Echo Weaver Is Like Outer Wilds in 2D

Even though we were traveling for the live show, we still made time to play new games! Echo Weaver is a Metroidvania in the style of Outer Wilds, but simplified from 3D to 2D. It’s a little rough around the edges, though not enough to tarnish its big ideas. Plus, Griffin joins Plante on the Dragon’s Dogma train with the updated Dragon Dogma’s 2: Dark Arisen. But have some of those changes led Plante to reconsider his fandom? So many mysteries! To get the answers, I suppose you’ll just have to listen!

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

• 0:00Russ Frushtick?

  I was in the Trader Joe's the other day and I did blow up a guy's spot a little bit.

• 0:04Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, okay. What'd you do?

• 0:06Russ Frushtick?

  So I was checking out at Trader Joe's and there's a guy, uh, for lack of a better term, like a bear type character from, from obsession, like a fucking loser weirdo.

• 0:20Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, okay.

• 0:21Chris Plante?

  Oh, you're just casually judging everyone at the grocery store?

• 0:24Russ Frushtick?

  Well, I only-

• 0:25Griffin McElroy?

  What's a, what's a person look like that makes them look like?

• 0:27Russ Frushtick?

  It's not looks. It's not looks. He-

• 0:29Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 0:30Chris Plante?

  His energy.

• 0:32Russ Frushtick?

  Well, it was specifically energy to another cashier.

• 0:36Griffin McElroy?

  Oh.

• 0:37Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, who I think he was doing his utmost to hit on, but doing it in a way, uh, there's no other way to summarize it, but say, he was talking about how great he is at Fortnite.

• 0:51Griffin McElroy?

  Awesome. Awesome. Got it.

• 0:54Russ Frushtick?

  She was like, oh yeah, I'm not that good. And he was like, well, I'm number one in Brooklyn. Let me tell you.

• 1:01Griffin McElroy?

  That's crazy that he would be able to measure that. That's crazy that he would be able to say like-

• 1:04Russ Frushtick?

  There's no leaderboard. There's nothing. There's no way to determine it.

• 1:06Griffin McElroy?

  There's no regional, for each of the boroughs, there is, there is a king of Fortnite. That's not possible.

• 1:13Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, so this goes back and forth and she keeps like underplaying her skill level. It's back and forth, back and forth. And then as I'm checking out, I'm right next to them. Like I'm in a different cashier, but right next to them. As I'm checking out, I turn back around and to her, I say, I think you're underplaying it. And I point to him and I say, I think you're overplaying it. And his shoulders slump.

• 1:34Griffin McElroy?

  Wow. Did you feel empowered to do this because he seemed weaker than you? Cause I've never seen you pull an alpha move like this before in person.

• 1:44Russ Frushtick?

  I don't think I've ever done it in my life and it felt so empowering. I think it was my wedding ring empowering me to do this, the total lack, lack of giving a fuck. And having to hear this for a good five minutes as I was checking out, uh, was just like, no, this can't, this can't be allowed to happen.

• 2:04Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. Gosh, who, what, it's hard to think about what would have happened if you hadn't been there. Like this may have been a real love connection spawned off of this person talking about how good they are at the video game.

• 2:16Russ Frushtick?

  Or sure, or it could have been six years and then a divorce after that.

• 2:21Griffin McElroy?

  Could have been. You could see it. You could tell this is unhelping. I think if you're a Trader Joe's cashier and someone's hitting on you, you should be able to ring that bell just to sort of scare them.

• 2:30Russ Frushtick?

  That's four, four rings for that one.

• 2:32Griffin McElroy?

  Four rings for, I got a, I got a weird beard.

• 2:53Griffin McElroy?

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

• 2:56Chris Plante?

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

• 2:59Russ Frushtick?

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

• 3:03Griffin McElroy?

  Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year club. Just by listening, you've become a member. I know what we said. I know we said we were gonna do Ace Combat. I don't know if that actually made it in the show or if we cut it out.

• 3:17Russ Frushtick?

  I think it did make it in the show. We just, we did try. There is, there are technical limitations that we ran into.

• 3:25Griffin McElroy?

  I was traveling for basically the entire week after we recorded the last episode at Ace Combat on a handheld. Does not, simply doesn't-

• 3:32Russ Frushtick?

  Too many clouds.

• 3:34Griffin McElroy?

  Too many clouds, too many jets. Instead this week, we're going to be talking about a handful of things, but primarily, uh, a new game called Echo Weaver.

• 3:42Russ Frushtick?

  Possibly a game you've never heard of before.

• 3:45Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. I talked about this game to a lot of people while we were traveling, uh, for our live show, which by the way, great success. Thank you to everybody who came out to it. It was a fucking blast.

• 3:56Russ Frushtick?

  It was great.

• 3:56Griffin McElroy?

  And I think for sure we'll do one. Did you like my Borat, Chris?

• 3:59Chris Plante?

  Well, I was wondering, uh, Freshak, who came to see the show for you?

• 4:03Russ Frushtick?

  What?

• 4:05Chris Plante?

  Who came to see the show for you?

• 4:07Russ Frushtick?

  Like who attended the show?

• 4:08Chris Plante?

  Would you say that your wife came to see the show for you?

• 4:13Griffin McElroy?

  Awesome. I definitely saw. Russ's wife is a wife. Echo Weaver kicks ass. What is it, Chris?

• 4:20Chris Plante?

  Oh, that's a, you know what? I want to save that question for after the break because I don't know what genre this game is.

• 4:28Griffin McElroy?

  I'll try. I'll take a swing at it. It's a search, action, information game.

• 4:32Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, that's terrible.

• 4:33Griffin McElroy?

  It's a search, action, knowledge, knowledge-based game about learning and iterating and discovery. And it's called Echo Weaver. And we're going to talk about it after this quick break.

• 4:44Russ 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.

• 5:32Griffin McElroy?

  It seems like you take umbrage with my description of Echo Weaver as a search, action, knowledge-

• 5:36Russ Frushtick?

  Information game, which sounds like the dullest fucking shit imaginable.

• 5:41Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, no, I, it's probably not the best, uh, sales pitch. We know what search action is. It's the words we use instead of Metroidvania because it hurts, it hurts psychically because it's that.

• 5:50Chris Plante?

  Also no Metroid Brania exists.

• 5:52Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, we-

• 5:52Griffin McElroy?

  Metroid Brania?

• 5:53Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, we didn't invent that.

• 5:54Griffin McElroy?

  What is a Metroid Brania?

• 5:56Russ Frushtick?

  It's this. Metroid Brainias are Outer Wilds. So these are games where you don't necessarily unlock things as you play. It's more you unlock, as you said, information, which in turn could allow you to succeed. So Outer Wilds is an example. This is definitely an example. The problem is I don't like how Metroid Brania feels on my tongue when I say it, but it is, and yeah.

• 6:20Griffin McElroy?

  Well, we need to work search action in there. So maybe smarch action?

• 6:23Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, smarch action.

• 6:24Griffin McElroy?

