The Besties - Living the Dorm Life with Multiplayer Classics

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

We’re back, and we’re talking about the multiplayer games that defined our college dorm experience, despite the fact that half of us never lived in a college dorm, and also some of the games we discuss came out like, last year.  Games discussed include: Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, Secret of Mana, Castle Crashers, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Destiny 2, NBA Jam, NCAA Football, Dropmix, Slime Rancher, Garden Story, Islanders, Spelunky 1&2, Axiom Verge 2, Forgotten City, Wildermyth and, naturally, Final Fantasy XIV. 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!

Uh, before we started the show, Fresh was telling us that his baby child was having trouble sleeping. And I thought I could help as someone who has had to share hotel rooms with one Russ Fresh dick for work for, I don't know, the past 10 years. I thought you had like a house. Oh, you meant like when you travel. Okay, sorry. I had a whole. Sorry. That is like a good sitcom.

Chris Bland is my other family. Right. We all know that. So have any of y'all shared a room with Russ Reschick? Because he thinks he sleeps well. That's the thing you should know about him. Yeah, that actually sounds like Russ. That sort of self-delusion sounds very much like Russ.

Let's cut to the chase, Chris. Which holes does the sound come out of? Oh, it comes out of all three. It comes out of the nose with like a... Like you're worried he's going to choke on something and die. It comes out of the mouth with like constant... Belly. I did not like that at all.

Belly. Belly. And then like occasionally a little toot toot toot that's so wild okay so i did share a room with russ one time and i woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a beautiful like major triad like a heart like a harmonic like c chord and I'm wondering if it's the sound from the three holes that were all like, you know, like a church organ. Like a church organ, yes, thank you, or a bagpipe. Yeah, it's actually more like Tibetan throat singing,

if you want to be specific. Yes. Years of training. See, I thought it was quite lovely. It sort of soothed me to sleep. I was surprised by how sustained he managed to keep the notes. You can actually thank me for that because that has been an evolution of the work that I've been doing with him without his knowing for the past 10 years. The trick is he needs a few things to sleep well.

He needs two white noise machines, but with different white noises. So kind of like a beach, right? But then like a thunderstorm in the woods. Yeah, I like air conditioner by a pond. Oh, that is definitely in his zone. He uses different apps, but also has his own standalone machine. So that's part of it. The other thing is, you know how a lot of people have water next to them when they go to sleep?

What does he do? He has a red Gatorade and a blue Gatorade. That's interesting. You got to mix them, though. Before you drink them, you got to mix them. Why wouldn't you just have a purple Gatorade? It's got to be a fresh Gatorade. Are there any other new things that you've done to kind of like help with your

lack of sleep and your tum-tum? Yeah, the trick is not to close your eyes. If you keep your eyes open the whole time, you sleep great. It's tough. It takes some years. A good defense is a, wait, no, a good offense is a strong defense. That's right. It's so hard

to get out of those habits, isn't it? Because you think, I'm going to break some of these habits that i've formed because they're really bad and then you think what's the night that i don't want to sleep but you want to sleep all of nights yeah you know you don't want to go at night without sleep that's so good that's your first mistake this episode is brought to you by Casper, the friendly ghost. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I don't know that we're talking about the best game of the week, but here it goes. My name is Chris Platt and I know games, bro. I know the video games.

My name is Ross Frosching and I know the best keg stand of the week. Welcome to Besties where we discuss the latest and greatest at home interactive entertainment it is a video game club and just by listening you my friend are a member and we're taking this sense of camaraderie and dare i say fraternity even more seriously this week uh as we bring you a well you guys set it up because it was your cockamamie plan god I hope it's okay to say cockamamie I haven't said it in years did it feel good? did it feel right? it felt okay but

I'll wait for twitter to have it's fucking say well I'm not sure what the origins of this episode were I think fresh came up with it it was literally you you know what I Fresh came up with it. It was literally you. You came up with the origins. No.

I probably, you know what? I probably came up with this without realizing it from sorority TikTok. It probably, like, you know, got in my brain. Because sorority TikTok, you can't escape it now. It's the new thing. It's one of my top talks. It's a top talk. New York Times says top talk.

No, it's back to school season. And, you know, we were getting nostalgic. And we're thinking, hey, what did we do When we were in school Besides school, and it was play video games So we're going to share Some of our favorite dorm room recommendations Some of these are things that we played

While we were in college Some of them are way too new I saw the rundown list, you didn't play these in college Did any of us, did any of you actually live in, in dorms? Yes. Yes. Ooh,

tell me more. Interesting. Yeah. Really? I did not. Yeah. Here's what I'll say about dorms. Oh man,

do they smell and are disgusting? Oh sure. I've, oh, I've been in dorms. Yeah. I've just, but I didn't ever live in one

because it seemed like, Beautiful decor. Terrible smell. Right. I was always worried about the roommate to toilet ratio it no it always seemed a bit off to me yeah yeah there's a lot of wearing flip-flops from what i heard i um i i went to nyu and i could not afford it so i stayed in the cheapest dorm, which was a former haunted hotel. Excellent, excellent.

