Chilling in the Grab Bag with Kingdom Come Deliverance 3

Usually, we talk about the latest and great video games. But this week, what if we try the greatest of the not-so-latest? That’s right, it’s finally time to talk about Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and many other tasty delights. In the back half, we reflect on Nintendo’s farewell Direct for the original Switch.

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

• 0:00Chris Plante?

  I got a question for you all.

• 0:01Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 0:02Chris Plante?

  It's kind of a tricky scenario.

• 0:05Chris Plante?

  You go to a movie theater, right? And it's nice and quiet, you're watching the movie.

• 0:09Russ Frushtick?

  Is this, are we you? Are we at a snobby movie theater that's showing some sort of black and white documentary?

• 0:15Chris Plante?

  I haven't even finished the premise yet.

• 0:17Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, sorry.

• 0:18Chris Plante?

  And you're already just dunking it down on me. Let me finish the premise and you can tell me who you are in this scenario.

• 0:24Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, sorry.

• 0:24Chris Plante?

  You're at a movie. And you're near the front, there are a lot of people behind you. And there are two people in front of you, but everybody else are all behind you. In front of you. One of those people starts snoring. And like, at first it's soft, maybe only you hear it.

• 0:42Russ Frushtick?

  So what you're saying is you are at a black and white documentary boring film?

• 0:46Chris Plante?

  Then they start snoring.

• 0:48Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 0:49Chris Plante?

  But everybody is behind you.

• 0:51Griffin McElroy?

  So they think you might be part of the snore party?

• 0:54Chris Plante?

  Maybe like they think it's you, or it's like it's your responsibility to kind of wake them. And then you can kind of defend yourself by like, well, yeah, but I'm not the person that they're with. Like, they surely have like the most obligation, right?

• 1:08Russ Frushtick?

  They might be sleeping too.

• 1:10Chris Plante?

  Well, I kind of like waved my hand around like a twirl in the air, like a, yes, yes!

• 1:16Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 1:17Chris Plante?

  But then here's the problem. Both of them. Start snoring. They are now both asleep on each other and you truly are now. The divider between the awake and the asleep.

• 1:31Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 1:32Chris Plante?

  What?

• 1:32Griffin McElroy?

  I know that we, I know we give you a hard time, Chris, for the, you know, the types of cinema that you do consume. But I would actually like to know the answer to what was the film that you were watching?

• 1:43Chris Plante?

  This was a while ago, this was The Monkey.

• 1:46Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, okay, well, never mind then, that's lit.

• 1:48Russ Frushtick?

  It's actually Le Monkey.

• 1:50Griffin McElroy?

  Wait, wait, wait, is it the kick-ass one with all the violence and stuff? Or is it one about like, you know, a French acrobat and?

• 1:59Russ Frushtick?

  They call him Monke.

• 2:01Chris Plante?

  Monke.

• 2:03Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 2:04Chris Plante?

  No, it is, it is The Monkey, it's where everybody gets their heads blown off.

• 2:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Chris Plante?

  People just fall asleep right in the front. Oh, twist, turns out I watch movies that people like. What a surprise!

• 2:15Russ Frushtick?

  By accident, you just wandered in there.

• 2:17Chris Plante?

  You're the worst.

• 2:18Griffin McElroy?

  But what do you do? Like, I don't want to wake somebody. That feels like bad.

• 2:23Russ Frushtick?

  Well, you don't want to wake.

• 2:24Griffin McElroy?

  Of course not, Chris. You have no legal right to wake someone up who is asleep.

• 2:29Russ Frushtick?

  You could kick both seats at the same time.

• 2:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, man.

• 2:33Russ Frushtick?

  If you're right behind them.

• 2:34Griffin McElroy?

  Scare them good. And then you'd be like, ooh, ah, right in their ear. And they'll be like, oh, fuck, we fell asleep in the monkey's movie. He's so mad. He's gonna explode our heads.

• 2:42Chris Plante?

  That's good. What if I grabbed both their hands and then kind of made them slap each other at the same time?

• 2:47Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, like they do in The Monkey.