  I did not realize that this terminology existed, but yes, what this game does is it takes the Metroid Brania genre of an Outer Wilds, where a lot of the game is about learning about the game and the world and learning about what you can do in this world and how to interact with it with the conventions of a Metroidvania or a search action game, if you will.

• 6:47Russ Frushtick?

  And I would even say more, even more like Outer Wilds because it is a time looping game.

• 6:52Griffin McElroy?

  It's extremely, extremely, I think, inspired by Outer Wilds. You play as a little guy called a Weaver. And, uh, what he does is he runs around and explore, explores the world. You fall down into a trash pit. It says cycle one, and then it's up to you to just kind of putter around, look around, check out what things are. It doesn't tell you what any of the buttons do because that's an important facet of the game. And you'll, you might do a couple of things. You might open up a little hatch that drains some water. You might go and figure out how you can summon a weapon and then, uh, then you die.

• 7:23Chris Plante?

  That time ticking down. That time, little bar up top, it's ticking down. And, uh-

• 7:27Griffin McElroy?

  You get one minute to start and then if that runs out, then you lose. And now you start over. Cycle two, you splash down into the garbage pit and you go again. And maybe you make it a little bit further. Maybe you find a little crystal and the little crystal extends your time limit by a minute. Or you can spend that a minute to heal yourself. You learn how to do that. And then you're gonna fucking run out of time again. And now you start over and you splashed out of the garbage pit and it's cycle three. Uh, and as you play, you are learning what, what you can do and what the rules of the world are. Imagine a Metroid game where Samus starts with everything. It's just, she doesn't know what the buttons do to, uh, to interact with them.

• 8:09Griffin McElroy?

  Or imagine in the Metroid game, uh, doors don't open when you shoot them. You have to, uh, crouch down and hold the down button for two seconds. And then you enter a special door opening mode that you did not know existed until you learned about it by exploring the world. That is, that is the, the whole deal with Echo Weaver.

• 8:28Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, there is a lot going on where the game, I think, at, on its surface, doesn't present as, quite as mind-blowing as it actually is. Cause on its surface, it looks like a, again, platforming indie game, 2D, et cetera. But because of the game is so smart about nesting that information in clever ways, you have these moments where, I mean, what are we allowed to really tell? I, I'm going to give you-

• 8:56Griffin McElroy?

  I think we should be pretty careful not to spoil any major kind of mechanical things.

• 9:00Russ Frushtick?

  There's one of the earliest, I think the first thing that you learn in the first five minutes, just to give you an example, to give people an example of like us thing.

• 9:09Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 9:09Russ Frushtick?

  Okay. So you've got, you get this weapon. It's called the glaive. It's basically a frisbee and you can lodge it in walls if you need to. Through the use of like audio logs and things like that, you find out that you can throw the glaive. And then if you down smash into a fire, like a torch, you will automatically teleport.

• 9:34Russ Frushtick?

  To where the glaive was. And so that's an example of something that like, why would you ever fucking down smash into a fire?

• 9:41Griffin McElroy?

  Exactly. Yeah. There are these arcane combinations of, of mechanical sort of inputs that you would not, you simply wouldn't do organically unless you do, and the game still rewards that. I definitely had one major breakthrough that I was so confused by, cause I, I had no idea why the fuck, like, I had done something to the world that was so weird and I didn't know what happened and I could recreate it, but I didn't know like what the purpose of this weird state that I was able to enter into was, until much later in the game, when I found like a memory log or whatever that explains sort of what this power is. You're going around the map and you're like discovering things and most importantly, you're finding shortcuts.

• 10:26Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, because again, that time limit is always there. Uh, there are progressive sort of elements to the game where you'll find, uh, like, a power up that will let you start with an extra minute or extend your health bar or like things like that. But the real main sort of thing that you are, uh, finding is the shortcuts and you are finding, you know, these, these secret kind of mechanics, these powers that you do have from the jump. Uh, I finished the game and then to make sure that this statement was true, I erased my save and started over. You can beat the whole game on the first cycle. You can find, if you know everything, there is no special unlock that you have to do before you're allowed to like, reach some, some, uh, point in the game. You can do everything.

• 11:10Russ Frushtick?

  Which was true of Outer Wilds as well. If you, you could do it.

• 11:13Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, for sure. If you, if you knew kind of what you were doing in Outer Wilds, it was very much the same, the same thing. I think that's, I think that's so rad and the constant sort of revealing of like, oh, fuck, those things I've seen all around the map that I've been running around and had no idea what they were there for. It was so easy, like it was so.

• 11:31Russ Frushtick?

  I was pooping in those.

• 11:33Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I was pooping in those. I didn't know that I was supposed to use them for a, a different thing. We're being kind of cagey talking around all of this stuff because I think we could spoil it pretty easily.

• 11:42Chris Plante?

  Yes. A, a challenge talking about this game is that stuff, the stuff that we don't want to talk about, because we don't want to spoil it for you, is by far the most interesting. And then like to me, a rung down from that is the actual mechanics of playing in this world, which is weaker. And then below that is like the writing, which will, we can save, but it's like really rough. But I'm curious, like, let's stay on the mechanic side because I think this game makes a pretty poor first impression, that it quickly gets passed, but that first loop where it drops you in, it, it is not the best that the game has to offer, is the platforming and the rolling and getting around.

• 12:23Chris Plante?

  And I'm curious, one, honestly, I'm just curious if you bashed your head against literally the very first thing that you need to do, because I found myself quite frustrated for the first like 10, 15 minutes.

• 12:36Russ Frushtick?

  Do you mean getting through the, that door? Is that what you're talking about?

• 12:39Chris Plante?

  There's a point where you go into, you have to jump across the thing and then it's dark. And then you need to dodge a, I don't know, like a pointy plant. And like, it just like, literally just like.

• 12:50Russ Frushtick?

  You gotta jump over this buddy.

• 12:52Chris Plante?

  I don't know.

• 12:53Griffin McElroy?

  That's one on one shit, man.

• 12:55Chris Plante?

  I just, I found myself pretty repeatedly struggling with like wrangling the controls and like getting around versus a like traditional platformer.

• 13:04Russ Frushtick?

  It does not have the polish that you would find in like a Silk Song or, uh, even.

• 13:09Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 13:10Russ Frushtick?

  Even like, uh, what did we just play? Well, Dweller, for, for example. It doesn't have that level of precision, which at times can be pretty frustrating because you're dealing with, at certain points, like pretty intense platforming challenges that does kind of require it. And granted, you could just restart or restart a run and it's not that big of a loss, but it can be a little bit frustrating. I think the, the, the larger challenges that I had weren't necessarily like core difficulty challenges as much as readability challenges. I think there are areas of this game that it makes it really hard to understand, like what is in the foreground, what is in the background, what can I jump on, what can I jump on?

• 13:51Russ Frushtick?

  And also like the way the maps connect. So you'll be in moments where you'll be in the sky and you know that there's an area below you, but you're not falling, falling in the right spot to like connect down.

• 14:05Griffin McElroy?

