Cairn Is a Climbing Game for the Real Ones

Climbing games have become a trend over the past few years, ranging from the AAA mountains of Death Stranding to the indie polygonal crags of Peak. But no climbing game has been as loyal to the actual physical experience of ascending cold, hard rock as Cairn. The guys report on their time on the cliffs. Plus, Plante shares his feelings about the brilliant adventure game, Perfect Tides: Station to Station. You can hear more about that game in Plante’s recent interview with its creator, Meredith Gran.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Griffin McElroy?

  I'll tell you the problem for me, and it is honestly sort of a deal breaker because I don't like a lot of mess, you know?

• 0:09Russ Frushtick?

  You're a clean boy.

• 0:10Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, yeah, I don't, I don't like having stuff on me, right? And so all the chalk while playing Cairn, it's getting all over my Rogal IX. It's getting all over my pants. It's getting all over my couch. It's getting fricking everywhere. I don't know why the, the game comes with a big bag of chalk and says you have to do, you have to have this on while you play it.

• 0:31Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I, I also didn't appreciate that it came in like writing chalk for, it didn't come powder. It didn't come like LeBron James.

• 0:38Griffin McElroy?

  You gotta squish it up yourself. Exactly. It's like, why do it that way?

• 0:41Russ Frushtick?

  Why do it?

• 0:42Griffin McElroy?

  Why even do it at all?

• 0:44Chris Plante?

  I think I know what went wrong here. You, yeah. So you're, you're actually only supposed to use the chalk on your hands. You're not supposed to fully disrobe and cover your entire body in chalk.

• 0:57Griffin McElroy?

  Okay. See, that's the, okay. So that's the, I've never climbed a rock before, guys. How am I supposed to know?

• 1:03Russ Frushtick?

  I know. I think I was watching, just recently, I was watching the live free climbing app. Uh, what is his name? Alex Harndt was climbing.

• 1:11Griffin McElroy?

  Harndt.

• 1:11Russ Frushtick?

  Harndt was climbing the mountain and, and, or the building.

• 1:15Griffin McElroy?

  Not a mountain.

• 1:16Russ Frushtick?

  The building.

• 1:17Griffin McElroy?

  So you didn't watch this at all. I want to be really clear.

• 1:21Russ Frushtick?

  I was watching it and he used his butt crack at one point to leverage.

• 1:27Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 1:27Russ Frushtick?

  A windowsill.

• 1:28Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 1:29Russ Frushtick?

  And I guarantee that butt crack had at least a little bit of chalk.

• 1:33Griffin McElroy?

  A little chalkiness.

• 1:34Russ Frushtick?

  Little bit.

• 1:34Griffin McElroy?

  Little, maybe a, maybe a touch of Gold Bond.

• 1:37Russ Frushtick?

  A scoach.

• 1:38Griffin McElroy?

  A scoach of Gold Bond.

• 1:40Russ Frushtick?

  To get that extra grip.

• 1:42Griffin McElroy?

  You got to sometimes.

• 1:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yep.

• 1:44Griffin McElroy?

  And also wintry, proud, refreshness. Feels great.

• 1:50Chris Plante?

  Gotta be real. I'm not caring for this conversation.

• 1:52Russ Frushtick?

  No.

• 1:53Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 1:54Russ Frushtick?

  No.

• 1:54Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 2:13Griffin McElroy?

  My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best game of the week.

• 2:15Chris Plante?

  My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week.

• 2:19Russ Frushtick?

  My name is Ross Fraschek. I know the best game of the week.

• 2:22Griffin McElroy?

  Justin got pulled into his toilet into toilet narnia. But this week, welcome to the besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year club. And just by listening, my friend, you have become a member. Hope that you are staying safe and warm. We've got a game for you that is maybe not the best for feeling safe and warm. It's a game about being quite cold and in peril.

• 2:51Russ Frushtick?

  And hungry.

• 2:52Griffin McElroy?

  And hungry and in peril and thirsty. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and give it the besties award for worst imaginable game to play while iced into your house with your two children. It is Karen. Hey, Chris Plant, what's Karen?

• 3:07Chris Plante?

  Some people are calling it the latest strand game. I'm calling it a climbing, bouldering, rock climbing simulation. You put one foot and one hand in front of the other, and you go up a mountain. It's as simple as that. Not quite as fuddy-esque as some other climbing games we've been playing, but we'll talk about all of that and more.

• 3:29Griffin McElroy?

  But still very, very, very funny when you fall down off the mountain. We'll talk about all that and more with Karen after this short break.

• 3:37Chris Plante?

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• 4:21Chris Plante?

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• 5:03Chris Plante?

  off your two-year plan. That's protonvpn.com/besties.

• 5:12Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so Karen is a mountain game. You are climbing a mountain. You are a expert climber and you've got

• 5:20Griffin McElroy?

  And kind of a butthole, I will, I will say. Ava, Ava I think is a great character, but kind of hugely unlikable for quite a bit of the game.

• 5:28Russ Frushtick?

  But I will admit that like having watched Free Solo, the documentary about Alex Honnold.

• 5:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Russ Frushtick?

  I think that's kind of part and parcel with the activity.

• 5:37Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, there's something, the game is a, a real love letter to bouldering, rock climbing, the whole, the whole world. There is a sort of detachment that one must possess in order to become a rock climbing weirdo.

• 5:52Russ Frushtick?

  You need to not be, not be worried about the pain that you would inflict on others because your passion is so great.

• 5:58Griffin McElroy?

  Exactly. Humongous selfishness. Thank you, Russ. I think that's what we're all kind of dancing around. I, I think if you heard the description and even I think if you played 30 minutes of the game, you would say it's baby steps, but with double the, double the attachments. It's baby steps with hands, baby hands, baby feet. It'll only, not really humorous in nature. And I think

• 6:24Griffin McElroy?

  That that is, I don't know, I had a pretty negative first reaction to this game. It honestly was not until I started to go up the mountain and get into the rhythm of it that I felt like, okay, I get what this thing is doing and what this thing is doing is actually pretty cool.

• 6:38Russ Frushtick?

  It has grown on me. That's true. I think it

• 6:40Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 6:41Russ Frushtick?

  overwhelms very early on because it's presenting you with pretty tough, just like mechanics within the first five minutes of like, use your peat on and use the grip and make sure you're filling up your thirst meter, whatever it is. But I do think it, you get there.

• 6:59Chris Plante?

