Let's Save Cats From Oblivion!

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

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is the first time I feel like in quite a while, we haven't had to lead off with like a reboot. Maybe the past few times, it's been a little bit better. Is that in my imagination, or does it seem to be?

• 0:08Chris Plante?

  The power of all four of us being here together.

• 0:13Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm on that fucking Pentagon crunchy pipes shit.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  You know what's hard is sometimes I, I forget the way we do the cold open in this show. And sometimes I feel like I'm talking to my brother.

• 0:25Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  And then all of a sudden, I'm talking to Griffin McElroy.

• 0:27Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  And it's like, do you know what I'm saying? It's like, I didn't realize.

• 0:31Griffin McElroy?

  So let me, so let's just to demonstrate the difference, because this would be useful for me, like, you know, when I'm out in the world and people see me. So like, give me that, give me that again. That was clearly Griffin McElroy, the, the internet persona.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Right, because you were like.

• 0:44Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, yeah. So give me, give me that, give me that question again. I'll do it like normal style.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  What was the question?

• 0:50Griffin McElroy?

  I was like, has your internet gotten a little bit faster?

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Griff, I feel like your internet has gotten a little bit better. Is that in my imagination?

• 0:56Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, baby. Go and zoom, zoom, zoom.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  You know, the problem is that once you, once I realize I'm talking to Griffin McElroy, I melt away and Justin McElroy is there. You know what I mean? So I'm not, we're already in that entertainment locus.

• 1:13Russ Frushtick?

  Severance situation.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:15Griffin McElroy?

  Very, very much a severance.

• 1:16Chris Plante?

  Have people actually ever heard the real Justin?

• 1:20Griffin McElroy?

  I don't think so. I don't think Justin is air, he's very careful not to put that on the, on the air.

• 1:26Chris Plante?

  Should we invite him on, onto the mic? I think this is the right place to do it, you know, now.

• 1:30Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, I can just say like, um, Juice, have you been messing around with more Linux stuff, man?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Fuck, yeah, dude. You know what I actually did? I accidentally hacked my neighbor's wifi with this little fucking Flipper's ear. I gotta put out a little sniffer PK.

• 1:46Griffin McElroy?

  That just sounds like Justin, if I'm being honest.

• 1:48Russ Frushtick?

  That's the same guy. That's what, that's what we're saying. He's the same guy on and off.

• 1:52Griffin McElroy?

  So I'm the only one who wears a mask.

• 1:55Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 1:55Griffin McElroy?

  Persona.

• 1:56Chris Plante?

  Fresh as a fucking giraffe from New York half the time.

• 2:00Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's very clear.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  You know the difference? I care, the last time my brother tried to make me happy.

• 2:09Griffin McElroy?

  But Griffin McElroy.

• 2:10Russ Frushtick?

  All the time.

• 2:11Griffin McElroy?

  Tries really hard all the time.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Griffin McElroy is very amusing.

• 2:21Russ Frushtick?

  Diplomatic.

• 2:22Griffin McElroy?

  That's what the AI Google search says when you look me up.

• 2:28Griffin McElroy?

  Popular banana eater.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best games of the week.

• 2:52Griffin McElroy?

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

• 2:54Chris Plante?

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

• 2:59Russ Frushtick?

  My name is Russell. I know the game of the week.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, your ears did not deceive you. That's those four besties back together again. The fearsome force.

• 3:11Russ Frushtick?

  I got so excited.

• 3:12Chris Plante?

  They haven't lost a beat. They still know how to do it.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  They haven't lost a step. They're exactly as good as they've always been. This week, this video game club that we are a member of, and you are a member of just by listening, we're going to be discussing the remaster of the Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion and Skin Deep. Chris Plant, what is the Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion remaster in Skin Deep?

• 3:37Chris Plante?

  Such a great question.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Describe those two things in a sentence, please.

• 3:40Chris Plante?

  One is a remaster of a very old game. One is a new game that is very inspired by old games.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  And we are going to be talking about both of those right after this, so don't go away.

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm really worried that I'm gonna forget to say this. I'll just tell you guys right now. You know that big, you know that big IV that they put up to hype the press conference for the Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion?

• 4:10Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Okay. I absolutely saw that image and absolutely parsed it as VI. So like I, the whole day I was like, here it goes.

• 4:20Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Here we go.

• 4:22Griffin McElroy?

  You forgot your Roman numerals.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  And then I saw the story go up a polygon about the Oblivion Remaster and I'm like, dang, Oblivion Remaster and Elder Scrolls Six in the same day?

• 4:33Griffin McElroy?

  Todd, you've done it again.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Todd, you shouldn't have, and we shouldn't have, I shouldn't have led off with that. I, we should have said, it's also been 10 years since I've been wanting to play this new game skin deep.

• 4:47Chris Plante?

  That's right.

• 4:47Griffin McElroy?

  Can someone give me a brief history of Blendo's sort of body of work? Cause it's quite, that's all Justin.

• 4:55Chris Plante?

  That has to be Justin, right?

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yes. So it is singular and it is a, a suite of games that really I think about as like, when I was in game journalism professionally, because these were very much like games I think of as joystick games. These were in like Polygon, early Polygon games. These were like the ones we would get fixated on. They're, they're not directly connected, most of these, and the ones I'm thinking of here are like 30 flights of loving, Gravity Bone. Um, there are a couple of Blendo games, uh, Flotilla and Flotilla 2 that are a little bit more like strategy type things. Uh, Quadrilateral Cowboy was the last one, but these, uh, are like first person,

• 5:41Speaker 00

  first person action adventure games where the sort of hallmark of them, besides the, the, technically they get a lot deeper as, as they go forward. Uh, there's like an editing style that is consistent throughout these games. It's a sort of, uh, an aesthetic, uh, like sort of blocky aesthetic and this idea of like,

• 6:02Speaker 00

  editing where you wouldn't necessarily expect it in video games like that. It is, it's a little bit, uh, uh, disconcerting, I think, the, the first few times it happens if you're not used to it, but it's interesting to see that sort of like aspect come back.

• 6:15Griffin McElroy?

  What does that mean, editing?

• 6:17Chris Plante?

  Oh, like, like, if you picture a movie, when you're watching a film and somebody is talking and then snap, you cut and you're in a different scene.

• 6:26Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, sure.

• 6:26Chris Plante?

