Is Avowed Too Good for Our Brains to Comprehend?

The Besties discuss Avowed, the new game from Fallout 76 developer Obsidian. It is extremely our shit. Perhaps… too much so? What does that even mean? Listen to find out!

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I got one of you guys, this is like the only venue I have for talking about the truly, truly nerdy ways that I've been spending my time lately.

• 0:09Russ Frushtick?

  Oh no.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  It's bad, man. I got, I got a bunch of cables and wires coming to me today that I don't remember what the hell I bought them for. It's a really bad combo.

• 0:18Russ Frushtick?

  I do see about 600 or 700 Warhammer figurines scattered in the background there, so we're not talking about those.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  I don't, listen, I don't have a micro center in my town. Some kind of building a micro center in my closet. I don't know what wires. It's gonna be, it's this, you're just gonna be subjected to it. I just want to warn you guys about that.

• 0:39Russ Frushtick?

  Oh boy.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  It'll be, it'll be fun though. You guys know what transistors are?

• 0:44Russ Frushtick?

  Sort of. I know that game.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Dang it, I was hoping you guys.

• 0:48Chris Plante?

  I know like what a transistor is, but what are you gonna show me something?

• 0:51Russ Frushtick?

  I don't know what it's doing.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  No, I don't know. I'm, I was hoping you guys.

• 0:56Chris Plante?

  Oh, you're like looking for answers. So you, when you say you don't have a micro center in your town, you thought you could come to the podcast.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04Chris Plante?

  And then treat us like micro center employees and get some information.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  You guys wear that glasses. I just tell me what transistors.

• 1:12Russ Frushtick?

  We're your geek squad, is what you're saying.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, if you guys wanted to know about how to, uh, please someone sexually, I would hope you would come to me.

• 1:24Chris Plante?

  You, you started the episode really kind of suggesting that you were the expert, right?

• 1:29Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, you did.

• 1:29Chris Plante?

  This is comedy. This is some real comedy.

• 1:31Speaker 00

  It's a status game. It's a status game. Yeah.

• 1:34Russ Frushtick?

  Are you gonna tell us what you're building? No?

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Well, I'm gonna save it for the podcast once we start recording.

• 1:41Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, right, right, right. Yes.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Cause we're not recording yet.

• 1:45Russ Frushtick?

  No, of course not. Don't be silly.

• 1:47Speaker 00

  Just shoot this stuff.

• 1:49Chris Plante?

  Cable guy.

• 2:10Speaker 00

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

• 2:13Chris Plante?

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

• 2:18Russ Frushtick?

  My name is Russ Roshig. I know the best game of the week.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a video game club and just by listening, my friend, you have become a member. Welcome. Welcome to our illustrious ranks. Today, we're going to be talking about Avowed.

• 2:35Russ Frushtick?

  Griffin died.

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. Griffin is.

• 2:39Russ Frushtick?

  He died.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Yesterday on Clubhouse, we said he was stuck to the toilet. So I'm worried if the continuity is he is stuck to the toilet and then he died. Then that means that we didn't go send someone to retrieve him from the toilet.

• 2:50Russ Frushtick?

  We thought he could manage on his own.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  We do have people for that. No, we have people whose job is entirely to not let Griffin die on the toilet. So we, I, no, uh, Griffin is not with us today, but we are going to be talking about Avowed. Chris Plant, what's Avowed?

• 3:06Chris Plante?

  Avowed is the latest open world RPG from Obsidian. You might know them from Fallout New Vegas or the Outer World series more recently. People have compared this to their Elden Rings, but I think it's doing a lot of different things, which we'll talk about on the show. Needless to say, I, hey, scootin' right ahead. I really like this game and I'm really excited to talk about it.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Spoilers. Well, we'll, we'll unpack that and talk about so much more right after this.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  I am gonna say something to you guys that is a result of the way we cover games and the way that we interact with games. I was certain that Avowed was Ashen. I mean, I was certain in my, when I was loading up this game, I was looking for those crazy spindly guys.

• 3:57Russ Frushtick?

  I don't even know what Ashen is. What is Ashen?

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Oh, man. It was a, it was like another single word, open world, action RPG. That's like, it was a little bit more, um.

• 4:08Russ Frushtick?

  It came out in 2018.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  I know, man, but it's just, okay. I'm not saying like.

• 4:13Russ Frushtick?

  Now it would be a perfect time for a sequel.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  I wasn't bragging, like.

• 4:18Russ Frushtick?

  You thought we were playing an old game?

• 4:19Speaker 00

  No, but then I booted this one up and I was awed by Avowed. Listen.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  This is great.

• 4:28Russ Frushtick?

  It's a great game.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  This is a great game. Good job, guys.

• 4:31Chris Plante?

  Yeah, okay, so let's talk about what it actually is.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  It's not Ashen.

• 4:36Chris Plante?

  It certainly is not Ashen. This is, uh, once a year, a big open world game comes along that hits that popcorn feel just so right, where you're like, you know what? I am gonna explore a little bit more of the map to unveil unveil some of that shadow of darkness that's happening out there. Fog of War, I guess that's the right term. I'm gonna see what's over in that corner. And let me tell you, this map is humongous. It's actually like, I don't know, five or six open worlds that stand on their own and you travel between them.

• 5:11Russ Frushtick?

  But it's not, but it's not like Skyrim humongous.

• 5:14Chris Plante?

  Well, it's not one world.

• 5:17Russ Frushtick?

  But even if you paste them all together, I don't know that it would be as big as this.

• 5:20Chris Plante?

  Who cares?

• 5:20Russ Frushtick?

  I know, I know, I'm just saying we should set expectations.

• 5:23Chris Plante?

  The other thing is, it feels humongous because it is so dense.

• 5:28Russ Frushtick?

  I agree with that.

• 5:28Chris Plante?

  So the second you leave a castle or whatever, you immediately stumble across a small village. And when you leave that village, you are suddenly in a strange, like Avatar-style forest. And when you leave that, you're suddenly inside a caves.

• 5:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Chris Plante?

  You really cannot throw a rock in any direction without hitting something interesting that is intentionally meant to be there. What's most impressive, though, is it doesn't feel like a whole bunch of monster closets, like, stuck together. It actually does feel like a dense living space.

• 6:03Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, so that's the big differentiator, is I think when you first jump into this, it's very easy. And there are a lot of similarities with Bethesda, open world RPGs. Obsidian has made those games before, Fallout New Vegas being the first one. But the big difference here is the intentionality of basically this whole thing, whereas in Skyrim, for example, a game that I really enjoy, you will encounter probably 40 dungeons that are like more or less kind of the same vibe. And you don't have that same experience in this. Uh, this feels, uh, much more curated and focused in making sure that everything you're experiencing is like a handcrafted thing.