• 2:49Chris Plante?

  Like they do in The Monkey.

• 2:51Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Chris Plante?

  This is good. Yeah, no, this is really, I really just sat through it. They did it for like 20 minutes and then they woke up and left.

• 2:59Griffin McElroy?

  Good for them, man.

• 3:00Chris Plante?

  Yeah, no, they got some good rest.

• 3:01Griffin McElroy?

  They got what they needed out of that film. Maybe it was too scary, too violent. They had to fall asleep as a defense mechanism.

• 3:07Chris Plante?

  That's so true. I bet that's right. Or maybe it was like their way of screaming and it just sounded like snores, right? That would be kind of troubling if you were falling off a building and as you like splattered on the pavement. That's the only time I can think of when people scream. Listen, I watched The Monkey.

• 3:24Griffin McElroy?

  You have a new reputation and now it's not you watch art house films, is that you watch so much violent stuff that it has turned you into a real nasty little gorilla.

• 3:34Chris Plante?

  Turned me on, is what you're saying.

• 3:35Russ Frushtick?

  Whoa.

• 3:36Chris Plante?

  The only way I can feel alive. Can we talk about the video games now?

• 3:40Griffin McElroy?

  I'd love to.

• 3:41Chris Plante?

  Thank you.

• 3:59Speaker 03

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

• 4:02Griffin McElroy?

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

• 4:05Chris Plante?

  My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I am awake and ready for this episode.

• 4:10Russ Frushtick?

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

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Welcome to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. This week-

• 4:17Russ Frushtick?

  Well, not the latest.

• 4:20Russ Frushtick?

  Now people, this is not the

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, good point. Good point.

• 4:24Griffin McElroy?

  You probably came here thinking, I can't wait to hear my boys get in here and discuss the Legend of Zelda, the Hero's Blade, or Metroid 9, Sanus's Gets It.

• 4:37Russ Frushtick?

  I can't believe how much Kirby ate. Kirby ate so much.

• 4:42Griffin McElroy?

  Kirby X Kirby.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Wait, did you say Kirby ate so much? Because I'm into it. If it's a new Bloodborne.

• 4:48Griffin McElroy?

  Kirby ate so much. You want to hear us talk about that? You want to hear us talk about Mario Paint 2?

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Bloodborne 2, Switch 2 launch?

• 4:55Chris Plante?

  Yeah, these are all great games that we're not talking about today.

• 4:58Griffin McElroy?

  I'm just gonna start jazzing in case I get one of these right. And then people will be like, oh shit. Um, cause we're recording this before, before the Nintendo Direct where they talk about all the Switch 2 stuff.

• 5:07Russ Frushtick?

  Nobby Dobby Man.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  So if you are playing a Switch 2 now, like if they're like, and everyone go look in your mailbox, they're out there.

• 5:14Chris Plante?

  Kind of Sega Saturn style. They're like, look under your seat. You're like, oh shit, how'd you get my house?

• 5:19Griffin McElroy?

  Um, what are we doing instead, boys?

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Instead, we're gonna do a bit of a grab bag, a bit of a potpourri.

• 5:25Russ Frushtick?

  And to be clear, it's because we didn't, we recorded this before the events. It's not because we don't care.

• 5:30Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  It's not some sort of weird protest. Yeah.

• 5:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, no, we're on tour. Um, and so we had to record early, but we'll talk about the Switch 2 eventually, probably when it's out, right?

• 5:38Russ Frushtick?

  And next week as well.

• 5:40Griffin McElroy?

  And next week, yeah, probably, yeah.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Uh, but today we're doing a potpourri, a grab bag. I'm not gonna ask Chris Play what that means because it's insulting, we've talked enough. But after the break, we'll talk about, uh, an assortment of games we've been enjoying. And, uh, so much more right after this.

• 5:56Chris Plante?

  Okay, I'm looking at the top of this list and I see the series of words, Nubby's Number Factory.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:03Chris Plante?

  And I have a lot of questions, but I feel like I should get an explanation first.