  That shit drives me crazy of like, there are parts of the game where you'll be up way high and you need to get down low really fast because you're up against a time limit or you have to. There are events that happen around the map only at certain times and you know, like, I gotta be here by the sixth bell. You can actually jump off and you can fall all the way down and then you'll be in that lower area. Unless it's like one of those arbitrary kill box places up in the sky where you fall and then it's, it starts you over.

• 14:31Russ Frushtick?

  It just sort of breaks the like uniformity of the world and like, it is incredibly clever puzzle box. I just wish it was more consistent in the way it works.

• 14:39Griffin McElroy?

  And since, since we already said the thing about, you know, the, the glaive teleport, the first thing that you learn, which it's so cool, the way it teaches you that, it will teach you, it teaches you everything like this, which is that it will trap you in a space and the only way out of that space is to do the thing that you are then going to learn about. Uh, it, it is rarely is it like, I don't know, telling you something that you're not immediately kind of in, in need of, of doing. But you can throw your glaive like way up in the sky and you might hit some shit. And then you might teleport to it and be somewhere that like, you're not maybe supposed to be at. Yeah. You're maybe, you were supposed to learn a bunch of other stuff. I definitely hit story beats that like, it then all of a sudden that you have like a note log,

• 15:22Griffin McElroy?

  sort of like Outer Wilds, the lead, uh, board that you have that you can access from the ship. You can do that in, in Echo Weaver. You have leads that you're looking at. I had one where I was trying to figure out the password to access like this elevator, but then like, I ended up teleporting past where it was supposed to be and it gave me the answer to like that code. It was like, I figured out the elevator code was this. And I was like, I actually didn't. I just kind of fucking teleported where I maybe wasn't supposed to go yet. I feel like there's a lot of stuff like that, that is.

• 15:50Russ Frushtick?

  I'm glad it gives you the option to like skip that stuff. It, it does bum me out that the game like, can't say like, well, you didn't figure that out, but.

• 15:58Griffin McElroy?

  You didn't figure that out, but you made it through, uh, this thing. Uh, there, there's moments like that that are very, very cool and rewarding. And then there's moments like that, that feel like, oh man, I just kind of clipped through that. I just kind of clipped through that wall and found that shortcut to that area I'm not supposed to be at yet.

• 16:13Chris Plante?

  The Outer Wilds comparison is interesting because I'm realizing now how much trouble a lot of people had with the controls of that game. And what I think both these games get at is if the ideas are good enough, if the little surprises and the discoveries are great enough, you're willing to put up with a lot.

• 16:31Russ Frushtick?

  I bounced the fuck off of Outer Wilds for like two years. I did not, I was not able to get over that first hump of like, what the fuck am I doing for so long? And just, I kept hearing and hearing and hearing how amazing it was and I was able to like, play it in a situation where it didn't make me motion sick and it finally clicked and it clicked like huge for me. But yeah, that's, Outer Wilds at a glance is not a pretty looking game. Uh, you know, you learn obviously as you sort of appreciate what's going on, how incredible it is. But it's not like when you're on that first planet, it's pretty ugly. And then slowly but surely you kind of like realize the majesty of it. And I think there are similarities here. I, don't get me wrong. I think Outer Wilds is like a top 10 of all time tier.

• 17:16Griffin McElroy?

  It's a masterpiece.

• 17:17Russ Frushtick?

  I don't think this is that, but I think this does, this does the thing. And, and I know Chris, Chris in particular, I think gets a little, uh, just like bored by Metroid brain search action games in general, just because we get a lot of them and we have to play a lot of them. And I think this is a good representation of why I really like the genre is because at its core, even if there are like consistent elements to them, people use it as a sandbox to explore some really, really divergent ideas.

• 17:50Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. I, I think the only thing that, I think Outer Wilds is a better game. There's a lot about this game that I did not, uh, think was very good. But what's very cool is that the things you learn in Outer Wilds are more or less siloed off to like the individual puzzles they correspond to, right? You learn about how black holes work. You learn about how the, um, whatever, what's it called? The quantum moon. You learn how to like do that. And that's like a really satisfying solution to that puzzle that you use for, for that and maybe a couple of other things. What's rad about this game is the things you discover are so transformative. You mentioned like having trouble with the platforming. There's. A dozen different traversal mechanics that make the game so much faster.

• 18:35Griffin McElroy?

  There are time trials. There are these little obelisks sort of all over the map that have time limits on them from each restart. So at the start of the cycle, the timer starts going and then it's like, how fast can you get to those things? And I tried doing a bunch of them and like, could not even come close. There are doors that will shut a certain number of seconds or minutes.

• 18:55Russ Frushtick?

  You'll get like, one of the doors is like, you have five seconds. Good luck.

• 18:58Griffin McElroy?

  You have five fucking seconds. Yeah. And you know, like, I'm clearly missing something. Like, there's gotta be some, uh, but like, after I had learned the many sort of traversal mechanics that you can just use from the start, from the jump, uh, it, it makes getting around the world, like, it is something you're going to use constantly. It's something that, like, inherently transforms what you thought you were able to do in this world. What, like, what platforms you thought, you know, I can't act, I can't reach that. I just, there's gotta be another way up there. You can actually, it's just, there's like a couple of different mechanics you gotta learn in order to do that. And, and that is maybe, you could maybe say it's a one-trick pony, but it's a fucking cool trick and it does a lot of stuff.

• 19:41Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. No, I think there's a lot going on with this game. Plant sort of alluded to it. I think the writing is a little bit millennial, cringe to some extent. It's like doggos. It has that.

• 19:53Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. You have a Pete, you have a cat, a pizza cat that lives in your brain. He's like an advertisement for, uh, for a pizza restaurant and you're like trying to figure out what the identity of this thing is. And also just kind of like the world that the game takes place in. They, there were these scientists doing experiments with the weavers and there's this long-lost alien civilization that you're kind of trying to, to put together and you're getting kind of in the business of a bunch of different NPCs. Uh, what's very cool is that all of those different side quests, there is a Groundhog Day-esque element to it where it's like, when you're trying to like, put together a perfect run,

• 20:36Griffin McElroy?

  you're like also trying to route through those things. Cause it's like, do I want to actually, do I want to help these people?

• 20:41Russ Frushtick?

  Can you save this guy from this giant rock falling on him?

• 20:43Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, exactly. Like that stuff is very, very cool. But on, on the whole, the writing, uh, I don't know. It left, it left me a little bit cold. It does the thing that games do sometimes where it's like, they assume you're gonna absolutely adore these characters without necessarily, uh,

• 21:01Russ Frushtick?

  earning it.

• 21:02Griffin McElroy?

  earning that to the degree that they're, they're like trying to go for. Um, so like, yeah, I mean, between that stuff and the, the just kind of bugginess of, of this, uh, very, very ambitious kind of mechanical sort of design, like it is far from a perfect game, but I fucking could not put it down. I, I, I picked it up after we talked about it, uh, after I guess last week's recording and then over the course of like five days, just like beat the shit out of it.

• 21:30Russ Frushtick?

  I remember right before the live show, you were just slamming on it.