  And that's like, not your brain is just used to moving from scene to scene that way. When you're playing a video game and you're walking and you're moving towards what you think is a goal and bam, snap, there's a cut and you're suddenly somewhere else pursuing a different goal. It feels really strange.

• 6:40Griffin McElroy?

  Jazz punk painted with that particular brush quite, quite a bit.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good example.

• 6:46Chris Plante?

  Um, I, I would say the thing that unifies all their games is these are PC gamer ass games, no matter where they go. So they might be, yes, hardcore strategy. The first person games, you know, their origins are in quake mods. And then at the same time, they are us games because Justin, you mentioned Gravity Bone, like that used In the Mood for Love's music, the one car Y movie, like they're very heady weirdos. They, they seem to love both like 1950s through 1970s tackiness and then also love like modern art house stuff.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  There's another facet to these, uh, I think a lot of these games where they feel sort of like barely together, like they're barely holding together. There's a certain, um, it almost feels like they've been sweeted. That I'd like the games are barely sort of like stuck together with tape and cardboard. There, uh, uh, it's like a DIY aesthetic that I feel like is, it permeates all of them.

• 7:53Russ Frushtick?

  And silly, right? We haven't really talked about it, but totally like their games tend to be very like almost Monty Python silly. Almost. You don't think so?

• 8:03Chris Plante?

  Well, let's be careful where we throw around the Monty Python, especially in this room. We have some real critics.

• 8:10Griffin McElroy?

  I could not want to talk about that less. Um, so skin, skin deep, I feel like goes, I mean, Unlike the name, yes.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:20Griffin McElroy?

  What the name suggests, it actually, I think, is heads, levels beyond the sort of immersive stuff they've done.

• 8:27Speaker 00

  Heads, heads above, heads above, you might, you know?

• 8:31Griffin McElroy?

  Cause there's a lot of heads in the game.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  There's a lot of heads.

• 8:33Griffin McElroy?

  You gotta do a lot of stuff with heads.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:35Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, Skin Deep is an immersive sim. Uh, the gameplay mimics games like Bioshock, System Shock, things like that. Um, and the idea is you are a insurance agent that's sent in to save various cats from various, uh, spaceships that have been attacked by pirates. And the way you do that is by sneaking around those spaceships, hacking devices, opening vents, and clearing out rooms using stealth and throwing objects, things like that, to basically get the upper hand on what is otherwise a very overpowering number of enemies. So if you've played any of those games, you're gonna feel pretty, uh, familiar ground here,

• 9:17Russ Frushtick?

  but there are some very, very specific differences where this game kinda sets the

• 9:22Chris Plante?

  If you haven't played those games, a couple of those differences. You're not running around Bioshock style with magical powers where you can just blow everything up. You are quite underpowered. You will eventually find things like a gun or a knife, but for the most part, you're finding a banana, eating it for health, and then throwing it on the floor to make someone slip. And once they've slipped, you jump on their back, you ride them around the room, and you look for things to bash their heads against until they die. And those things that you can break might be, let's say, a, um, a thing of, uh, hand sanitizer. But when you bash your head against that, it releases hand sanitizer into the air that is, uh, combustible.

• 10:03Chris Plante?

  And then you bash their head against something that sparks, and suddenly the entire room is on fire. And they're dead, but you nearly are too. And to make matters worse, when characters die in this world, their heads pop off their bodies, and they fly to a regeneration station. So, after you kill, kill someone, you have to grab their Living head and then find a way to dispose of it. So not only do you have to take out enemies, but then you have to be able to carry these heads to very specific disposable centers. So that could be flushing one down a toilet. It could be throwing it in the trash. There's all sorts of ways.

• 10:44Chris Plante?

  So it's just the, the kind of flow of combat feels very, very, very different from a lot of its inspirations.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  There's no Gears of War curb stomping here either.

• 10:55Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  The whole world feels very tactile and physical, like every object in it is beyond just like, there's a physics aspect to it. I guess where you're picking up objects, they have a weight, they have a heft, they interact with each other when you, you throw them or whatever. But there's also a lot of like tiny signage throughout the game that you can like zoom in on with your, your camera. And you can get hints about stuff, but it also feels like very lived in, uh, because there's this like layer beneath where you can zoom in and everything feels very hand wrought.

• 11:25Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, that's how they do the tool tips, which I've never seen this in a game before. I thought it was fucking brilliant is like, if you have a, let's say someone, one of the enemy guards drops like a walkie talkie. You can zoom in on that walkie talkie and it might give you just like the instructions on how to use it. Another thing like a, let's say it's a piece of wire. If you zoom on it in on it, it'll tell you, hey, if you break, if you hit this against the wall, it'll create sparks. And you intuitively know, oh, sparks might ignite the gas from the hand sanitizer thing. So it's all kind of informing you about each object without, again, pulling you out of the game using like an on screen tooltip or just like floating text or anything like.

• 12:06Griffin McElroy?

  I really appreciate, there's also a like running ticker, like log of everything that happens.

• 12:12Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 12:13Griffin McElroy?

  All of the, anytime anything interacts with something else, or, uh, you know, you throw something at a character and it hits them. Like it shows up in a log, like this character was, you know, bonked by this, or this thing was ignited by this. So when things get extremely chaotic and, you know, in, in Chris's explosive hand sanitizer example, like it is actually pretty easy to follow what is. Happening in that case.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's chaotic, but not random.

• 12:40Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 12:40Speaker 00

  Like, it feels like you understand the interactions that are happening. And I think that's a part of the problem with games like this. Sometimes it starts to feel a little bit like I threw a bunch of junk together and we're not sure how it's going to interact. Like, the interactions make sense, but just like you may not intend on all of the the interactions that you that you start.

• 12:59Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I think the biggest difference as well, apart from everything we've talked about, is this game does not have level to level progression. You're basically starting from scratch at the beginning of every level. And the way the levels play out differently is mostly like the things you can find. So, you know, you don't get pistol, you don't get guns for quite a few levels at the beginning of the game. And once you unlock guns, that doesn't mean you'll always have a gun. It just means like you might find more levels with guns in them. And that, I think, is it's very interesting because if you played System Shock or you played Bioshock, whatever it is, as you're progressing through those games, you you land on a build.

• 13:39Russ Frushtick?

  It's like, OK, I'm focused on whatever rifles and I'm really good at sneaking or I'm really good at hacking, whatever it is. And because there's no progression in this game, you actually are constantly having to reevaluate like how you're handling situations. And so that is a big differentiator. I think it is a little challenging. I mean, I think it makes it feel more like a puzzle game than it does like a immersive sim RPG, which I think a lot of its inspiration comes from.