And they didn't fix it up ever, basically, since they took over the building. So I lived in a room with five people. I could see them all while I slept. And then in the foyer, which really was just this little patch of carpet before we got to the hardwood floor, there were bloodstains. And one time I got in the elevator to go to class and it stopped halfway through. And we were like, oh, the door's opening. So we should just climb out of the elevator.

That's literally my nightmare, Chris. Which we did. And in true movie fashion, minutes later, it just went down. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, definitely. Hey, not great. Not a great time.

But we're here to not talk about that time Chris Plant almost got cut in half. Which is a shame because then we could have had two Chris Plants. I also saw a ghost in that building, but i don't want to talk about it that's well that's all unfortunately all i want to talk about is yeah real ghost changers why would we waste time on video games honestly no let's do video games first and then we'll talk about ghosts no we'll talk about ghosts later i love that we don't want to scare i love that so what are uh some some great dorm room video games? Let's start with you since you're the person who came up with the idea, right?

No, it was you, but that's fine. We're going to roll with this. I actually think that in looking at this entire list, I think what's cool about this list is that while some of these are games that I pull from my own dorm room experiences, they are all games that you can now currently play on active modern consoles and PC devices. So you should not worry about having to dig out the, I don't know, fucking GameCube, whatever, to play this stuff. And I'm going to start with a little game called Super Monkey Ball. And you should know that there's actually a new remake of the old Super Monkey Ball games coming out called

I believe Super Monkey Ball Mania coming out very soon. So you will be able to experience all this stuff that I'm about to talk about in a second. I believe it is Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. I'm sorry. That can't be right. I forgot the banana. Yeah, it's not just he's not manic.

There's just a lot of bananas. Russ immediately updates our rundown sheet well i don't want to get it wrong um people i feel like people know super monkey ball because of the like core gameplay of super monkey ball which is you there's like levels and you tilt the world and the monkey ball rolls around and you pick up bananas and then you get to the exit and you keep going like there's like 100 levels or whatever yeah yeah it's bananas i feel like that's the core understanding of monkey ball but in truth the the heart of monkey ball is in its multiplayer modes which are absolutely fantastic um from monkey shoot to monkey baseball to um just varieties of ski ball incredibly incredibly

intense multiplayer experiences that I remember having. I think I was playing on GameCube when I first played it. But it's extremely exciting to be cheering Gon-Gon as he rolls down a giant ramp, shoots himself off 1,000 yards, and lands in a little fairy hutch or something like that for 100 points.

These games are absolutely phenomenal have you any of you played them in multi-part of course yeah i've my my main multiplayer exposure i forget i think it might be monkey ball 2 was the i think monkey bowling where you went down a big slide and then you had to like land on a target I have played dozens, if not hundreds of hours of that game mode. It is exquisite. I did Google Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, and a playable character in the game,

running around in a little hipster ball, is Kiryu from the Yakuza series. Yes. That's fantastic news. That's great. They also have Sonic and Tails are also in it. Who gives a shit? Look at this little fathead

Kiryu just running around in his little white suit. Oh, he's great. He's not collecting bananas either. He's collecting, I believe, bottles of beverage. It's good stuff. A classic for me that I played through with several friends, intimate

experience, I would say, is Secret of Mana. Secret of Mana, which is a two-player game for the Super Nintendo. It's out on a bunch of different platforms. There were three playable characters in Secret of Mana. And if you were one of the nine people that had the SNES multi-tap, you could connect four controllers to your... I never played with that or even saw somebody that had one i think i saw one at a demo station at our local babbage's uh but just playing it with two players is uh is a delight i had i can think of a few times that me and a buddy would just like have a few sessions

where we'd sit down and play through all this game uh and it's a lot of fun. It's very engaging. There's lots of stuff to explore and level up. And the music is, it rips ass. It's such a good game, Secret of Mana. Secret of Evermore, a fine follow-up. And this is something that is a collaborative experience, you feel? Yes. Yeah. And that it's a multiplayer game.

Do you ever sit down with a friend and open a book and then just read it together? No, because that's a different thing. It's not a multiplayer video game. I'm confused. I don't remember the multiplayer part of this. Yeah, bud. Why does it not occur to me? I don't know.