• 21:33Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. I just like couldn't stop, like, I don't know, couldn't stop my, my wheels spinning in my head of thinking about like, oh wait, shit, if I can actually do that, then I can get to this area way faster and so on and so forth.

• 21:45Russ Frushtick?

  Just while we were talking about this, I was like, things were a little bit clicking for me.

• 21:49Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. And that's like, I don't know, that's a cool little satisfying experience. I, you know, I almost a hundred percented it in, I don't know, like eight or nine hours. Maybe it's not like the biggest thing in the world and it's, it scratches the brain itch in a really satisfying.

• 22:05Russ Frushtick?

  What are these people, sorry, these people clearly spent years working, I don't know, I don't know the developer, to, to release it in fucking October, in the heart of nightmare town in terms of releases.

• 22:19Griffin McElroy?

  On PC.

• 22:20Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 22:21Chris Plante?

  Like, there is a difference, right? Like, it, it, like, at least for the PC side of things, people are looking for games. It's not all Grand Theft Auto. Like, it could,

• 22:30Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 22:30Chris Plante?

  I don't know how it's doing on Steam.

• 22:32Russ Frushtick?

  I wasn't, it's not even a Grand Theft Auto thing. Like, a fucking Castlevania game comes out this week. Like,

• 22:37Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. Really hard. Really hard.

• 22:39Griffin McElroy?

  It is tough. But I don't know when a good time to release a game like this is, right?

• 22:43Russ Frushtick?

  February, January, like,

• 22:47Russ Frushtick?

  August.

• 22:48Chris Plante?

  I, I, I love doing this show because I am playing three Metroidvania games right now and I can't say which they are and definitely won't nod towards one that was already mentioned. But it really hammers home, like, this hobby is a collection of entire other hobbies. Like, you could at this point just like Metroidvania, the way you like wine or coffee and just get into all of the different flavors of it and enjoy all of the little details. I, again, like you said, Fresh, it's not my favorite genre, but there is a game that I'll talk about in honorable mentions that is very much in the same scope of it's, the people who love it, it's their entire own separate thing.

• 23:30Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. This, yeah, I, I'm, I'm really glad we played, check this game out. I'm really glad Ace Combat would not work on any of my devices, cause otherwise I probably, I probably wouldn't have played this game. I heard, had heard nothing about it.

• 23:42Russ Frushtick?

  I will give it up. Props to friend of the show, Jason Schreier, who recommended it to me. And when he did, I had not heard of this game and I probably, it probably would have passed me by. So.

• 23:52Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, same. Um, but I think it's real cool. And if you like, you know, the, the feeling of discovering a secret that was kind of there all along, that's like a thing that kind of only game, video games can do. And this one, this one does it so well. And I would, I, I really hope that they keep making them. Like, I would love another sort of, uh, search, search action Metroid Brania. Um, because I think there's so much about this game that is really special and really, so many moments that are just really satisfying.

• 24:25Russ Frushtick?

  I would.

• 24:25Griffin McElroy?

  And I don't think I need much more than that.

• 24:27Russ Frushtick?

  I would recommend for those that didn't get the chance, go back and play Tunic. Tunic is in a lot of ways.

• 24:34Griffin McElroy?

  I never got too far into Tunic and then this made me think, like, I struggled a lot with the sort of core gameplay of Tunic. I never really got to the secret, the real shit.

• 24:45Russ Frushtick?

  I think for a lot of people that like, wanna play it more as a puzzle game, you can lower the difficulty on the combat to make it like pretty manageable. And then the rest of it is so much of this shit where you're piecing together, like, how, what is it saying on this manual page that I'm trying to read, but the language is not English? And what does this little icon mean and all that stuff? If you like this stuff, Tunic is like one of my favorites of all time.

• 25:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I'll have to check that out. That, that one is like, probably at the peak of my pile of shame of like games that I didn't really give a fair enough shot. Um, that's Echo Weaver. Let's take a brief break and then I think we're gonna talk about some other stuff. Are we gonna talk about Dragon's Dogma?

• 25:22Chris Plante?

  Yeah, let's do some Dragon's Dogma.

• 25:24Griffin McElroy?

  Fuck yeah. All right. Quick break, then DD2, BRB.

• 25:29Russ 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.

• 26:17Chris Plante?

  Does this mean you're back on the Dragon's Dogma beat? Do I have another friend on the show who respects one of the greatest video game series of all time?

• 26:26Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, I liked Dragon's Dogma 1 quite a lot. My only issue with Dragon's Dogma 2 is that it ran like absolute fucking dirty dog water on everything I owned, on everything I owned. It also only gave you one save profile, so I started the game and then we had to do a Monster Factory about it. So I had to fucking delete my save. And then I was like, I don't really feel like starting over or playing through the whole game is Kilford Brimby, our, uh, Monster Factory creation. They have fixed, so, so we're specifically talking about this because Darker Risen, the DLC for Dragon's Dogma 2 just came out. And maybe, Chris, you can talk a little bit about the lineage of this. I know that Dragon's

• 27:05Griffin McElroy?

  Dogma had its, one, had its own Darker Risen sort of version that was expanded and improved. And that's the one that I sort of sunk my teeth into.

• 27:13Russ Frushtick?

  I like that they're both called Darker Risen.

• 27:15Chris Plante?

  I'll do, I'll do, well, I'll do, I'll do the speedrun of all of this really quick cause it will make sense. Dragon's Dogma comes out. People are like, I don't know, this must be like a Souls game or it must be a Zelda-like. And it's like very much its own thing. The best example I can give is, it is like playing D and D without the numbers. It is about going out and having these kind of like surprise adventures on the way to wherever you think your main quest is. But, uh, people are very frustrated by it. It's really janky. Dragon's Dogma Darker Risen comes out and it mostly polishes that stuff. And then people are like, hey, whoa, maybe this series is actually pretty good. But doesn't sell enough. We don't get Dragon's Dogma forever until Dragon's Dogma 2 announced. People are like, wait, what? They're actually gonna bring this thing back? And it looks

• 27:58Chris Plante?

  gorgeous? And it comes out and it's the exact same thing all over again. It runs terribly. It is extremely off-putting in, uh, how much it will punish its players. And I think it's fair to give a spoiler here because we've been doing this for long enough. The Dragon's Dogma 2, the like actual title card, doesn't appear until the end of the game because it's kind of a remake of Dragon's Dogma 1. And then after the game, there is a, I guess you could call it a post-game, an entire extra thing that is more, that builds upon what you played in that first game.

• 28:38Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. I also heard that there wasn't.

• 28:39Chris Plante?

  Dragon's Dogma 2 polished, cleaned up.

• 28:40Russ Frushtick?

  I heard that there, there wasn't really an ending to the original release of Dragon's Dogma 2 as well. Like, it just ended very abruptly.

• 28:48Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I mean, not like Metal Gear Solid V. Not an ending, but like it definitely was open for what they've added in the Dark Raze.