• 14:11Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Russ Frushtick?

  Which, you know, has pluses and minuses to it.

• 14:14Griffin McElroy?

  I think, yeah, lacking that sort of progressive progression sort of element. I feel like that is such a hallmark of the immersive sim genre that it, I don't know. It it feels a little bit more puzzly.

• 14:26Russ Frushtick?

  I kind of get it, though, from a design standpoint, like. Like honestly, when I'm late, when I'm late game in like a Bioshock, like I'm using the three things I'm really good at.

• 14:37Chris Plante?

  Right.

• 14:38Russ Frushtick?

  Like, and that's all you do. And by limiting it to like the gear that you pick up along the way of a given mission, it does really force you to like see everything, whether that's to your taste or not is kind of up in the air, but it is an interesting kind of approach to that problem.

• 14:53Chris Plante?

  Um, later in the game, for those who have gotten there, how, how does it kind of like, uh, evolve difficulty wise? My favorite Blendo game is, is probably Quadrilateral Cowboy, just because I really liked the kind of like on the fly hacking sort of mechanic of it. But I also thought that like, the way that it escalates and requires you to like queue up all of these different commands to go off at very specific times, like got really, really difficult, really fast. Um, I don't know if anyone's gotten sort of far enough to comment on this, but does it, does, does this game sort of evolve in a similar way? Or what's the sort of arc like?

• 15:30Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, you are fighting more objects. I think the biggest like challenge leap comes when they introduce the idea of like, after you go through and you save all the cats, uh, the, uh, ship that you're on gets basically invaded, uh, and a boarding party will join where like eight or nine guards will come on the boarding bar, on the ship. And you have to either steal a key from one of them or kill them all, which killing them all is incredibly difficult. Uh, so that I think is like where part of the challenge comes from. And also just like, once new objects get introduced, those objects can also be used by the guards. So you're kind of juggling a lot of the different mechanics all at once.

• 16:10Chris Plante?

  I like that FaZe style of games of these sort of puzzle strategic games. It reminds me of, um, oh damn, the, your robots. And there's like a million of these. And one of them, Steam World, Steam World Heist, uh, two, where you would, you know, you have the time and the, the space to solve the first stage of the game. But as you actually complete it and then you need to make your exit, then it becomes almost a different strategy altogether as you're avoiding like all the enemies that are flowing in. I don't know that like staged games, I also think of that, um, Pizza, the Wario where to, or not Wario, the Wario light game.

• 16:53Russ Frushtick?

  Pizza Tower.

• 16:54Chris Plante?

  Pizza Tower, yeah.

• 16:55Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Chris Plante?

  Like having that A B, I don't know, it's a really good flow.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  There's also a lot of sneezing mechanics. That's crazy. Yeah. It's very funny for a stealth game is that you have to like account for how badly you want to sneeze.

• 17:07Chris Plante?

  If you go through somewhere where there's where the air quality index is not favorable, your sneeze meter starts to fill up. Which is honestly, I don't know, a little bit annoying, but also hysterical.

• 17:23Russ Frushtick?

  It does seem like they came up with clever ways around the like abuse systems of like, oh, you've been spotted, you can just go in a vent. But you can't because if you stay in the vent for too long, you'll sneeze.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  I know we don't normally talk about the value proposition of a game, but this thing is $18 on Steam. That's a great, if you, if you, if this sounds at all like something you might want to play around with, like, I, I think you, they're, they don't make a lot of games like this. And I think that it's really, really worth kind of like messing around with and experimenting with.

• 17:52Russ Frushtick?

  In fact, they haven't made a game like this in so long. This game is built on the Doom 3 engine, if you can believe it.

• 17:59Chris Plante?

  Wait, what?

• 18:01Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Chris Plante?

  It's in Tech 4.

• 18:02Russ Frushtick?

  In Tech 4, which was what they used for Doom 3, which is why it looks like that, which is very funny to me. I also, the other thing I wanted to mention is outside of the, just like the normal gameplay loop, the, the levels are not randomly generated. They're all like created. They made them. And what that allows them to do is have like little side quests within the levels that are totally optional. But you'll have like little narrative beats where you're finding notes. And the notes will be like, oh, I left another note under this guy's whatever. And eventually you're like repairing lighthouses and doing all sorts of like little side stuff that you don't have to do. But I found compelled because generally you'll find like the, the most fun narrative beats in those.

• 18:43Chris Plante?

  Just a good little bit of a story, like that lighthouse mission that you're talking about. There's a particular, well, there's two cats in that mission that I, I would read a little novella about. There's a little goth cat who's pretending to be a ghost. And there's a little troublemaker cat named, I think, like Gerbo or something.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  The cat, the cat thing is so funny because when I started it, the, when I started playing, I was like, there's a little bit of like, you know, I like this style, but I kind of miss like the wild, blocky. And then like the most, just there's no re, aesthetically insane block cat. The first time you encounter one.

• 19:19Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, everyone looks like a Doom 3 model. And then suddenly it's a Minecraft cat that hops out of a cage.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  And it's like so well. The conversations with cats are also funny to me. I don't know why it is, but when I see a blocky cat who's like giving me orders and stuff and uh is being treated like a VIP, I think that's great.

• 19:38Russ Frushtick?

  And when you save them, they pop out like Superman and you say meow with like a ton of reverb.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  No.

• 19:45Russ Frushtick?

  And they just fucking crush the audio design. It's so good.

• 19:48Chris Plante?

  I wish we still had the Sega Dreamcast virtual memory units so I could get little cat emails throughout my day, wherever I'm going.

• 19:57Griffin McElroy?

  Really nice.

• 19:57Chris Plante?

  It's great that they send emails in the game. I just want to have it, you know, if I'm just walking around pulling the gas, check my cat email. It sounds nice.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Um, we are, we have so much, so much to talk about. I think we should wrap our discussion here, if that's okay by you guys. Is that all right?

• 20:12Chris Plante?

  Yeah. Do it.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Okay, when we come back, uh Elder Scrolls Oblivion. So the Elder Scrolls four Oblivion.

• 20:22Chris Plante?

  Yep.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Not six.

• 20:25Russ Frushtick?

  It's tough. The luminomoles are tough, man, because the order matters.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  It's tough, man, especially when you don't pay attention very close to stuff and you're like, yeah.