It famously has multiplayer. There's three characters and you and a buddy can control one. Is it maybe because you never asked me to play it with you, so I just assumed it was a one-player thing. This is a weird tack to take. Yeah, it was a weird tack to take. I definitely played it with Dad. That's weird.

Okay, well. I guess, oh, you know what it was? You guys were playing sports, trying to win Dad's affection, and I came in there, and I was like, hey, old man, let's play some jrpg together and right that actually makes that now that you're saying that like that that makes perfect sense that could just came out on switch or something they just did a remake i don't know man they've released a billion different versions of secret of mana and a lot of them are not great uh but the original one is good.

If you can find one and it looks pixelated and not that weird iOS smooth shit that Square Enix does for some reason, then hop right on it. I brought Castle Crashers. God, now you're talking. On the list, right? Yeah.

Medieval fantasy uh looks like a very nice flash game you play as uh colorful knights and you kill animals that poop and bleed and vomit uh everywhere it is uh gross and cartoonish and such a delight but the real pleasure of it is it has one of in my memory best reward systems of any game because as you go through you are constantly unlocking weapons and characters in these like adorable animals that follow you around as buffs um and that was the fun they found the i mean the core of the game is just a you know a beat-em-up you know go from left to right and kill everything in your way and those games are fine but they usually have the arcade problem of being designed to be played for about you know 45 minutes total and then never

touched again where this game i i can't remember how many hours i i sunk into this um it was it was like a thing on xbox 360 arcade um how did y'all were y'all big castle crashers people oh my god yes so much so it came out on switch i think last year and like i have wanted to rekindle i think it might have on my multiplayer i've wanted to rekindle my love for it but like that was a game i played with my roommates non-stop when when when it first came out and i don't know that i'll be able to to necessarily recreate that experience but hey younger folks in college maybe you will get there when did this come out i'm trying to remember where in like my i'm gonna guess like it feels very early time i thought that 2007 it's like right around when I joined Joystick, I feel like. It was like one of the, no, 2008.

So it was early in those days. It's one of the first big like arcade, some of arcade joints, right? Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Yeah, alongside like Super Meat Boy and stuff like that. It is kind of crazy that like, you look at the company who made it, The Behemoth, who still makes games,

very good games i enjoy their stuff but like they had this insane level of success with castle crashers and the idea that they like didn't immediately make a sequel and really haven't made sequels of their games kind of yeah i have a lot of respect for that like there's an easy cash in if you just do castle crashers 2 they'd make a ton of money but they you know they've done hd re-releases but but haven't haven't done it yeah their follow-up to this was battle block theater which

they were so enthusiastic about and it was like this weird platformer game show very like modular weird thing and every time they would demo it at a at a live show they'd be like yeah it's it's BattleBlock Theater, baby! And I couldn't help but be like, yeah, but

Castle Crash is pretty good too. Also, sequels are just such part of the industry. If you don't want to make it, have a different developer do it and just license it. Give the people what they want. I just would

love a little bit more of this video game. Yeah, you're a sellout. Like Wes and I said. Hey, listen. As a representative of the Zoomer generation, I don't care about selling out. I care about finding success.

Yeah, selling out is actually kind of an antiquated idea at this point. I think we've found ways to live in harmony with corporations. And I got a whole. Yeah. You finally stopped watching Reality Bites every day. Yeah. And I actually, I fell in love with wild Alaskan seafood.

So it's just a synergistic sort of thing. I kind of cheated with my two because, and this is, my experience is just individual to me. I've never been surrounded by a lot of people who are like very adept video game people. I typically found myself around people that like games, but not necessarily wanting to balance, like, especially with family, like wanting to bring in, you know, a lot of like controller dexterity capability, that kind of thing. Uh, so I, uh,

went with two things that do have a digital component, but also don't necessarily require, um, any sort of, uh, video game controller aspects. I will say the obvious pick for this would be like the Jack box games. Um, they are are there's many great

jackbox games they have so cornered this market yeah it's like so expansive at this point like yeah it doesn't bear repeating like that's of course the thing that everybody plays you know what i really want from jackbox though at this point i want them to do a like a netflix you know what i mean or like a yeah like a whole thing because i really actually the thing that i don't like about that experience is trying to keep track of like which one has this on it and which game is like i just want them all on one place dude how good would a net just in netflix you don't know jack like the one that they released uh on xbox 360 that had like episodes that you would play through yeah i mean well whatever i'll talk to him about it assassin's creed like full encompassing

living game system for jackbox wouldn't that make more sense at this point like if you pay five bucks a month and they introduced a new game every couple months like i'm gonna pitch them on it it should be pretty good anyway um my first one is One Night Ultimate Werewolf. Werewolf is a very old game that does not require anything, really. You can play it with playing cards. But One Night Ultimate Werewolf is, it goes like this. You have a group of people. Everyone gets secret roles that represent either a werewolf or some sort of

villager no one knows who the werewolves are except the werewolves and the villagers uh don't know the the true identity of the werewolf in one night ultimate werewolf each player also has like a different role so like um there's a clairvoyant that knows a little bit about, you know, what's going on. They have a little bit of insight. And there's – Griff, you've played one of my ultimate werewolf, right? There's like – There's a dozen roles. I feel like it would be complicated.