• 28:59Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, I don't want to get lost in the sauce here. I fell off because it it wouldn't run on fucking any like even my desktop PC like it was it could. It was okay. It would not run on Steam Deck, wouldn't run on my Rogue LAX, wouldn't run on anything. And then like the quality of life stuff was just so fucking bad. Just so bad. Like, uh, you want to fast travel? You better have enough fairy stones. And there's like two fast travel points on the whole fucking map and uh, uh oh, one of your, one of your pawns got sick. You don't know what to do about that. It's gonna fucking destroy like the whole city, you fucking dork. Why didn't you do it? So, things they have fixed. I want to say I haven't even gotten to the DLC yet, but I have played more of Dragon's Dogma 2 than I have

• 29:44Griffin McElroy?

  had before. I've like gotten way deeper into like the main story and just had a great time running around the world and exploring. My character is Griffin and he looks a lot like me and my, uh, my like road dog is Elphaba from Wicked. I made a green wizard and she's cool and she goes around and does not like any of the other pawns I bring around. Cause they'll be like, great job. And she'll be like arrogance is an enemy unto itself. We should instead strive to do better. And it's like Elphaba.

• 30:17Russ Frushtick?

  You had a tough upbringing. I get it.

• 30:20Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, no, it's hard to, hard to blame her. Uh, it runs amazing. It runs so well on my Rogue LAX. There is a casual mode which makes, from what I can tell, the combat's the same. It doesn't affect the combat. It doesn't affect the difficulty of like the core game. It just does things like make it so that you're not weighed down by items as much. And it gives you an eternal fairy stone that you can use to teleport to fast travel points at your leisure. Without having to worry about if you have like the consumable fairy stones that that you needed before.

• 30:53Chris Plante?

  I think you get that no matter what, I think. Like I think it's spread across the game now, yeah.

• 30:59Griffin McElroy?

  Well, then why is there, why do you get the consumable fairy stones if you have the infinite eternal fairy stone?

• 31:05Chris Plante?

  That's residual. There's some choices that are strange.

• 31:08Griffin McElroy?

  Maybe. It's kind of weird when you get them for like a reward for a big hard quest. It's like, thanks, a fairy stone. I don't actually fucking need that. All, I feel like a lot of stuff has kind of gotten out of, the game has gotten out of its own way a lot because now it really is just, I'm running around the world. And I see a cave and I go into it and it's creepy and I see a type of monster I've never seen before. Or I get jumped by a huge boss monster and it's like, there's a lot of times where I'm like, I actually need to run away from this fight. Cause this thing is going to clean my clock. Uh, and it feels so vast and so adventurous and so cool. And I don't know, I'm just really, really having a good time with it. And I feel like I'm seeing the stuff

• 31:53Griffin McElroy?

  that you kind of preached about, Chris, uh, when, when the game first came out, what, two years ago, three years ago?

• 31:59Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I think about that. Yeah. I, yeah, I'm I am very torn on this game for me personally. I'm very happy it exists and I think a lot more people are going to finally play this game. And I think all the things you described are generally good, but I don't necessarily see them all as like fixes per se. Because for me, the, the most exciting time I had playing this game was when those decisions to make it so that you couldn't save a game whenever you wanted. So that when you like died and there wasn't an auto save, you were punished, that you couldn't fast travel. You, when you went out exploring, it felt like you were taking tremendous risk.

• 32:38Chris Plante?

  And like my, my best memory of the game was going out and, uh, getting past a boss fight and like, great, I did what I set out to do. And then moving forward rather than moving back. Cause I'm like, you know, I can make it to the next town. And getting to a campfire and realizing I didn't have the equipment to camp. And then realizing, shit, I need to keep moving. It's getting dark. I need to see where I can go. Getting through the, the night by the skin of my teeth, only to find as the sun comes up that there are two dragons fighting each other. And I need to keep moving. So I scoot past them and let them go into battle against each other. And by the time I get past that, once again, night is falling and I see a castle and it's glowing on the mountain.

• 33:21Chris Plante?

  And I barely make myself up there just as nights once again, uh, coming down and I enter the castle. And it's not actually a town that I thought I was going to. It's literally just a fucking bunch of skeletons and ghosts waiting to kill me. And that, that shit of like, I, I have no choice but to keep going. I have no choice but to keep taking these risks. I need to be smart every second that I'm doing this. That was so thrilling. All of that said, that is not how I get to play most games. I was playing that game in a very fortunate period of my life when I could like, like, you know what? I guess I'm just gonna keep playing this for five hours. That is not the general experience.

• 34:02Chris Plante?

  And especially now that this game is on Switch 2, having a version of this game where, like you said, you don't have to have one save point that you go and place somewhere in the world to then like teleport to whenever you want, that you can actually go back to town as you need and use it the way that like most RPGs work, including D and D. That makes a lot of sense, but it's, it's just a very different game. When, when you can teleport back to town and take your quest and recoup whenever you want. It, it fundamentally changes what the game was setting out to do.

• 34:38Russ Frushtick?

  It is amazing because I think about the, my experience when playing it and like liking core moments. But so much of it in my memory was like, well, it's going to be 45 minutes of walking to get back to town. And, and maybe nothing of interest happens. Maybe I just fight the wolves that I already fought before. And so there was, there was a lot of like downtime, which sometimes would pay off and sometimes it wouldn't. Quite honestly, more often than not, it didn't. Um, but I liked the core of it and I love the exploration stuff. So this definitely, I haven't played it yet, but this definitely sounds like more my speed.

• 35:14Chris Plante?

  I'm curious, Griffin, for you, like, again, the selling point was the adventures that happened on the way to the adventure. Like you could take a, a cart from point A to point B and then go to sleep. And you might get woken up because your cart's being attacked or these like surprising things that are unscheduled would happen. Were you, were you still like running into those things?

• 35:35Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, for sure. I, you know, you still got to go from point A to point B. It's just that like, when you get to point B, you can set down a, a port crystal and then go back to town and do your shit and then go back to your port crystal and pick it up and keep, keep on rocking.

• 35:51Russ Frushtick?

  It's like they invented the internet in that world. It's like.

• 35:54Griffin McElroy?

  Some of that, some of that stuff I had done during my first attempt at playing Dragon's Dogma 2. It's just like, I ran into shit that Russ described of like, well, this is just, I've just done a lot of running and I haven't done like an interesting quest or like a fight or like, I feel like, Chris, I'm seeing more of that stuff.

• 36:11Chris Plante?

  That's good.

• 36:12Griffin McElroy?

  Because the waiting around and the repetitive kind of parts of the game, those, those are the parts that I feel like have been, have been whittled down quite a bit. Um, and I, I feel like you still get a lot of the, a lot of that feeling of danger and, and discovery, um, even though there are auto save, there are abundant auto saves and uh, stuff like that. I should point out, I'm also playing it on the, the casual mode, which like gives you a lot of these quality of life things. You can also just play on normal or hard, which just got added. Um, and I don't know what the fuck that would do, uh, to the game experience, but it would take it so far from the light of Christ in my eyes.

• 36:56Chris Plante?

