The Halo Remake Is a Metaphor for the Xbox Mess

In the back half of this week’s episode, we chat about Halo: Campaign Evolved, a video game that has the misfortune of representing everything infuriating about the modern Xbox strategy. Fortunately, other games exist. To soothe the soul, we start with an inspired murder mystery, a surprisingly deep Spelunky-like, and the 1.0 of Palworld.

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

• 0:00Griffin McElroy?

  I know that Power World has gotten sort of a bad rap, just been pretty much characterized as Pokemon with guns. I have major, major issues with this. One, because I think it's inaccurate. Two, Pokemon's got guns, guys.

• 0:15Russ Frushtick?

  Doesn't?

• 0:16Griffin McElroy?

  Not a ton, and Pokemon doesn't have a ton of guns, but if you watch the anime, Jesse and James are packing heat a lot of the time.

• 0:23Russ Frushtick?

  But it's like, it's like ray guns. They're not shooting like 40 caliber sniper rifles.

• 0:28Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, there's an episode where Ash goes to the safari zone and the guy who runs the safari zone holds a revolver up to Ash's forehead, like he's about to execute him, Gangland style. And that one has been banned. You can't see that episode on the WB or other sort of similar platforms. But may I turn your attention to those two silver barrels sticking out of the back of my friend Blastoise? What do you guys think those are? They're guns.

• 0:53Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, but they shoot wa- they're water guns, literally.

• 0:55Griffin McElroy?

  You don't know that they only shoot water.

• 0:57Russ Frushtick?

  We've never seen him shoot projectiles of other form.

• 1:00Griffin McElroy?

  Well, if you jam something in there and you have him just charge it up and bla- I think he could kill a guy. Blastoise could kill a guy with those gun- it doesn't matter, we're splitting hairs.

• 1:11Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 1:12Chris Plante?

  I'm sorry, this is kind of like a Cronenbergian question, but is it a gun if it's growing out of your body?

• 1:18Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 1:19Chris Plante?

  Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, that answers it.

• 1:22Griffin McElroy?

  Have you seen Existence?

• 1:25Chris Plante?

  Existence? Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good point. That is a good point.

• 1:29Griffin McElroy?

  With Jude Law, he makes a gun out of like a chicken, out of chicken, a chicken mess.

• 1:33Chris Plante?

  And then he shoots teeth, I think, yeah. So that, no, that checks out. Hmm. So what you're saying is maybe Pokemon's freakier than Power World? That Power World doesn't have the guts.

• 1:46Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47Chris Plante?

  Quite literally, to make body guns.

• 1:49Griffin McElroy?

  To make body guns.

• 1:51Russ Frushtick?

  You have to hand them the guns in Power World.

• 1:53Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. Officer Jenny's leg is a shotgun. And nobody's talking about this stuff, guys, except for us on the Best, the world's greatest gaming podcast.

• 2:21Griffin McElroy?

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

• 2:23Chris Plante?

  My name is Christopher Thomas Plante. I know the best game of the week.

• 2:26Russ Frushtick?

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

• 2:30Griffin McElroy?

  Welcome to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It is a game of the year club, and just by listening to you, my friend, have been inducted into our ranks as a member. You're starting at member status. There's higher ranks, but you gotta really earn your, you gotta earn your way up there. This week, we're going to be talking about a few games. We are going to be talking about Pal World, which launched in its 1.0 form earlier this month on July 10th. We're going to be talking about Galley House. We're going to talk about Spirits Abyss. We're going to be talking a little bit about the Halo campaign evolved, just a, just, I guess you could call it a grab bag. I guess, I don't want to be dismissive.

• 3:06Chris Plante?

  It's a grab bag.

• 3:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Chris Plante?

  A timely grab bag, I would say. Very timely.

• 3:12Griffin McElroy?

  Chris, I'm not going to have you say what all those games were, because there's four of them, and that seems kind of silly. We will eventually get around to all of them, but do you?

• 3:19Chris Plante?

  Video game is an interactive piece of software with beeps and boops.

• 3:23Griffin McElroy?

  That's cool. That's basically all there is to it, and we're going to get further into it after this short break.

• 3:30Russ Frushtick?

  This episode of The Besties is sponsored by Alienware. You know, gaming today isn't one thing. It moves between cozy, chaotic, and everything in between. One minute, you're exploring something slow and immersive. The next, you're in a fast-paced match. And somewhere in there, you might be creating, streaming, or seeing where the session goes. That's why Alienware systems are built with the performance to handle it all. With Nvidia GeForce RTX, it delivers powerful graphics that bring every world to life while optimizing battery life. So whether you're playing, creating, or jumping between both, everything runs the way it should. No interruptions, no slowing down. You don't have to adjust the way you play. You just keep gaming your way, however that looks in the moment. Be more Alien at Alienware.com/gameYourWay.

• 4:19Russ Frushtick?

  Griffin.

• 4:19Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 4:20Russ Frushtick?

  It's been a while since Power World first came out. When it came out initially, I remember playing it and being like, neat idea.

• 4:27Griffin McElroy?

  Sure.

• 4:27Russ Frushtick?

  Definitely legally dubious to some extent, but definitely also a big mess like as a product.

• 4:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, so.

• 4:35Russ Frushtick?

  Pretty messy.

• 4:36Griffin McElroy?

  It launched two years ago in early access. I think we all played it back then when it first came out. And it's funny because they've definitely updated it a lot and they've refined a lot of stuff. And I'm excited to talk about all that stuff. But like the kind of the core principle of this is an open world survivor, survival craft game in the vein of an Ark, Survival Evolved, or a, you know, a base builder, a Rust, or something along those lines. But also there's Pokemon. There is Pokemon Bennett. And I am very quick to defend this game and sort of criticize Nintendo for their way overly litigious kind of protective

• 5:19Griffin McElroy?

  nature of their IP. But some of them designs, I mean, that guy looks a lot like, I think we can all agree, let's call a Lucario a Lucario, just say like, some of these dudes.

• 5:29Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, to be fair, once you have a thousand of a thing, it's really hard to come up with an original Penguin, for example.

• 5:37Griffin McElroy?

  For sure, for sure. I think this game was dismissed back when it came out because it did have a lot of big ideas, super duper duper ambitious. And while they were able to kind of like fulfill the brief on a lot of those ideas, it really just felt like a bunch of ideas and not so much a video game that you would sit down and like invest a bunch of time into playing. And I have to, I was not looking forward to this one. I have games that I'm like stoked for the 1.0 to come out. Fields of Mystery next month. We got Enshrouded coming out a little bit later this year, like. Games I really have loved playing, mostly this like open world survival craft sort of genre that I'm like looking forward to. This was not one of them, but they have done

• 6:22Griffin McElroy?

  a really terrific job of making it a game, like making all of these systems hang together in a way that feels more sort of cohesive than I would have guessed they'd be capable of of of kind of achieving.

