where this game kind of sets itself apart. Yes, if you haven't played those games, a couple of those differences. You're not running around in Bioshock style with magical powers where you can just blow everything up. You are quite underpowered. You will eventually find things like a gun or a knife, but for the most part you're finding a banana, eating it for health, and then throwing it on the floor to make someone slip. And once they've slipped, you jump on their back, you ride them around the room and you look for things to bash their heads against until they die. And those things that you can break might be, let's say, a thing of a hand sanitizer.

But when you bash your head against that, it releases hand sanitizer into the air that is combustible. And then you bash their head against something that sparks and suddenly the entire room is on fire. And they're dead, but you nearly are too. And to make matters worse, when characters die in this world, their heads pop off their bodies and they fly to a regeneration station.

So after you kill someone, you have to grab their living head and then find a way to dispose of it. So not only do you have to take out enemies, but then you have to be able to carry these heads to very specific disposable centers. So that could be flushing one down a toilet, it could be throwing it in the trash, there's all sorts of ways. So it's just the kind of flow of combat feels very, very, very different from a lot of its inspirations. There's no Gears of War curb stomping here either. The whole world feels very tactile and physical, like every object in it is beyond just like,

there's a physics aspect to it, I guess, where you're picking up objects, they have a weight, they have a heft, they interact with each other when you throw them or whatever. But there's also a lot of like tiny signage throughout the game that you can like zoom in on with your, your camera and you can get hints about stuff, but it also feels like very lived in because there's this like layer beneath where you can zoom in and everything feels very hand rotwrought and constructed. Yeah, that's how they do the tool tips, which I've never seen this in a game before.

I thought it was fucking brilliant. It's like, if you have a, let's say someone, one of the enemy guards drops like a walkie talkie, you can zoom in on that walkie talkie and it might give you just like the instructions on how to use it. Another thing, like a, let's say it's a piece of wire, if you zoom in on it, it'll tell you,

hey, if you hit this against the wall, it'll create sparks, and you intuitively know, oh, sparks might ignite the gas from the hand sanitizer thing. So it's all kind of informing you about each object without, again, pulling you out of the game using like an onscreen tool tip or just like floating text or anything like that.

I really appreciate, there's also a running ticker log of everything that happens. Yeah. All of the, anytime anything interacts with something else or you throw something at a character and it hits them, it shows up in a log, like this character was bonked by this or this thing was ignited by this. So when things get extremely chaotic,

and you know, in Chris's explosive hand sanitizer example, like it is actually pretty easy to follow what is happening in that case. Because you have a little bit of this. Yeah, it's chaotic, but not random, right? Like it feels like you understand the interactions that are happening. And like, I think that's a part of the problem

with games like this sometimes, is it starts to feel a. And like, I think that's a part of the problem with games like this. Sometimes it starts to feel a little bit like, I feel a bunch of junk together and we'll, we're not sure how it's going to interact. Like the interactions make sense. They're just like, you may not intend on all of the, the interactions that you, that you start. Yeah. I think the biggest difference as well, apart from everything we've talked about is this game does not have level to level progression you're basically starting from scratch at the beginning of every level and the way the levels play out differently Is mostly like the things you can find so you know you don't get pistol

You don't get guns for quite a few levels at the beginning of the game And once you unlock guns that doesn't mean you'll always have a gun. It just means like, you might find more levels with guns in them. And that I think is, it's very interesting because, if you played System Shock, or you played Bioshock, whatever it is,

as you're progressing through those games, you land on a build. It's like, okay, I'm focused on whatever, rifles, and I'm really good at sneaking, or I'm really good at hacking whatever it is and Because there's no progression in this game You actually are constantly having to reevaluate like how you're handling situations And so that is a big differentiator. I think

It is a little challenging. I mean you I think it makes it feel more like a puzzle game than it does like a immersive sim RPG, which I think a lot of inspiration comes from, which has pluses and minuses to it. I think, yeah, lacking that sort of progression element, I feel like that is such a hallmark of the immersive sim genre that it, I don't know, it feels a little bit more puzzly.