  And, and the frustrations I've talked about even with the original version, like that's not the point of the game. The point of the game is to get your pawns. Like get a group together, Lord of the Rings style, and those pawns could be the characters that you are borrowing from your friends. And going on adventure and having this kind of group combat that feels like multiplayer, even though you're playing with NPCs. And the combat is very, it's, it's not, it kind of looks at first like Monster Hunter or Dark Souls, but it's not really either of those. It is using things in the environment to bring down enemies. It is jumping and climbing on them and like bashing them in the neck.

• 37:36Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I had a fight, I had a fight against a Cyclops, which is like one of the first big boss guys. It's like the basic big boss guy. Uh, only this one was at the tail end of one of these like, uh, expeditions that I was going on. It was nighttime. Lanterns were out. I had me and my three pawns. And we find this guy and he's asleep right next to, uh, like a wooden bridge that we needed to cross to get to our destination. So I was like, all right, let's fuck this guy up. Let's get some, let's get some points. Uh, and so we start fighting him. And in the course of the fight, he, uh, smashes the bridge, like while trying to kick our ass. He destroys the bridge. The bridge goes down. And I'm like, uh oh, shit, I'm gonna have to like find another route to our destination.

• 38:18Griffin McElroy?

  Or what I ended up doing was I jumped up on him and I climbed up to his head and I stabbed him a couple of times for good measure. But then while I was on top of his head, right next to the cliffside, I jumped off his head and cleared the gap and landed on the other side where the bridge was. And then I was like, wait, fuck, how are my pawns gonna get across? And right when I had that thought, he stumbled backwards and fell across the pit and landed. So his feet were on one side and he was holding on to the other side with his hands, like it was programmed into the game that the Cyclops would turn into a fucking bridge. And all my crew like ran across and then I just hit his hands a couple of times and he rolled out into the castle. And that whole thing like came out of nowhere and was so rad and so exciting and like, I don't know.

• 39:02Griffin McElroy?

  So dynamic and unpredictable and like that, that is the stuff that is so cool. I think the main story quests so far have been kind of a snooze. Like, yeah, sneak into the castle and find this note from the queen's regent because she's up to no good. And it's like, okay, I did that and ran into literally no resistance and it took me 20 seconds and now I have to wait for the next day. Like that stuff is whatever, but the actual adventuring out in the world, I think is, is, I don't know, it's, it's, it's just the best. It's really cool.

• 39:31Chris Plante?

  So glad you had one of those moments because there's so many other things like that. Like your pawns can catch you as you're falling from a high height. In the original version, I at one point was riding a giant, um, hawk. I don't know. Some giant, giant bird. And didn't realize like, oh, it can literally take me up into the clouds. So I think I have like the edge on it and suddenly I am hundreds of feet in the sky. Trying to figure out like, well, I can kill it.

• 39:57Russ Frushtick?

  How do I not die?

• 39:58Chris Plante?

  But like, that doesn't seem like the right choice for me right now. Uh, I, I played a couple hours of this on the Switch 2 just to see how it works. Shockingly well, like really works well. So if you're considering it and after hearing all of the issues with the original version, wondering like, how the hell can it be portable? Well, they've figured it out and it's working.

• 40:22Griffin McElroy?

  I would like to keep playing it if, you know, nothing else kind of comes after my, my time. I know we got some big stuff sort of coming out. I would really like to see the DLC. The DLC adds like a whole new continent and like a whole side story and a bunch of like specialized dungeons to, to explore. And like, I'm sure that stuff is great. I'm sure that stuff is really, really cool. I just, I don't know. I feel like I'm finally enjoying the original game, Dragon's Dogma 2.

• 40:49Russ Frushtick?

  I do want to provide one last little bit of insight into the developer mindset. I remember this is before the original Dragon's Dogma came out. So we're talking like 15 years ago, right before it came out, I went to a press event for Capcom and during those press events, they would show like presentations about the game and then show gameplay. There was a presentation for Dragon's Dogma that was about 40 minutes of the most boring slide deck I've ever experienced in my life, like top 10 most boring slide decks, talking about the currency and the world and the lore and the who these guys are, da, da, da, da, da. And it ends with like three minutes of climbing up a fucking giant and stabbing him in the

• 41:32Russ Frushtick?

  face. And I was like, lead, lead with that, guys. But it is again, more insight into who these folks are that are making these games is like the stuff that they care about. I mean, they do other things amazingly well, but it's, it's always interesting to see what they actually deeply care about.

• 41:48Chris Plante?

  One quick pro tip, and then we can get to honorable mentions and everything. But if you are playing this game for the first time and you get your pawns, listen to where they want to take you. They will shout like, hey, they're always trying to show you things.

• 42:02Russ Frushtick?

  They still talking ladders?

• 42:04Griffin McElroy?

  I have not gotten a single ladder mention. I feel like the signal to noise ratio is much improved.

• 42:09Chris Plante?

  There's so much that the developers were able to like very much hide in the game, knowing that the NPCs would guide you to it, which makes the adventures feel really cool. And it makes the NPCs feel like they're actually helping you.

• 42:21Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. No, I've had a number of times where like I've been running somewhere and one of my guest pawns will be like, master, I know. And first of all, I'm going to be like, don't call me that. Please call me something else. There's got to be another.

• 42:32Russ Frushtick?

  Just Griffin. You can go Griffin.

• 42:33Griffin McElroy?

  Griffin is fine. Um, follow me because I know the route.

• 42:36Chris Plante?

  Oh, that was the bird I was riding.

• 42:38Griffin McElroy?

  What?

• 42:38Russ Frushtick?

  It was a Griffin.

• 42:39Chris Plante?

  Griffin.

• 42:40Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, yeah. Maybe that makes sense. It seems, I know they know how to say that word. It's just they refuse to. Uh, and I was like, no, I know where I'm going. Thank you. And then reached like a dead end because the, you know, paths had been blocked by boulders. And then I feel like the pawn was really holding back, not being like, all right, did now will you listen to me?

• 42:59Russ Frushtick?

  There was a deep throat clear.

• 43:00Griffin McElroy?

  There's a secret forest that only I know about. So yeah, they always know. They always know where they're going. Uh, any mail?

• 43:08Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, yeah, we have one letter. This one comes from Ethan. Really surprised that Droid Deck wasn't mentioned in this episode. The Steam Deck is now a native Android app. Would love to hear your thoughts about it. So before our live show, Justin actually mentioned this. I don't think any of us have tried it yet.

• 43:26Griffin McElroy?

  I'm so curious. I mean, the only thing I want to know is like, does it require an internet connection for a compatibility layer that will get?

• 43:37Russ Frushtick?

  And that's still the case with the?

• 43:39Griffin McElroy?

  Game native and like Game Hub, like that shit works. It works. It works really well. It's just sometimes when I put my thing to sleep, it disconnects and then I lose all my, my progress. Um, that's the only issue. So like, if Droid Deck can do that, I'll, I'll check it out. I'm, I'm, I am curious about it.

• 43:55Russ Frushtick?