  Let's kick in to that, like, like literally the moment to the moment. It's weirdly almost closer to Quop, the other Bennett body game where you control each different appendage with a button. Here, they've tied, you can cycle between your two hands and your

• 7:16Russ Frushtick?

  In fact, you have to. I don't think there's a way to control two limbs at the same time.

• 7:20Griffin McElroy?

  No, no, I don't think so.

• 7:21Chris Plante?

  And, and there is an auto mode, so you don't have to be like, making sure like, okay, do I want to use my right arm or my left arm? And I, and it recommends the auto mode where it's picking what is probably the best appendage to move at that time.

• 7:33Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, I think it is the way it weighs, there's so much stuff going on under the, the, the climbing mechanics of this game are the fucking star of the show. I feel like clearly the thing that like the most thought and effort went into. And it really is an accomplishment because it is weighing so much stuff all the time. Like, it's not just enough for you to have your hands and feet both like pretty well embedded, uh, you know, in like a nice grip as you're climbing the mountain, you'll see little alcoves and little cracks and you gotta really look at that stuff and figure out. Love those cracks because they're, they're just an easy little path for you to follow. But also like if your legs are twisted up or like if your butt is sticking out too far.

• 8:17Griffin McElroy?

  Like, there's a lot of kind of physics calculations that are taking place and true to sort of the genre. You have a certain amount of endurance as you're finding these lines and trying to figure out where to put your hands, where to put your feet as you climb Mount Commie. And if you run out of endurance, you can kind of shake it off once or twice, but then you are going to fall. Unless you put a peat on down, but you can run out of peat on. So this brings us to the sort of. Economy of the game, which I am way more mixed on than just the straight rock climbing of it.

• 8:46Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. So you are, there is a whole survival element to this game. In addition to the climbing and measuring stamina, you're also making sure your hunger meter is filled up. If you don't do that, then it's going to impact your stamina and your ability to grip, et cetera. Same thing with water. Same thing with, I think rest is one of them. Is that correct? You remember?

• 9:07Griffin McElroy?

  I don't know, man. I, I.

• 9:09Russ Frushtick?

  Regardless.

• 9:10Griffin McElroy?

  You have to.

• 9:10Russ Frushtick?

  Stuff off pretty quick. You, you fill a bag very early on. You have like starting equipment that you find and you've got water bottles and, and bars and things like that. You can cook, you can mix items together. And you can also find stuff in the wild. So I found some raspberries. I found like a little spout that was giving out water from the rock, uh, filled up my gear and you gotta make sure that stuff balances. Now, early on, very early on, maybe the first thing you decide is how you want to play this game. And the second that I knew that there was intense survival mechanics, I was like, no, thank you. And opted out.

• 9:48Griffin McElroy?

  It's just, it's interesting. The stuff that they are doing with that is interesting. It is like, it incentivizes you to be playing the game in a certain way, looking for alcoves and little caves. And there's, you're sort of exploring kind of an abandoned mountain village as you're kind of climbing up and you're finding supplies from them. You're finding straight up dead mountain climbers and kind of getting their, their resources.

• 10:14Russ Frushtick?

  Which like score, by the way.

• 10:16Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's a sweet, but like that stuff, all on top of just the moment to moment, I think incredibly strong, satisfying, honestly, kind of puzzly, mountain climbing of trying to find your path and keeping it all balanced. I feel like it's just a hat on a hat a little bit and it was not, uh, I don't know. I turned it off after a couple of hours because it just felt like it was making me want to not play the thing, making me not want to, maybe want to stop playing the game fully, even though I was really enjoying sort of the climbing aspect of it. So you can turn that stuff off.

• 10:52Chris Plante?

  To use Baby Steps as a comparison, and I'm not saying one is better than the other, but Baby Steps has these other alternative routes, or you can even go down in a different direction, right? You can go see a pool, or you can go intentionally off an edge and find a new path. Or you can not, like you can just keep going up. You can create that challenge for yourself. When you have this mode on, it is weirdly encouraging you to consider going back down to get other things. So you'll climb up the side of a mountain, right? And that's like, feels like the core of the game. And then you will, while climbing, see a bee's nest and be like, oh, once I get to the top, I could plant my piton or

• 11:36Chris Plante?

  pylon or whatever and rappel down into that cave.

• 11:40Griffin McElroy?

  They say piton in the game. I had always heard piton, but I don't know.

• 11:43Russ Frushtick?

  Sure, it's a region thing.

• 11:44Chris Plante?

  And go for it. But you also, in doing that, you might fall and lose not just the effort that you made, but like more supplies and more energy. So I, yeah, I, I get it. It reminds me like Death Stranding one in some ways of like...

• 12:01Russ Frushtick?

  It is way more punishing than Death Stranding one. I don't, I don't want to like spend too much longer because I think we all agree that the survival stuff is unnecessary and kind of detracts from the overall experience, unless you're like a hardcore person, but we're not. And so I think it's...

• 12:15Griffin McElroy?

  And I think the game builds well enough tension without the kind of like survival aspects. The main thing that you're doing in this game, and I think it is something you do more even than in a peak or in a Baby Steps. Is like routing out where you are going to go.

• 12:34Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Griffin McElroy?

  Sometimes while exploring the world, you'll find a map and the map has been drawn by another mountain climber and it will show you kind of potential lines and their respective difficulty settings. That's great. When you find one of those, you're like, oh, fuck, yeah. Because otherwise, like, you're gonna roll up to the next sheer rock face and go into like the, you know, wide angle view mode that you have and just kind of look at it for a long time until you say, okay, I think I see where I can get up there. Because otherwise, you may get halfway up a face and you've spent 15 minutes trying to like get up there and then the thing just dead ends and you're like, fuck. But even that, like, you can have cool, very emergent moments where like you put a piton in and you repel and you just kind of swing over to the other track, making sort of like a desperate jump.

• 13:18Griffin McElroy?

  Like, that stuff is so good. They crushed it. That shit is so, so good. I keep coming back to play the game because it is really, really, really satisfying to get up over a thing.

• 13:29Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I think initially I was put off by the AI controlling, like, deciding what limb you do.

• 13:36Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 13:37Russ Frushtick?

  But I do think that the way it was built, you sort of have to do that because it's not visually always the most obvious thing of like where your weight is at any given moment.

• 13:47Griffin McElroy?

  Huge.

• 13:49Russ Frushtick?

  So having the AI sort of take command of that and say like, oh, you really should be moving your left hand now because there's no weight on your left hand.