• 6:44Chris Plante?

  Justin, can you, can you tell us what type of fantasy this is? I guess just to set the, the foundation, everybody.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say it's like... I don't want to say reductive in saying like pop fantasy, but I will say that that's like, it is less, from what you encounter, it is less uh, sort of like obsessed with class and things like that, and more about these uh, godlike beings that are sort of like mortals that are touched by different gods, different deities, um, that are, some develop like powers, some are kind of shunned. They're sort of demi gods, I guess, but they're considered as a little bit more outsider-y than that, like, you know, uh, they're, they're treated as sort of freakish by people. There's like growths on their face sometimes.

• 7:31Russ Frushtick?

  I wanted to mention that specifically to Justin because there, I can't think of a game that has ever specifically woven in the fact that you can make like a truly bizarre character in the character creator and then have other characters like reference that fact. Like it actually encourages you to make a character that looks very irregular.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, they want, yeah, that is kind of like folded into the fiction is that you're a little bit on the, on the outside of that.

• 8:02Russ Frushtick?

  Um, and you've got like a mushroom face or a giant like tree face, like really.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can go kind of however you want with it, which is, it's interesting. I wish you didn't necessarily have to make all those decisions like right when you start. Cause I feel like you don't like, like when you start creating a character, then the amount of mushrooms I want on there is usually zero. But you know what I mean? I don't necessarily understand the context of why I'm, I'm getting the mushrooms, but um, it's, it's like the, when I say sort of like pop fantasy, it's, it's uh, I tend to think of fantasy in like two broad classes of like world-based versus like character-based where an author is like wanting to tell you about a world that exists and a character is helping you go through that world.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  Or it's, the story is following this character through the world and the only things that really matter in it are the, the ways in which it interacts with the world. Like a lot of like romanticy and is like this where there is an outside world, but you're only interacting with it in as much as it's important to your central characters. And that feels closer to this, right?

• 9:08Russ Frushtick?

  Is it like, is the world more normal in those situations or is it?

• 9:11Speaker 00

  It's just like there's less, your enjoyment of the story is less about how well you can keep all these different factions and stuff in your head. And more about how well you can just like. Be in the world.

• 9:24Russ Frushtick?

  It's a more humanist story than like a world.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  And I find this to be a, a, a, a pretty humanist, like, people aren't spending thirty minutes telling me about the different warring factions in some other kingdom that I don't have any context for. They're talking to me about me and the person that tried to kill me and why they think.

• 9:43Russ Frushtick?

  Someone stole my potatoes.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Yes, right. Do you have, you look like a man who can find a potato?

• 9:48Chris Plante?

  Yes. What I, I, the, the little tweak I would make to that is if you are the sort of person who wants that, I guess, capital F fantasy or high fantasy or whatever, it's there, but it's for the people who are going to read every note in the book.

• 10:05Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Chris Plante?

  And there is a lot of it. And I've, I've found myself weirdly pulled into it in a way that I, I don't think of myself as with these sorts of games. Maybe that's because over the last few years, since I guess, like, the last, what was it? Skyrim? Like, I've gotten more into that sort of thing. But I'm really intrigued by the top level story here, which is basically, i- it's about colonialism. It's basically Avatar. It is the closest comparison of you are this person who is sent in on behalf of.

• 10:42Russ Frushtick?

  A Jake Sully, if you will.

• 10:43Chris Plante?

  You're the Jake Sully. You've been sent in at the, uh, king or whoever's personal request, and it's your job to figure out in this, this strange new land, how you're going to solve for all of the problems that are happening there. There is a virus that is spreading in some form that has some real COVID vibes. There are, um, different warring factions.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  I just got it. Okay.

• 11:08Chris Plante?

  Yeah. Yeah. Your, your, your group, like, your nation has partnered with, like, a extremist religious cult, uh, of soldiers. There's like, i- it, there's all the familiar pieces, but what I enjoy about the game is it does not bash you over the head with all of this, at least not for the first ten or so hours. Starts to become more and more a piece of it.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  It's very smartly. It very smartly does. I mean, I alluded to this, but someone kills you. And you come back to life and you are trying to find the person that killed you. And that is like, that's not the only thing that you're doing, but it is the thing that your brain can be like, what was I doing? Oh yeah, someone killed me. Right. I gotta go find them. There is another quality that I want to compliment here, and I'm going to struggle to articulate it. So I'm hoping you guys can help me, but there's also, I feel like more moment to moment fun or pleasure in combat scenarios where the outcome does not seem predetermined when I enter the encounter. Where like a lot of Bethesda games, I feel like you go into the encounter and it's like,

• 12:19Speaker 00

  you either get flattened or you flatten them.

• 12:22Russ Frushtick?

  Well, you flatten them by hiding in a bush and shooting arrows until they're all dead.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  Exactly. Or you like rig something up or you do something stupid and Fuss Rudolph, the guys off the cliff, whatever. This actually had a lot more encounters that I felt like if I died during them, I felt like, well, if I tried this a little bit differently, I think I could get there. Like there's a, there's a place in of uncertainty in there that I feel like doesn't exist with a lot of these open world games where you can kind of min max your way to just like blowing through the actual gameplay. And they're like actual like game part of this is still fun. Like it's, it's, it's enjoyable and it has a good like balance of tension and power.

• 13:02Chris Plante?

  That also happens on the story level in ways that I found really exciting. Where you have your stat sheet like you do in any of these games. And over a decade ago, I felt like you would play this sort of game. And you would get into an encounter and it would be like, oh, well, you have just enough perception or communication to like skip this, this event. And congratulations, your reward for being very good at that is you don't have to have this fight. Where here you pick that, you also pick kind of like your archetype at the beginning, like mine was some like basically library nerd. And you would get into these conversations and you'd be like, oh, great. And I, my, my little thing came up. That means I get to pick a special thing. I can pick my library.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  You get three points, three extra gold.

• 13:48Chris Plante?

  Great. And it'll be like six out of six perception plus library. Wow. This must be great. And I'll say that and I'll be like, well, um, actually, uh, you're not from around here. And then like the ogre would be like, Did you just contradict me and then would start a fight?

• 14:04Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Chris Plante?

  Like, the, that you actually had to think through what you're doing and not just spam, this is quote, best option.