A henchman who wins if the werewolves win. There's a hunter that they're sort of like – they can always, uh, at the end of the, the conversational part, there is a sort of vote, um, where the, the villagers try to ferret out who the werewolves are and the, uh, the werewolves try to lay the blame on other people. Um, so it, and it's very much just about like laying blame and doing conversation and fulfilling your role. And other roles have different things that they can do. There's a doppelganger. Yeah, a doppelganger who can copy somebody's role, whatever.

The main idea is that they're trying to make it fun for people who aren't the werewolf. It's still fun because you're doing something that's a little bit different every round. And also those roles make it harder to figure out who the werewolf actually is right so there may be somebody who um the the henchmen if they get killed the werewolves win so they may be trying to draw attention to themselves right to be more suspicious so you accidentally vote for them um what's cool about one night ultimate werewolf is that they have not only do do they have all these lovely cards that really explains well what all the different roles are, there's an app that you select in the app what roles you have in each game, and it'll actually walk you through as you play. Werewolves, look up and acknowledge each other.

Doppelganger, switch your card now. You need that, too, because there's a specific waking up order that you have to do. By which I mean everybody's heads are down, so nobody sees who's who. Right. But it's really, really fun, and it's something that anybody can play pretty much instantly. And it's only one turn. It's not an extended drawn out thing like Werewolf or Among Us

or any of the other games. It's very much like, do you have 10 minutes? You can play this. And if it gets boring, you switch the roles out so you have different roles and different things each game.

There's also expansions and different games of this that all work together. So there's like, there's a vampire one. I think there's an alien one where you can like actually bring in those roles too, which is kind of wild.

Then it gets like, it can get kind of out of hand. That's like Fortnite at that point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it's, it's,

it's, it's really cool. And, and a great, a great party game unless it gets a little heated sometimes not every people can take things a little seriously uh sometimes we talk about that pretty good times uh remember when uh ubisoft the company that makes assassin's creed uh commoditized werewolf and then turned it into a movie. That was weird.

That's apparently really good. I've heard the movie is okay. I did not realize it's based off of a VR game. Yes. So weird. Yeah. It is quite weird.

So strange. Everyone's favorite video game to get adapted, Werewolf Within, that game that we all played and talked about and knew existed. Now, Russ,

your next game is interesting because I've only known it to sort of decrease my social output. Okay, so when I was a senior in college, we would all, you know, get together and play the newly released Destiny 2. And it was a really good bonding experience, honestly, like going on raids and stuff with my fellow doormates when that game came out.

It's free to play. You could just jump right in and start shooting guys and um i don't know i think i think destiny 2 is a great multiplayer game i don't know about you guys but brings back a lot of memories from college for me it's just not a i don't think of it as a dorm a dorm game i played it in my dorm destiny how old were you when Destiny 2 came out? It's impossible. It was senior year in college. It was, you know, a few years ago. I don't remember.

I think all Russ is having a little bit of fun. A little bit of fun here. Did y'all, y'all played Halo in college? Fuck yeah, man. Yeah, dude. We did the, we would do, I can think of at least one time that we split the, did the LAN thing with like one TV in one room. The best we ever did was my friend John Mahaffey hooked up a N64 with two, by splitting the video output. And then put one TV in the window facing outside

and the other TV inside and then use cardboard to cover up the half of the screen that that team did not have. So we could do the team-based golden eye on two screens. With no screen looking? With no screen looking. That's so wild. Yeah, it's a lot of work to get there,

but it was totally worth it. Our dorm had a shared intranet, so you could play effectively LAN with anybody else in the dorm, no matter what floor they're on. And I hung out because I did not bring a video game console to college my freshman year. I had to hang out at the drug dealer's room because that had the best TVs for video games. And, of course, the newest video games because he was a drug dealer. And the room was called The Deuce, which I'm realizing now as I think about it

was probably named after Poopy. And my clearest memory... Best case scenario, it's named after Poopy. My clearest memory of playing Halo 2 is actually not about Halo 2. We were playing Halo 2 on the nice TV and there was kind of like a side room that didn't have a door to it.