• 13:55Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Russ Frushtick?

  Is, I think, a requirement. But there are moments where, there's a few mechanics in here that I think work really well. You get to moments where you have to like reach up and to do that, it'll mean like going on one tippy toe to reach up your hand and be in a very precarious situation for like a second or two before you-

• 14:17Griffin McElroy?

  You have to, and you're really committing to it. Because you can't really go back down once you push yourself up like-

• 14:22Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. So you make these interesting choices like that, that I think feel really good. You just have to like accept the fact that Baby Steps, we keep going back to it, is a game where every footstep is like you deciding exactly where your foot's gonna be at any given moment. And this you do, it does require a little bit of finesse.

• 14:42Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I really like that. One suggestion I definitely have is not a difficulty toggle. I don't think it's just like a gameplay setting you can turn on is feedback on like good foot placement. So like if you with that setting on while you're climbing up, if you like get your foot on like a nice foothold and it's like pretty locked in, a little like square will appear when you do it. Otherwise, like no thing appears. And if you have like a couple of limbs that don't have good placement, your stamina just like vanishes. Your stamina also is not a meter that is on the screen. It is, you see Ava's arm like start to shake and legs start to shake and the screen will start to darken. Yeah, you get rumble feedback and you know, like, okay, I can shake this off and then maybe I need to decide

• 15:27Griffin McElroy?

  whether or not to put a pitting down.

• 15:29Russ Frushtick?

  Now you're saying pitting.

• 15:31Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, that's what they say in the game, right? I don't like, I've seen Free Solo, I watched some of the thing. I think this world is really fucking interesting. I always think it's really interesting when there exists an, I think, pretty esoteric athletic endeavor that there is so much like, so many strats about. Sometimes I'll get like, I'm friends, I'm buddies with somebody who's like about that life. And we'll share like clips of somebody just doing like a bouldering tournament where they're like one foot off the ground, trying to like find exactly where to put their fingers on this weird dodecahedron to like get up it. Or like trying to climb a two foot high rock wall, just like with these little tiny, I think that stuff's really cool.

• 16:12Griffin McElroy?

  And this is a game about that. And I think a lot of care and attention went into sort of courting that community. I have to imagine this is, this is something that people who actually rock climb would, would enjoy. Cause it was made by those people.

• 16:25Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it feels very much targeted to them.

• 16:27Chris Plante?

  It's also so different than peak in baby steps and all these other climbing games in that way too. And that those games are about moving up, but basically everything is a ladder. You're always climbing just one hand in front of the other. This is.

• 16:43Griffin McElroy?

  Really, you might want to watch some of video of people doing free climbing just to get an idea of what it is supposed to look like, because you're wedging yourself in weird positions to create that balance. It is not unusual for you to be almost horizontal at points as you are making your way between, let's say, like a V-shaped crevice of the mountain. If you try to just go straight up, you will fall because the gravity is against you.

• 17:13Russ Frushtick?

  Which isn't to say that like the physics and the like animations don't get a little bit janky at times. They definitely do. And that's okay. That's fine.

• 17:22Griffin McElroy?

  But I've also seen it a number of times, like get janky and then see it actually correct in a way that seems like a human body would do. It's really, I think that stuff is a technical kind of huge achievement. There are some design issues. The writing is a bit so-so for me. Like there's scenes that have been like pretty great, but I don't know that there's a whole lot of development. I don't feel particularly attached to the lead character, mostly because I think she does feel this kind of like standoffish, not standoffish, but kind of isolated, individualistic kind of person, which is, I don't know, kind

• 18:04Griffin McElroy?

  of tough to root for. But then again, I also think they are doing something with that that I just haven't gotten to in the story.

• 18:10Russ Frushtick?

  Maybe it's like a long, what is that, a short hike where at the end you just have like a very meaningful sad call and everything is fixed.

• 18:20Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I don't want that. I don't, I genuinely don't. Around the like three or so hour mark, I feel like the game introduces what feels like a, I don't know, an arc. And I think I'm, I'm sort of getting to the resolution a little bit. It's hard for me to tell where I'm at on this fucking mountain because you look straight up and it looks like you're close. And then no.

• 18:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, they do a lot of false peak stuff. I do want to share an anecdote. So I was talking to, we've mentioned him a few times, Bennett Foddy, who created Quop and Baby steps. And I was, I mentioned to him, like, my initial reaction to this game was not very positive. And apparently he is like, fully into it.

• 19:03Russ Frushtick?

  Incredibly engaged with it, but specifically mentioned that he's been playing it in free solo mode, which maybe shouldn't surprise anyone.

• 19:10Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 19:10Russ Frushtick?

  The hardest difficulty. And he says he's got about 40 hours into it and he's only about two thirds of the way up the mountain. So if you want to make it last.

• 19:20Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Russ Frushtick?

  You could make yourself miserable like Man at Foddy, but I think for most people, probably turning off most of the survival stuff is the way to go.

• 19:28Griffin McElroy?

  Free solo mode, by the way, a mode that exists in the game where you don't get ropes and you do not get pitons or pitons. It is just you and it is permadeath.

• 19:38Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Griffin McElroy?

  So if you fall, you're done. That's cool, guys. That's great. That's fucking in there and available. There's gonna be some speed run.

• 19:45Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Griffin McElroy?

  Travesties that are done to this game and I'm very, very excited to see those.

• 19:51Russ Frushtick?

  The other thing I wanted to mention, if you're interested in this, but you feel like it's too semi or whatever. We had mentioned this game a while ago. I forget if it was on Rusty's or Besties, but the game was White Knuckle, which was a first person climbing game with like one bit graphics. That is like a very arcadey approach to this idea, but still has things about like your hand strength and things like that are still factored in.

• 20:17Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Russ Frushtick?

  But much more like short runs and things like that. But I really liked it.

• 20:21Griffin McElroy?

  What's your guys takeaway on Karen? Do you think you're going to stick with it as we move on to the next game?

• 20:27Russ Frushtick?

  I think it is starting to get way too competitive for games that I like, sort of like, but aren't like, I'm not totally in love with.

• 20:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, sure.

• 20:35Russ Frushtick?

  To stay with it much more than I have. I'm several hours in and I've enjoyed it. I, it did start clicking with me in ways that I wasn't expecting, but not necessarily in ways that like Death Stranding 2 hit.

• 20:48Griffin McElroy?

  Grippy. Yeah, sure.

• 20:50Chris Plante?