I kind of get it though, from a design standpoint, like honestly, when I'm late game in like a Bioshock, like I'm using the three things I'm really good at. Right. Like, and that's all you do. And by limiting it to like the gear that you pick up along the way of a given mission, it does

really force you to see everything. Whether that's to your taste or not is kind of up in the air, but it is an interesting kind of approach to that problem. Later in the game, for those who have gotten there, how does it kind of evolve difficulty wise? My favorite Blindo game is probably Quadrilateral Cowboy, just because I really liked the kind of like, on the fly hacking sort of mechanic of it. But I also thought that like, the way that it escalates

and requires you to like, queue up all of these different commands to go off at very specific times, like, got really, really difficult really fast. I don't know if anyone's gotten sort of far enough to comment on this, but does this game sort of evolve in a similar way or what's the sort of arc like? I mean, you are fighting more objects. I think the biggest like challenge leap comes when they introduce the idea of like after you go through

and you save all the cats, the ship that you're on gets basically invaded and a boarding party will join where like eight or nine guards will come on the boarding bar on the ship. And you have to either steal a key from one of them or kill them all, which killing them all is incredibly difficult. So that I think is like where part of the challenge comes from and also just like once new objects

get introduced, those objects can also be used by the guards guards so you're kind of juggling a lot of the different mechanics all at once. I like that phase style of games of these sort of puzzle strategic games. It reminds me of damn the your robots and there's like a million of these and one of them, you'd steam world, steam world heist, uh, too, where you would, you know, you have the time and the space to solve the first stage of the game, but as you actually complete it and then you need to make your exit, that it becomes almost a different strategy altogether as you're avoiding like all the enemies that are flowing in. I don't know that like staged games. I also think of that pizza, the Wario where time or not Wario, the Wario like pizza tower, pizza tower. Yeah. Yeah. Like having that

AB, I don't know. It's a really good flow. There's also a lot of sneezing mechanics. Yeah. It's very funny for a stealth game is that you have to like account for how badly you want to sneeze. If you go through somewhere where the air quality index is not favorable, your sneeze meter starts to fill up, which is honestly get, I don't know, a little bit annoying, but also hysterical. It does seem like they came up with clever ways

around the like abuse systems of like, oh, you've been spotted, you could just go in a vent. But you can't because if you stay in the vent for too long, you'll sneeze. I know we don't normally talk about the value proposition of a game, but this thing is $18 on Steam. That's a great, if you, if this sounds at all

like something you might wanna play around with, like I think you, they don't make a lot of games like this. And I think that it's really, really worth kind of like messing around with and experimenting with it. In fact, they haven't made a game like this in so long. This game is built on the Doom 3 engine, if you can believe it. Wait, what?

Yeah, it's built- It's in Tech 4. In Tech 4, which was what they used for Doom 3, which is why it looks like that, which is very funny to me. I also, the other thing I wanted to mention is outside of the, just like the normal gameplay loop, the levels are not randomly generated.

They're all like created. They made them. And what that allows them to do is have like little side quests within the levels that are totally optional. But you'll have like little narrative beats where you're finding notes and the notes will be like, Oh, I left another note under this guy's whatever. And eventually you're like repairing lighthouses and doing all sorts of like little side stuff that you don't have to do. But I found compelled because generally you'll find like the most fun narrative beats in those.

Just a good little bit of story, like that lighthouse mission that you're talking about. There's a particular, well, there's two cats in that mission that I would read a little novella about. There's a little goth cat who's pretending to be a ghost, and there's a little troublemaker cat named, I think like Gerbo or something. The cat thing is so funny because when I started it,

when I started playing, I was like, there's a little bit of like, you know, I like this style, but I kind of miss like the wild blocky. And then like the most, just there's no aesthetically insane block cat. The first time you encounter one, it's like... Yeah, everyone looks like a Doom 3 model, and then suddenly it's a Minecraft cat that pops out of a cage. And it's like so well-spun. The conversations with the cats are all so funny to me.

I don't know why it is, but when I see a blocky cat who's like giving me orders and stuff and is being treated like a VIP, I think that's great. And when you save them, they pop out like Superman and you say meow with like a ton of reverb. No. No. And they just fucking fucking crush audio design. It's so good I wish we still had the Sega Dreamcast virtual memory units So I can get little cat emails throughout my day. Oh, I'm going really nice

It's great that they send emails in the game I just want to have it, you know, if I'm just walking around filling the gas check my cat email. It sounds nice You know if I'm just walking around filling the gas check my cat email sounds nice We are we have so much so much to talk about I think we should wrap our discussion here if that's okay By you guys is that all right? Yeah, yeah when we come back elder scrolls oblivion So the elder scrolls for Oblivion yep, not six Four. Oblivion.

Not six. Yep. Not six. It's tough, the ruminomorals are tough, man, because the order matters. It's tough, man, especially if you don't pay attention very close to stuff and you're like, yeah. The order matters.

Here's the problem. So true. You can't fit VI into the lettering of oblivion. Doesn't work. It's true. Wait, obliv... It's perfect. Oh, you can.