• 6:08Griffin McElroy?

  Stepping up, stepping up to the plate here.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:10Griffin McElroy?

  Um, Nubby's Number Factory. Uh, in the, in the grand tradition of, uh, of a Pachinko sort of rogue, rogue light, rogue-like, yeah, sure, a Pachinko rogue-like, uh, with elements of Bellatro and Ballionaire and other games with ball in it. Here comes Nubby's Number Factory. It looks like a vaporwave calculator and it's my obsession. I stayed up too late last night, partially because of a tummy ache and partially because of Nubby's Number Factory. It's, it, we were actually turned on to this game by our, by a few members of our, our staff.

• 6:54Griffin McElroy?

  Who, who spotted it and it is really scratching that itch for me. Uh, of, of, of a Bellatro, of a go do this simple thing over and over again while collecting synergistic items to make crazy shit happen and get very good scores.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  The difference here is Bellatro is made by a caring genius that wants to create an intricate series of puzzles for you to unpack and enjoy. And Nubby's Number Factory seems to be made by an insane dirtbag that knows, sees you for exactly the, the numbers pervert that you are.

• 7:27Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, it's by MogDogBlog Productions is the name of the developer of, of this one. So Brass Tacks, uh, you have a board with a bunch of little pegs on it and the pegs have numbers. And you shoot Nubby, he's a little bouncy ball from the top of the screen. You aim him, shoot him peggle style. He bounces off the pegs. Earning points for the, the numbers that he pops, uh, each time you hit a peg, it gets cut in half. And then, uh, and then if you beat the score, uh, that is required of you that round, then you get more pegs that combine and make even higher numbers. You can also really fuck up that score and make it re-rack those pegs like six or seven times.

• 8:08Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, before you move on to the next round, all of a sudden you're way ahead of the curve. You've got numbers so high that you couldn't even believe it. Every few rounds, you go to the shop and you'll be able to buy stuff. This is where the game really goes bananas. You have an inventory of like seven items that you can have equipped at any given time. And the things are all very tactile. They're all very physical and they come in sort of like different, uh, strategic kind of columns. You can find items that are like every time you hit the wall, you double the lowest peg on the board. Or you double the highest peg on the board. Or sometimes it'll be things that actually help you hit more pegs. So like this one will shoot lasers out of Nubby.

• 8:48Griffin McElroy?

  And it will get you the score for the things without popping the peg. So you can keep those high numbers on the board a little bit longer. But there's, there's dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of these items. And there's little passive upgrades that you get each run. Um, and I don't know, gang. It's, it's one of those games where everybody was talking about it. I saw Northern Lion playing it a bunch. I was like, I'll check, I'll check this out. And then I played it once and didn't get it. And I played it a second time and didn't get it. And I played it a third time and I was up until one in the morning playing Nubby's Number Factory.

• 9:21Russ Frushtick?

  Is that because you weren't putting like runs together or just the gameplay wasn't clicking?

• 9:24Griffin McElroy?

  It takes, um, yeah, I mean, it is a, it's a weird, um. It's a weird thing to strategize, right? Like when you start playing this game, you are not going to know how to succeed. All of the usual kind of like, you know, um. Four brain shit that you would probably like factor in while like deciding what items to buy or what synergies to go for. Will end up actually screwing you over. It's a lot more about like, you know, making sure that, that, that your numbers are high, that your board is stocked. And that you are, uh, able to really maximize what it is that the board gives you.

• 10:06Griffin McElroy?

  Instead of just going for like, oh, well, this one shoots a sword out and it hits all the pegs around it. That's fine, but if those pegs are worth eight points, then it's not going to do you a whole lot of good. Talking about Nubby's Number Factory is, is boring. Um, because it's, uh, because it's a game about shooting bubbles at numbers to make them get higher, but.

• 10:24Russ Frushtick?

  Does it, does it have the like game feel that Peggle does where it like actually feels good to like watch the ball bounce around?

• 10:32Griffin McElroy?