  Were all of, were you all able to get it to run on Steam Deck?

• 20:53Griffin McElroy?

  I'm playing it on Rogue Ally X. It struggles a bit. It's, it doesn't do, it has some hiccups. I think for the most part it runs pretty.

• 21:01Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, we are at the territory where like an open world. 3D game probably is gonna have a tough time on Steam Deck.

• 21:09Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I consistently.

• 21:10Chris Plante?

  I couldn't get it to start and I didn't know if it was just an issue with my Steam Deck. And that that's like the bummer is this is the sort of game that I think I would put a lot of time in if I could play it basically before sleep. I I I love a game like this. I love a game that is all about just the flow and the feel and I can tinker with the settings and just like be in that space. Sure. Just branding one. But it would be very hard for me to like commit to it if I'm gonna be you know, stuck to my computer when I'm playing it.

• 21:39Russ Frushtick?

  It is an okay game to play in front of children for the most part, so long as you don't.

• 21:43Griffin McElroy?

  Not if you're taping up your grody fingers.

• 21:45Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, fair, but they should know about that.

• 21:47Griffin McElroy?

  All torn up and then you gotta bandage them. But then again, you can turn off finger mode.

• 21:51Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 21:54Griffin McElroy?

  Our fingers that have been put through an absolute meat grinder. I think it's cool. I think it's really, really cool. And I there are a few things I wish it had done differently. Game Bakers is the developer of this, which is I don't think I've played one of their games since Squids and Squids Wild West, which are some fucking banger old App Store gems.

• 22:14Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I think I played Fury. They made Fury, which is pretty good.

• 22:18Griffin McElroy?

  Last one. I I think it's really cool. I think it's great. I think I'm I if I am as close to finishing it as I think I am, I will probably keep going. But then again, if I play it this afternoon and I climb up and then all of a sudden there's.

• 22:30Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, there's gonna be probably another mountain.

• 22:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, maybe. It'll be like a Symphony of the Night. It'll be an upside down mountain.

• 22:36Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Griffin McElroy?

  Damn, that would be cool, actually.

• 22:38Russ Frushtick?

  Parachute in.

• 22:40Griffin McElroy?

  That'd be sick.

• 22:42Griffin McElroy?

  Anyway, that's Karen. Let's take a break and then talk about another game. If that's okay.

• 22:48Russ Frushtick?

  Cool.

• 22:50Russ Frushtick?

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• 23:12Russ Frushtick?

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• 24:11Chris Plante?

  The game we're talking about in our B segment is Pirates of the Caribbean: Strange Tides. I don't know why Chris Plant has brought a... Aye, matey, I'm ready to be canceled.

• 24:26Chris Plante?

  It's good stuff.

• 24:29Chris Plante?

  Hey, I want to tell you about Perfect Tides: Station to Station. Have either of you had a chance to play this game yet?

• 24:34Russ Frushtick?

  No, I haven't.

• 24:36Chris Plante?

  No, I have not either. That's great, then I can tell you all about it. So Perfect Tides: Station to Station is actually the sequel to a game called Perfect Tides. It is an adventure series. They are more or less memoir games. They are about a fictional young woman named Mara, but they are like pretty clearly inspired by the life of the game's creator, Meredith Grand. You also might know her as the creator and author of the comic Octopus Pie. It was a browser comic many, many years ago. But this game, it is set in the year 2003 in the magical land of Manhattan and you are Mara as a freshman in college.

• 25:21Chris Plante?

  This is interesting to me because I was a freshman in college in the magical land of Manhattan in 2004. So it feels like I am literally transported back to a very specific moment in a very specific place.

• 25:35Russ Frushtick?

  Narrow casted to Chris Plant.

• 25:37Chris Plante?

  Profoundly. In that... Fresh. Not every place in this is explicitly named what it is in real life. But like, when you keep going to your friend's apartment in this game, when you were like, "Hey, I want to go get food," your options will be the Selica. When you want to go see a movie, it is the Second Avenue Old Yiddish Movie Theater. It is full of recreations of a lot of places that don't even exist anymore, like the High Line before it got turned into the High Line. There are moments in the game where you go up on the elevated subway tracks that have since been converted into a very famous park.

• 26:19Chris Plante?

  It is truly a time capsule of a video game. But like, that alone doesn't make it great. What makes it great is the writing here is exceptional. And even though it looks like a kind of pixelated, point-and-click adventure game, it does its best to cut all of the things that are annoying about that genre so that you can just focus on the story. So you're not doing the like, "I need to find bubble gum and a root beer bottle, and that's going to help me solve the puzzle." You're largely just living the life of this young woman over the course of four seasons and experiencing really three big relationships

• 27:02Chris Plante?

  in her life, along with what is going on with her mother and her grandmother. And that's it. Like, it is really that simple. It is a year and a person's life, the video game. But the writing is so good and so powerful that it pulls you through like reading a really great novella.

• 27:22Russ Frushtick?

  Is it, uh, is there like, player choice?

• 27:26Chris Plante?

  Agency?

• 27:27Russ Frushtick?

  I guess?

• 27:27Chris Plante?

  Yeah, that's a great question. So there is. The game itself is very authored. So like, every day, you're gonna experience the story that the game has. Like, you're not gonna be able to choose who your boyfriend is or anything like that. But you also manage your time. So how you spend your time during that day is up to you. You can decide. decide what book you want to read each day that you can like literally go to the library. You can buy books from a street vendor. You can trade them with friends and doing those things will increase Mara's stats, like her knowledge of music or anarchy or sex. And then you can apply your stats.

• 28:09Griffin McElroy?

  Knowledge of anarchy.

• 28:11Chris Plante?

  I know. You acquire different skills and then you can apply that to your writing. So then when you go to like, write papers, which are kind of the goals of each season, I guess, you will want to combine wherever your like best stats are. So if you've been reading a whole lot about music and the city, you would want to write an essay about music in the city. If you're writing a lot about sex in the city, you would want to write sex in the city, baby.

• 28:42Griffin McElroy?

  You're gonna be rich.

• 28:43Chris Plante?

  Yeah. And.

• 28:46Griffin McElroy?

  It's, I mean, it sounds a little disco Elysium in the way that kind of ideas would take root and become kind of mechanics.

• 28:54Chris Plante?