• 14:12Speaker 00

  There's another funny thing that it does where like, if you don't have the stats for a particular thing, you can see that there is a thing that you could say if you had the stats. And sometimes it's like intellect. So it's like, someone will tell you something and they'll be like, one out of four intellect, nothing. And then below that, it's like, sounds good to me. It's like, oh, man, if I was a little bit smarter, huh? And you can like, convincingly threaten people if your might is high enough. But that's smart because that is just folding for this kind of game, right? Which isn't Dungeons and Dragons. You are basically consolidating a conversational style, like conversational stats and physical

• 14:53Speaker 00

  stats into one thing, right? What they've done is they've removed intimidation and that sort of like social dynamic and just folded it into your combat stats.

• 15:04Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it's, it's basically happened since Fallout, basically. I mean, that's what this is kind of building off of is in New Vegas, like if you had zero intelligence, all, the only response you could have was like, ugh, ugh, bleh. Like you'd just like have these one word things and they're evolving it in really interesting ways where it's not just that stat thing, but it's also, as you mentioned, like, that doesn't grant you an instant solve to every problem.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  It also makes the conversations, I think, a lot more engaging.

• 15:35Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Because I'm paying attention to what I could have said, what I should be saying, like, it, I think it really brings you in.

• 15:42Russ Frushtick?

  You can really tell that their priority on narrative kind of trumps a lot of other things that you see in Bethesda style RPGs, where when you have a giant continent sized map and you have to fill it with content, like, the narrative kind of takes a backseat automatically. There will be individual quests that are interesting in a Skyrim game or an Elder Scrolls game, but the broad narrative, like you talk to a lot of guards that more or less just mumble the same thing. And by narrowing it down and focusing it, you're making sure that you're having a meaningful back and forth with anyone you can actually speak to.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Can I ask you guys what your style was, like your game, like what, what, what kind of characters did you play?

• 16:23Russ Frushtick?

  So I started as a wizard and I was like doing a wand and like an offhand book and doing spells and things like that. I will admit, I was kind of disappointed. It felt like it was pretty underpowered, even though I was constantly like upgrading my gear. And then I got like a random gun off of some guy, like a unique gun that like did double the, even though I hadn't invested anything into guns, did double the damage of what I was doing and I just like respect into that, which didn't feel great, I'll be honest. I imagine maybe if I had gotten a special wand, I would have felt the same way, but I eventually just migrated over into like more of a ranger ranged class.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Hmm. That's interesting.

• 17:04Chris Plante?

  I, I did wizard and stuck with it. It went much better for me, but I do agree, it's a, it is a slower start with it because I think they, I don't know, I feel like there's, this is common in these sorts of games where there will be a class where you start really weak, but you can become the most powerful character, or you start really strong, but you're not going to be as powerful as say the wizard by the end of the game. With this, yeah, it started weak, but once I started getting all of the upgrades, I got better wands. You get these grimoires, these spellbooks, and you can unlock greater and greater spells that you can cast. And by the time I am, I'm like probably halfway through the second big open world.

• 17:46Chris Plante?

  My wand, whenever it hits, hits three people in a row. It like multiplies on damage. Each person it hits, it explodes and stuns anyone near it. And then my grimoire, I have like a love, like three levels above what I think I should actually have abilities, where I rain ice on everything, freeze the entire battlefield, and then create a vortex that pulls everyone into the center, loads them up into one area, and then I can pound that like area with whoever like my, you have other characters who can do special moves.

• 18:21Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, you have companions.

• 18:22Chris Plante?

  So I, it started to like. Reveal itself, the other version of that, that I was playing before I switched to this style with the wizard was I had created a like build where I had a staff that walloped people. It was like I could create a divine staff. It would wallop people and steal their essence. And then I had a like soul suck that would steal their health. And I could basically switch between these and just plow through large, again, battlefields of enemies using this power.

• 18:54Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, the spells are cool. I just, the stuff that I was using, whatever, because I didn't have the right gear or something, just like was not from a numerical standpoint.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  There's also a weird thing that I ran into. I also, I didn't intentionally go the wizard. I was gonna go with a ranger, but then like you find, I found a grimoire as like an item. It's really, the grimoire thing is weird. Like you find a grimoire as an item and all of a sudden you have access to like very easy access to four different spells.

• 19:19Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  And it's like so insanely useful that I just switched to wizard from that. But it's weird because if you have one of those spellbooks, your unlocks for quite a long time as wizard are like kind of not that impressive. It's kind of boring because it's like you're not getting new abilities. You're just kind of like leveling up the ones you already have because you've been carrying around this book. And then it gets weird, like the way it handles, there are some spells you can kind of map to the control pad. And then there are some that are attached to the grimoire. And then you have the ones that are on the, the wand itself. I wish that was a little bit better explained.

• 19:54Chris Plante?

  My, my recommendation for people who are gonna be just hopping into this is re-spec regularly. It doesn't cost a whole lot of currency to re-spec.

• 20:04Russ Frushtick?

  No, it's very cheap.

• 20:04Chris Plante?

  And then also really play two classes at the same time. When you tap Y in the game, you switch your loadout effectively. And really, I think the game wants you to have, almost certainly always have one wizard or spellcaster loadout, and then something else, whether that is like a rifleman, or a melee person, or whatever. Because even when you adjust your stat sheet, that other class will still be, as fresh discovered with like the rifleman, still be very powerful. And I think it wants you to experience all that type of play. I would also say, again, with like the wizard specking like Hoops is talking about.

• 20:47Chris Plante?

  Unless you're really gonna commit to wizard, I don't think you need to put all of your points into that one. You could just put them wherever you want, knowing that you can change it at a later time. Um, I respect like, I don't know, probably two or three times now. Um, and it's been a big help and just allowed me to have more fun because I kinda chase whatever the coolest item I have is.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  That's really good to know. I wish the game would like.

• 21:11Chris Plante?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 00

  You know, and, and this is, I kinda wanna touch on this for a second because I, we've been very glowing and like we, we really, it, this game is exactly kind of up our alley. I would say that there, I, I do not know for me if it hits like transcendent where it's like, even if this is not a thing that you would necessarily go for, I think it's a very good one of those. And like, there's a lot of iterative things in here that, that are just like fun, right? Like, if you're a, if you are a wizard, you can cast an ice spell on water, make a little platform at any time that you want. That's fun. Like, there's fun stuff, but there's things like when you're walking around a new town, right? Your partners will say a lot of stuff really fast. Like, they will tell you about everything

• 21:57Speaker 00

  as you're walking past it in an offhand way where they're just like, oh, that's a good place to get this. Hey, you know, this is the, and then they'll be fucking silent for 20 minutes. It's just like nothing. They have nothing to offer you. So I would say like immersive qualities are not great, um, but if that is not exactly what you're, you're, if you're not going for that, if that's not your, your vibe, then I, I think that it's, I just don't think it's necessarily something that you need to like, uh, everyone needs to play.