• 20:31Russ Frushtick?

  Matters. Here's the problem. You can't fit VI into the lettering of Oblivion. It doesn't work.

• 20:38Chris Plante?

  It's true.

• 20:39Russ Frushtick?

  Wait, Obliv- no.

• 20:40Chris Plante?

  It fits perfectly.

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Oh, you can.

• 20:43Russ Frushtick?

  You can, though.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  The message was the secret.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Maybe it wasn't my fault. The clues were there all along. Um, this is six. This is six.

• 20:51Russ Frushtick?

  It's like counting the doctors. They just like went out of order a little bit.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  So, uh, I, there was a long time that I said Elder Scrolls four Oblivion was my favorite game of all time. Sort of tied with Link Between Worlds, but uh, it was a really.

• 21:09Griffin McElroy?

  Link Between Worlds or Link to the Past? Cause that's crazy.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Link to the Past, not Link Between Worlds.

• 21:13Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, okay.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  So it was released at this weird time where it was right before I let, like moved out. It was like the last time that all three of us were living in the same roof. Uh, and it was just sort of happenstance right after my mom had passed away. So the three of us and my dad like really.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Spent a lot of time in Oblivion, like, a lot. Like, this game was like, sort of foundational in like, getting us through that time period. Like, we, it was that and hero clicks. That's what we did. We bought a lot of hero clicks and we played a lot.

• 21:51Griffin McElroy?

  And those hero clicks have only accrued value.

• 21:55Russ Frushtick?

  They're basically Bitcoin.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  You've heard of Glen McElroy Island? Well, I'll tell you what paid for that, it's hero clicks.

• 22:04Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, yeah, I, I have not played Oblivion. We did it for Monster Factory a few years ago or something at this point. And even then, it was like, this is, this feels, it's strange how unfamiliar this feels because we spent so much time at like, a crazy part of our, of our lives. And I was not prepared for just kind of the insane sort of sense, memory of like, walking out of the sewers for the first time. And it's, it's really, I, I don't think, you know, I'm saying anything that people who have played this remaster have not already said, but like, it is amazing how much they

• 22:40Griffin McElroy?

  have captured the weird, broken shit about this 19-year-old video game. And, and managed to maintain that while also making it more enjoyable to play and look like a million bucks.

• 22:59Chris Plante?

  Without laughing at it, it feels like it's laughing with it. You know, like, there's a lot of decisions, what I mean by that is, we talk about the broken shit, there's a lot of dialogue, for example, that is rough in this game.

• 23:12Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Chris Plante?

  And it recreates that roughness, but it's recreating it in the same way that if you made a perfect recreation of your favorite childhood stuffed animal, if you took all the effort to make it just, you know, as messy and disheveled as you remembered it. I don't know, there's like, care, rather than, I think there's a version of this, a kind of like, I don't know, gearbox version of this, where you're actually adding more and being like, can you believe how stupid it was, you know, back in the day that we liked this? We're here, it's like, no, we, we genuinely love the rough edges.

• 23:49Russ Frushtick?

  And, and I do, on the rough edges, like, I do think... Part of the reason that I enjoy Oblivion more than Skyrim, certainly more than Starfield, is I think as the studio has grown in size and sold so many fucking copies you can't even imagine, I think there's a level of like, safety that needs to be enacted to ensure that like, these games don't launch totally fucking broken. And I think the only way to ensure that is to like, put a lot of guardrails in certain aspects of the game, to the point where like, in this game, like, you can craft any combination of any spell with any other combination of any spell.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:29Russ Frushtick?

  You can, I've talked about this before, you can make a ring that makes you jump so fucking high that you die from the fall damage. Like, there is no limit to how much they are willing to let you kind of bust this thing wide open.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  You know, the practicing spells, I mentioned that in Slack, but like, the idea that you're just like, no games do this, where you're just like, running from A to B, and you're like, you know what, on the way, I'm gonna cast Cure on myself 10 times, and I'm gonna level that up. Cause that's fun, man, it's more fun than walking, walking around, leveling up, casting Cure, that's great, that's good stuff, every game should do that.

• 25:00Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, it's, that's, yeah, I guess, I mean, other games have figured out like, maybe let's just make the walking more enjoyable, like Elden Ring, you don't need to level up your skills like that in Elden Ring, cause like-

• 25:12Chris Plante?

  It's a different type of game, when I'm playing this type of game, I wanna be able to just be spamming my, my growth potential.

• 25:18Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, there is a, there's a clicker aspect.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not just a clicker aspect, it's like the, I don't know what it is, that's in the secret sauce of this game that makes you feel like, you know what, I am gonna go do that, I am gonna go like, level that up, like, I have the ability to do that. If you wanna do it that way, you absolutely could, it's a valid way of doing it. Like, it's, it's weird that I still don't think many games match the, oh, I see a cave over there.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna go look in that cave. Like, it's very rare, but Oblivion like makes the world feel consequential enough and it makes the the rewards seem real enough that it's like, yeah, I think I think I will poke around.

• 25:57Russ Frushtick?

  It's also before Bethesda started doing AI-generated questing. In Skyrim, Skyrim was the first one that did it. And it was like, you love Skyrim, but you beat all the quests? Good news, we've got infinite quests because we can just generate them using all these little algorithms, whatever. And the second you introduced that, in the back of my head, I'm thinking, is this an AI quest? And is it going to be inconsequential in the way that like all AI quests are? But because in Oblivion, there's none of that, you know that everything they made in there is actually like a handcrafted, like, has-impact piece of content. So it kind of elevates the value of everything you're experiencing.

• 26:36Griffin McElroy?

  Big, big, like standout stuff for me is, one, adding a sprint button to the game seems like, yep, the original Oblivion's kind of not so enjoyable to play because you feel like you're just going kind of slow most of the time. But the biggest thing is the way they've changed sort of level scaling. The way that leveling in Oblivion works is as you level up your skills, you earn basically like points towards your next level up where you get to increase your stats. But it used to be, if I'm not mistaken, your stats would increase based on which skills you leveled up. And you had to be very careful because like, if you went on a shopping spree or a lockpicking

• 27:19Griffin McElroy?

  spree, you would level that stat up, level yourself up, level up every enemy in the world and not have any skills to actually be useful.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  So it wouldn't be related? Like, they they leveled up not related to the skills that you leveled up?

• 27:31Griffin McElroy?