  Yes, but with zero sticks, where disco Elysium is like, you could die at any moment and all that. This is like, yeah, you might fail, well, not even fail, you'll, you'll do poorly on a paper and you'll get a different reaction from your teacher if you chose a really bad match, or you might not impress a blog editor that you're trying to impress, things like that. But really, all of that is there largely to give you just a little bit of mechanical, you know, zip in your brain. That way you are pulled through the story. What it, what it wants you to do is just kind of sign on for the ride, right?

• 29:36Chris Plante?

  And go from scene to scene and meet all these characters and really explore the world. So you can kind of touch and engage with anything in the world. I say touch. I mean, you can like, get a description for pretty much everything that you see. So it is this little. diorama almost of these places in this person's life where you can ask like, hey, why is there a X versus Sever poster in this apartment? And if you click on it, you'll get six paragraphs explaining X versus Sever and why someone would steal that standee from their shitty movie theater job in Long Island and carry it all the way to the East Village as a goof.

• 30:16Griffin McElroy?

  I fucking love the way this game looks, man.

• 30:20Chris Plante?

  It looks, can you describe like the general visual style?

• 30:23Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's, it is something that I feel like is not often captured in, uh, you know, modern pixel art games, this like kind of, uh, brief period of, I think about like Sega CD pixel games, right? Or it's not like, uh, necessarily constrained to, uh, a, any particular hardware limitations. And so the pixel art looks a bit more cartoony.

• 30:52Griffin McElroy?

  It is giving me kind of Willie Beamish vibes, if that tracks for anyone. It's giving, it is giving weird South Park kind of vibes a little bit in just like the, the art and the songs.

• 31:06Russ Frushtick?

  Scott Pilgrim, beat them up.

• 31:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, for sure. I think that, well, no, even that, I think, you know, Hughes pretty close to that kind of, um, what tribute games?

• 31:17Chris Plante?

  Sure.

• 31:18Griffin McElroy?

  Kind of high def, high detail stuff. This, this is, this is not really that. It looks like a, I don't know, like a, a, a PC game from 1994 or something like that. Like in that weird transitional period. But it's like, really cool. It's, it's so, uh, expressive and, um, just really, really well drawn.

• 31:41Chris Plante?

  I, I also think like, if you are a fan of point and click adventure games, even though it strips away a lot of the mechanics, it's doing some interesting things with how it tells story using that system. So like in a lot of the old LucasArts games, you have that omniscient narrator who is kind of like holier than our, or smarter, cleverer than Guy versus Threepwood. What's weird with this is you're playing this game where Mara is.

• 32:10Chris Plante?

  The author, like this is her most of her life, not one to one, but it's her. And then the narrator feels like Meredith Grand today, like it feels like somebody who knows that what's going to happen in life, right? So you are kind of this third party and watching somebody argue with their younger self. And sometimes the younger person is actually right. You know, they're like, we weren't total morons when we were kids. But being in that dynamic is unlike anything that you get in a book. It feels like very local to what you can pull off in a video game. It's, it's so good.

• 32:49Chris Plante?

  Also, just the vibe, just very quickly of like, so capturing that weird moment when you are in your early twenties and you are both like a kid and adult at the same time. And like, in a moment, you'll be like, talking with a crush on the phone, falling asleep. And then you'll be listening to Neutral Milk Hotel on the subway, thinking you're having the most profound experience of your life. And the next moment, you'll be buying condoms for the first time. And then the moment after that, you'll be like, having to take your grandma to the hospital or something, you know, like.

• 33:22Griffin McElroy?

  Sort of just a sashimi plate of slices of life.

• 33:25Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Griffin McElroy?

  Just a spread, a charcuterie, if you will. I love it. I will definitely want to check this out. What are you playing it on? Is it?

• 33:34Chris Plante?

  You can play it on PC or Mac. It works perfectly well on a MacBook Air. So you don't need like a whole bunch of power to run this thing. And I believe it is coming to Switch later this year.

• 33:46Griffin McElroy?

  Okay. Cool.

• 33:48Russ Frushtick?

  Very cool. We have some.

• 33:49Griffin McElroy?

  Do we want to do some mail?

• 33:50Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, we have some reader mail. We had this letter from J-Man 1980. We had this letter from J-Man 1980 about the game genie. We were asking how the game genie works, if you remember. This is what J-Man wrote. "The game genie just intercepts memory reads, writes between the game and the console. The codes are actually just memory address and values. So the game genie people find out where the in the system memory Dick Tracy's health is. And then every time the game tries to reduce Dick Tracy's health, the game genie is like, I got you. But then when the game asks what this Dick Tracy's health is from the system memory, the game genie is like, it's 100. And then the game is like, you sure? Okay, sounds good." So basically-

• 34:34Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, that's what we said, right? It's just a shunt. It basically is just it captures the electricity signals, changes them a little bit.

• 34:42Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I do want to know what like, how you find the like flying mode in Mario in the system.

• 34:50Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Russ Frushtick?

  Like, I guess it is, is, is swimming versus not, basically, in the code, probably.

• 34:56Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Russ Frushtick?

  Something like that.

• 34:58Griffin McElroy?

  I don't think we know enough about, um, however, SNES games were programmed to, but it's gotta be in there somewhere, right?

• 35:05Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, probably. Evan, Evan said that it's probably some understanding of the wish-making process.

• 35:10Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Russ Frushtick?

  So that could also be it.

• 35:12Griffin McElroy?

  It's about visualization and manifestation. That's very huge for the game genie.

• 35:18Russ Frushtick?

  Drew also wrote in to say that Fable will-

• 35:21Griffin McElroy?

  Drew, Drew, not frickin' Level 9000, yeah, Drew, Drew, Drew Davenport.

• 35:27Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Griffin McElroy?

  Put some respect on this man's name, Drew.

• 35:30Russ Frushtick?

  Drew. Fable will have office-style cutaways. Please devote 20 minutes to the next episode to talk about it. Without Justin here-

• 35:38Griffin McElroy?

  That feels wrong.

• 35:38Russ Frushtick?

  Feels wrong. So we'll, we'll save the Fable talk.

• 35:41Griffin McElroy?

  But I don't like, but I don't like that.

• 35:43Russ Frushtick?

  You don't like it?

• 35:44Griffin McElroy?

  As, as someone who is genetically kind of linked to Justin, I don't like that.

• 35:50Russ Frushtick?

  Why?

• 35:51Griffin McElroy?

  I, I don't think it will be good. I don't think it will be good to have cutaways in the Fable, in the Fable game.

• 35:58Chris Plante?

  I think, I think I know what would really get you, though.

• 36:01Griffin McElroy?