• 22:29Russ Frushtick?

  There's a part of me that wishes that they may be focused more on narrative and less on like, things like upgrading your gear and like finding materials to upgrade your gear and enchantments and things like that. Because, so the game, the way the game handles enemy difficulty is really interesting. I've never seen this in a game before. Enemies are ranked based on.

• 22:56Russ Frushtick?

  The gear you have. So if you have a rank two wand, you can do normal damage to rank two enemies. But if you find a rank three guy, he's gonna fuck you up really bad. And you're basically gonna do no damage to him. So to some extent, it is kind of funneling you in very specific directions. Because you know, oh, I can't win this fight because I just don't have the proper gear. And you kind of know that before you even start the fight, which is both good and bad. But what it ends up doing is making you feel a little railroaded. Because you're like, oh, I just need enough materials to get my wand up before I could even attempt this thing.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  So the railroading is the other thing that was really bothering. There was a quest that I got early on that was like, uh, get a fine, one fine piece of armor and one fine weapon, like fine quality.

• 23:47Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  And the, like, to buy those was like, uh, it doesn't matter if you're listening to this.

• 23:53Russ Frushtick?

  A lot.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  It's a lot. And it takes a long time. And it's not to get like a special magic one. This never happens in video games. But I legitimately had to like, go out and like, look for money to buy these things. And you talk about the importance of like, switching between the two. It very, like, I agree, but at the same time, it took so long just to get these two items to be like a good wizard. I, you know what I mean? Like, the idea that I would like, collect all the other stuff that I like, you know, have the wherewithal to do another class.

• 24:24Chris Plante?

  This is all super helpful because I didn't see or notice any of this. And I'm realizing this is expectation of play. And that's like an issue for it. And by that, I mean, there are two ways that you play open world game, right? You play an open world game and it gives you the main mission. And you go and do the main missions. And then there are side quests and maybe you do like a couple of them. Or you are the type of person who turns on the open world game. They give you a main mission and you go and do everything else before you even do the first mission. And I'm the latter. So when you, the things that you're talking about of like, um, Hey, I needed money for this, or I didn't even know that there was a leveling

• 25:08Chris Plante?

  system on the enemies. I've never like gotten into a fight that I couldn't get out of. And I think that is because since I did all of this other optional stuff, since I was just spent the first, I don't know, again, 10 hours exploring. Once I went into the pipeline of the mandatory stuff, I like zip through it.

• 25:28Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, but like I'm not even like, I did the side stuff too. So like you weren't running into like bounty missions where you were fighting guys that were like clearly taking.

• 25:38Chris Plante?

  I didn't know bounty missions existed until I went to the bounty person and then I turned all of them in.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  See, the bounty missions that I ran into, they were too hard. They told me to do the bounty missions to get the money to buy the fine weapons. But the bounty missions were too hard for me to do, to do the, to get the fine weapons. And there was really this time where I was like, I don't, I don't, I don't really know what to do. Cause like all the quests were ranked too hard for me. And I didn't realize what you just said about the, um, the ranking of it. I guess what we're saying is like, this stuff is not that important. Like I wouldn't get too hung up on it. But if you are a systems focused person, like, like, uh, it seems that Russ and I are, I do think that you're gonna get, there's some stuff that could be communicated a lot better.

• 26:21Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I think it is important too, in that it's, um,

• 26:26Chris Plante?

  the meal's not gonna taste the same to every person in the way I think some of the best games can. And but I don't want it like to be that rigid, but that like I was able to have that experience, which I'm, it's great. I really loved it. But it's a bummer that like the game was not so honed that you could have the experience I had to. Like when I go into, into, into Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, I think everyone's gonna have a fucking fantastic experience, no matter which direction you go. Um, and this, I, I do agree. I think probably she messaged me the other night. You're like, Is there such thing as a B plus game? And B plus, A minus, it's that thing where it's like,

• 27:07Chris Plante?

  it's so close to excellence, but there is something that you can just kind of feel in the game where it's, it's not Tears of the Kingdom, it's not.

• 27:17Russ Frushtick?

  And that's fine, like, I don't need every game to be.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  I don't need, I don't need every game, but, but Chris, man, you're hitting on something that's like, Russ asked me, is this game like really your shit? And in Slack, I was like, yeah, it's like 100% is, and I really, it is like, it's 100% like, this is the kind of thing that I like, but it's almost, it's almost so much the kind of thing that I go for, that I don't know if it'll be sticky. You know what I mean? Like, it's so, everything is so how I would want it to be. You know what I mean? Like, it's, it's, there's not like much surprise, like, it's all very consistently good. And what?

• 27:57Russ Frushtick?

  It feels familiar to you.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  It feels very familiar, not, but it's not in a, uh, not, you know, not like in a way that they're, it's not derivative, it's just like, it's not challenging me in any sort of way where I'm like engaging with it on a different level that would make it sort of, that, that's the kind of thing that gets games in my head.

• 28:17Chris Plante?

  I, I was thinking a lot about, um, Like a Dragon from last year, the Yakuza RPG, right? And there are, that was probably my favorite game of last year. There are so many things about that that are not what I would ever ask for in a video game. I would not ask for turn-based combat, I wouldn't ask for the Pokemon minigame, I wouldn't ask for just so many mini-games that aren't very like fleshed out. I wouldn't ask for having to spend 10 hours of a story in it, and yet,

• 28:47Chris Plante?

  if you're right, it challenged me in a good way, it surprised me, it did things that I didn't know I actually like. I felt like I was learning about my taste when I played the game. And I agree, this is, this is not, to be fair, a criticism of this game. It is almost in a weird way, a sort of compliment of, it is every, if you ask me, what is your dream open world RPG? It would look a lot like Avowed, it would look a lot like, where it's like, I have melee combat and it's sick. I, you have guns and they actually feel good, you have all these wizard spells and they're like completely overpowered. Also, the writing is excellent and it reminds me of Pentament.

• 29:28Chris Plante?

  Great, make it. And then I'm playing, I'm like, yeah, this is like, this is exactly what I want.

• 29:35Chris Plante?

  And yet, I'm waiting for it to do that thing that surprises me and is the thing that I would have never guessed.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Uh, but yeah, that's, yeah, that's, that's interesting. That's, man, that's real damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of thing.