• 6:35Russ Frushtick?

  Did you start from scratch?

• 6:37Griffin McElroy?

  I did, yeah. I so I didn't play a ton back when it came out in 2024 and I haven't touched it since I first played it. I've kept my eye on it a little bit. They've done some, they've done a lot of like crossover, like events and updates. There's like a whole Terraria.

• 6:52Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, really?

• 6:53Griffin McElroy?

  Sort of update.

• 6:54Russ Frushtick?

  Crazy.

• 6:54Griffin McElroy?

  That's in the game where they've added like the Moon Lord boss fight and like a bunch of other like Terraria weapons and armor and stuff like that. They've done that for a few other games. But mostly like the things that they have added have been like, you know, new content, new islands, new monsters and gear and shit like that, but also just like a lot of refinement of its systems.

• 7:15Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 7:15Griffin McElroy?

  And I think that it has benefited so much from that because it really, it handles all the things that I expect an open world survival craft game to kind of get right at this point. Like you put a chest down inside of your base, base building is a huge element of this. You put shit in any chest, anywhere within like the radius of your base and you can access that gear.

• 7:35Russ Frushtick?

  Huge.

• 7:36Griffin McElroy?

  Anywhere when you're like crafting. There's a quick stack button. You look at a chest, you just press B on controller and it just instantly dumps everything you have it like. And then you have pals who are, you can just make their job transporting gear and organizing your stuff. This is the big kind of novelty of the game, right? It plays like a, like a third person action game. You know, you forge melee weapons and ranged weapons and fight pals and you also fight other humans, which is kind of probably still the wildest part about the game to me is like ordering my, my monster companion to kill a person is is still quite strange. But the big thing is how they use the pals

• 8:20Griffin McElroy?

  in the base building side of things because as you sort of level up. Your base and you, you know, discover more like formulas for different, you know, pieces of equipment that you put in your base. And now you can craft more stuff where you can refine resources to do these things. Pals not only have like combat abilities, but they also have like base abilities as well, like things they will do around camp. Like logging, if there's trees in the, you know, radius of the base, they'll go and they'll automatically go and smash those, get the wood. Uh, and then either transport it or another pal that you might have on hand who just transports loose items into the chest that you have designated. This is where the wood goes. This is where this goes. Um, all that stuff works.

• 9:00Chris Plante?

  Correct me if I'm wrong here. Just it, it sounds like what you're saying is all of the annoying aspects of survival games for me. All the busy work. You have a bunch of cute, not Pokemon. We're going to take care of it for you on your behalf.

• 9:14Griffin McElroy?

  And it does it, gang. It does it really well.

• 9:17Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Griffin McElroy?

  There's like a thing you build that looks like a, um, like a podium, like a, at a church or something like that, that you interact with. And then you can designate like, okay, you go and you only work at this one spot. You only live at the ranch. I have a ranch inside my base. And if you assign certain pals there, like the sheep one or the chicken one, then they will drop wool or eggs. There you can just say, that's where you live. But you can also say like, okay, you have mining and logging and, uh, you know, gardening. I only want you doing logging. So you can like check mark, like exactly, you can, you can really refine it to a degree where now I roll back to my base. I collect the stuff that they've, they've done. I have one guy just doing full-time crafting of like ingots.

• 9:59Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, one guy doing like full-time crafting of like ammo and food. I just run through, I grab that stuff and I'm back out on the road. Catching new monsters and, and discovering new stuff and.

• 10:09Chris Plante?

  Kind of buried the lead here. There's a, there's a religion in Pal World.

• 10:14Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, no, it's not a pulpit, I guess, from a liter- I mean, I said that-

• 10:19Chris Plante?

  So you said church, I didn't know if maybe like-

• 10:21Griffin McElroy?

  It looked like a church.

• 10:21Chris Plante?

  Do the pals have a god?

• 10:24Griffin McElroy?

  No, they could, they're obviously godlike. I'm the god, yeah, I'm the god of Pal World. Um, the combat and stuff is like, it's okay, it's not like the, my favorite part of the game, but like, there is definitely incentive to keep catching, like, new pals and use type matchups sort of wisely. The game kinda hangs around these eight major boss fights that happen at these eight towers, where you collect these eight key spheres, which is the analog to badges or what have you, uh, and the boss fights are hard as hell, and serve as these kind of like checkpoints of like, we gotta make sure your gear's good enough and that you have been catching new pals and, and, you know, leveling them up, breeding them

• 11:05Griffin McElroy?

  to get like certain skills on them or attributes, like, there's, there's, I don't know, man, a lot of this stuff was in the game at launch, a lot of this stuff was sort of proof of concept, like, and this idea's in the game and it kinda works, only now, like, it's so cohesive, it all comes together so, so well.

• 11:22Russ Frushtick?

  You were only playing single player, correct?

• 11:23Griffin McElroy?

  I've only been playing single player, but there's also like dedicated servers and, and, uh, support for that. I don't know if I would, I don't know if I would spring for that, um, because like, while the base management stuff is cool, especially the way you kind of staff it out with the pals, uh, I haven't found it to be like so aesthetically satisfying. I really, really like it in Enshrouded because I feel like I can make something that looks so rad and so unique.

• 11:49Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, there's a ton of like, different building types and parts and things like that.

• 11:52Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it really puts way more emphasis in that side of things. That game doesn't have necessarily the, like, quite the staffing thing. You are like finding people who go and live and can like be different vendors and stuff for you, but like, that's Pal World's kind of specialty. Um, and it's also, it hasn't been so difficult that I have felt like, god, this would be nice if I had more, more people around, but I mean, you can play it like that, there's a whole PvP arena, if you wanna do like fights against other players and their pals and see how they're kinda like kidded out. It's great, it's really, really fun. I've been really, uh, stuck into it in a way that I, I just was not expecting.

• 12:27Russ Frushtick?

  Alright, try it out, yeah.

• 12:29Griffin McElroy?

  I was playing it obligatorily, cause I was like, you know, it's, it's, you know, it has almost a million concurrent players on Steam like this.

• 12:35Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it's obscene, the, how big the audience is.

• 12:37Griffin McElroy?

  We should talk about it, and, uh, was, was very pleasantly surprised.

• 12:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Griffin McElroy?

  Looks great, too. Looks really, really good. I've been playing it on Rogue Ally X and even on there, it looks fantastic.

• 12:47Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. Okay, so Spirits Abyss came out in the year 2020.

• 12:54Griffin McElroy?

  How did you even find this? You're like a truffle pig.

• 12:57Russ Frushtick?

  Well, okay, so Steam's algorithm knows me pretty fucking well, as you could possibly imagine. And for whatever reason, this popped up in my algorithm and I was like, well, this looks kinda neat. And then there was some mention of Spelunky in the description of the game.