You can, though. It's perfectly. The message was that the secret. The clues were there all along. This is six. This is six. It's like counting the doctors. They just like went out of order a little bit. So, there was a long time that I said

Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion was my favorite game of all time. Sort of tied with Link Between Worlds, but it was a really- Link Between Worlds or Link to the Past? Cause that's crazy. Link to the Past, not Link Between Worlds. So it was released at this weird time where it was right before I like moved out. It was like the last time that all three of us

were living in the same roof. And it was just sort of happenstance right after my mom had passed away. So the three of us and my dad, like really spent a lot of time in Oblivion, like a lot. So like this game was like sort of foundational in like getting us through that time period.

Like it was that and hero clicks. That's what we did. We bought a lot of hero clicks Like this game was like sort of foundational in like getting us through that time period. Like it was that and Hero Clicks. That's what we did. We bought a lot of Hero Clicks and we played a lot. A lot of it. And those Hero Clicks have only accrued value. Those were huge. Oh, they were basically Bitcoin.

At the great investment. You've heard of McElroy Island? Well, I'll tell you what paid for that. It's Hero Clicks. Yeah, I have not played Oblivion. We did it for Monster Factory a few years ago or something at this point. And even then it was like, this is, this feels,

it's strange how unfamiliar this feels because we spent so much time at like a crazy part of our lives. And I was not prepared for just kind of the insane sort of sense memory of like walking out of the sewers for the first time. And it's really, I don't think, you know, I'm saying anything that people who have played this remaster

have not already said, but like, it is amazing how much they have captured the weird, how much they have captured the weird, broken shit about this 19 year old video game, and managed to maintain that while also making it more enjoyable to play and look like a million bucks. Without laughing at it, it feels like it's laughing with it. You know, like there's a lot of decisions. What I mean by that is,

when you talk about the broken shit, there's a lot of dialogue, for example, that is rough in this game. Yeah. And it recreates that roughness, but it's recreating it in the same way that if you made a perfect recreation of your favorite childhood stuffed animal,

if you took all the effort to make it just, you know, as messy and disheveled as you remembered it. I don't know, there's like care rather than I think there's a version of this, a kind of like, I don't know, gearbox version of this, where you're actually adding more. And I mean, like, can you believe how stupid it was, you know, back in the day that we liked this. We're here, it's like, no, we genuinely love the Rough Edges. Mm-hmm. And I do, on the Rough Edges, like, I do think part of the reason that I enjoy Oblivion more than Skyrim, certainly more than Starfield,

is I think as the studio has grown in size and sold so many fucking copies you can't even imagine I think there's a level of like safety that needs to be enacted to ensure that like these games don't launch totally fucking broken and I think the only way to ensure that is to like put a lot of guardrails in certain aspects of the game To the point where like in this game like you can craft any craft any combination of any spell with any other combination of any spell. You can, I've talked about this before, you can make a ring that makes you jump so fucking high

that you die from the fall damage. There is no limit to how much they are willing to let you kind of bust this thing wide open. You know, the practicing spells, I mentioned that in Slack, but like, the idea that you're just like, no games do this, where you're just like running from A to B and you're like, the practicing spells, I mentioned that in Slack, but like the idea that you're just like, no games do this, where you're just like running from A to B and you're like, you know what, on the way,

I'm gonna cast Cure on myself 10 times, and I'm gonna level that up. Because that's fun, man. It's more fun than walking, walking around, leveling up, casting Cure, that's great. That's good stuff. Every game should do that. I mean, that's, yeah, I guess.

I mean, other games have figured out like, maybe let's just make the walking more enjoyable. Like Elden Ring. You don't need to level up your skills like that in Elden Ring because like. It's a different type of game. When I'm playing this type of game, I want to be able to just be spamming my growth potential. Yeah, there is a clicker aspect. It's not just a clicker aspect. It's like the I don't know what it is that's in the secret sauce

of this game that makes you feel like, you know what, I am gonna go do that. I am gonna go level that up. I have the ability to do that. If you wanna do it that way, you absolutely could. It's a valid way of doing it. Like, it's weird that I still don't think mini games match the, oh, I see a cave over there.

Yeah, I'm gonna go look in that cave. Like it's very rare, but Oblivion like makes the world feel consequential enough and it makes the reward seem real enough that it's like, yeah, I think I will poke around. It's also before Bethesda started doing AI generated questing. In Skyrim, Skyrim was the first one that did it and it was like you love Skyrim

But you beat all the quests good news. We've got infinite quests because we can just Generate them using all these little algorithms whatever and the second you introduced that in the back of my head I'm thinking is this an AI quest and is it gonna be inconsequential in the way that like all AI quests are But because in oblivion, there's none of that. You know that everything they made in there is actually a handcrafted, has impact piece of content. So it kind of elevates the value of everything you're experiencing.