  Well, the the stats that you that got increased, I think, were related to the scale.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  Oh, you're saying the scaling of the, oh, yeah.

• 27:37Russ Frushtick?

  If you if you put on like heavy armor and you got hit a bunch of times in heavy armor because you just wanted to see how heavy armor was, it would level you up in heavy armor and give you more strength, even if strength wasn't something you were interested in.

• 27:49Griffin McElroy?

  Right. So you had very little control. Now, it's like, you you have these minor skills that you don't

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Pick and those don't move you towards the next level as quickly. So it's not a big deal if you go and do a bunch of mercantile stuff. Also, when you level up, you get to pick which stats you increase, like just you spend points to do it. And all of that makes, I don't know, there's always this underlying tension when you were playing original oblivion of like, you know, I have all this fucking scuma to move, but if I do that, my mercantile is going to increase and I'm going to upgrade my personality stat and I'm going to get fucked. Next time I fight like a big skeleton or something.

• 28:26Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I really have always wanted to get into these games. And I struggle every damn time to really fall in love. But a funny thing happened here and it's not that I got, you know, head over heels for oblivion. I did return to avowed. That's what this game did for me. It made me think like, you know what? I'm more of, I'm more of an avowed. I'm more of that studio thing. I like what they're doing here, but I want all of the like modern niceties. I don't need as much freedom as this game provides and it like send me back into that world.

• 29:04Chris Plante?

  But I want to hear hoops because hoops is eyes are like trying to, they're looking to the sky, trying to figure out how my brain makes that connection.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  I'm thinking about what you just said because I'm trying to parse, I have like, been trying to go back to avowed somewhat because I, not in relation to this, but just because like I keep going back to it because I feel like this should be the kind of game that I'm really into and like I, I, I do, I like avowed. I think that uh, there is something about avowed that seems much more interested in whether or not you were doing quests. Avowed would like you to be doing something and like oblivion seems perfectly happy to let you just screw around like oblivion doesn't really care what you're doing. And like, I feel like avowed really wants you to, to like, and avowed, I will say this also, like,

• 29:52Speaker 00

  the, the scaling of the difficulty in avowed and the way that all plays out is like, is often very frustrating, especially for a modern game. It feels off in a way that this like, at least if it's off here, you can kind of figure out a, a way around it or some sort of scam or something.

• 30:08Russ Frushtick?

  It feels very, very specific and kind of railroaded in some ways in avowed, even though I actually do like avowed. Whereas this is like, I mean, quite honestly, like, if I'm doing a quest in Oblivion and these fucking vampires are like two-shotting me, I'm just gonna lower the difficulty, cuz it's cuz the combat is so inconsequential and stupid. And I don't even mean that in a bad way. It's just like a little bit mindless that it's not the challenge. It's just the like, hey, this is a fun thing to do for 30 minutes.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:41Russ Frushtick?

  Whereas I think the combat in Avowed is fucking spectacular and like, there's some element that the difficulty adds to that experience.

• 30:50Speaker 00

  I also just, I really, it feels good to level up so specifically the skills that you're using. Like, it feels good to use a bow and arrow and know that I'm getting a little bit better at it every time that I use it. That just like for my brain, like, that feels, feels really good.

• 31:08Chris Plante?

  What it reminded me of, as somebody who does not have a long history with this game in particular, was weirdly crackdown? The original crackdown game, where like, everything you did also gave you that feeling, right? Like, yes, you could go chase experience orbs, but also if you just kept jumping, you got better at jumping, and you kept running, you got better at running. Yeah, and that there is something to that, you're right, Hoops, that just feels so good and weirdly not very underused.

• 31:37Russ Frushtick?

  They've also made a few smart tweaks to like how things leveled up. Because previously, like, the only way to level up your mercantile was by selling one item at a time. If so, you had a stack of like 400 arrows and you would just sell one item, and that was the best way to do it. And now they like factor in like how much money you're making, which seems obvious, but, you know, it's tricky making games.

• 31:58Griffin McElroy?

  What was the team who did this remaster?

• 32:00Russ Frushtick?

  It's Virtuos, I think they're called.

• 32:06Russ Frushtick?

  They've worked on like a few others as like,

• 32:10Russ Frushtick?

  You know, I don't think they've gotten like as much of a spotlight on the team itself.

• 32:13Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Russ Frushtick?

  But I am incredibly impressed by the work.

• 32:15Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, no, I again, like that balancing act.

• 32:18Russ Frushtick?

  Very smoothly.

• 32:18Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I think it's hard to do this. I think it's hard to make it so much, the quality of life of playing the game so much better. While also, you know, still feeling like it is pretty clunky most of the time.

• 32:33Chris Plante?

  How are y'all feeling about your appetite for this sort of game right now? And by that, I mean, I feel like we don't get this.

• 32:40Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 32:40Chris Plante?

  Every year. And yet this year we get Avowed, we get this, and then this fall we get the Outer Worlds 2, which feels just like a lot.

• 32:50Griffin McElroy?

  If I'm being completely honest, I've played it for maybe 15, 20 hours. I completed all the Mage Guild stuff and started to get silly with, with like the spell crafting and enchanting. And that stuff really is so fun from a sandbox perspective. You can make a ring that drains your health if you have it on you. And then you can pickpocket someone and put it in their inventory and then just wait a minute and then they'll just fall down dead. Like, I find stuff like that like really, really entertaining. I don't think I'm going to stick with it just because it's, it is a game I have a lot of nostalgia for. But it is also a game that I feel like, and this is true of Skyrim and honestly, every Bethesda game, it gets a bit samey.

• 33:30Griffin McElroy?

  After not, not too long. And so I, and also there's just like, there's a lot of other stuff out right now that I don't know that I have it in me to dedicate. You know, 100 hours or so to getting back to Serendio.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  You gotta free it from the, I agree with everything you're saying, but it is so heartening, I think, to have a game like this be. To have this work done just from a preservation standpoint, and I know that this is a corporation, they're not doing this for, for charity's sake. But like, it's very, I think this game was so, we didn't really talk about the context, but like, this game for console players was like the first time really, really. That a game like this. Felt good, like Morrowind existed, but like it was not, it didn't.

• 34:20Russ Frushtick?