  I also know that there are teams right now, indie teams that are like, cause, cause SteamOS natively supports, sorry, I'm going to throw some jargon, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 or whatever the fuck. Uh, and, and some teams outside of Valve are trying to like port that over to other handhelds. So that's kind of what I've been waiting for. But it's cool to see that we're getting closer and closer to like a world where we can just run our Steam games on fucking everything.

• 44:21Griffin McElroy?

  God, God, it'd be so good. I've got a game right now that I'm playing that does, definitely does not need the fucking raw power of my rog ally S and therefore does not need the 25 pounds of, uh, video game hardware built into this thing. Let me play it on my little, you know, Retroid Pocket Nova or some shit. Um, cause that would be a, a much better experience, I imagine. Um, yeah, we'll check it out. Honorable mentions?

• 44:45Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I want to talk about Breath of the Wild. Uh, I have, for people that are curious, have taken a break from blueprints because I need to get through the live show and all the logistical, everything that was going on there. So I, I did not have spare, spare brain power at the end of the day.

• 45:02Griffin McElroy?

  To do 50 more Ajai puzzles? What's wrong? Are you scared?

• 45:07Russ Frushtick?

  A little bit. Uh, I will get back to it very soon, but for now I continue to play Breath of the Wild with my child. And there's an element that I did not really, I kind of rolled my eyes at it when it first came out. Uh, and now I kind of appreciate it. So when Breath of the Wild got remastered for Switch 2, uh, if you get that bonus upgrade pack, it included 60 FPS and all sorts of stuff. But the other thing it included was Zelda notes. Did you, did either of you guys try this?

• 45:32Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, I did with the Tears of the Kingdom, uh, Switch, Switch 2 version.

• 45:36Russ Frushtick?

  Zelda notes are just, it's at least in Breath of the Wild, it's probably comparable in Tears of the Kingdom, 120 short audio logs from Zelda scattered around the map. And so you'll walk up on like an arch and she'll be like, people used to have commerce here. And I remember meeting some guy and having a good time that day. And all it does is like more fucking context for this world, which more and more I'm like realizing just, I think maybe the most in-depth lore that Nintendo has ever built into any game is in both of these games, Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild. And they clearly spent so much fucking time on it that hearing all that stuff has been really interesting. And

• 46:19Russ Frushtick?

  in addition to that, I went out and bought the Dark Horse, I think it's called Building a Champion or something like that. It's like a 400 page fucking art book and maybe the nicest art book I've ever owned. It's like 20 bucks on, online. Uh, but I'm like blown away by how nice it is and how much detail you get. Like the different designs of like the Yigas and what the champions looked like at one point and then they changed them. And there's just like so much insight on the overall art design of the game that Nintendo generally does not offer. They usually are pretty closed book on that stuff. So if you are a fan, uh, definitely worth going back because it's just been kind of a feast.

• 47:01Griffin McElroy?

  I have been, uh, mostly, mostly playing Echo Weaver and Dragon's Dogma 2, but I also, I went to Annapolis, uh, this past weekend. We got tickets to go to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, which I've heard is incredible. And my kids were super excited and we got managed to get tickets. We've tried to get tickets past years, haven't been able to. This year we finally did. Booked an Airbnb, went up to Annapolis and then it got rained out by the tropical storm, uh, which was a huge bummer. So we took the boys, they dressed up in their Ren Faire costumes and we went to the mall, uh, just to like, you know, putter around and do some stuff.

• 47:39Russ Frushtick?

  What about you? Were you dressed up?

• 47:41Griffin McElroy?

  I did not dress up to go to the mall. No. Uh, we went to the Lego store. I was like, oh, we'll get the boys some Legos, something they can build because the weather sucks. And I saw there the PlayStation model Lego set, which I did not know existed, did not know had been made. And I impulsively bought it right then and there and have started building it. And it's been a primo.

• 48:04Russ Frushtick?

  They don't like it when you build it in the store, right there.

• 48:07Griffin McElroy?

  They do not like that. Um, it's so fucking cool, you guys. Like the, it has like a spring loaded top flap, which I don't know that I've ever seen on a Lego set before. Uh, the sides of the PlayStation like slide out and on one side is like a tiny little diorama model of Gran Turismo and on the other side is Apescape. Uh, and it's, it's just.

• 48:29Russ Frushtick?

  It's incredible.

• 48:30Griffin McElroy?

  It looks so fucking cool. I loved the, um, the Game Boy model build. Me and Henry did that one together and, uh, that one was very cool. And I, I don't know, I'm really, I'm really enjoying putting this one together. It's very satisfying snapping all those ridged sort of gray pieces around the outer shell of the thing.

• 48:50Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I tried it as well. And it reminded me that like these video game things in particular can be very hit or miss because if you look at the like Pokemon collab that they did, it was like.

• 49:01Griffin McElroy?

  A lot of the Pokemon shit is not so great. Uh, but some of it's really cool. I should, I should talk about that too. We did some of the Smart Brick, uh, Pokemon sets, uh, which like they have some big ones. There's like a huge Charizard one, or there's one that it looks like a Pokeball, but then you open it up and it's like a diorama of Professor Oak's lab. Like that stuff's kind of cool. What we've really enjoyed are the much smaller sets that are just like, here's a set and it's got Bulbasaur and Badoof in it and you can build it in 30 minutes. And then, uh, they make some sounds and this is a real issue with the Smart Brick shit. That don't sound fucking anything like these guys. I don't need it to be one to one, but when Badoof is like, it's like, what the, what's, what's he, the laser sound of the Star Wars ships is like really but, really busted, like

• 49:46Griffin McElroy?

  really fucking terrible. Uh, the Smart Brick stuff, I don't know.

• 49:50Russ Frushtick?

  I need to take a step back. What is Badoof sound? I'm not talking about Badoof like in the anime, but like in the games, maybe he sounds like that.

• 49:56Griffin McElroy?

  No, this doesn't sound like, I know what Bulbasaur sounds like.

• 50:00Russ Frushtick?

  What is Bulbasaur?

• 50:00Griffin McElroy?

  Down, like Pat.

• 50:03Griffin McElroy?

  Like, you know, this, but choppy or more, more bit rushed than that. Uh, and this doesn't sound like, they all sound kind of the same.

• 50:11Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:12Griffin McElroy?

  Um, I don't know. I thought the smart brick shit had a, a chance of being like, kinda neat. And we've not really, we don't, we've, they've been uncharged for the most.

• 50:22Russ Frushtick?

  I think the blockier, the better. And I think because the PlayStation one is, is like a rectangle. I think it helps a lot because it looks, it looks pretty damn close to the original.

• 50:31Griffin McElroy?

  It looks really, really cool.

• 50:32Russ Frushtick?

  You don't have to use your imagination and obviously the Game Boy, same thing. And they had an NES one too, didn't they? Or like a TV or something?

• 50:38Griffin McElroy?

  They did. They had an NES one. They had like, they, the one that, uh, Henry really wanted that we missed the boat on. And now they don't make anymore is the Mario diorama one. It looks like a CR2 TV. And you can like turn the wheel and it looks like he's going around the, uh, didn't get our hands on that one.