  What's that?

• 36:01Chris Plante?

  Office-style cutaways, but they kind of make like, you know, those like silly Monty Python-style jokes, like, uh.

• 36:09Griffin McElroy?

  I don't think hu- I don't think- It is so hard for humor to exist in a manner in which it, the game will stop and say, here comes, and now, and now here comes some humor. It's like, that's crazy, guys.

• 36:25Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, but Fable has that. Fable's like a jokey game constantly.

• 36:29Griffin McElroy?

  Fable doesn't have the exact thing. If Fable doesn't have a thing where like you pick up a chicken and then like the game stops and the main character looks at you and is like, mm, extra crispy, like. Cock-a-doodle-doo. He's not Gex. Like, they're Gex-ing it up.

• 36:44Russ Frushtick?

  I don't think it's gonna be constant. I think it'll be during cutscenes. You'll like meet a big boss and then the boss will be scary and then it's gonna cut away and he'll be like a nerdy guy making trains. That's my guess.

• 36:54Griffin McElroy?

  Great. I mean, Conqueror's Bad Fur Day did it. I don't know why.

• 36:58Russ Frushtick?

  Did it?

• 36:59Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, probably.

• 37:00Russ Frushtick?

  They did like two camera?

• 37:02Chris Plante?

  Well, it didn't, it didn't, it didn't do like the documentary cutaway.

• 37:04Griffin McElroy?

  It didn't do documentary cutaway. That's fine.

• 37:06Russ Frushtick?

  That's a big difference.

• 37:07Griffin McElroy?

  The Office did, the Office did invent that.

• 37:08Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Griffin McElroy?

  I, just, Fable needs to fucking come out. Fables make me anxious now.

• 37:14Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, they released like a lot of information. It does seem like it's actually happening. I know it came up during our predictions episode of whether it would happen or not.

• 37:21Griffin McElroy?

  This is what I get for not being logged into a newsroom Slack channel all the time, is I miss when they actually do come out and say Fable's real.

• 37:29Russ Frushtick?

  They said some nonsense about like there being a thousand NPCs or whatever, which, whatever, Todd Howard has said that for a thousand years.

• 37:36Chris Plante?

  We can't trust anything until the game is out. That's, that's, new rule, no trusting video games until they're out.

• 37:42Russ Frushtick?

  I guess.

• 37:44Griffin McElroy?

  Anybody play anything else?

• 37:47Russ Frushtick?

  Well, I've been playing something that I can't talk about, so we're not gonna talk about that. I will talk about the, the thing that I went to, which was Taskmaster Live.

• 37:56Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, how did you get tickets to that? Jesus Christ.

• 37:59Russ Frushtick?

  I have some very nice friends that work at the town hall in New York City, which is a very nice theater and I like them a whole lot. And I was able to sneak on in there and, and it was, it was spectacular. It was so much fun. I was skeptical that they would manage to capture the spirit of the show that I've watched on YouTube many, many years. In a live format and it just the charm and the chemistry between Greg and Alex through the roof.

• 38:31Griffin McElroy?

  Is it a different cat? What is the format? I know nothing about.

• 38:34Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, so they'll do so the first half of the show, the live shows at least when they're touring, I think the tour just wrapped. At least for this time, they did a Q and A for the first half and then in the second half, they just like turn it into like a mini episode of probably a full length episode of Taskmaster where they'll do partially people from the audience as as members of the cast and partially like special guests.

• 38:57Griffin McElroy?

  Just brought up at random or?

• 38:58Russ Frushtick?

  They actually had tasks that the audience could complete to become a member. So one of the tasks was they handed out when everyone came in, they handed out pieces of paper and that piece of paper was used for a few different challenges to like make it up on stage, but one of them was make your best paper airplane in a minute and then throw it on stage and try to hit Alex in the head.

• 39:20Griffin McElroy?

  Great.

• 39:21Russ Frushtick?

  And whoever got closest basically won. And so, yeah, so they had three random people on stage who were like incredibly fun to watch. They were like perfect for that. It can be a little awkward, I would imagine sometimes, but those three people that I saw was great. And then we had Alex Moffett was there from SNL and also Lisa Gilroy, who is a very, very talented improvisist. And it was just like dynamite. Oh, and Jason Manzouka showed up at the end and had like a little special guest.

• 39:53Griffin McElroy?

  Jesus Christ, that's so stacked, that cast. That's crazy.

• 39:55Russ Frushtick?

  The night before was John Oliver and Seth Meyers were the were the big guests. So pretty crazy. Yeah, the the tickets tend to be very competitive, so I would recommend going to the Taskmaster website to sign up to their mailing list if something is coming in your neighborhood. Amanda mentioned that they sold out Chicago in like two minutes.

• 40:16Griffin McElroy?

  She was on a meeting with us when the tickets went on sale and she was like, sorry, guys, I'm gonna be a couple of minutes. Oh, they're gone. Like great, like instantaneously.

• 40:24Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, but it was it was great. I was really enjoying myself.

• 40:26Griffin McElroy?

  Cool. I have been playing, so we've started to stream playing video. Games individually, me and Justin and Travis on the MacRae Family YouTube channel. And I am doing a new run of Trial by Fiery, which is my randomized Zelda series. I've done Link to the Past, I've done Ocarina of Time. Both of those games that I know extraordinarily well and felt well equipped to handle a randomizer for. But we've had people ask for more of it, and so I was trying to figure out what to do next. And Majora's Mask has been randomized. People have picked it apart to a degree where you can't do it. The problem is I don't fucking remember that game.

• 41:07Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Griffin McElroy?

  Cause I haven't played it.

• 41:09Russ Frushtick?

  I would struggle with normal Majora's Mask.

• 41:11Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, absolutely. I am struggling in a major way because that is a game that I've been playing. It's Majora's Mask 3D, specifically the Grezzo version that came out in 2014. I do think you're supposed to say Grezzo.

• 41:23Russ Frushtick?

  So you're also supposed to say Fieri, by the way, but.

• 41:25Griffin McElroy?

  Fieri, Grezzo Fieri.

• 41:27Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I've been playing it just honestly to freshen up because playing it again for stream randomized like you find the Gero mask. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that? I don't know. That was 12 years ago that I played this game. There is a restoration mod that has been made for Majora's Mask 3D specifically to address a few, you know, issues that people have with the game. Apparently they fucked up Zora swimming pretty bad in the 3DS version. But there's a lot of like really great quality of life stuff in the 3DS version. Like for instance, when you play the Song of Double Time, you can jump to a specific hour. Because in the original Majora's Mask, like if you were waiting for the lady with the bomb bag on the first night in North Clock Town, you'd have to wait around until midnight and it took fucking forever.