And a guest of the room had taken shrooms and was playing Katamari Damacy, which was brand new at the time. That's a good choice. And had to stop because he was convinced that both the walls and the ceiling were becoming popcorn. Yeah, you don't need a game like Katamari Damacy. If you're just doing shrooms, you could just look at like a postcard and be fine.

It was a big mistake. I'm glad we have here. Russ is here to give us his different drug advices. I love it. I've always loved Russ's, loved and trusted Russ's drug advice. It's kind of a new B segment we need. Russ, bro, thanks for hooking me up with your Claritin plug. He has the good stuff, dude. He's got Claritin D, E, F.

He's got Claritin X, which is really fucking a lot. It's intense. Griffin, because I'm watching out for you, you're using a burn wrap when you're ordering that Clareton from CVS, right? Oh, dog, of course. I'm not going to. Yeah, they can't take me down. Cool, cool, cool.

I might change my second one, because I did put Puyo Puyo Tetris here, because I think it's one of the best puzzle games ever. But I'm going to change it to what is actually a real-ass dorm room game for me, and that's NBA Jam. Oh, yeah. On whatever console you can get it on.

Maybe not the Wii version. That was weird. But NBA Jam, NBA Jam Tournament Edition, whatever it is, man, that's just one that you can just sit down with and pick the same two teams, unless one of them is the Chicago Bulls. But if you're going to do the Chicago Bulls,

you can counter them with the Charlotte Hornets and just go for it and just go for it and play it. And it's a good hang. You play, what, five-minute periods? And it's like no big deal? And it's entirely designed around having close games like if you're winning you miss more shots until the point where it's like a two-point game every single game it's genius we played this game a lot like my senior year of college we would go over to

our our buddy bradbury's house and just play this game and uh over the hundreds of games that we played every time that you dunked or more specifically uh got on fire it's still exciting and like viscerally satisfying to dunk a flaming basketball uh right on scotty pippen's face like it's it's it's a good ass time man who is who's your uh go-to secret character my go-to secret character was probably william jefferson clinton because i think i didn't know too many of the other um the other codes was not george clinton no i was george clinton also also in it yes That game's fucking wild. It is.

And also the new remake, which, I mean, is not new anymore. It's probably like eight years old. But it's good. That was the Wii one that Griffin was ragging on. Yeah, it's on all sorts of other consoles and on iOS. And it's pretty solid. Like, it does the trick. Shit, MCA was in it, too.

Sarah Palin was in NBA Jam. Oh, the new one. They had some fun. Okay, y'all, I'm going to keep the... In NBA Jam, oh, don't forget AirDog. That's a child? Sorry, it's AirDog, yeah. That was the child.

The child was AirDog? Yeah. Was that before Air Air Dog? Yeah. Was that before Air Bud? Yeah. I would have my name, if I was that kid, I would have my name legally changed to Air Dog. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, listeners who weren't alive in 1994,

there was just a kid named Air Dog in the first NBA Jam and nobody really knew why. It's basically the plot of Space Jam 2. A boy got digitized. Who's next? I'm going gonna keep the sports train going please don't stop listening to our show dear listener i swear it's good ncaa football 040506 this series doesn't exist anymore it was the best what if you made madden but fun isn't it's a bold idea and one that i am forever pissed off that uh electronic artists stopped doing because uh they just could not figure out a way to pay student athletes but that might be changing but here here's here's why this is good i'll give you

some specifics because it's not about what happens on the field even though that's part of it this game is meant for dorm rooms to humiliate uh whoever you live with that is the point of the game in one of these games you could save you effectively create a trophy room where it would like play replays and photos of uh your favorite games so i would just every time i i beat, really get some gorgeous photos of me destroying them, you know, like running back, breaking away with the entire team's defense running after them. So that every time we turned on the console, that's what my roommates had to look at. And more games should have that. I don't know why every game doesn't have the option to decorate your start menu with just relentless gloating. Also, Dorm Room Game, it's a game about college football.

You know, you could play it in the dorm. They recreate that college football experience. There's all sorts of just pageantry and fun, you know, goofy mascots. And then, you know, you have a non-alcoholic beverage of your choice and he goes to the big game it's great yeah i want to side sidebar i don't have any affinity for the ncaa series but uh the nfl 2k games specifically 2k1 and 2k5 are some of the best sports games ever made and like the only sports games i think i ever really gave a shit about or football games at least that ever really gave a shit about or

football games at least that i ever gave a shit about for the same reasons that you could make like a career mode with a completely broken team and simulate a whole season and like have a special room that you could earn money to unlock uh like paper football mini games and all kinds of wild shit man that was god i wish madden hadn't monopolized that market. I guess when they did, that's when we got weird shit like Backbreakers. And, well, what an awful name for a video game, by the way. I mean, the whole premise of that game was pretty disgusting. It was pretty horrible, yeah.