• 13:16Russ Frushtick?

  The game is, okay, so if you are not familiar with Spelunky, Spelunky was a rogue-like platformer that came out years ago. We've talked about it a ton on the show. Very, very hard, notably very, very hard, not welcoming to new players. Incredibly easy to control, but a big part of the game is learning how the game works and a lot of that has to do with dying a lot. Spirits Abyss, to me, feels like a much more approachable version of Spelunky. It also uses pixel art, graphics, 2D platforming. At a glance, from a gameplay standpoint, it seems very similar to Spelunky, but there are some core differences that I think make it a much more approachable experience.

• 13:56Russ Frushtick?

  For one thing, your starting character, and there are different characters in this game in a way that there are not in Spelunky. There are different characters that have different powers, like the way their standard attack is. So in Spelunky, you just get a whip. Everyone has a whip. Here, you might start with a guy with like a laser rifle, or there's a guy with like a samurai sword, or whatever.

• 14:17Griffin McElroy?

  So pretty meaningfully different.

• 14:19Russ Frushtick?

  Incredibly meaningfully different, and those inputs allow you to, I think, learn the game in a much more safe way. Like, if you're just starting out, use the guy with the assault rifle, because you can stay at range and like, take some shots at this weird-looking Grim Reaper thing and figure out, oh, is this something gonna wake up and attack me, or whatever else.

• 14:39Griffin McElroy?

  Do you feel like that detracts anything from the game? Because I know the thing that Spelunky does so well is that it explicitly, I feel like, doesn't do this stuff. So you have to learn the systems, you have to learn the sandbox. You don't have like a lot of ways of kind of putting English on the ball based on like some decision that you make before you even, you know, go down.

• 14:57Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I think... I think Spelunky is at its core, a much more refined, probably better designed game.

• 15:06Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Russ Frushtick?

  But I also think it is incredibly hostile to players that are like, "I'll check this out."

• 15:10Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, don't get me wrong. I hate that shit. I'm glad that this game does it differently, but I know that it is one of the, you know, it's why Spelunky has earned its place in the stars as like, this is like chess. This is like, this is a game with rules and you gotta learn them and there's really no other way around.

• 15:26Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. I mean, this game has rules too and interesting enemies that are very, very dangerous if you don't know what they are and you will die instantly, several times, but I do think because of that class element, it allows you to get a little, a little bit further in the run and see more without wiping.

• 15:43Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 15:44Russ Frushtick?

  There are other like basic things like when you finish a screen, when you finish like an area and the areas play out very similarly to Spelunky, you get to pick a perk and this is a passive perk that'll give you, let's say like toxic bombs or like the ability to hover using a balloon or whatever else, uh, kinda like the perks that were in Downwell, if you remember those. So this again allows you to customize your character in a way that doesn't require you to be like, "Oh, did I get the right shop? So I can like start crafting a build, but really you know nothing that's going on." So you're just able to do a lot more like just YOLO runs where you're just trying things and seeing how you go. And I've felt like I've been, um, seeing much more of the game again earlier on.

• 16:30Russ Frushtick?

  This game also has like a ton of different modes, most of which I haven't unlocked, but just side modes where maybe it's focused on like just gathering money or maybe you're, you know, there's more like time constraints, things like that. And then character unlocks that you're chasing that again have different starting equipment, different perks, things like that. It just feels like it's surfacing a lot more, whereas Spelunky, uh, has that magic trick of like, "Okay, I'm in this weird ice cave and whoa, what is that? Oh, it's a UFO. Incredible." There are still some of those moments, but I think a lot more of this feels just like surface in a way that you can kinda chase it more, uh, which again feels more approachable to me.

• 17:12Griffin McElroy?

  Which seems to be in line with the, the creator of the game and their entire like design philosophy because the creator, I don't know if it's pronounced Kay, it's C-A-Y-S, where-

• 17:24Chris Plante?

  Makes a lot of games, like is very productive, has games coming out, it seems like every year to every two years. And is doing, I don't know, like rifts on other popular games. So has a like survivor like has a, I think, an auto battler that they call a brotato like has this spelunky like it seems like is like

• 17:53Chris Plante?

  learning from all, you know, they, they seem like almost intellectual exercises of how can I do a riff on this very popular game? What can I gain from it? And the games are all like under 10 bucks. So they are not meant to be super polished. It seems like they're kind of things that you're supposed to pick up. And then, you know, in a year or two, you're going to pick up the next one where spelunky is kind of a, you play it for 10 years, maybe you get spelunky too.

• 18:23Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, I will say I, I haven't played the other ones. I've just played Spirit of the Abyss and I was actually pretty impressed by the level of polish in this game. I don't think it's like spelunky level polish. It reminded me of the level of polish that was in like spelunky classic. That was the original, like free to play one, um, which has like a shitload of depth to it. It's just like, yeah, granted, they didn't necessarily spend four or five years making this game, but there have been continued to be updates and, and new, not DLC, but just like new modes and things like that added over the years. And as of right now, if you're listening to this on Friday, this game is currently on sale for five bucks, which at that price point, total steal, not even a question. So,

• 19:07Chris Plante?

  cool.

• 19:07Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, if you like spelunky, but want something different, highly recommend it.

• 19:11Chris Plante?

  Cool. I dig it.

• 19:12Griffin McElroy?

  I'm so excited to talk about the incident at Galley House.

• 19:16Chris Plante?

  Oh, man. The Incident at Galley House. Okay, so if you are ready for another deduction game, like what is your deduction game of this year? You like that over-din stuff? Have I got the game for you? It is called The Incident at Galley House, and it is actually a remake of a game that came out last year.

• 19:37Griffin McElroy?

  Really?

• 19:38Chris Plante?

  Very strange. So this game, The Incident at Galley House, it is a murder mystery kind of ghost story style game where a series of murders happened over the course of 24 hours at Galley House in the 1930s. And then you are somewhere closer to the present, and you are using a basically like a seance machine in which you enter codes that will trigger these memories of what happened that fateful day at Galley House. So you'll put in something like DR 010611.

• 20:18Griffin McElroy?

  And that's one of my favorites.

• 20:20Chris Plante?

  It's one of the best ones. And what you'll find out is that means dining room with guest number 1, 6, and 11.

• 20:28Griffin McElroy?

  Or number at first seen in the, there's also a time, a strict timeline that you have to follow along. So you have to say where it is, what time it was, and who was there.

• 20:37Chris Plante?

  Yes.

• 20:37Griffin McElroy?

  Basically, the breakdown.

• 20:39Chris Plante?