  It like barely ran on.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  It barely ran and it felt bad. It felt chunky. This, when, when Oblivion came out, it felt like I didn't know you could do this on a console. And that was like, it's massive. And I think it's really cool that people are able to see that part, that really important thing. And like, understand where that is coming from, I think is, is, is really awesome, even if it's like, kind of fighting for oxygen with a lot of other stuff. But it seems like people are into, I like, you know, people for whom this was not a formative game are, are still kind of into it.

• 34:51Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I think it stands astride something like Skyrim. It might be a little bit, again, rough around the edges, but it feels like kind of 80% of the way there in terms of like what I felt like when I was playing Skyrim. And honestly, certain things in this game I like more than Skyrim. So.

• 35:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I like how this game, it doesn't tell you as much as Skyrim does. Like it doesn't, to, the, the example I always see is to get into the Mage's Guild in Skyrim, you go to a bridge and a woman's like, you're a mage, huh? Shoot a fireball. And you do it and she's like, welcome to the school. And in this one, you have to go get letters of recommendation from like eight different universities around the world.

• 35:30Russ Frushtick?

  Some of those quests are insane. One, one of them was like, oh yeah, go collect my ring under this well. And you pick up the ring and it increases your encumbrance by 300 and you're like drowning in the well because the guy sent you on a death, death mission.

• 35:42Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Russ Frushtick?

  Like that's the sort of stuff that they, it feels like they take more swings in these quests.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  There's also like, the permanence is so funny. Like the way that they handle, it's right on this line between like, okay, I'll give you an example. I, I go up to a shrine and I see these three people and they look like enemies. So I like get out my bow and arrow and I snipe one, just dead. And then I roll up a little closer. It turns out they were just like other people that were there at the shrine, right? But they didn't see me kill this person. So they're not mad at me or anything, but I'm mad at myself because they did have a name. And I would like to know what's going on, but then I've had to return to this shrine as part of the puzzle that I'm doing. I keep having to come back. Every time there's this corpse and I'm like, I'm sorry, I didn't know. Like, I didn't, I didn't understand that, but like, there's no spell for this?

• 36:33Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  There's no fix? I'm just stuck with this.

• 36:35Griffin McElroy?

  I was over encumbered right in front of the mages college in the, in the capital city. And so I just dropped a bunch of garbage right outside the entrance to the major. And every time I have to come back to the mages guild, I have to just wade through this, this pond of detritus.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  It's also a great reminder of how easily video games can get away with like, the sort of tropes that would get you laughed out of the room in any other media. But the fact that it's so effective for the, for you to rescue the king by a chance prison break. And then as he's dying, he gives you a necklace and is like, find my son. Hell, yes, let's get, that's all I need. Thank you. Like, seriously.

• 37:18Griffin McElroy?

  I will not, I'm not going to do that for like 25 hours.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  I saw a cave.

• 37:25Russ Frushtick?

  It is nice how quick that intro is because man, that Skyrim intro takes so fucking long to get through. And this you could really blaze through in like 10 minutes.

• 37:34Speaker 00

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

• 37:56Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  And it's like, I don't know. It's a cave. We didn't tell you to come in here. You came in here on your own.

• 38:00Russ Frushtick?

  Here's some tongs.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  There's tongs and skeletons. It's a cave.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  My other games, if you went into a random cave and be like, ah, yes, you found the black wolf cave where the black wolf dagger hides. Good job. Oblivion's like, hell, you want a cup? It's a cave. I don't know. It's mud. It's a cave.

• 38:23Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, should we move on?

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 38:27Chris Plante?

  Okay. Hey, I'm gonna open up the Reader Mailbag to talk about a tricky thing. That sound good by everybody?

• 38:34Russ Frushtick?

  Let's do it.

• 38:35Chris Plante?

  Let's do it. Okay, so we had a few comments in the besties.fan post asking about how and if we would cover this game. Basically, to sum it up, some people asked us to consider, in very specific words, not promoting Bethesda and Microsoft by talking about Oblivion. I want to talk a little bit about like what we do here. So first, the context of why that was asked. There is a thing called the BDS movement. You can read about it on Polygon. I'm gonna make sure that I drop it in the besties.fan newsletter this week, so you can get a link to it. But in short, to just summarize the top of the Polygon article, BDS, it's a pro-Palestinian human rights movement focused on pressuring Israel to comply

• 39:19Chris Plante?

  with international law by promoting boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against the country and its economic partners. One of those economic partners is Microsoft. So there's that. The big thing here is, we do not see this show as promoting anything. That's not what our job is. We're not PR. We are not taking advertising money from Microsoft. And we cover a whole variety of games that we have, very, very wide range of feelings about the people who make them and the companies that own them. So, we, for this game, didn't buy the game. We're covering it like we cover anything else, as we do as both journalists

• 40:01Chris Plante?

  and critics. And that is it. That's why we cover this. That's why we've covered some games in the past that also had, I would say, substantial controversies around them. So I hope that's clarifying. And, yep.

• 40:15Griffin McElroy?

  I do think it is valuable to read that Polygon article, just to sort of learn about the links between Microsoft, specifically their Azure Cloud stuff and the, you know, Israel military. There is some very surprising stuff in there.

• 40:33Russ Frushtick?

  Okay. I think that was it for Rear Mail. We want to do honorable mentions.

• 40:39Griffin McElroy?

  Can we talk about the retroid flip, too?

• 40:42Russ Frushtick?

  Yes, I kind of te- I feel like we teased, we teased the world with this last week.

• 40:48Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 40:48Russ Frushtick?

  I, I had barely had any time to mess with it. And now I have, and I know you guys have both jumped on board the bandwagon just before, right under the wire.

• 41:00Griffin McElroy?

  Right before things became way more expensive. Yeah.

• 41:04Russ Frushtick?

  Parallelsly expensive.

• 41:05Griffin McElroy?

  I got the, earlier this year, I think January, I got the Retroid Pocket 5. And so like very recently, I set up a Retroid device and I wasn't really looking forward to doing it again. But it looks so neat and I was like, man, am I going to regret this purchase? Uh, and now that I've got it set up, uh, I just don't think so. It's insane how much more I want to use a thing just because I can close the lid on it and be done with it. And then reopen that lid anytime I want instantaneous access to the thing.

• 41:36Griffin McElroy?

  It feels so good every single time to be able to do that.

• 41:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. So, so for those that aren't aware, it internally, I mean, we talked a lot about the Retroid Pocket 5 the first time around. Internally, the guts of this are identical basically to the Retroid Pocket 5. It can run all the same stuff, same power, et cetera.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Screen is the same too.