• 50:52Chris Plante?

  When you miss it, they like cost a bajillion dollars now. Is that how it works?

• 50:56Griffin McElroy?

  They do. Yeah. No, if you wanted to try and find one, it would have to be on like eBay or something, something, something like that. Um, there's a Donkey Kong arcade one that looks cool now. Um, I just really, I enjoy at night putting on a hockey game, drinking a cup of tea and working through two or three bags of a Lego set, uh, for adults.

• 51:17Russ Frushtick?

  That's nice.

• 51:18Griffin McElroy?

  It's, it's been a really, it's a really nice wind down.

• 51:21Russ Frushtick?

  Plant, what'd you play?

• 51:22Chris Plante?

  My, my wind down game during this trip and playing a lot on the plane on the A and Thor was Warhammer 40K Bolt Gun 2.

• 51:31Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, what's this game? What's this game?

• 51:34Chris Plante?

  Yeah. Well, I, I did not appreciate that I am a boomer shooter person.

• 51:39Griffin McElroy?

  That's crazy.

• 51:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, you love talking about them. So.

• 51:44Chris Plante?

  Yeah. Well, what I've, I like that they've evolved into being something more than just like, hey, we made Doom 2.

• 51:52Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Chris Plante?

  And I think that's why the, the, the genre or the subgenre is growing on me. Warhammer 40K Bolt Gun 2 is a sequel to a game that I think we talked about on Rusties.

• 52:01Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it was a Rusties.

• 52:02Chris Plante?

  But it, it was evolving the boomer shooter formula even then. It was these kind of big, open spaces, more like, I would say kind of quake, uh, than, than Doom. Mixing 3D space with like 2D pixel art. This game is very interesting because it feels like the history of Doom in a single game. At first it has that kind of yes, Doom 2 corridor things, but very, very quickly you are running through these humongous environments. So tons and tons of enemies zipping in and out and wheeling through your weapons like the modern Dune games.

• 52:41Chris Plante?

  Uh, it just looks like low poly or pixely, but the actual play of it has so much in common with the modern id stuff. And that I think is the sweet spot. I love these games so much more when they actually add mechanical complexity. And it's not just, you know, go find the key card, uh, use the same two or three weapons and get back and forth. The boss design here is really interesting, like a gajillion enemies are in it. Uh, whenever I try to like learn more about the series, I feel like how other people must feel listening to us talk. Uh, cause I'm like, oh, it's got Nergal and Zinch and, and Korn and Slaanesh.

• 53:25Chris Plante?

  Um, they're all here. Uh, but I like it. Is this ever going to convince me to care about the Warhammer 40K universe? Absolutely not. I do not find this aesthetic that appealing. And yet like on a purely mechanical classic FPS level, damn, this like, they have really figured it out with the series. And it is, as we were talking about, being able to have steam on anything. This is exactly the sort of game that has the potential to take advantage of that.

• 53:56Russ Frushtick?

  I think with Warhammer, it's probably very similar to Star Wars because my impression is they're doing the thing that we've been cheering Star Wars on for, which is making these very narrow genres. So I think there's like a space trader game in Warhammer. There's the RTS. There's the like third person gear style action game. Now there's the boomer shooter. So the idea, I think they're trying to like gateway people in that like the genre, but don't know a lot about Warhammer. And maybe that's going to be it. I agree. I've played a few of them and it hasn't happened yet, but I like the games. They generally did.

• 54:28Chris Plante?

  I think they've been doing that, to be fair to them, like way longer than the Star Wars thing. Like that's been their formula for decades at this point of, hey, you like Left 4 Dead? Well, guess what? Warhammer likes Left 4 Dead 2.

• 54:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 54:40Chris Plante?

  Um, they, they really do just go anywhere and everywhere with the series. Uh, and it mostly works. I like, again, I like the video games. I never quite looked forward to them and then I end up playing most of them.

• 54:52Russ Frushtick?

  Hmm, for sure.

• 54:53Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I've never, I've never gotten into, I've never gotten into.

• 54:57Russ Frushtick?

  He's too cool.

• 54:58Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, no, they seem very cool.

• 55:00Russ Frushtick?

  No, no, you're too cool. That's what I'm saying. You're too cool.

• 55:02Griffin McElroy?

  Oh no, I don't know about all that. I always, I don't know. I'm the type where every time I am at like a, a friendly local game store and I see people playing Warhammer, I always think like, that looks fucked.

• 55:14Griffin McElroy?

  I wish my life was completely different, um, so that I could enjoy that. Uh, cause I feel like I've just, I couldn't get, I couldn't start doing it now. And I also don't know how I would fit that into my, my day to day, but man, it seems neat.

• 55:27Chris Plante?

  You kind of have one or the other, right? Like you kind of, you either are going home and then drinking the tea and doing the Lego set, or you're going home, drinking the tea and you know.

• 55:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I'm sure people who play Warhammer also don't fuck with Legos in a major way.

• 55:39Russ Frushtick?

  I could see you, I could see you with like a loop, like a jeweler's loop, carefully painting the pants on like a little Warhammer guy.

• 55:46Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, I don't, I don't have much.

• 55:47Chris Plante?

  You specialize in pants. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 55:50Griffin McElroy?

  Folks, that's going to do it for us this week on the Besties. Plant, would you mind summarizing the games we talked about here today?

• 55:56Chris Plante?

  Oh my gosh, we talked about so many great games. We talked about Echo Weaver. We talked about Dragon's Dogma 2, Darkarisen, Breath of the Wild, specifically the Zelda notes, the PlayStation Lego set and Warhammer 40K Bolt Gun 2.

• 56:11Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, I want to mention, uh, certainly the Patreon, patreon.com slash the besties. Uh, go on there, support us. You make the show possible. We really do greatly appreciate it. And we also greatly appreciate everyone that came to the live show, which happened last Friday and it was a total fucking blast. As Griffin alluded to, we had so much fun doing it. If you have any photos that you took, uh, you can email them, [email protected]. I guess people know how to spell that probably. Email them there or just tag them besties live on, on socials and we'll see them and maybe we'll drop in a few more photos, uh, that we've collected. Uh, but we greatly, greatly appreciate everyone, uh, for showing up. We also greatly appreciate these new backers. We have Jasper, we have Ava S, we have Chance B and Jacob W.

• 56:56Russ Frushtick?

  Thank you for being backers of the besties over at patreon.com slash the besties. And, uh, yeah, we have a new Rusties out just this week and, uh, fun stuff coming.

• 57:07Griffin McElroy?

  Yep. Speaking of fun stuff coming, next week we're going to be talking about Castlevania, which almost certainly has a subtitle.

• 57:13Russ Frushtick?

  Castlevania Belmont's Curse. I'm going to, I'm going to say it's that, just off the top of my head.

• 57:21Chris Plante?

  That's right.

• 57:22Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. Castlevania Belmont's Curse. Can't wait. Um, so join us for that and, uh, join us every week here on the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friend play the world's best games?