  But these codes seem very abstract, very quickly become pretty logical and reasonable to follow. And your goal, at least early on, is to figure out who are these people? Why are they at this house that was supposedly abandoned? What leads to presumably all of them dying? That is very cool. And the way it's displayed, it's very beautiful. It is, it looks kind of like a classic point and click adventure game, even though you're not doing that sort of thing. You're just getting these stories. You have these ghastly figures with numbers on them to represent each character because, again, it's your job to figure out who they are. You can have these little notepads where you can jot down like, oh, I think this

• 21:24Chris Plante?

  person might be Annie, and I think that they might be Sisters of Evelyn. And you're the full deduction suite. What is? Strange about this game and its creation is it was made, this one was made by the people who did The Root Trees Are Dead, which was one of our favorite other recent action games. But it is a remake of the game type Help, which I believe the creator's name is William Roos or Rouse, and it is more or less the same game, but it is a command line text

• 22:03Chris Plante?

  adventure style game. So where that game is about being inside of a computer and reading all of this text and the numbers and text being very raw, this is definitely trying to recreate the murder mystery vibe of you can see, you know, the old fashioned manner. You can see the machine that you're typing this code into. You can hear the voices of these characters and hearing them is important because they each have kind of a sound. There's a reason that they have this kind of vague shape to them that every little detail is a clue about who these people are. So this game is friendlier by a lot than the previous

• 22:48Chris Plante?

  version. There is no like one is better than the other, though. They're just different. And that is again, what is so strange about these two, two versions of effectively the same game that exists so close to one another. That's the basics. Griffin, how did this game hit you?

• 23:08Griffin McElroy?

  Um, I honestly, I started it and dropped it pretty quick because I didn't really get it. Um, I think the setup to this game is so Obra Dinn coded that like you're literally figuring out how to go back and watch these events that transpired that led to the gnarly death of everyone in the house, apparently, right? Uh, that's, that's so, that's so very Obra Dinn-y. But it is the like figuring out what these codes are and figuring out where, when, and who was at each of these scenes. And then you get to watch them and you get like a breakdown of all the dialogue in it. You'll also get a little notification that'll tell you the number of like clues left in that scene

• 23:52Griffin McElroy?

  that you haven't really figured out yet. Like, maybe somebody mentions the name of a room that you haven't punched into your machine, that you haven't added to your list of rooms that you can kind of like look at scenes in. Or, you know, maybe somebody confirms a familial relationship with someone, now you know their last name. In that regard, it plays a lot more like her story than it does an Oberden or a Chance of Sonar or anything along those lines. Like, it is about paying attention to the, the things that are being said and the things that are being implied, and then like trying some shit out back on the like, search machine side of things. And then if you get a hit, now you got a new scene.

• 24:34Griffin McElroy?

  It's got new clues, it's got new stuff for you to pay attention to and stuff for you to search and try and figure out how it like fits into the rest of the story. I came back to it after we said we were gonna talk about it on this episode, and I'm glad I did, because like, there is a flow state you get into this game, honestly, not that far in. Like, once you get it and you start knowing what to pay attention to, and you start to figure out like, okay, in this scene, this person said they were leaving this room with this person, I can guess where they were gonna go. What if on the next scene, I guess that this scene happened in the place they mentioned, and it has those two characters in it? And then you get a hit on that, and then it just keeps kind of like unfurling from that. It's really cool, it's really, really satisfying.

• 25:16Griffin McElroy?

  I don't actually love the look of the, of the game, to me. I, I, it's a, I don't know, maybe a personal thing. I feel like it kind of looks a lot like, like an iOS, sort of like dating sim style, sort of, uh, this design, like, very static, and, uh, I, I, I don't know. It's also like, the stuff you're doing on the computer is not so like, interesting kind of mechanically or visually. It's just like compelling because you are trying to piece together this enormous, very, very, very elaborate puzzle. Yes. I, I've enjoyed it a lot.

• 25:53Chris Plante?

  I grew to really like the look. I was skeptical when I saw it in like on the Steam page. Throw in the music, throw in the sound effects and I found it like very cozy.

• 26:05Griffin McElroy?

  It's very good.

• 26:05Chris Plante?

  Yeah, but the the game that I kept thinking about is um TR 49, which came out in the very beginning of this year from Inkell. And it helped weirdly to have that game center me for this one. TR 49 is very similar at a high level of you have this World War II era computer that has been eating books and I won't spoil exactly what that means. But you very similarly are plugging in these codes to figure out what happens when I mix this location in the computer with this number? And what piece of this story can I find that then makes it easier to find more?

• 26:50Chris Plante?

  And that game is the very abstract, very dense version of this. I found that game quite off putting. I ended up enjoying it a lot, but the look is harsh. The story is harsh. The figuring out the codes feels a bit like playing with a slot machine. And this game by comparison felt very, very welcoming and cozy. And the reality is I want both of these games to exist because you're right, like it does. This uh Galley House is certainly the more soothing cozy. If it's a rainy night and you can play this game, you're gonna have a great time.

• 27:32Chris Plante?

  It would be a great one to play with um a roommate or a partner and just to be taking notes together. Fresh, y'all are going to love this after.

• 27:42Griffin McElroy?

  Eventually, once you've beat Blueprints.

• 27:45Chris Plante?

  Yeah, once you get past this, but TR 49 then on the other hand is the like, oh, you've fully gone sicko. The deduction games have have have found their most uh like.

• 28:00Chris Plante?

  grind you into a pulp version of themselves. I think it's just really cool that the deduction genre is blown up and expanded this much, that there are now teams who are specializing in this, who are working with one another to evolve each other's games.

• 28:20Griffin McElroy?

  It's rad.

• 28:21Chris Plante?

  It's pretty damn rad.

• 28:23Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, I think a lot of it is to do with the fact that previously before these really got popular, the best way to do narrative in indie games was just like text based visual novel stuff. And now suddenly they've figured out a way to, for lack of a better term, gamify the projection of a story.

• 28:42Chris Plante?

  Right.

• 28:42Griffin McElroy?

  And like really engage you in it in a really interesting way.

• 28:45Chris Plante?

  I am also just very excited to see what this developer, the one who actually made this version of it, that did the root trees are dead, does next. Because whether you like the visuals or not, this is a noticeable upgrade from the root trees.

• 29:02Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Chris Plante?

  Um, and it feels like this is.

• 29:06Griffin McElroy?

  I think it's visually an upgrade. I definitely enjoyed the experience of like going through a vast fake internet more than like going through the scenes and the dialogue that's happening like that. To me, that felt, listening to a song and hearing clues in the, in the, in the music, like that shit was intoxicating.

• 29:26Chris Plante?

  Yes. I root trees might still be my preferred one of these two, but I haven't finished this just yet. So mystery might still land. But yes, to imagine what they're gonna do next. They, they just seem to be getting more and more polished and they, they, they had the storytelling stuff from the drop.

• 29:46Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Chris Plante?

  Um, so yeah, exciting stuff.

• 29:49Griffin McElroy?