Well, remember when, what is it, NFL 2K kept trying to make games and they had the, like, hey, it's just some of the classic athletes. Yeah. Yeah, that was bad um i wanted to uh briefly close this with a i think if you want like a casual party game experience it is very very hard to beat drop mix what is drop is DropMix? Are you saying, you ask, is that still a supported product that is being manufactured? Well, no, it's not. It was made by Harmonix. It is still available.

Get this. You could go to Amazon right now. Oh my God. And you could get the entire Dropbox music gaming system for $35. Pretty good. Really good. And a bunch of cards for

less than that. You don't get cards with it? It was like $120 or something like that. You get a bunch of cards with it. There's additional cards. Okay, DropMix, really quick. Imagine this sort of a table

that is a small shelf, perhaps. It's about five playing cards wide each playing card is labeled the space is labeled with a different color there's one that is for like drums there's one for vocals one for keys one for what like effects there are like a bass whatever There's different slots for different instruments and loops. And basically what happens is you have cards that represent like the bass groove from All About That Bass or the keys from Call Me Maybe or whatever. And you simply lay them on top of the board and it fills in these different parts of the songs and then magically combines them into a song

or something approximating a song. Something song adjacent, yeah. Yeah, some of them are like extremely cool. Some of them are like less so. But oh, the way that you hear the music is that you prop up, you sync it to an iPad or phone and you prop it up

in the table. It's got like a place to prop up your device and the device plays the music. It is really fun and can be funny because you can continue to lay cards on top of the other cards.

So like if you tire of the, the keys part of something, then you can just lay new keys over it. Um, and you can combine all the songs in like really wild ways. Um, and it just, every time it sounds,

it usually sounds good. And if it's not good, it sounds pretty funny. Funny. Yes. Yeah. And it's like a great, like if you're just sitting around and you got a huge pile of cards and somebody's like here here no i gotta i gotta i gotta i'm gonna add this on and it's just funny i mean it's like and it's and if you leave it on the background it can like perfectly handle that like people can just go switch things out as they as they want to um if you've played fuser it is the it is the predecessor to Fuser.

It is the card game predecessor to the digital harmonics video game Fuser. If you're playing that game and you wanted to have some fun and drop in a shiny Snorlax foil card, would that be cool with people or not? I don't think that would fly. You can save mixes to your device

if you come up with something really choice. There's also a drop mix button that will basically like do a big drop and then like remix your stuff in like a different way, like with a different rhythm or balance or whatever. So it's really fun and funny and literally anybody can do it. So it's really fun and funny, and literally anybody can do it. So it's great.

Awesome. I have one thing that I want to share with y'all about NFL All Pro Football 2K8, that game that we mentioned. I'm sorry. I got to go back to it because I had a vague memory of something that happened. And I thought, no, it can't be true. But it turns out it is. So I'm going to read just a paragraph from a joystick story from 2007 about this game. If that's okay by y'all.

Is this an article that either me or Justin wrote? No. Okay. Because I'm getting tired of that. Yeah. No, no, no. No, I wouldn't pick on you. It's one of my favorite bits, I wouldn't pick on you It's one of my favorite bits I wouldn't pick on you

I would never Okay, no, this has nothing to do with either of you Jeez Okay, are you ready? This is one of those instances When all the right pieces get put together And make for sensational news It turns out that in the recently released

All-Pro Football 2K8 from 2K Sports, part of publicity magnet Take-Two Interactive, features OJ Simpson. Well, that might be an issue for some people who consider the man a murderer, but it gets better. There's also a team called the Assassins in the game. Now, when you combine those two elements you get the video above oj simpson making a touchdown in the giant assassins mascot making a stabbing motion oh no holy shit that was in the video game and the mascot is huge it's like the size of the scoreboard that that that happened in the pre-release game, and I think the developers realized that that was a problem, so they moved them to another fake football team.

That was not the Assassins. Oh, good. Yeah, that fixed it. Let's take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about some other things. I mean, ephemera. Just friends talking about games. I was out last week. Apparently there was some sort of

indie independent gaming event for the Nintendo Corporation. There was. They've done a number of these, and they tend to be a little hit or miss. Sometimes they'll announce a bunch of cool shit, and sometimes they'll announce Bakugan as their big announcement but in this presentation that was

last week they were like you know we're just gonna drop like a lot of games right now yeah um axiom verge 2 dropped like right now it's also on other platforms uh are we gonna talk about that at some point i think we will i feel like an episode i haven't played it yet but i think we're gonna talk about it i actually never finished the first i've been trying to go back and play the first really interesting yeah yeah um they announced a slime rancher which has been a long requested game for switch but has never come to switch um and it dropped like that day i've been playing a lot of that which has been really interesting griffin you've been playing that too right yeah i uh yeah i've been i've been having fun with it i think i've hit my slime limit but um