• 29:48Chris Plante?

  Oh, for sure. It's not a fair.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  I would also say, it also seems to me that it's laudable and something I want to mark is that there's been a long time, like 10 years or so, where I feel like a game like Avowed would have really been weighed down by some sort of microtransaction garbage. And I feel like they have done a real admirable job of making you feel like, once you're in the world, you're just in it. Like, you're not, they're not trying to weasel more out of you. They're not, you know what I mean? It's like, you could see the hooks in a lesser game, or a game that was released a few years back, you know, where you would be buying a lot of.

• 30:27Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  I don't know, fucking.

• 30:28Chris Plante?

  Well, it has its business model, right?

• 30:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:30Chris Plante?

  It's Game Pass. But that of the models, I mean, Game Pass has been a real mixed bag and had, seems to have struggled over the past couple of years. But it, the goal for Microsoft is, we just want you to spend as much time in the game as possible because you enjoy it. And that, again, when you open the map in this game and you see how much there is after you go through the first world and then you see the larger world map, it is clear that they want you spending a shit ton of time.

• 31:01Russ Frushtick?

  Let me also mention, like unquestionably one of the best Game Pass games that's ever been released, like as a day one release.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Oh, this is an unbelievable value. I mean,

• 31:12Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  unbelievable. This is, I, when I'm saying that this game won't be sticky for me, why worry? What I mean is, I don't think I'll be fixated enough that I'll keep returning to it, even knowing that we are gonna play different stuff. I mean, like, we're already looking down the barrel of new, you know, Yakuza games and stuff like that. Like, I, if I was just playing this, I would be thrilled. Like, it is, it is sumptuous, delicious. A satisfying, satisfying too. That's the other thing that I really like is you can have a satisfying, small adventure. Like you can have a moment and you can have a quest and it's not a four hour thing that's like just stringing you along.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Like it's encapsulated. You can go through little arcs and then it's, it's done. It's really good.

• 31:58Chris Plante?

  I want to share one, one experience in the game really quick and then we can go on to the next section. And I won't give any story details here. I'll just talk about what happened. In the second world, maybe an hour into this huge open space, I found what I think is the final mission of the second world. And bashed up against it and came across characters who are like, hey, you don't know a whole lot about us. What are you even doing here? And there's like things I could learn by talking to them, but eventually there's not much. And there came a choice of like, do you want to like just pick a fight anyway?

• 32:38Chris Plante?

  And I did. And I proceeded to go through this whole, what felt like a end game mission for this section. Learned so much story along the way. And what was so unbelievably cool is the like notes and stuff that I'm finding as I go through this mission. Provide enough information that I am actually learning what I'm going to discover in the game later on. I get to the end of the sequence and the final character is like, hey, um, yeah, sorry. You uncovered a lot of this. I think you should really go talk to this, this and this character. Because I think they're going to be like really freaked out.

• 33:20Chris Plante?

  And then sure enough, I go back to those characters and like, that's crazy. I was just going to talk to you about this, but like, thanks. And that they had the writing there that, that, that one, it's cool that you could do it. But two, that it actually didn't break the game. The game was ready for me to do it and had not just planned for that, that sequence to respond to it, but all the other dialogue I was going to count encounter related to it, to respond to it. And I even found times where things I read in a book became information that I could use in conversations like that later. That level of storytelling detail is just so unbelievably cool.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  There's also smart little things to plant, like the books that you're talking about, they are blue. Or at least by default, they are blue. And after you read them, they're not blue anymore. Oh, yeah.

• 34:13Chris Plante?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  There's a lot of blue books in this room. Allow me. Oh, stand aside, everybody. I'm going to make all these blue books gray. Am I going to read the text? I will not. Oh, this is a good video game. Let's take a break. Can we do that?

• 34:31Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  And we'll talk more about Obsidian and what that means in 2025. Here's my question to you guys. Is Obsidian the new Bethesda?

• 34:43Russ Frushtick?

  It's so weird because their origins obviously were very entwined with Bethesda for years. Like, again, we've mentioned Fallout New Vegas, but honestly, they were making Bethesda, quote unquote, Bethesda-style, choice-driven RPGs forever. And so, I, I mean, look, Avowed is not going to sell Elder Scrolls or Fallout numbers. There's no question. Well, beyond the game pass, like in terms of player count, it's not going to hit those numbers. But for me personally, like, I find this game 10 times more interesting than Starfield. And Starfield's obviously a much, quote, bigger game.

• 35:27Russ Frushtick?

  But the the focus curation thing is like, that's my jam. I want it to matter.

• 35:32Chris Plante?

  The comparisons between this and Starfield are just brutal to me for for a specific type of player. And I get that like, but if you are the person who wants that density of story and ideas, if you're the person who wants good combat, if you're the sort of person who wants a world that is intentional, this is that where you're right, Starfield, that decision of like, well, there's just gonna be a lot of space because it's big and the story is going to be a real pain in the ass to get into. And and there's just, you know, instead of blue books around that you can grab, there is just infinite clutter.

• 36:12Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I don't even I don't even know. Let's let's not even talk about Starfield because we've already like ragged on Starfield. Let's talk about Skyrim, which is a game I think more or less we all enjoy and is a very beloved game. There are elements in here that are like, oh, God, I wish Skyrim did that. And one of them, Plant was sort of alluding to, when you're walking through a dungeon or a town or whatever it is, if you could pick something up, it has value. And if you could pick something up, you're not stealing from anyone. You don't have to worry about like, oh, no, the cops are gonna chase me because I stole a thing because it was colored red for some reason. And that simple thing of scoping and like, oh, this is a priority versus not, is really just like hammering home the priorities of

• 36:57Russ Frushtick?

  this game. And I don't know what having 10,000 cups that you can pick up in a Skyrim dungeon does for anyone. Like, I don't know who loves that.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  But Skyrim was released 14 years ago.

• 37:10Russ Frushtick?

  But that's like a more intensive effort, like graphic, like, that's not because it was an old game. Those, if anything, too ambitious.

• 37:17Chris Plante?

  They've learned from it. I I think.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  But I'm saying the learning is, I don't know that there's a meaningful difference between. I guess here's here's what I'm interested in, right? When you release Skyrim or Elder Scrolls 6, is it on a separate fork from this?

• 37:34Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  Or do you feel like Elder Scrolls 6 has to be in conversation with a lot of these, like, quality of life things that Obsidian is so good at? Like, or is it its own thing? Like, is this a like, a lineage? Or is this a separate branch?

• 37:54Chris Plante?