Big, big standout stuff for me is, one, adding a sprint button to the game seems like, yep, the original Oblivion's kind of not so enjoyable to play because you feel like you're just going kind of slow most of the time. But the biggest thing is the way they've changed sort of level scaling. The way that leveling in Oblivion works is as you level up your skills, you earn basically

like points towards your next level up where you get to increase your stats. But it used to be, if I'm not mistaken, your stats would increase based on which skills you leveled up. And you had to be very careful because like, if you went on a shopping spree or a lock picking spree, you would level that stat up, level yourself up,

level up every enemy in the world and not have any skills to actually be useful in combat. So would it be related? Like they leveled up not related to the skills that you would level up. Well, the stats that got increased, I think were related to this. Oh, you're saying the scaling of the, oh, yeah, yeah.

If you put on like heavy armor and you got hit a bunch of times in heavy armor because you just wanted to see how heavy armor was, it would level you up in heavy armor and give you more strength, even if strength wasn't something you were interested in. Right, so you had very little control. Now it's like you have these minor skills

that you don't pick and those don't move you towards the next level as quickly. So it's not a big deal if you go and do a bunch of mercantile stuff. Also, when you level up, you get to pick which stats you increase. Like, just you spend points to do it. And all of that makes, I don't know,

there's always this underlying tension when you were playing original Oblivion of like, you know, I have all this fucking skooma to move, but if I do that, my mercantile's gonna increase and I'm gonna upgrade my personality stat and I'm gonna get fucked next time I fight like a big skeleton or something Yeah, I mean I I

Really have always wanted to get into these games and I struggle every damn time to really fall in love But a funny thing happened here and it's not that I got you know head over heels for oblivion. I did Return to avowed that's what this game did for me. It made me think like, you know what, I'm more of an Avowed, I'm more of that studio thing, I like what they're doing here, but I want all of the modern niceties, I don't need as much freedom as this game provides, and it like sends me back into that world. But I wanna hear Hoops, because Hoops' eyes are like trying to, they're looking to the sky,

trying to figure out how my brain makes that connection. I'm thinking about what you just said, because I'm trying to parse, I have like been trying to go back to Evolved somewhat, because I, not in relation to this, but just because like, I keep going back to it, because I feel like this should be the kind of game that I'm really into. And like, I keep going back to it, because I feel like this should be the kind of game that I'm really into.

And like, I do, I like Avowed. I think that there is something about Avowed that seems much more interested in whether or not you were doing quests. Avowed would like you to be doing something. And like Oblivion seems perfectly happy to let you just screw around. Like, Oblivion doesn't really care what you're doing.

And like, I feel like avowed really wants you to, to like, and avowed, I will say this also, like the scaling of the difficulty in avowed and the way that all plays out is like, is often very frustrating, especially for a modern game. It feels off in a way that this like, at least if it's off here, you can kind of figure out a way around it or some at least if it's off here, you can kind of figure out a way around it

or some sort of scam or something. It feels very, very specific and kind of railroaded in some ways in a vowed, even though I actually do like a vowed. Whereas this is like, I mean, quite honestly, like if I'm doing a quest in oblivion and these fucking vampires are like two-shotting me, I'm just gonna lower the difficulty.

Because the combat is so inconsequential and stupid, and I don't even mean that in a bad way. It's just, like, a little bit mindless that it's not the challenge, it's just the, like, hey, this is a fun thing to do for 30 minutes. Yeah. Whereas I think the combat in Avowed is fucking spectacular, and, like like there's some

element that the difficulty adds to that experience I also just I really it feels good to Level up so specifically the skills that you're using Like it feels good to use a bow and arrow and know that I'm getting a little bit better at it every time that I use it that just like for my brain like'm getting a little bit better at it every time that I use it. That just like, for my brain, like, that feels, feels really good. What it reminded me of as somebody who does not have a long history with this game in particular was weirdly crackdown, the original crackdown game, where like everything you did also gave you that feeling, right?

Like, yes, you could go chase experience orbs, also, if you just kept jumping, yeah, got better at jumping and you can get better at running. Yeah. And that there is something to that you're right, hoops, that just feels so good. And weirdly not very underused. They they've also made a few smart tweaks to like how things leveled up. Because previously, like the only way to level up your mercantile was by selling one item at a time. So you had a stack of like 400 arrows

and you would just sell one at it. And that was the best way to do it. And now they like factor in like, how much money you're making, which seems obvious, but you know, it's tricky making games. What was the team who did this remaster? It's Virtua, Virtuos, I think they're called. They've worked on like a few others as like, It's Virtua, Virtuose, I think they're called. Yeah.