i i have enjoyed what i played yeah it's like one of those progressive like build a farm to get more productive at building your farm kind of games yeah with some fun like exploration yeah like super fast-paced like uh the first first person actiony pseudo stuff uh yeah it's it's it's a good time it also runs really well on switch which i know the other versions don't run great i don't know i got a pretty buck wild farm that oh really quite a bit laggy when uh yeah okay because you can blend slime so i I have ones that give off radiation and explode, and there's like 20 of them in one box. And so anytime I go to feed them, it gets not great. One game that came out that I've been digging into is Garden Story,

which is this very charming, very, very chill. It was part of the Wholesome Games presentation that happened. And you play a grape named concord and you go around this this town doing favors for people and uh collecting resources and upgrading tools and it's very very simple but it's got this like really great like uh almost game boy color like high quality game boy color Color aesthetic that is really doing it for me. So that's, yeah, a ton of stuff came out, which I think quelled the usual

where the fuck is Hollow Knight, Silksong announcement that usually comes out of these indie presentations. At least for a week or so. At least for a week. I also want to call attention to a game called Islanders, which is a game that came out on Steam ages ago and just came out on Switch for $5. Brand new game.

It's basically a city builder with like this weird point system where you have like a limited amount of space. So if you drop three farms in a row, it turns into like a more valuable area. a row it turns into like a more valuable area and the idea is to maximize this limited amount of space to get as many points as you can um in a certain amount of time um so uh if you're looking for like a very chill puzzle game islanders is super sick great art um and only five bucks which is really nice uh there was a game that was not included weirdly in the Nintendo Direct for Indies, but was announced like the day after. And that is one of our favorite games of all time. Spelunky and Spelunky 2 are coming to Switch.

Everybody who listens to the show should be aware that you can play these two masterpieces on Switch very, very, very soon. And you might have missed that news. I have some stuff, but it's not Nintendo Switch related. So if we want to keep on that theme, Justin, do you have any Switch things that you wanted to share? I downloaded Axiom Verge. I want to talk about it.

The first one? No. So I tried that one for like five minutes and completely bounced off of it in a pretty major way. I think we will do like a deeper dive into axiom verge um but what is yeah what's your first gut check pretty wild i mean it's like pretty it's pretty doesn't really seem like the other one at all but i didn't play very much the other one but man it doesn't seem like it's kind of master blastery right it's got like i mean

currently i have two weapons a pickaxe and a boomerang whoa whoa okay that's what that's the kind of thing that's happening and i'm just a lady running around a thing that died and then came back to life and now i'm heavier than water and i don't breathe and i got an axe and a boomerang and i have the oh another wild thing happens like first, like half hour. So not so much. You get an ability that's like a sort of like sphere of, I don't know, nanoparticles or something surrounds your body. And anything, any machine that is within the sphere of nanoparticles, you can hijack to like explode or attack other people or open open gates or whatever and it's like just like one of the mechanics in it it's just like hacking any enemies that you come across that's rad

it's wild it sounds sick i'm looking forward to digging into it there's nothing keeping you from it russ i'm gonna get into my pc gaming corner of of the episode because you know me a real pc gamer. I talked about Wildermyth last week. I'm just going to mention it again, because everybody who has tried this, whether they are on Twitter or are on our besties like Quarkslack, have really fallen in love with this game. It continues to just astound me. I've gotten to the point where I've completed a campaign with my core original core group of people. And now I'm bringing I'm in the middle of a new story with a new group of people. And there are ways for me to bring back some of the stars of my old

squad into this in just truly bizarre and incredible ways i i said this last week and i'll say it again it feels like a magic trick um so if you are not playing it you're making a a grave mistake this looks so it looks so my shit you're going to enjoy it a lot i had not heard of this game i wasn't here last week it's fucking fucking radical. It's basically single player D&D where the game is just the best Dungeon Master imaginable. The other thing that I want to shout out is the Forgotten City, which our friends at Into the Ether got me on. And it is effectively adapted from this award-winning Skyrim mod, but now is a standalone game. You fall into a city buried under the ground, maybe in the past, that is a Roman city. And it's basically entirely dialogue.

It's a talkie game. And the point of it is in the city, they have one rule. They have the golden rule, which is nobody can sin because if one person sins, everyone in the entire city will be turned to gold instantly and die. That's not good. So you have to kind of figure out how to – like what does that even mean? Like what is a sin in the context of Roman society? How do you stop it? How do you help people? How do, you know, these supposedly good intentioned moral codes actually hurt people in the society? It's great. It sounds like probably too heady, but it really is quite fun.