  What I would worry about with the next Elder Scrolls is that it misunderstands the value of Baldur's Gate 3 and the scope and the freedom of Baldur's Gate 3. Because I think the argument for you can pick up anything, or some things are stealing, is we're trying to create a realistic world, we're trying to give you so much freedom, and freedom means doing a lot of things that are completely benign, or sometimes get you in trouble. But what Baldur's Gate 3 understood is even with that, freedom is only valuable if the world responds to what you're doing. It's not really actually exciting to just be able to do random shit that has no response from the world. Feedback is like the pleasure of video games, right?

• 38:38Russ Frushtick?

  Well, Bethesda would argue that cops chasing you because you stole a cup.

• 38:41Chris Plante?

  Yeah, unfortunately, I think you're right. But I, that's where I'm curious what, I'm curious what Elder Scrolls will do next, because I think there are three paths really. I think there's this, which is the everything here is intentional, and it's a bit more restrictive, and freedom exists within these very tight boundaries that we set. Baldur's Gate is, we have a lot of freedom in terms of how you actually engage with the world, and you will know, whatever you did, how it impacted the world by how the game responds to you. And then there's whatever Bethesda is doing, which has bits and pieces of that, but also

• 39:23Chris Plante?

  just has, and it's just big, and it's, it's, I guess, you can get lost in it, and I don't, I don't find that especially appealing, especially because if you're going to do that, then you're starting to compete against the no man's skies of the world that are just doing that thing in, I think, more interesting ways.

• 39:42Russ Frushtick?

  I will say, I have, I find great joy in getting lost in these worlds. Like, I think Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild are two games that you very easily can get lost in, and you discover things as you're, like, that moment of like, I went into this cave and crazy ass shit happened, does occasionally happen in Bethesda games. Like, Skyrim has like a few of those, like, very curated experiences. The question is, do they cut back on the stuff that isn't that, that is just a little bit filler, and to make the whole experience feel better? I would like for that to happen, but I think the standard is such that they've set

• 40:23Russ Frushtick?

  that they kind of can't step backwards and make a more focused thing. And you can't bring the quality of everything that you've made up because these worlds are only getting bigger and bigger. There's no way to match the density of this on a grander scale.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  Do you guys, do you guys have any sense of, you know, it's, it's interesting. We're having these conversations about Bethesda and Obsidian without really acknowledging the elephant in the room is that they're the same company.

• 40:54Russ Frushtick?

  Well, owned by the same company, yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  They're part of the same, yes. Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Russ. Yeah. I don't think they're actually the same company going by different names with mustaches on them.

• 41:03Russ Frushtick?

  That was not for you. That was for the audience that don't maybe remember that they're both owned by Microsoft.

• 41:07Chris Plante?

  And they were bought at different times.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  They're bought at different times, but they're owned by the same company. To what extent do you guys think that there's, that those boundaries are like semi-permeable? Like when we talk about a they in terms of Obsidian or Bethesda, to what extent do you think those comparisons are even like useful? You know what I mean? Or are we just shifting people, you know, as, as it becomes necessary?

• 41:31Russ Frushtick?

  I think there, it depends on the studios. I think there are studios that are owned by Microsoft that are very chatty with the other studios there. You look at, you know, id, for example, probably working directly with Machine Games and having a back and forth on the tech and things like that. I think with Bethesda Game Studios in particular, it would not surprise me that at least before Starfield, they were like, leave us the fuck alone, we'll do it and it'll be great. And it's possible that that wall is coming down a little bit after the Starfield reaction wasn't as glowing as everyone wanted, but I still think that like Microsoft or even Obsidian might be like, hey, you might want to try this. And they could still be like, no, we're doing our own thing. Go fuck yourself.

• 42:15Russ Frushtick?

  I also think there's a big technical problem on the Bethesda Game Studios side that this game doesn't have because this game was made in Unreal. And Bethesda Game Studios games are made in an engine that is a dinosaur, a total hanging.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  That sounds sweet.

• 42:32Russ Frushtick?

  The engine of Starfield and the engine of Skyrim has been, you know, since Morrowind, basically. It's, it's.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  I'm just saying that if you could run like.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  Doom on a dinosaur, that would be pretty cool.

• 42:47Russ Frushtick?

  That would probably could.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  That'd be cool. That'd be pretty sick.

• 42:49Russ Frushtick?

  So I think there's like a lot of, like, the fact that I can walk into a city here and not have a load time. I mean, there are parts of the city that do have load times, but like, most doors that you walk into don't have a load time is a sign that like, the Bethesda engine needs to kind of go.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  As we're thinking about this, like, the future of this, like, I guess I'm interested in where, what are the frontiers for this? Like, where are the places that like, I, I think that we all kind of agreed, talking about a valve, like, very, very great, but probably no, what do you feel like is the thing that you're wanting that you're not, that you're not getting right now? Like, what's the frontier for you?

• 43:27Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, the frontier-

• 43:28Speaker 00

  As a player of these games?

• 43:29Russ Frushtick?

  No, that's a very good question. And I don't know that I can look to the future for Frontier, because I'm not that good of a game designer, but I've experienced the Frontier, and it was Tears of the Kingdom. Tears of the Kingdom is a giant open world game that was like, okay, great, that's, that sounds good. But what if you can directly interact with all the physical objects in this world to make fucking boats and hot air balloons and planes to do that to like, solve your problems? And I'm not saying every game needs building or anything like that, but that's the level of like, holy shit, my world is changed because this thing was introduced to the world.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Now, this is very interesting, because I want to stop you there.

• 44:05Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Mine is none of that, and the opposite. And getting all of that out, and it's just about the people in the villages and making their interior lives, like, more affected by my actions. That's the frontier for me. The frontier for me is, I walk into a village, people know who I am, they've known a lot of the things I've done, my relationships with them actually matter, outside of like, a score, like, there's a continuity there. That, to me, is what's like, that's really exciting. And I think yours is very valid, too, obviously. It does raise this, like-

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Can both of those things be served by the same like franchise? Or maybe is there an opportunity for Skyrim to be one of those? And for this to be the other one? I don't know.

• 44:56Chris Plante?

  To go back to what I said earlier of the magic of games is how they respond to your impact on the world. That's what brings all these together, right? In either of those cases, the game is saying, hey, interact with the world in some interesting way. And what will make this feel like it is the future is we're going to respond back to you in ways you've never seen.

• 45:18Russ Frushtick?

  We're gonna let you do it.

• 45:19Chris Plante?

  And that's, yes, that's what I want to see from the next game from Bethesda is that there is some new way of engaging with the world. And when it responds to me, I say, that's not something I've never seen before. I didn't think a game would do that.