• 41:54Russ Frushtick?

  The screen is the same. The difference here is it is a clamshell form factor and the control layout on the second half, the bottom half, if you will, is, you know, more offset. The Retroid Pocket 5 was like stacked analog stick D-pad and this is offset.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  What do you guys think about that?

• 42:13Russ Frushtick?

  I think it's a huge improvement.

• 42:14Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's the, the Retroid I found.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Wait, hold on. Specifically, so I've got my rock ally here, just to, so we're talking about on the right-hand side, these are flipped. So the sticks are parallel.

• 42:28Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, I'm not talking about that. Sorry.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  Sorry.

• 42:31Russ Frushtick?

  You know, you're talking about the Xbox versus PlayStation model of like, are the analog sticks in this in line with one another versus not?

• 42:38Chris Plante?

  Yes.

• 42:39Russ Frushtick?

  Right?

• 42:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:40Chris Plante?

  Yes.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  It's where your hand rests, right? Your hand, does it rest on two thumbs? Or does it rest on a thumb and buttons? But it's natural.

• 42:47Russ Frushtick?

  Right. I was more talking about the fact that if you look at the flip, and you could probably see a screenshot if you're listening at home, the, I believe it's the D-pads are like further out to the edges and the analog stick is closer into the edges.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  Got, okay, yes.

• 43:03Russ Frushtick?

  So that means it kind of follows as your thumbs are moving back and forth between the two. You're not making an awkward like, like kind of jamming your thumb in, which you kind of had to do with the Retroid Pocket 5. If that's clear, it's kind of a visual thing.

• 43:17Griffin McElroy?

  I find my thumb just kind of rests exactly where it needs to go.

• 43:20Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Griffin McElroy?

  On it. It's a bit boxy. I do wish the plastic felt just a little bit, um, I don't know, more premium, I suppose. It does feel like some of the other kind of handheld, you know, retro handhelds I've gotten that.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Do you guys like the sticks?

• 43:39Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, you know, for what they are, like recessed sticks that you can close a lid on, like I think they're pretty great.

• 43:45Russ Frushtick?

  They're better than the circle pad, certainly.

• 43:47Griffin McElroy?

  Much, much better than the circle pad ever was on the 3DS. I do think that is, uh, I don't know, the Retroid Pocket 5 probably has sort of preferable sticks. But I think that these work, I think these work exceptionally well for, for the, for the form factor.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  So what have you been doing with this thing?

• 44:07Griffin McElroy?

  I have managed to get Vita stuff working on it for the first time. It's the first handheld I've been able to do that, which is like really quite difficult to achieve. I only got mine like two days ago, so mostly I've been sort of setting it up.

• 44:21Griffin McElroy?

  But yeah, I got Persona 4 Golden working on it. And I don't know, man, it feels weird. It feels like I'm playing it on a 3DS, uh, because that is sort of what the form factor suggests.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  The, um, I tell you, the, uh, the thing I've used it for the most this week has been, uh, streaming for, to like Steam streaming and, uh, uh, the Xbox streaming also are both fantastic. I mean, they are, it is the best streaming experience I've had on any platform. Like it just works so well.

• 44:56Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it's interesting that that would be even better than it would be on like a Steam Deck or something like that.

• 45:02Russ Frushtick?

  I just like the fact that like I've used a lot of these handhelds and there are a ton of them out there, obviously. I have never used one where I could go between D-pad games and analog stick games on the same device with the relative same level of comfort. I've found that like some devices would kind of excel in one versus the other and this feels like it can do both.

• 45:21Chris Plante?

  What got you, Russ, specifically to like buy this? Because you, every time we talk about one of these, you're like, resist. You can hold, hold off. There's new hardware coming. There's new chips coming. They're gonna be better. Was it purely that?

• 45:36Griffin McElroy?

  That's what he says. He sucks shit at following his own suggestions. Because Russ, I feel like buys quite a few of these.

• 45:41Russ Frushtick?

  This was, this was a, this was a loner review unit from Rettroid. So this is not my device for what it's worth.

• 45:47Chris Plante?

  Okay.

• 45:50Russ Frushtick?

  But the reason I was interested in covering it, because I did have to reach out and request it, was clamshell as a like, you know, I'm carrying around all this stuff, the Steam Deck, for example. Every time I bring the Steam Deck, which I absolutely love, but if I bring it on a trip, it's like a third of my bag. It's huge because you need the protection to keep it safe. And that's the same with the Rettroid 5 and all these things. And I wanted something that I could play all these games on, but I could feel comfortable like dropping it in a fanny pack and be cool with it, as I always am with fanny packs.

• 46:23Chris Plante?

  Very cool.

• 46:24Russ Frushtick?

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

• 46:49Griffin McElroy?

  I, I just like, I, it's shocking to me still how important instantaneous access to the game that I'm playing is for me where I'm at in my life now. Like I never have a good 20 uninterrupted minutes like in, at all in my day to like sit down and play a game. And being

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Looking like a man who just installed Bazite on his Rog to uh

• 47:15Griffin McElroy?

  Right, so that was what I was gonna say too. Yeah, so like when I play games, like playing Oblivion on the Rog Ally X,

• 47:23Griffin McElroy?

  you know, playing it in just the straight up Windows mode that comes standard on the Rog Ally X, like if it's in hibernation mode, now all of a sudden, there's like 20 seconds of like loading shit that you have to do before you can like get back into the game. There's annoying stuff like if you plug it into a charger, it just turns on and then you have to like log into it to turn it back on. Like, there's so much shit that was so annoying. And so I followed Justin's lead and installed Bazite, which is a Linux-based. Uh, it's basically SteamOS. Uh, like it turns your Rog Ally X into a Steam Deck. So I dual booted that into it. And now when I press that power button, I'm back and I'm playing games within like three seconds for those like little two-minute chunks of my day where, you know, I'm not

• 48:05Griffin McElroy?

  making chicken tenders or whatever. Like, it's not having to spend-

• 48:10Speaker 00

  Open a chicken tender restaurant. We should finish it. That has taken up a lot of his time.

• 48:14Griffin McElroy?

  It's like, I, that, that is really important to me. And I feel like I am always looking for the path of least resistance for like actually being able to pick up a game and play it in like a small window of time, because that's all I really ever have to play games in. And I think that this is the best version of that in the retro handheld world, uh, so far. And I'm like, I don't know, I, I've got it set up now and I feel like sometimes I'll buy one of these devices and I'll get it set up and I'll be like, ah, fuck, I don't actually want to play anything. But now I like, I don't know, I want to play stuff on it because it feels great.