The way that the story is organized is so painless. It really does a great job of making sure that you are not repeating yourself, even though it is a bit of a time loop game. So if you're just like really jonesing for more story games, because that seems to be the beat that I'm on right now. I think you'll like it. I believe it's only like eight to ten hours. So, you know,

you can get the whole experience in, you know, a couple weeks. So, yeah, there are a lot of great games out right now. It's kind of wild. Hey, can I real quick,

just two minutes, just put juice on blast because I know you started playing Final Fantasy XIV and is that something that you've just completely fallen off? i know you started playing final fantasy 14 and i is that something that you've just completely fallen off i know you had some time to kill and that was your jam and if that's if you glanced off it that's fine i just want to hear your thoughts it's not that i just i like man this is a bigger conversation than i get it's it's it gets very

personal but the truth of the matter is like i know myself in a game like this that doesn't have here's what i will say about ff14 that is neither a plus nor minus it is very easy to fall into a groove with and just like start playing it and within the first few hours of me playing it i noticed that i was already like blasting through cut scenes skipping dialogue just wanting like the next hit of advancement achievement the next level up the next whatever um and i just know myself well enough to know that uh i i can't i can't get sucked i got too many other things going on i can't i can't get sucked. I got too many other things going on. I can't get sucked into an MMO like this again. I thought I wanted it.

And then the more I played it, the more I was like, I don't know, this seems like it's going to be really bad for my anxiety. I think I'll get depressed if I play this too much. The one negative I will say pretty concretely is that there's too much running around. Like, way too much. I'm not kidding. Getting from A to B in this game

is a huge pain in the ass and I'm sure it gets better once you get like a chocobo yeah but yeah early on that that really was not was not loving that you get one like 120 hours in so that should be fine oh good yeah I'll just

push through the first 120 hours I may dip back into it. I didn't hate it. It's just like, for myself, I have other things I want to achieve with my life. For sure. And I feel like, and I know my, I don't, I'm not good at finding a balance with that kind of thing.

Our listeners sent in some of their favorite dorm games. I pulled a few to try to get a couple different periods in dorm room gaming culture. The first one from Patrick, currently in college currently in college and i have five roommates smash ultimate has been the college game often getting woken up by yelling and whooping late at night or even early in the morning uh andrew said uh the original unreal Tournament and original Star Wars Battlefront forever will bring back warm memories of my first LAN parties. Not sleeping when we should all be studying. Mario Kart was always a classic and the peripheral based Guitar Hero Rock Band changed everything.

Oh my God, how did I forget about Rock Band? I know. It's like so hard to get into at this point, right? I still got my shit. I still got my shit. I still got my shit in the garage. From Stalemate, this is a rather niche one, but I played an ungodly amount of a Flash game called Tank Trouble with my best friend on school computers every day on the bus ride home.

It's kind of like We Play Tanks, but more fast-paced and fluid. And then the last is just a list that hits home. This one's from Patrick. Bust a move to on PS1, hot shots, golf, Tony Hawk's pro skater to golden. That was some golden era.

That was some good shit. For me, it was Tony Hawk underground, but yes, the point stands. Thug. I do want to thank the following people for writing reviews. Real quick, Bunch of Frunch, Cactus Girly, AndyDrake221, Winterlight, and TheShameGovernor.

Thank you for writing reviews on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, whatever the hell they call it now. Really appreciate it. We appreciate everyone else that wrote reviews. And yeah, keep them coming. Plant. This is going to be a big one do this fast we're recapping what we played uh or talked about this week we have super monkey ball banana mania which you can play that version of it on switch very soon secret of mana iconic jrpg action RPG, I believe. Castle Crashers, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Destiny 2 and Halo 2 as shooters, NBA Jam and NCAA football, specifically 040506 as sports games,

and Justin brought Drop Mix, which was a real surprise. Then we spoke about Slime Rancher, Garden Story, Islanders, Spelunky 1 and 2, and Axiom Burge 2 specifically. Those games are available now or very soon on the Nintendo Switch. I also talked about The Forgotten City, which is the Roman Switch. I also talked about The Forgotten City, which is the Roman storytelling, kind of like walking simulator adventure game. Also, I continue to recommend Wildermyth, the one single person D&D like game. And Justin finally gave us his update on Final Fantasy XIV. It sounds like he's got another 300 hours to go in him. And we can't wait to hear more from him.

That is going to do it for us for this week. Next week we're going to be talking about Psychonauts 2. Been a long wait. The wait is over, as they say. The wait is finally over. And I can't wait to talk

with you about that. But we will have to wait until next time. So be sure to join us again then for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends make the world's best games? Besties!