• 45:35Russ Frushtick?

  I remember when I, uh, one of the very earliest times I went to E3, and I think it was a Morrowind demo. And you walk into a town in Morrowind and, uh, they're like, oh, it's the dragon slayer, or whatever the fuck they said. And that.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  The fucking.

• 45:51Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, whatever they called you. And that at the time was like, oh, wow, they're really reacting. And then over time, we've learned that like, oh, it's just like a bunch of canned phrases they do. If you check the box on this quest that you already did. And I, I worry that like Bethesda has leaned on that as player response for so many years where there's just like, oh, there's going to be a bark that they give you that indicates they know you beat this quest. And it just needs to be more meaningful than that.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, and, and I think, you know, another big bar for me is I think immersion is shattered. The first time I hear someone say something twice. Like if I hear one of my companions give me the same phrase, that should never happen.

• 46:36Russ Frushtick?

  Which is funny because you mentioned earlier, the fact that your companion said a shitload of things and then nothing for 20 minutes.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  They had one bark about each thing and then they were silent.

• 46:46Russ Frushtick?

  They didn't try. Probably for the best, although they probably would have spaced them out, should have spaced them out a little more.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Uh, I tell you though, there's, I mean, you talked about like the way these different like things tend to focus on. Uh, Dragon Age had fantastic inter-character dialogue where depending on who was with you.

• 47:06Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  They would talk to each other.

• 47:08Russ Frushtick?

  And Baldur's Gate did that as well.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. Baldur's Gate is another great example. Talk about like another like frontier, you know, a place where like, if you want to give me a shorthand for developing characters, make it like, give me story when I have nothing else going on, rather than slowing the story down. Like, that's a great way of advancing things. And that's like, like, giving those characters more of a relationship, I think, can help to fill a lot of gaps.

• 47:32Chris Plante?

  Tales of Arise was the game that like really impressed me with this. I don't know if you all remember that, but as you went around the world, especially in the solo parts, the party would start chatting with each other. Or whenever you went to camp, you could have these group conversations. There was a little bit of this too. And again, like a dragon last year, where you would find things around the world and you could initiate story as you walked around the world and all your characters would talk to each other.

• 47:56Russ Frushtick?

  The first time I remember seeing it was in Left 4 Dead. Before you'd start a mission or even during a mission in Left 4 Dead, the characters would like, based on their whatever, their personalities, their backstories would like directly address one another in interesting ways. And it's, I lo-, I agree. I love to see this. Did, did your favorite game, Dragon's Dogma, do this at all? I'm trying to remember.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Uh, Dragon's Dogma 2, you know, as in all things, did the most insane version of it.

• 48:24Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Where your, where your characters would, uh, just talk about how their previous owner used to prefer the company of men. And they'd tell you 20 times until you sent them back into the eternal void. So it's just like, it's very similar.

• 48:44Russ Frushtick?

  All that is to say, I don't know when the fuck the next Elder Scrolls game is going to come out. I will certainly play it. I'm sure I'll enjoy it. Uh, so long as it's not like Starfield, I'm sure I'll enjoy it. Uh, but it does beg the question of whether there is a kind of a turning point for Bethesda where they need to kind of wake up and realize they need to evolve this model beyond where it's gone.

• 49:07Chris Plante?

  You got any reader mail?

• 49:08Russ Frushtick?

  We have a, we have a little bit of reader mail. We can go really quick. James W. wrote in to say Earth Blade has been canceled and it bums me out. Wow, yes, I am so massively disappointed, but Earth Blade, the game that was on our most anticipated list, and we've been talking about for a while, the Matty Thorson game, along with a team of other people, is officially fully dead. It was a search action game that was using like Celeste artwork, and it looked fucking sick, and it's because of internal strife has been dashed. I'm sure Matty will work on other stuff that will be very cool, but for the time being, I was so bummed to hear that.

• 49:49Russ Frushtick?

  We also have a letter. This comes from Caleb. Been playing an older, I think it came out 10 years ago, shoot them up called Zero Ranger this week. It's on Portmaster, which is the handheld software we've talked about a little bit. So I put it on PC and on my RG35XS XP. Love it both. Very fun, perfect amount of BS for that genre, and the music is perfect. Plant, did you play Zero Ranger?

• 50:12Chris Plante?

  Yeah, Zero Ranger rules. People should definitely check it out.

• 50:16Russ Frushtick?

  What's it on?

• 50:17Chris Plante?

  It's on, you can play it on Steam. It's a schmup. It's like 12 bucks or something, but it's, it's doing some interesting things with like repetition and playing through the same thing multiple times, kind of like Nier, but then being something different. And there's my mandatory Nier shout out for the week.

• 50:38Russ Frushtick?

  We'll end the reader mail section with a question from Revy. I unironically want Justin's Romancacy Rex. Do you have any more Romancacy Rex for the people? I know we talked a little bit about it last week.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  I, I don't know why it would be ironic. I finished Onyx Storm quite good, quite a cliffhanger. If you, if you are looking for a good place to start with, I think that Iron Flame is the second one, and then the first one was Fourth Wing. Those are, those are good books. Right now, I'm currently reading Shadow in the Ember by Jennifer L. Armentraut, and it is the first of the Flesh and Fire series.

• 51:20Russ Frushtick?

  I love that title.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  I had to look up the name because I don't know the names of these books as I'm reading them usually. But in this one, a woman named Seraphina. Was supposed to become the sort of consort of the primal of death, which is sort of a death god, but he turned against her and rejected her and didn't want her as his consort. But then some other things happened and maybe his mind has changed.

• 51:45Russ Frushtick?

  Oh.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  And maybe the handsome stranger that she Seraphina has just met and fallen for might have more connections to the primal of death than she ever suspected.

• 51:55Russ Frushtick?

  Whoa, someone's writing a blurb.

• 51:58Speaker 00

  There's four of those, I think. Yes, my wife's already on the third one, so I'm trying to catch up. But yeah, there's my, there's my recommendation for you.

• 52:07Russ Frushtick?

  Thank you, Justin.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  It's very well written. It's very, it's very well written. It's good stuff.

• 52:11Russ Frushtick?

  Do we have any honorable mentions for anyone?

• 52:16Russ Frushtick?

  Apart from what you were just mentioning?

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been doing some dank stuff.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  I decided, I, man, I don't know, Russ, good Russ broke my brain. Like, he came on and told us, told us about computers and video games and I have just been, I can't stop messing around with Raspberry Pis.

• 52:34Russ Frushtick?