  Um, that's the incident at Galley House. Let's take a short break and talk a little bit about this new old Halo thing.

• 29:57Russ Frushtick?

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• 32:24Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so uh, there is a new, there's a new Halo game, sort of. It's called Halo Campaign Evolved. And it comes at a very strange time for a lot of different reasons. On its surface, just so you're aware, it is a remake of the original campaign of Halo Combat Evolved. So this is the very first Halo game. It is a remake of just the campaign. There's no multiplayer in this. There's co-op, but there's no like PvP multiplayer in this. It's just the campaign. It adds a bunch of features, online co-op, which the original didn't have. Uh, as well as updating some of the gameplay, adding some of the guns that showed up in later

• 33:09Russ Frushtick?

  iterations of Halo, uh, adding things like being able to hijack a Banshee, things like that.

• 33:16Russ Frushtick?

  I say it's a weird time for a few different reasons. One of which, obviously, Microsoft just went through yet another pretty gutting round of layoffs, closing a number of studios, sending another, a number of studios fully independent. Like Double Fine, for example. And it feels like Microsoft is like, kind of grasping at straws to figure out what their next step is. Uh, especially with a franchise like this, which is Halo has been having a really tough time really since uh, Halo Infinite, which came out in 2021. Uh, and that game came out and I think, I, I will say, I like that campaign, but as a

• 33:59Russ Frushtick?

  iteration of like Halo's dip into the live service marketplace, it was a total disaster. So this one comes at a weird time. Something interesting about this game that you might not know is that it is made in Unreal Engine.

• 34:13Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 34:14Russ Frushtick?

  Which is a big, big change. Previously Halo games were always made in their own kind of bespoke engine. This is the first one that's ever been made in Unreal. And is kind of a sign of like what they're trying to do, which is stabilize the Halo games to a point where they can be developed quasi easily moving forward without having to rely on all these bespoke tools. That's my interpretation.

• 34:38Griffin McElroy?

  That's a really tough thing for us to kind of like get across here is like Halo to this point, I think, has been its engine. Like it is the stuff that is great about Halo and the reason that it was the killer app on Xbox and why it's always been like pretty good to play is the engine is that is where they ironed out the when you throw a grenade at a warthog and flip it like when you melee an enemy and they go rag going across like that stuff feels first class like top of the line best best feeling shit ever. And to redo that from the ground up, I think is a huge undertaking.

• 35:16Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Griffin McElroy?

  And I think it's mostly successful. I think that I think this game feel like going back and playing these old campaign levels and the new ones, which we can talk about in a bit, like it still feels like pretty good to headshot a grunt with the pistol and you know, he screams out something that's very silly and fun. Like for the most part, it feels good. I, I, I, it's not a hundred percent.

• 35:41Russ Frushtick?

  I don't know that I, do you know, like if there was there a moment where you're like, oh, that doesn't feel like original Halo to you?

• 35:47Griffin McElroy?

  Um, it's little stuff. It's little stuff. I talked to you about it. Russ and I played some co-op together and like there's a little stuff like the feedback, right? Like the feel of busting a jackals like energy shield with a, you know, charged up plasma pistol shot. Like there's certain ways in which like just it from a really impossible to describe kind of tactile level, like it doesn't hit like a hundred, a hundred percent, right? But it's so close and it's like, I mean, it does look, I mean, it's Unreal Engine. So it looks pretty good.

• 36:20Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. The other thing to consider about the old engine, even though you're right, like a lot of the reason they were able to like fine tune all that gunplay feel stuff is because they were used to that engine. That engine was also kind of the demise of

• 36:33Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 36:33Russ Frushtick?

  The Halo game. Because it was so cumbersome to add new content and to just like make changes in the system for the same reason that like Destiny had similar problems where it had like a really bespoke engine.

• 36:45Chris Plante?

  I I I I find pretty much everything about this project profoundly depressing inside and outside of the game. I think the engine is certainly a piece of it. This whole we are going to standardize video games down to a single engine that has a similar look and a similar feel echoes the focus on Unreal Engine during the Xbox 360 era and was just also deeply depressing.

• 37:12Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Chris Plante?

  I don't think it's like

• 37:16Chris Plante?

  the things that I find so grim about this game happened too recent to have been part of the game's creation. But the fact that id just had massive layouts that cut out the people who made idtech, one of the most interesting engines in the history of video games, and that does things in I think a much more spectacular and beautiful way than what we see with Unreal Engine is just really fucking depressing. And now seeing like, okay, and now Halos, that's Unreal. What a bummer. Having this be, hey, here's more Halo for

• 37:57Chris Plante?

  you dorks after all the layoffs and the new CEO of Xbox doing shit like, should we call it Xbox all caps? Feels so pandering. And again, that's not what this, that's not what this was greenlit to be. It wasn't meant to be that. But it is this weird confluence of everything that is so deeply depressing about this brand and about how its IPs right now feel like they are being used as a don't look this direction. We know you're mad about the layouts. We know you're mad about the BTA BDS boycotts. We know you're mad about us acquiring all these studios. We know you're mad about the AI. We know you're mad about all these things. But We have a new Halo.

• 38:42Russ Frushtick?

  We got cheap.

• 38:43Chris Plante?

  We're gonna make some more Fallout. It just, it very unfortunately for the people who made this game because they did, and we should talk about the game, obviously, put a lot of work into it.

• 38:53Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 38:53Chris Plante?

  The idea of yet another Halo remake right now, I just, I found it fairly depressing. And then playing it, and it being not especially inspired in terms of like what creatively they were allowed to do, certainly didn't help.

• 39:11Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I think that you look at the design side of things. I, that is probably where, I mean, I agree with everything you just said, but also from a game design standpoint, like there are new levels in this that were not in the original campaign. It's like a chunk of three missions. It probably takes like two and a half hours or so to complete. And in those new levels, it doesn't feel like there's a lot of new to it. It feels very

• 39:40Griffin McElroy?

  They're bad, they're bad dude, like they're, they're, the, Russ and I played through almost all of them together. Yesterday I played through the, the rest of them solo and like, it's just a not, it's the thing, the moments from the original Halo that are so like memorable, uh, I feel like are not even remotely reflected here. It is just a bunch of rooms of pretty similar, almost, almost all the levels are on like Covenant ships and that doesn't

• 40:10Russ Frushtick?

  No one likes, no one likes those levels.

• 40:13Griffin McElroy?

  A bunch of purple kind of, uh, spheres that you're going around and you're shooting, you know, 15 enemies before you can go on to the next room. Uh, it's, and then it sort of ends with a big space combat thing, which is not good. It's not fun and it, it's so like,

• 40:31Griffin McElroy?

  I think, I, I don't want to be like a total, uh, naysayer because again, like they recreated one of the most.

• 40:39Chris Plante?