They've worked on like a few others as like, you know, I don't think they've gotten like as much of a spotlight on the team itself. Yeah. But I am incredibly impressed by the work they've done. Yeah, no, I, again, like that balancing act. It launched very smoothly. Yeah, I think it's hard to do this. I think it's hard to make it so much,

the quality of life of playing the game so much better while also still feeling like it is pretty clunky most of the time. How are y'all feeling about your appetite for this sort of game right now? And by that I mean, I feel like we don't get this every year and yet this year we get Avowed, we get this and then this fall we get the Outer Worlds 2,

which feels just like a lot. If I'm being completely honest, I've played it for maybe 15, 20 hours, I completed all the Mage Guild stuff and started to get silly with the spell crafting and enchanting, and that stuff really is so fun from a sandbox perspective. You can make a ring that drains your health

if you have it on you, and then you can pickpocket someone and put it in their inventory, and then just wait a minute, and then they'll just fall down dead. I find stuff like that really, really entertaining. I don't think I'm gonna stick with it just because it is a game I have a lot of nostalgia for, but it is also a game that I feel like, and this is true of Skyrim and honestly every Bethesda game,

it gets a bit samey after not too long. And so I, and also there's just like, there's a lot of other stuff out right now that I don't know that I have it in me to dedicate, you know, a hundred hours or so. I really don't, you gotta free it from the, I agree with everything you're saying, but it is so heartening, I think,

to have a game like this be, to have this work done just from a preservation standpoint, and I know that this is a corporation, they're not doing this for charity's sake, but like, it's very, I think this game was so, we didn't really talk about the context, but like, this game for console players was like the first time really, really,

that a game like this felt good. Like, Morrowind existed, but like, it was not, it didn't. It like barely ran on Xbox. It barely ran and it felt bad, it felt chunky. This, when Oblivion came out, it felt like I didn't know you could do this on a console. And that was like, it's massive. And I think it's really cool that people are able to see

that part, that really important thing, and like understand where that is coming from, I think is really awesome, even if it's like kind of fighting for oxygen with a lot of other stuff. But it seems like people are into it, are like, you know, people for whom this was not a formative game are still kind of into it. Yeah, I think it stands astride something like Skyrim.

It might be a little bit, again, rough around the edges, but it feels like kind of 80% of the way there in terms of like what I felt like when I was playing Skyrim. And honestly, certain things in this game, I like more than Skyrim, so yeah. Yeah, I like how this game doesn't tell you as much as Skyrim does. Like it doesn't, the example I always see

is to get into the Mages Guild in Skyrim, you go to a bridge and a woman's like, you're a mage, huh? Shoot a fireball. And you do it and she's like, welcome to the school. And in this one, you have to go get letters of recommendation from like eight different universities around the world.

Some of those quests are insane. One of them was like, oh yeah, go collect my ring under this well and you pick up the ring and it increases your encumbrance by 300 and you're like drowning in the well cause the guy sent you on a death mission. Yeah, yeah. Like that's the sort of stuff that they,

it feels like they take more swings in these quests. There's also like, the permanence is so funny. Like the way that they handle, it's right on this line between like, okay, I'll give you a example. I go up to a shrine and I see these three people and they look like enemies. So I like get out my bow and arrow

and I snipe one, just dead and then I roll up a little closer and it turns out they were just like other people that were there at the shrine, right? But they didn't see me kill this person. So they're not mad at me or anything, but I'm mad at myself because they did have a name and it's like I would like to know what's going on.

But then I've had to return to this shrine as part of the puzzle that I'm doing. I keep having to come back to it. Every time there's this corpse and I'm like, I'm sorry. I didn't know. I didn't understand that. But there's no spell for this. There's no fix.

I'm just stuck with this. I was over encumbered right in front of the Mages' College in the capital city. And so I just dropped a bunch of garbage right outside the entrance to the Mages. And every time I have to come back to the mage's guild, I have to just wade through this pond of detritus. It's also a great reminder of how easily video games

can get away with the sort of tropes that would get you laughed out of the room in any other media, but the fact that it's so effective for you to rescue the king by a chance prison break get you laughed out of the room in any other media, but the fact that it's so effective for you to rescue the king by a chance prison break, and then as he's dying, he gives you a necklace and is like, find my son. Hell yes, that's all I need, thank you.