• 48:45Chris Plante?

  I know it's not video games, but how is Chicken Griffingers doing as a business?

• 48:51Griffin McElroy?

  It's doing, here's the deal. When I made the decision, decision to open Griff- what did you call it?

• 48:58Chris Plante?

  Chicken Griffingers.

• 49:00Griffin McElroy?

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

• 49:14Russ Frushtick?

  You also said it needed to have bird flu. That was a requirement of all the chickens you served.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  I'm recreating my favorite number from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. Chicken, my name is Chicken Griffingers. I'm giving you the flu.

• 49:30Griffin McElroy?

  You don't need no sauce. You don't need no sauce.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  You don't need no sauce!

• 49:34Griffin McElroy?

  They taste good enough already.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  It tastes good enough already.

• 49:38Griffin McElroy?

  The flu makes them wet. The flu makes them wet already, so... Anyone else been doing anything else?

• 49:45Chris Plante?

  I'm gonna share something. Can you just take a look at the Besties' Slack real quick?

• 49:51Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Oh, shit. God dang, Chris.

• 49:56Chris Plante?

  I'm doing it.

• 49:56Griffin McElroy?

  What are we looking at here?

• 49:57Chris Plante?

  I'm living the dream.

• 49:58Griffin McElroy?

  What, a 21-inch CRTV?

• 50:00Chris Plante?

  Yeah, yeah, this is a Panasonic CRTV with the VCR built in.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Get on down to Goodwill, what's up?

• 50:06Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I mean, everybody's out here saying, you know, you gotta get those like Sony high-end models from the TV stations. And I said, "What if it just has some scuff marks because it looks like it fell off the back of a truck?" Works pretty well.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  Good.

• 50:21Chris Plante?

  The great thing about it is what I'm playing on it is Promised Mascot Agency because I am running HDMI to S video into the TV. And now I can play all these games. All these games that are like, "We want it to look like it's on an old TV." I put on this, I say, "Turn off all those settings. I've got the old TV."

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Get it all, get it, make it small!

• 50:40Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 50:40Griffin McElroy?

  Chris, I'm glad to know you, man. I feel, that's such a vibe, man. And I don't know anyone else who would put in the effort.

• 50:49Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, his name is Chris Grant. I think you've met him before.

• 50:51Chris Plante?

  No, but Grant, he goes in that other direction, you know? It's like suddenly you've spent most of your like child savings making sure that you have pixel-perfect ratio recreations of Booger Man. This is a slightly different, some might say a much cheaper approach. But dude, it rules. I've been playing Tokyo Extreme Racer, which is the new game in the series that like came out on PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast. And I played on this TV, and let me tell you, it looks like it's just the exact same game back then. They didn't even need to make a new one.

• 51:24Russ Frushtick?

  What resolution do you run these games at?

• 51:27Chris Plante?

  So, it is, it is at 8.

• 51:34Chris Plante?

  That's, I mean, you got your answer fresh. That's, I don't know what more do you want? I don't, I don't even know how it would expand. It's amazing that it does because I started like clicking random numbers and eventually it started to look pretty okay.

• 51:47Russ Frushtick?

  Love it.

• 51:49Griffin McElroy?

  So what are we doing? I mean, I guess.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  I want to say that this week I played Hotel Dusk Room 215, a game which continues to whip ass. It makes you hold your DS the wrong way. What?

• 52:04Griffin McElroy?

  Is that DS or 3DS?

• 52:07Speaker 00

  Are you asking what I played it on or what it was designed for?

• 52:09Griffin McElroy?

  What it was designed for?

• 52:10Speaker 00

  The DS, the Nintendo DS. You hold it like this, like a book. And you navigate the world and the music's absolutely funky. All the characters look like they're from an, the Aha video. And it's such a good game and it is so inaccessible. Cause it's like, it's locked to this bizarre form factor. It's worth mentioning, like, part of what got me thinking about this is the despite being very cool, the retro would flip to still lacks a second screen in the middle. To presumably keep the device cost down and not have a capacitive touchscreen at the bottom, but like, it, it still can't replicate those great. So, uh, I got a DS and I

• 52:53Speaker 00

  put the game Hotel Dusk Room 215 into it and played it. It's great.

• 52:59Griffin McElroy?

  I love that. I love it. I love the notebook style gaming handheld. I feel like Nintendo was only courageous enough to do that trick like two or three different times and.

• 53:10Chris Plante?

  What if right before the switch two comes out, they like, they show you just like folding it. It's like.

• 53:16Griffin McElroy?

  Russ, when you did your hands on with the switch two, did you try to fold it?

• 53:19Chris Plante?

  Try to fold?

• 53:19Russ Frushtick?

  Of course I tried to fold it.

• 53:21Chris Plante?

  Did you ask like, where's the fold?

• 53:22Russ Frushtick?

  They, they didn't like it when I tried to fold it. They were against that, which maybe because they were hiding the truth.

• 53:28Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Russ Frushtick?

  They wanted to save that as like a day one surprise. Doug Bowser's just gonna show up and fucking fold that shit.

• 53:33Chris Plante?

  He could.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  What are we doing?

• 53:35Russ Frushtick?

  He's so strong. Uh, next week, we are doing Claire Obscure.

• 53:40Chris Plante?

  Expedition 33. The Paintress is back and so are we. We're finally talking about it, so don't you worry.

• 53:48Russ Frushtick?

  Justin, don't worry. We're also doing Revenge of the Damaged Planet. So you don't, you don't have to play the RPG that you don't want to play and I don't want to play, but.

• 53:55Chris Plante?

  Uh, that's great.

• 53:56Russ Frushtick?

  We'll play the other one.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  It's so sweet that you think I would have played it without you saying that, but thank you for releasing me.

• 54:01Russ Frushtick?

  I want to thank some members, uh, over at the Patreon, some new members. Uh, we have Connor, we have Oliver, we have Jacob, and we have Becoming a Weeb Purely Through Plant Osmosis.

• 54:13Chris Plante?

  Wow. That's great. Hell yeah.

• 54:15Russ Frushtick?

  Which, uh, you know, I, I get it. I, I've felt that same instinct before.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Oh, that sounds fantastic. I'm looking forward to it. Be sure to join us again next week for the best of it. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best game?

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Besties.