• 42:14Griffin McElroy?

  And it was so boring. Like there's lots of.

• 42:15Russ Frushtick?

  But now you're waiting, you wait, you wait and then she's selling like a feather, right?

• 42:21Griffin McElroy?

  What?

• 42:21Russ Frushtick?

  Because it's randomized.

• 42:23Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, so yes, I'm not playing the randomizer.

• 42:25Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, oh, oh.

• 42:25Griffin McElroy?

  I'm just playing tradi- no, no, no, I wouldn't spoil that. I'm just playing traditional.

• 42:28Russ Frushtick?

  Got it.

• 42:29Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, but yes, that is how it will work. Once it is randomized, is I will go through all the fucking effort to reunite Cafe and Anju. And then, uh, as the moon crashes into the world, it'd be like, here is five rupees. Like, thanks, dude.

• 42:45Russ Frushtick?

  Can you guarantee that it will be completable when you do the randomization?

• 42:48Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, so, I mean, this stuff is really incredible. It is incredible how much these communities have been able to kind of reverse engineer these games. There is one for the 3DS version that I'm thinking about doing, but the, uh, you know, N64 version of Majora's Mask has been, this software has been available for a long time. When you load it up, the, uh, Majora's Mask randomizer, uh, first of all, you have to have like, you know, the right file for the game that you put into it for it to kind of chop and screw. But then there's like tons of settings, right? So you can turn on, Logic is on by default, right? And that just means like, it's not going to put the hookshot behind a thing you need the hookshot for.

• 43:28Russ Frushtick?

  Got it.

• 43:28Griffin McElroy?

  Right? Everything is solvable, but you can checkbox like, I actually know how to do this glitch.

• 43:33Russ Frushtick?

  Oh.

• 43:33Griffin McElroy?

  I can do the bomb jump to get over the bridge. And so Logic will then bend to say like, okay, well, if you know how to do that thing, then we can move some stuff around. Like, it's incredibly granular.

• 43:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 43:43Griffin McElroy?

  You can turn on things like, when I do the stream, I will probably turn on this setting where you can choose which checks, which is like the word that they use for like, when you find an item, it is a check. Uh, you can choose which checks are gonna have guaranteed junk, like five rupees. You can make it so I don't have to do all the Cafe and Andrew side quest stuff, uh, because it's, I know it's gonna give garbage and you can like pick and choose exactly what it's, what it's going to do. So it's like, it's, it's very detailed, uh, and, and very, very cool.

• 44:14Russ Frushtick?

  I've thought about doing it for Elden Ring. Seems like a fun one to do.

• 44:17Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, so, uh, the reason I really like Zelda for it, okay, there's like, there's a, there's a whole suite of randomizer tools called Archipelago. Are you guys familiar with this at all? What it allows you to do is set up a multi-world, uh, which is basically you have a server and the server multiple users are like logged into at a time. They are playing different randomized games that are all being piped through this server and you can find items from one game in another game.

• 44:47Russ Frushtick?

  What?

• 44:48Griffin McElroy?

  So this exists already in a like mashup of Link to the Past and Super Metroid. I saw this like a few years ago.

• 44:56Russ Frushtick?

  So you could find the screw attack in Link to the Past?

• 44:58Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, right? And but and also like you would go through a door in, you know, Cornaria and it exits out of the fortune teller's shop at Lake Hailea. So like that existed, but now Archipelago is this software and platform where you can do that with fucking like every like Hollow Knight and Pokemon Red and Blue and Microsoft Paint. There's like checks in Microsoft Paint. You have to copy an image only like you have no tools. And so as you get closer to getting the image right, your canvas gets bigger and you get more like there's all that stuff. It is that stuff is really, really, I think, kind of challenging to stream maybe from my somewhat

• 45:39Griffin McElroy?

  rookie position, but like this, this world of randomizers is fucking gargantuan and you can do a ton of crazy stuff with it. Uh, and it really is like I've beaten Ocarina of Times maybe a dozen times, uh, probably more, honestly, uh, throughout my life. I used to speedrun it with my buddy Clint. Uh, playing it in this way was like a completely different experience. It is a completely different experience to find something and be like, well, shit, I guess I'm starting with the spirit temple. Like it really is interesting. Uh, and I'm really excited to do it with a game like Majora's Mask where there is, you know, you have the bomber's notebook and like all of the side quests and like having that tool to kind of like help track stuff.

• 46:18Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 46:18Griffin McElroy?

  So, uh, yes, I have been playing Majora's Mask 3D with the restoration patch and it has been really incredible. Very, very cool, very weird game. Uh, and I think Greta's 3DS Zelda remakes are like absolute top tier great shit.

• 46:33Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to some of these actually coming to Switch. I would imagine they will eventually, uh, just because a lot of people don't have their 3DSs lying around.

• 46:41Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. It looks great, by the way, running on my computer.

• 46:44Russ Frushtick?

  I'm sure.

• 46:45Griffin McElroy?

  I should, maybe shouldn't say, but running on my computer with the restoration mod, like, it looks fucking great. I do have a copy. I have a copy of Majora's Mask on N64 and on fucking...

• 46:56Russ Frushtick?

  3DS.

• 46:57Griffin McElroy?

  3DS.

• 46:57Russ Frushtick?

  Wow.

• 46:58Griffin McElroy?

  Boom, I got the holographic gold cartridge.

• 47:00Chris Plante?

  Oh damn, that looks nice. This is where we need video.

• 47:03Griffin McElroy?

  Um... I got the nasty ass faded gray Zelda Ocarina of Time cartridge, because my dumbass brother gave my gold version to his ex-fiance.

• 47:14Griffin McElroy?

  What a butthole.

• 47:15Russ Frushtick?

  Was that how he proposed?

• 47:16Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, he gave her my gold Zelda Ocarina of Time cartridge. I'll never forgive his ass for that.

• 47:22Chris Plante?

  Uh, do you have a Banjo Kazooie, uh, copy back there?

• 47:25Griffin McElroy?

  No, I got Smash, my cart, my 64. And Mischief Makers.

• 47:30Russ Frushtick?

  No yellow Donkey Kong 64?

• 47:33Griffin McElroy?

  No, I don't have it. I don't have a lot of N64.