  One of the best and most beloved kind of like game feels that, you know, has ever sort of graced, you know, a major gaming platform, right? That's impressive. It's impressive, the work that they've done. And there are times where it looks like really, really great. But if you're, man, if you're buying this to play some, some classic co-op stuff with like your buds, like that shit's in the game and it works really well. If you're playing, buying this to get the new, the new like mini campaign that's in there, it's not, it's a nothing burger. It is not good at all.

• 41:10Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's in a weird position. It's also kind of depressing for me because I thought that what Halo Infinite did, especially with the campaign, was really innovative and really stood out because it was suddenly a first person shooter that had really cool mobility stuff, open world structure that we hadn't seen a lot of.

• 41:31Chris Plante?

  It was crackdown. They made Halo crackdown. That was a great pitch.

• 41:35Russ Frushtick?

  And maybe they'll go back to that sort of format after this game made in the Unreal Engine because maybe they, the engine will allow them to make that game a little bit quicker. I don't know. But to go back to this, which just feels kind of like a dinosaur, like for people that love that old school gameplay, fine, but for me, it feels very rusty.

• 41:56Chris Plante?

  Even that, it just, it so epitomizes what is wrong right now, which is for decades, we've understood that the first game as series, the Assassin's Creed one effect, right? That you need to make that game, learn how to make the new thing that you're making.

• 42:15Russ Frushtick?

  Right.

• 42:16Chris Plante?

  And then go make more. And rather than do that, and you've done all the hard work, you did all the investment, the answer seems to be, let's go back to what is safe. And again, it's not this game's fault because it was greenlit, like.

• 42:32Chris Plante?

  There is a world where this is just a game and it is a standalone thing of like, oh, great. Another version of Halo. Fine. What's such a bummer and where I just feel like so bummed experiencing this game is it feels like a foreshadowing of what the company wants to do next. That they are telling us explicitly, we just want to make more of the big IPs. We want to make you the things that you want. And yet we, I know that we love the Resident Evil games on this show. That isn't doing it right, right? Like they, they really take swings with their remakes. They

• 43:13Chris Plante?

  are different experiences. They're making new games. They're making new franchises at Capcom. They're doing all of these things. That is not what is happening here. And I, I, I try not to get like heated. I never get heated on this show.

• 43:28Griffin McElroy?

  They just fired fucking everybody who could have done this, right? Like that's

• 43:33Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, let me ask you, I agree. Capcom, I think is doing this much better than Microsoft is right now. But don't you think this is a representation of like AAA gaming is in such a precarious spot right now. So Microsoft is basically pick, what is the safest possible thing we can do? I'm not saying that's interesting or creatively good, but like, what is the safest thing we could do?

• 43:53Chris Plante?

  Oh, I think that's a hundred percent what they're doing. And I think it is moronic because doing the safest thing you can do is you might as well just keep digging the grave faster. That is not how you create the next thing. Trying to make the next Roblox right now is not how you make the quote, next Roblox. And that it seems like their two visions are, we will do what kind of worked decades ago, and we will do a knockoff version of what works now and hope that it's what people still want in six years. I just, I don't know, like Game Pass didn't work, but it was a swing. This stuff is like,

• 44:39Chris Plante?

  it, it, I, it truly feels like a slow motion car wreck of. Anybody would look at this and say, these are not the path forward. And unfortunately for this game, it happens to represent all of it. It's, it's just, it's a, it's a playable metaphor.

• 45:00Griffin McElroy?

  I, I, it reminds me of the 30 Rock joke, uh, where, uh, Donny is talking about their business, their business ideas to save NPC or save NBC. And one of them was make it 1997 again through science or magic.

• 45:17Griffin McElroy?

  It's depressing, man. And I tell you, the, the, the real rug pull of it is like, I thought the Microsoft press conference during all the summer games fest stuff looked pretty great. Like it seemed like they, they, they just gotta put some goddamn games out that are very good.

• 45:32Russ Frushtick?

  And how many of those studios that they talked about aren't there anymore?

• 45:36Griffin McElroy?

  Don't exist anymore, right?

• 45:37Russ Frushtick?

  Or independent or whatever, they sold them off.

• 45:40Griffin McElroy?

  It's, it's to not bail on a studio, the first, at the first sign of like, uh, unprofitability, or to not saddle them with games and, you know, business models that are incongruous with their, like, what makes a good game? Like, all of this stuff is, all of this stuff is snobby game journo bullshit that like, a drum that everybody has been banging for a long time. But Christ alive, guys. It's, I hate to, to make this, uh, somewhat innocuous remake of, uh, of, of a classic first person shooter campaign. Kind of the focal point of this, but like, I, I, I agree with you wholeheartedly, Chris.

• 46:22Griffin McElroy?

  Like, it's a bleak, bad fucking time, uh, specifically for, for Microsoft, but also for AAA gaming as a whole. And it's hard not to look at this and be like, then this is what's, this is what's gonna be left after the bombs fall. Well, we'll have.

• 46:37Russ Frushtick?

  I will, I will say that I am personally happy that we do this show where we talk about a bunch of games that aren't necessarily reliant on-

• 46:46Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, there's so much good shit happening.

• 46:48Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Griffin McElroy?

  Like game shit happening that is outside of that. Like, if anything, it's, it's proof that that's the thing that has been left behind.

• 46:55Chris Plante?

  Hit that back 30 seconds button like 20 times and man, you've got a whole different episode going for you.

• 47:01Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, you sure do.

• 47:04Russ Frushtick?

  We have some reader mail. This one comes from Kate. "I put down blueprints after the first time I got to the final room, I guess room 46. At the time, I assumed I had mostly finished it. I now realize, listening to Russ, that I basically missed everything. If I want to go back, do you recommend starting over, picking up where you left off, using a guide? I feel like an idiot for stopping so early and I wanted to see what I missed."

• 47:29Griffin McElroy?

  I think starting over is probably fine. Because there is, it's not like an over then where it's just the like, "Well, now I know how it works, so I can blaze through it." Like, there is the whole drafting element and, you know, I think if it's been a while, you'll have to remember a lot of the stuff about how the, how, how all the different things work. But if you just stopped when you got to room 46, like, not to be an asshole, but like, there is a lot of meat left on the bone there.

• 47:53Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, Kate basically says that. They're like-

• 47:55Griffin McElroy?

  The best meat, the best meat that game has to offer, I think, does, does come after the, the first surge.

• 48:00Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, in a way, the, the getting to 46 feels like, oh, it's a straight puzzle game in a lot of ways. Uh, and just like managing resources and then everything after that feels closer to like, yeah, deduction.

• 48:12Griffin McElroy?

  You gotta study. Like, you really have to get, get into the, the D. Russ sent me a very late text screenshot of him solving a puzzle. That was the defining moment of blueprints for me. It was a moment that I, I was, I think I was, uh, like, staying with Juice and Sid and, uh, he heard me just cackling, uh, when this happened. I've been dancing around it, trying to find out if you had done it yet. You sent this picture at like 11 o'clock at night.