Like, seriously, three minutes. I'm not going to do that for like 25 hours. Not 25, I saw a cave. I saw a cave. It is nice how quick that intro is, because man, that Skyrim intro takes so fucking long to get through. And this you could really blaze through in like 10 minutes.

Another, I have to say one other thing about Oblivion that is so funny that struck me is like, it does have this reputation for being a game that you like want to get out and explore. And that's so true but it also doesn't feel the compulsion to pat you on the head and Tickle your butt and say you did such a good job Like cuz like you can explore a whole cave and not find much of anything. Yeah, it's like I don't know

Cave we didn't tell you to come in here. You came in here on your own. Here's some tongs There's tongs and skeletons. It's a came in here on your own. Here's some tongs. There's tongs and skeletons, it's a cave. Other games, if you went into a random cave and be like, ah yes, you found the Black Wolf Cave where the Black Wolf Dagger hides, good job. Oblivion's like, how you want a cup?

It's a cave, I don't know, it's mud, it's a cave. Should we move on? Let's do it. Okay, hey, I'm gonna open up the reader mailbag to talk about a tricky thing that sounded good by everybody. Let's do it. Let's do it. Okay, so we had a few comments in the besties.fan post

asking about how and if we would cover this game. Basically, to sum it up some people asked us to consider in very specific words not promoting Bethesda and Microsoft by talking about oblivion. I want to talk a little bit about like what we do here. So first the context of why that was asked. There is a thing called the BDS movement. You can read about it on polygon. I'm gonna make sure that I drop it in the besties dot fan newsletter this week so you can get a link to it. But in short, just summarize

the top of the polygon article BDS it's a pro Palestinian human rights movement focused on pressuring Israel to comply with international law by promoting boycotts, divestment and sanctions against the country and its economic partners. One of those economic partners is Microsoft. So there's that. The big thing here is we do not see this show as promoting anything. That's not what our job is. We're not PR.

We are not taking advertising money from Microsoft. And we cover a whole variety of games that we have. Very, very wide range of feelings about the people who make them and the companies that own them. So we, for this game, didn't buy the game. We're covering it like we cover anything else, as we do as both journalists and critics.

And that is it. That's why we cover this. That's why we've covered some games in the past that also had, I would say, substantial controversies around them. So hope that's clarifying. And yep. I do think it is valuable to read that Polygon article,

just to sort of learn about the links between Microsoft, specifically their Azure Cloud stuff and the Israel military. There are some very surprising stuff in there. Okay, I think that was it for Rear Mail. We wanna do honorable mentions. Can we talk about the Retroid Flip too? Yes, I feel like we teased the world with this last week, but I had barely had any time to mess with it,

and now I have, and I know you guys have both jumped on board the bandwagon just before, right under the wire of the tariffs, swooping in and coming. Right before things became way more expensive, yeah. Parallelously expensive. I got the, earlier this year, I think January, I got the Retroid Pocket 5, and so very recently

I set up a Retroid device and I wasn't really looking forward to doing it again, but it looks so neat and I was like, man, am I gonna regret this purchase? And now that I've got it set up, I just don't think so. It's insane how much more I wanna use a thing just because I can close the lid on it and be done with it and then reopen that lid anytime I want instantaneous access to the thing.

It feels so good every single time to be able to do that. Yeah, so for those that aren't aware, internally, I mean, we talked a lot about the Retroid Pocket 5 the first time around. Internally, the guts of this are identical, basically, to the Retroid Pocket 5. It can run all the same stuff, same power, et cetera. Screen is the same, too. The screen is the same.

The difference here is it is a clamshell form factor, and the control layout on the second, the bottom half, if you will, is more offset. The Retroid Pocket 5 was like stacked analog stick D-pad, and this is offset. What do you guys think about that? I think it's a huge improvement. I like it, yeah.

The Retroid, I found- You don't, wait, hold on. Specifically, so I've got my wrong ally here, just to start talking about, on the right-hand side, these are flipped, so the've got my rock ally here, just to sort of talk about on the right hand side, these are flipped, so the sticks are parallel. Oh, I'm not talking about that, sorry. Sorry, okay. You know, you're talking about the Xbox

versus PlayStation model of like, are the analog sticks in line with one another versus not? Yes, right? Yes. Yes, it's where your hand rests, right? Your hand, does it rest on two thumbs or does it rest on a thumb and buttons, most naturally? Right, I was more talking about the fact that

if you look at the flip, and you could probably see a screenshot if you're listening at home, I believe it's the D-pads are like further out to the edges and the analog stick is closer into the edges. Got, okay, yes. So that means it kind of follows as your thumbs are moving back and forth between the two,

you're not making an awkward like, kind of jamming your thumb in, which you kind of had to do with the Retrohead Pocket 5, if that's clear, it's kind of a visual thing. Yeah, I find my thumb just kind of rests exactly where it needs to go on it. It's a bit boxy, I do wish the plastic felt just a little bit, I don't know, more premium, I suppose.