• 47:35Chris Plante?

  You're gonna wanna go get a Banjo Kazooie, because you're gonna wanna play Banjo recompiled on PC ASAP, because it's absolutely sick. That is what I have been playing as my bonus this week. It is a native PC build of Banjo Kazooie that takes about 30 seconds to get running, and also launched alongside two huge mods, including an Ocarina of Time mod for Banjo Kazooie. It looks bonkers. It is wild how good these native versions of Nintendo 64 games look on PC.

• 48:15Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Chris Plante?

  They are truly stunning, and, uh, yeah, if you have a copy of it, I recommend you go and check this one out, because a solid game. You know, it's not, it's not Mario 64, but it is still pretty damn good.

• 48:33Russ Frushtick?

  It's also, uh, they, uh, much less of a lift than running an N64 emulator is running these recompiled games. So you'll see a lot of these games running on like... Relatively crappy handhelds through Portmaster and like, I was playing like Mary 64 at 60 FPS, like running great, so.

• 48:51Griffin McElroy?

  There's a, there's an Ocarina of Time, uh, sort of version called The Ship of Harkenian.

• 48:57Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Griffin McElroy?

  Um, that is like a huge fan project that like a ton of work and, and love and effort has gone into. And there is also a version of Majora's Mask called Two Ship, Two Harkenian, which is really, really very good.

• 49:10Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 49:10Griffin McElroy?

  I'm so fascinated. I'm so fascinated by that world. Um, hey, thank you so much for listening to the besties. I had a great time with you guys.

• 49:18Russ Frushtick?

  Me too.

• 49:19Griffin McElroy?

  And Miss Justin. Um, but it was fun talking about Cairn and Perfect Tides, uh, Tides to Tides. Shit, what's it called? Fuck.

• 49:28Chris Plante?

  Uh, Station to Station?

• 49:30Russ Frushtick?

  Perfect Tides, Station to Station is the full name.

• 49:33Griffin McElroy?

  What else did we talk about, Chris Plant?

• 49:34Chris Plante?

  What else did we talk about? I mean, we talked about Cairn. We talked about Majora's Mask. We talked about Archipelago, uh, dot GG. We talked about Taskmaster Live. We didn't talk about how if you want to hear more about Perfect Tides, Station to Station, you could listen to an interview with its creator on post games.

• 49:51Griffin McElroy?

  Oh.

• 49:52Chris Plante?

  But now we have talked about that. A little plug in there. Maybe we did.

• 49:56Griffin McElroy?

  I love that. Can I get a plug in there for the Patreon?

• 49:59Russ Frushtick?

  Our Patreon.

• 50:00Griffin McElroy?

  Please.

• 50:00Russ Frushtick?

  We don't care about your Patreon, Chris Plant.

• 50:02Chris Plante?

  Whatever.

• 50:03Griffin McElroy?

  I mean.

• 50:04Chris Plante?

  I'll do. I'm not gonna complain.

• 50:05Russ Frushtick?

  That's true. Uh, it is patreon.com slash the besties. Uh, and we have some members to thank. We have Brendan W. We have Alexandra T. We have Drowren and we have Evan. Thank you for being members. We have a new Bracket Battles episode coming out on Tuesday. That'll be exciting. Uh, we've got new Resties, uh, coming every other week and, uh, all good stuff. Okay, Plant, you can, you can, you could drop in your post-dash games. What is it?

• 50:34Chris Plante?

  Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, I already did that post-game. You can go do that, but I want to talk about the game we have next week because.

• 50:40Griffin McElroy?

  I had a professor in college of my capstone ethics class.

• 50:45Chris Plante?

  Yes.

• 50:46Griffin McElroy?

  Who about three weeks out from the capstone paper being due, sat the class down and said, "If you have not started your paper, you need to drop this class. It is too late. It is too late for you to do this paper in time for the due date for the assignment." I defied him and I did fucking cram that shit into like three intense sleepless nights. But I will say, folks, if you haven't started playing Dragon Quest VII, it's too late for you to participate in next week's discussion.

• 51:17Russ Frushtick?

  This, Griffin, this is a gift that you've given me that maybe dwarfs any other gift that you've ever given me.

• 51:24Chris Plante?

  Griffin, I think it might just be me and you for that segment.

• 51:27Griffin McElroy?

  Correct. Listen, Dragon Quest VII is what we're talking about, the remake. It is frickin' RPG comfort food, baby. We're gonna be talking about that and other stuff. There's actually a few sort of embargoes that go up next week. So it'll be, it'll be action-packed, but you know, Dragon Quest VII is gonna be the raison d'etre.

• 51:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yes, I think it's fair to assume that Justin and I will be doing something else.

• 51:48Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 51:49Russ Frushtick?

  And that's okay.

• 51:50Griffin McElroy?

  Chris and I, dirty dogs in the trenches.

• 51:52Russ Frushtick?

  Right.

• 51:53Griffin McElroy?

  With our 100 hours.

• 51:54Chris Plante?

  Our JR. Fresh, you'll be closer to the, the journalism seminar that I had in college where my friend Colin and I went and did, what's the def charge is the politically correct term for the drink. I did def charges to back to back.

• 52:13Russ Frushtick?

  Guinness with a shot of Baileys, that one?

• 52:15Chris Plante?

  Yeah, and then went to this class, showed up reeking of booze, showed up 30 minutes late. The professor sat us down in front of the whole class and he said, "Everyone, pull out paper, pull out pencil. We're writing a essay right now. It's gonna be very important towards your grade. Except for you two, you don't get to write the essay. You both get As and everybody else gets to learn that this is how life actually works."

• 52:40Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, my God.

• 52:40Griffin McElroy?

  That's cool. I mean, it sucks for everyone and it sucks probably the optics of that for you, but cool that you didn't have to write the paper.

• 52:46Chris Plante?

  It was great.

• 52:47Griffin McElroy?

  You're learning the wrong lesson. You're learning the worst possible lesson.

• 52:51Russ Frushtick?

  Not ethics class, as he would think.

• 52:52Chris Plante?

  I was toasted enough that it didn't bother me at all.

• 52:55Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 52:56Russ Frushtick?

  You know, he used the word toasted.

• 52:59Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. We had a lot of fun in college, and you're gonna have a lot of fun listening to us talk about Dragon Quest VII and probably playing Dragon Quest VII, if you live that life. So tune in for the besties next week, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

• 53:42Griffin McElroy?

  Besties!