• 48:39Russ Frushtick?

  I have not done it yet.

• 48:41Griffin McElroy?

  What?

• 48:41Russ Frushtick?

  No, I haven't gotten-

• 48:43Griffin McElroy?

  You sent me a picture of a thing that, you've done the thing that I'm talking about. You're maybe thinking of a different thing.

• 48:48Russ Frushtick?

  Maybe a different thing.

• 48:49Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway.

• 48:51Chris Plante?

  I love video games.

• 48:52Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I love blueprints. Go back and, yeah, I think start over and, and, you know, play it. Cause I think, I do think if you know what you're doing, you can get through that part of the game relatively quickly.

• 49:01Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I think that's right. This comes from Dr. Dake. "One thing I've been thinking about lately is the idea that every game studio is a monolithic thing that produces good or bad games, but aren't game studios effectively just massive ships of Theseus at this point? The Bioware that made Dragon Age: Valgarde is a completely different studio from the one that put out Kotor, yet we treat them as this sanctified team that has 20 years of experience building exceptional games, and we're confused why they put out something like Valgarde and talk about how Bioware has fallen. Especially given the constant layoffs, it feels odd to me to treat a studio by name as anything other than just the studio name of a company, rather than a cohesive team that hops from project to project. What do you all think?"

• 49:46Russ Frushtick?

  I think there are examples of this where the studio name still means something.

• 49:51Griffin McElroy?

  Sure.

• 49:52Russ Frushtick?

  It doesn't necessarily mean the studio is successful. I'll give you an example. Double Fine still means what Double Fine meant 20 years ago, however long they've been around. I think their games have a very consistent voice and a very consistent priority when they're being designed, where you can see that DNA throughout. But I agree with you, there are a lot of studios that have lost that over the years in turnover, or not having strong leadership, or whatever it is.

• 50:20Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's tough. I am bad at this, and I was in the industry for a long time of actually putting human names on projects, like going that one layer deeper from like, oh, this is a bungie game versus like, this is a game from the original creators of Halo. Like, that's one where so many people have left that studio, and maybe this is a terrible example, since bungie's in such bad shape. By the way, playing Halo campaign evolved also another side bummer, really made me sad about Destiny, Destiny 2. When there's a name attached to a thing, I feel like you see it more often in RPGs, specifically like CRPGs and narrative-focused RPGs, you get more of like, and here's the

• 51:05Griffin McElroy?

  name of the person who's doing it. That stuff, I think, tells you a whole lot more, just because, yeah, you could have a studio that is- Completely new staff from the last game that they released because of the brutality of that part of the industry and it's going to feel different.

• 51:21Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I'll give you an example of a studio that represents how this has changed, which is Vicarious Visions. The studio is located up in northern New York and Vicarious Visions, when you heard that, you could think of one of two things, that it was a kind of Activision tie-in game. That was probably going to be maybe cool, it could be trash, but it could be like a Game Boy Advance adaptation of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. They were people who are figuring out interesting ways to translate IPs into hardware that otherwise shouldn't be able to do it. Vicarious Vision was also perpetually tinkering with weird controllers, like a Guitar Hero mobile controller, right?

• 52:06Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Chris Plante?

  They had a personality and they had a personality because at that time, and because these games, I mean, they're shipping five or six games a year, there was guaranteed work. So you could go and have a career at a place like Vicarious Visions. Today, Vicarious Visions is not even called Vicarious Visions. It's called Blizzard Albany. And that is what has happened to so many studios. They just become support studios for whatever the one or two big projects are that are coming out that year. And it has become hard for any studio, on top of the ship of Theseus problem, which is the layoffs,

• 52:47Chris Plante?

  which are just so abundant, on top of that, so few projects are being made at these studios that seven studios are needed to create the new Assassin's Creed. How could any of those studios possibly have a personality? That said,

• 53:06Chris Plante?

  To what Griffin said about like individual people, you now will see things like, oh, a large chunk of people who worked on the burnout series are now working on a Star Wars pod racing game.

• 53:20Griffin McElroy?

  Like that, that shit gets me excited. That lets me know like, oh, okay, people who are passionate enough about this thing that they're not allowed to do anymore are now allowed to do it. That's gonna be good stuff, I bet.

• 53:30Chris Plante?

  Exactly. And that's now how we've tracked these things. There is a team of people who used to work at Vicarious Visions who are now working on a very Vicarious Visions-esque game that is coming out. Like, we're, we're seeing that again, but it's almost like you have to trust the kind of thing that you would see in a movie trailer where it's like, from the people who brought you blank, rather than from this studio.

• 53:53Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Russ Frushtick?

  Last letter comes from Drew. In honor of the live show, by the way, we're doing a live show. You can get tickets. Besties.fan has a big link for it. And out of the live show, I'll share a Besties adjacent live show experience. I was at a Taz live show at San Diego Comic Con, and we were all getting into our seats, and I spotted someone cosplaying Russ's character from the Awful Squad series.

• 54:18Griffin McElroy?

  Amazing.

• 54:19Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so in my memory, my character was, was striped shirt and no pants.

• 54:27Griffin McElroy?

  No pants. Yeah.

• 54:28Russ Frushtick?

  And a frying pan. Apparently, they did have a frying pan.

• 54:30Chris Plante?

  I've got questions.

• 54:31Griffin McElroy?

  I don't know. Yeah, I feel like whatever venue we performed at must have had a dress code of some sort.

• 54:38Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, they were like boxer shorts, but that's not better.

• 54:41Griffin McElroy?

  Maybe the person took their pants off after they got inside.

• 54:43Russ Frushtick?

  If there's a photo of this, please drop it in the comments.

• 54:47Griffin McElroy?

  I'm gonna say, don't send me a photo of you without pants on.

• 54:50Russ Frushtick?

  I've never been cosplayed before, so I wanna see what it looks like.

• 54:53Griffin McElroy?

  This was also, put some respect on the name of Drew Davenport, who did send in this, who did send in this email.

• 54:59Russ Frushtick?

  Thank you, Drew.

• 54:59Griffin McElroy?

  Thank you, Drew.

• 55:01Russ Frushtick?

  But yeah, you can, you can, who knows what sort of magic and wonder awaits you at the Besties live show.

• 55:07Chris Plante?

  You left out the conclusion of this story, which is that Drew was like, hey, you're cosplaying as Russ. And the person was like, I am not the real Russ Frushtick. I am, I'm only dressed as the character Russ Frushtick, which I admire that the cosplayer was concerned that, I think the cosplayer thought that's how you dressed all the time.

• 55:26Russ Frushtick?

  Right. I mean, I do.

• 55:28Chris Plante?

  That's true. This is very true. This is very true. Hey, what else have y'all been playing?