It does feel like some of the other kind of handheld, retro handhelds I've gotten that- Do you guys like the sticks? You know, for what they are, like recessed sticks that you can close a lid on, I think they're pretty great. They're better than the Circle Pad, certainly. Much, much better than the Circle Pad ever was on the 3DS.

I do think that is, I don't know, the Retroid Pocket 5 probably has sort of preferable sticks, but I think that these work exceptionally well for the form factor. So what have you been doing with this thing? I have managed to get Vita stuff working on it for the first time. It's the first handheld I've been able to do that,

which is really quite difficult to achieve. I only got mine like two days ago, so mostly I've been sort of setting it up. But yeah, I got Persona 4 Golden working on it, and I don't know, man, it feels weird. It feels like I'm playing it on a 3DS, because that is sort of what the form factor suggests. I tell you, the thing I've used it for the most this week has been streaming. It's like Steam streaming and the Xbox streaming also are both fantastic.

I mean, it is the best streaming experience I've had on any platform. Like it just works so well. Yeah, it's interesting that that would be even better than it would be on like a Steam Deck or something like that. I just like the fact that like I've used a lot of these handhelds

and there are a ton of them out there, obviously. I have never used one where I could go between D-pad games and analog stick games on the same device with the relative same level of comfort. I found that some devices would kind of excel in one versus the other, and this feels like it can do both. What got you fresh specifically to like buy this?

Because you, every time we talk about one of these, you're like, resist. You can hold off, there's new hardware coming, there's new chips coming, they're gonna be better. Was it purely the image? Yeah, that's what he says, he sucks shit at following his own suggestions. Because for us, I feel like he buys quite a few of these.

This was a loaner review unit from Retroid. So this is not my device for what it's worth. Okay. But the reason I was interested in covering it, because I did have to reach out and request it, was clamshell as a like, you know, I'm carrying around all this stuff, the steam deck, for example,

every time I bring the steam deck, which I absolutely love, but if I bring it on a trip, it's like a third of my bag. It's huge because you need the protection to keep it safe. And that's the same with the Retro Red V and all these things. And I wanted something that I could play all these games on, but I could feel comfortable dropping it in a fanny pack and be cool with it, as I always am with fanny packs. Very cool. Super cool. Clamshell makes a big difference, so long as they designed it well. fanny pack and be cool with it. Uh, as I always am with fanny packs and clam shell

makes a big difference. So long as they designed it. Well, we, I don't think. Look, it's going to be six months before we know if like these things are falling apart on the clam shell, but they have made clam shells before they had some issues in the initial run and then they fixed those issues. So my hope is that things are sort of fixed on the clamshell side, but we'll see. I'm sure a good Russ will tell us if they're bad.

I just like, it's shocking to me still how important instantaneous access to the game that I'm playing is for me where I'm at in my life now. Like I never have a good 20 uninterrupted minutes at all in my day to sit down and play a game. And being- Like a man who just installed Bazzite on his ROG to- Right, so that was what I was gonna say.

Yeah, so when I play games, playing Oblivion on the ROG Allie X, playing it in just the straight up Windows mode that comes standard on the ROG Allie X. Playing it in just the straight up Windows mode that comes standard on the ROG Allie X, if it's in hibernation mode, now all of a sudden there's like 20 seconds of loading shit that you have to do before you can get back into the game.

There's annoying stuff like if you plug it into a charger, it just turns on and then you have to log into it to turn it back on. Like there's so much shit that was so annoying and so I followed Justin's lead and installed Bazite, which is a Linux-based, it's basically Steam OS. It turns your ROG AliEx into a Steam Deck. So I dual booted that into it.

And now when I press that power button, I'm back and I'm playing games within three seconds for those little two-minute chunks of my day where I'm not making chicken tenders or whatever. Like it's not having to spend- Open a chicken tender restaurant which is taking up a lot of his time. It's like that is really important to me.

And I feel like I am always looking for the path of least resistance for like actually being able to pick up a game and play it in like a small window of time because that's all I really ever have to play games in and I think that this is the best version of that in the retro handheld world So far and I'm like, I don't know I've got it set up now and I feel like sometimes I'll buy one of these devices and I'll get it set up and I'll be

Ah, fuck. I don't actually want to play anything. But now I like I don't know I want to play stuff on it, cause it feels so great. I know it's not video games, but how is Chicken Griffingers doing as a business? It's doing, here's the deal. When I made the decision to open Griff, what did you call it? Chicken Griffingers.