  That's cool.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  I've always been kind of interested in like computing and stuff, but it's always been so intimidating to get, to get into. And I've been messing around with these little things, these little Raspberry Pis. You know what? I'm going to give the very quick dummy version because I didn't know and I was too embarrassed to ask. So let me just say, I told you last week about that thing, the piecade that I got and it was a kit that you build around this thing called Raspberry Pi, which is just a little, it's a little computer. It's called the inputs and outputs that a computer normally has. It's got power, it's got HDMI out, it's got memory. You can put an SD card in there and put whatever operating system that you want on there, right? Because it's a tiny computer. So you put a tiny operating

• 53:17Speaker 00

  system. There's lots of different operating systems you can put on there. So the Retro Pi is one. That's an operating system that you can put on a Pi that has all the emulators already built into it. It's constructed around that. I, this week, I put a operating system called DAC board on a Raspberry Pi. And so what this one is, is this is a pie that I have hooked up to a TV, an old TV I had lying around mounted to a wall. And the, uh, DAC board is synced with, they've got a bunch of different layouts, but mine is synced with like my home calendar and the weather.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  And family photos. And so during the day, when you walk around, you see the DAC board and it's got our family's calendar. The stuff that's going on, photos, it's got a QR code that you can scan to get onto our wifi. And some other stuff like that. So I, but it's just a little computer, like the computer is just plugged in behind it. So. I did that. I set up this thing this week called a pie hole. That's, that thing's cool. You guys know what that is? Let me tell you about that. That's another Raspberry Pi that I made that is a, uh, I plugged it into my router. And pie hole is a little computer that you set up as a fake. I'm not going to use the right terminology, but this is working. It's a fake DNS server.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  That when the computer goes to look for ads and it's pinging the DNS server for ads. It said pings my pie hole and says, hey, you got any ads?

• 54:50Russ Frushtick?

  And I'm like, no ads.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  Shit, man, I'm fresh out. Sorry, brother. Hey, do you have any personal information about Justin? Cause I would love to send this to everybody. And the file is like, let me look around. I don't know shit about him. Best of luck.

• 55:02Russ Frushtick?

  Wow. So you're not getting personally identifiable like ads or Google searches or anything like that.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  I'm off the grab, baby.

• 55:08Russ Frushtick?

  That's cool.

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Check, get, check it in the pie hole. Check the pie hole. Uh, um. Then I was trying to figure out how to watch Canadian TV and I got into some dark stuff. I got into, I got, it got dark enough that I was like, whoa, I should need to actually look into DNS. And not, not, it was, or sorry, VPN. I need to, yeah, I, it got bad in there. I was really just trying to watch Canadian Dragons Dead. I did not need people trying to get me to watch the new Captain America movie in 8K. Saving it out yet, brother?

• 55:45Russ Frushtick?

  Wow.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  Some nasty boys out there doing a lot of really nasty, nasty things.

• 55:52Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, I, I want, that's cool. I want to give a quick shout out to a game called Alba, A L B A, which came out many years ago. Uh, I had mentioned that I've been playing a Pokemon, new Pokemon Snap with my son. And it got to a point where he has memorized every Pokemon that's in that game. It's like 250 some odd Pokemon. Uh, and we were like, maybe you should be learning more real animals. Uh, and Alba is a lovely little game where you're a small girl living on like a tropical island with your grandparents who are like you're on vacation. And your objective is to just go around the island, taking pictures of animals and like picking up trash. And all the animals are real. And when you take a picture of an animal, it like fills your book in and gives you facts about them. And it makes like the animal

• 56:37Russ Frushtick?

  sound like you would have in like a children's book with animal buttons. Um, and it's fucking sick. Like it's a great photography game and there are so few of those.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:46Russ Frushtick?

  Um, and perfect for, you know, kids that are very little, whether they're controlling it or not, like they'll be like, oh, there's a seagull or whatever it is. And, uh, it's been great. I bought it. Right now it's on sale. It's like three bucks on Switch for what it's worth.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  It's a shame that we have so many great shooters and so few great photography games, but it's really just the same metaphor. Yeah. I mean, it's the same idea, right?

• 57:07Russ Frushtick?

  It is. Headshot seagull.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  First person snapper.

• 57:12Chris Plante?

  Uh, I recommend Kirby Manga Mania. There is a long running Kirby manga series that has been gradually brought over, uh, stateside. And I think there's actually a new edition, maybe like number eight, coming out this, seven or eight, coming out this July. But you can read all the ones before that right now. And let me tell you, you people on the ears can't hear this, but look at this beautiful cover art. It is just presented in a beautiful fashion from Viz Media. And if you are wondering how much story can Kirby have, let me tell you, Kirby can get into some real troubles. King DDD can look like a real freak.

• 57:55Chris Plante?

  In this thing, quite often, it is just absolutely bizarre and strange. I am showing the guys, uh, uh, an image of Kirby roughly the size of a planet right now, fighting a space station. Um, it's wild. It is such a treat. Um, my son loves it, but honestly, like, I love it. Um, because it's the best. And I think that you all, if you're listening to this show, you're the sort of weirdo like me who will love reading something like that.

• 58:28Russ Frushtick?

  Cool. We did it. I think we did it.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  Yay.

• 58:32Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, I wanted to thank our lovely patrons over at patreon.com/thebesties. Uh, y'all are awesome. We love you. Uh, some new members I wanted to call out. We have Ryan, we have Isaiah, we have Eric, and we have Dr. Ego. Thank you for being patrons of the besties. Thank you to everyone else for supporting the show. Uh, I mentioned we have a new bracket episode. We have a new besties episode coming at you, um, new resties, I should say, coming at you shortly. And what are we doing next week?

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Uh, Yakuza? Like a Dragon? And like a Dragon, Pirate Problems?

• 59:07Russ Frushtick?

  Pirate Problems next week, the official name. Uh, like, yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  Do I have to stop playing Avowed?

• 59:14Russ Frushtick?

  Probably. This one does run on Steam Deck, so I guess Avowed did too, but not as well.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  Oh, is that interesting at all? I ran the Steam version. It runs.

• 59:24Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  Pretty good. I mean, yeah, you can play it. It's playable. Yeah.

• 59:27Russ Frushtick?

  But yeah, I'd ima- I haven't tried, uh, Pirate Yakuza game, but I'd imagine, based on how well, uh, the last one ran on Steam, I imagine this one also runs well on Steam.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  Uh, excellent. Well, I'm looking forward to it. Uh, folks, that's gonna do it for us for, for this week. Until next time, he sure joins again for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?