• 55:34Russ Frushtick?

  I've been playing a game called Blueprints. It's an exploration game that takes place now.

• 55:40Russ Frushtick?

  As Griffin said, I am incredibly deep in it. We are like, I've said this a number of weeks, but exceedingly more and more true. Running out of threads to pull. I think there were like two threads left to pull. I will, I promise Griffin, both you and friend of the show, Jason Schreier, will be the first person I reach out to when I'm asking for help. We're still not quite there yet, but we're very, very close to running out of like, what do I do next? Kind of thoughts.

• 56:09Russ Frushtick?

  It's a good video game. People should play it. I think it's on sale now. Last I saw, I got an email saying it was on sale. So check it out if you haven't played it yet.

• 56:17Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I'm dying to know what the next game from this fella is from Yagubomb is because, Jesus Christ. Wild fucking project.

• 56:26Griffin McElroy?

  I played a game called The Game About Chopping Trees. It's a short, little sort of progressive game where you go, you chop trees and then you sell them and you, and you get a stronger axe. It's, it's basically a game about digging a hole, but instead of you're digging a hole, you're chopping trees.

• 56:44Russ Frushtick?

  Do you like, did you find the chopping trees more satisfying than digging the hole?

• 56:49Griffin McElroy?

  No, but I did still like it. But it's like, it is like three hours. And it was just sort of a satisfying little progression for a few hours. I like that. I mean, I also played a lot of EverQuest Legends. That is now down. The beta is over and it launches next week, next Tuesday on the 28th. And I would love us to talk about it on this show. I would love for you guys to play EverQuest.

• 57:11Russ Frushtick?

  I literally have never played EverQuest in my life.

• 57:14Griffin McElroy?

  Awesome, awesome. You're gonna not like it, but if that's the case, but man. It's so cool. I'm fucking stoked. I had to pull myself away from it because I, I was spending too much time with it, knowing that like they're gonna wipe the servers after the beta's done.

• 57:29Russ Frushtick?

  So you think you're gonna start from scratch?

• 57:31Griffin McElroy?

  You have to.

• 57:32Russ Frushtick?

  But you personally are so invested that you would start from scratch.

• 57:36Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, because the big thing is like the you're making a fusion of three different classes. And it truly is such a fun, dynamic like thing where no characters feel the same. So you will play, I mainly played the beta just to see like, okay, I have this kind of madcap idea. What if I like took these classes that all have like these special AOE melee attacks? They don't go so great together, but if you get all those going off at the same time, I bet that'd feel pretty fucking good. How can I make that work? It's like a, I don't know, like working through the puzzle of that. And, and all the build crafting is just, it's, it's, it's really, it's really great. Having it open and like farming some NPC who comes back every seven minutes while I'm working on something else.

• 58:19Griffin McElroy?

  Like, I don't know, dude, it's, it's a, it's, it's really meeting me where I'm at right now.

• 58:25Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I'm not gonna play it, but I'm glad that it's making you happy.

• 58:29Griffin McElroy?

  It is, it's making me very happy.

• 58:31Russ Frushtick?

  Plant.

• 58:32Chris Plante?

  Been watching a movie. I just screened this last night. It's called Tomorrow. It's from 1970. Follow me here, ready? Aliens have been monitoring Earth for over 3,000 years, trying to figure out what big idea Earthlings will come up with. And let me tell you, the aliens, they're, they are bored. Like nuclear power, whatever, everything's a weapon. We don't need any of this. And worse, the aliens, they are so smart that they've succumbed to generative AI. And their lives are losing all meaning because the music is made by the machines and they don't know how to find love and joy anymore.

• 59:13Chris Plante?

  Fortunately, a band with Olivia Newton-John as its lead singer has discovered the power of pop music. They know how to get a good groove going. So these aliens need to go find this mod pop band in groovy England with an Australian lead singer doing a British accent. And let me tell you, they discover so much kooky stuff along the way. Turns out these kids know how to have sex with their professors at a school that is having sit-ins and sit-outs. Yeah, baby, yeah. You swingin'. This movie, it's, it's swinging, it's groovy, baby.

• 59:57Griffin McElroy?

  It's two W T W O. What is the name of the thing?

• 1:00:01Russ Frushtick?

  I think it's just spelled tomorrow, but you said it's just spelled tomorrow.

• 1:00:04Griffin McElroy?

  Tomorrow, like it's too much. It's tomorrow.

• 1:00:08Russ Frushtick?

  So there's two O's before it.

• 1:00:10Griffin McElroy?

  Two O's, two O's. I think it is nearly impossible to find right now, but it will be coming out in a wider release in September on Blu-ray. But if you can find it, there's a gorgeous restoration by Deaf Crocodile and the BFI who dug this out of their archive. It's, it's sick.

• 1:00:32Russ Frushtick?

  Incredibly fucking weird.

• 1:00:34Griffin McElroy?

  Really weird. That's it for the show this week. Chris, what games and movies and stuff do we talk about? Oh, man. What didn't we talked about? We talked about Power World 1.0. We talked about Spirits Abyss, the incident at Galley House, a little bit of TR49 in there, Halo, Campaign Evolved. And then we also talked about Blueprints, a game about chopping trees, EverQuest Legends, and the film Tomorrow. That's a lot of stuff, but if you're still hankering for more, you can go to patreon.com/thebesties, where you will get access to all of our monthly bonus bracket battle episodes and also

• 1:01:16Griffin McElroy?

  episodes of The Resties, where Russ and Chris talk about the games that we did not have time to discuss here on, on the core program. Do you want to thank some backers?

• 1:01:26Russ Frushtick?

  I would love to. We have Aubrey W, we have Felix T, we have Daggerpants, and we have Anthony. Thank you for being new backers to The Besties and thank you to everyone else who backs the show. You make the show literally possible. It would shut down and be a quiet wasteland without your support. So thank you.

• 1:01:45Griffin McElroy?

  It would be so sad. We got a live show coming up in October. If you want to come see us, we're going to be at the Town Hall in New York City on October 9th. You can go to bit.ly/besties on Broadway. Get your tickets now. Join us as we talk about games and have a lot of fun with you.

• 1:01:59Russ Frushtick?

  Love it.

• 1:02:00Griffin McElroy?

  I love it. Next week, very excited to play Platoon Raiders, the new sort of looter shooter. Solo slash co-op rogue likey thing.

• 1:02:10Russ Frushtick?

  Seems like a totally different kind of game than Splatoon was.

• 1:02:13Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, one that I would be interested in play.

• 1:02:16Russ Frushtick?

  Yes.

• 1:02:17Griffin McElroy?

  And so we're going to talk about that and probably some other stuff too next week on the besties. So join us then and every week here on the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends? Play the world's best games.

• 1:02:55Chris Plante?

  Besties.