I don't think that's the best version of it. Chicken Griffingers. When I made the decision to open Chicken Griffingers, and I said no sauces, I said the taste of the chicken is good enough by itself that you can't dip. If I see you trying to dip stuff in the restaurant, you'll be kicked out. You also said it needed to have bird flu.

That was a requirement of all the chickens you served. I'm recreating my favorite number from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. My name is Chicken Griffinger. I'm giving you the flu. You don't need no sauce. You don't need no sauce. You don't need no sauce.

They taste good enough already. They taste good enough already. The flu makes them wet. The flu makes them wet already, so. Anyone else been doing anything else? I'm gonna share something. Can you just take a look at the best use slack real quick? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh man, oh shit, god dang Chris. I'm doing it. What are we looking at here? This is like a, what, a 21 inch CRTV? Yeah, yeah, this is a Panasonic CRTV with the VCR built in. Should we get on down to Goodwill? What's up? Yeah, I mean everybody's out here saying, you know, you got to get those like Sony high-end models from the TV stations And I said what if it just has some scuff marks because it looks like it fell off the back of a truck

Works pretty well The great thing about it is what I'm playing on it is Promise Mascot Agency, because I am running HDMI to S-Video into the TV, and now I can play all these games. All these games that they're like, we want it to look like it's on an old TV. I put on this, I say turn off all those settings. I've got the old TV.

Get it off, make it small. Chris, I'm glad to know you, man. I feel, that's such a vibe, man, and I don't know you, man. I feel this is such a vibe man. And I don't know anyone else who would put in the effort. I mean, his name is Chris Grant. I think you've met him before. No, but Grant, he goes in that other direction. Now it's like suddenly you spent most of your child savings

making sure that you have pixel perfect ratio recreations of booger man. This is a slightly different, some might say a much cheaper approach, but dude, it rules. I've been playing Tokyo Extreme Racer, which is the new game in the series that came out on PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast,

and I played on this TV, and let me tell you, it looks like it's just the exact same game back then. They didn't even need to make a new one. What resolution do you run these games at? So it is, it is at eight. Um, that's, I mean, you got your answer fresh. That's, I don't know what more do you want? I don't, I don't even know how it works, man.

I it's amazing that it does because because I just started clicking random numbers, and eventually it started to look pretty okay. Love it. So what are we doing? I want to say that this week I played Hotel Dusk Room 215, a game which continues to whip ass. It makes you hold your DS the wrong way. What?

Is that DS or 3DS? Are you asking what I played it on or what it was designed for? What it was designed for. The DS, the Nintendo DS. You hold it like this, like a book, and you navigate the world, and the music's absolutely funky.

All the characters look like they're from the AHA video, and it's such a good game game and it is so inaccessible because it's like it's locked to this bizarre form factor. It's worth mentioning like part of what got me thinking about this is the despite being very cool, the Retroid Flip 2 still lacks a second screen in the middle to presumably keep the device cost down and I have a capacitive touchscreen at the bottom.

But like, it still can't replicate those great. So I got a DS and I put the game Hotel Dusk Rim 215 into it and played it. It's great. I love that. I love the notebook style gaming handheld. I feel like Nintendo was only courageous enough to do that trick like two or three different times

in Hotel Tuscan's one of them. What if right before the Switch 2 comes out, they show you just like folding it? It's like take it out and it folds. Russ, when you did your hands on with the Switch 2, did you try to fold it? Try to fold it? Of course I tried to fold it.

Did you ask like where's the fold button? They didn't like it when I tried to fold it. They were against that, which maybe because they were hiding the truth. They wanted to save that as like a day one surprise. Doug Bowers is just going to show up and fucking fold that shit. We could. What are we doing next?

He's so strong. Next week, we are doing Claire Obscure 33. Expedition 33. The Patress is back, and so are we. We're finally talking about it, so don't you worry. Justin, don't worry, we're also doing Revenge of the Damaged Planet. So you don't have to play the RPG that you don't want to play and I don't want to play. But we'll play the other one.

That's great. It's so sweet that you think I would have played it without you saying that, but thank you for releasing me. I want to thank some members over at the Patreon, some new members. We have Connor, we have Oliver, we have Jacob, and we have becoming a weeb purely through plant osmosis. Wow. That's great. Hell yeah.

Which, you know, I get it. I felt that same instinct before. Oh, that sounds fantastic. I'm looking forward to it. Be sure to join us again next week for the best. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!