  It does feel good to watch the ball bounce around. It feels good when you can really trap it. A lot of the items activate at set intervals. So like, this item is really strong, but you have to stay on the board for three seconds. It activates every three seconds. So like, now all of a sudden, you don't want a bunch of items that pop a bunch of pegs. You want your, your nubby to just kind of keep bouncing around, uh, helplessly as you kind of like accrue these like other bonuses for, for these like time gated, uh, items. So like, yeah, I mean, it's, it's fucking satisfying. Watching, there's a little meter that fills up as you, uh, hit the, the, the goal for the round.

• 11:12Griffin McElroy?

  And then watching it kind of lap and go like, times nine, times 10, times 11, as you like, have these perfect, perfect synergistic shots. It really is a, a tremendous dopamine hit. Um, and I don't know, I'm pretty self-aware of that. Uh, but it is still very enjoyable all the same.

• 11:32Chris Plante?

  There's a certain aesthetic, I don't know if I would call it like, elementary school library aesthetic.

• 11:38Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Chris Plante?

  That when I see it in a modern game, I expect there to be a secret game hidden underneath it at this point.

• 11:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it looks like snood.

• 11:46Griffin McElroy?

  Snood?

• 11:47Chris Plante?

  It does look like snood, but, but I mean more of like you like.

• 11:50Russ Frushtick?

  Fucking imagine a game called snood. You, you guys, you down with snood?

• 11:54Griffin McElroy?

  Juice, you're muted. I don't know if you were trying to rap about snood.

• 11:58Speaker 03

  It looks like snood. I mean, that's my incredible contribution that I was trying to say is that it does indeed look like snood. It was basically a confirmation of snood-ness.

• 12:08Griffin McElroy?

  It's, I mean, I love it. I thi- I think this shit rules. I can't get, uh.

• 12:12Russ Frushtick?

  Who's the guy?

• 12:13Griffin McElroy?

  Huh?

• 12:14Russ Frushtick?

  I'm looking at screenshots. Who's the guy on the left?

• 12:16Griffin McElroy?

  I think his name is Todd.

• 12:18Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, he's not nubby.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Is it Todd?

• 12:19Griffin McElroy?

  Tony. Maybe it's Tony. No, there's a Tony and I think there's a Todd. Anyway, it couldn't matter fucking less.

• 12:26Russ Frushtick?

  No, no.

• 12:27Griffin McElroy?

  You work at the number factory with Tony or Todd.

• 12:29Russ Frushtick?

  You were kind of implying that the ball is nubby.

• 12:31Griffin McElroy?

  The ball is nubby, yeah.

• 12:33Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so that's to be respected, because honestly, that's like a CEO getting down in trenches and like, working with undercover.

• 12:39Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, his name's right on the 10. Um, one fun thing. Is that I can't get it to work on the wrong LAX. Fucking power, the horsepower of this thing is not capable of handling Nubby's Number Factory, mostly because it's, you know, mouse and keyboard controls. So I have, I have to scratch this fucking itch while I am seated at my desk, doing my work, which is probably honestly for the best.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:08Griffin McElroy?

  If I had Nubby with me anywhere. I mean, I lost months of my life to Bellatro, so I'm not looking to do that again.

• 13:15Chris Plante?

  MogDogVlog Productions. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna follow this developer so I can see what comes up after Nubby's number.

• 13:23Griffin McElroy?

  It's like five bucks also.

• 13:25Chris Plante?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:25Griffin McElroy?

  And they've already updated it like a handful of times. Yeah, I mean, you don't need a demo. I'll say this, you don't need a, I'll say this, if you download the demo for Nubby's Number Factory before buying it for $5, you're wasting your time. Look at it, look at a video of anyone playing it.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  No instantly.

• 13:42Griffin McElroy?

  Just a fucking gut check, around the horn, looking at Nubby's Number Factory, yes or no?

• 13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:46Griffin McElroy?

  And I'll regret it.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Yes, and we'll feel guilty.

• 13:48Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, okay, so like, yeah, it's, I appreciate that there's a demo out there, it's Nubby's Number Factory, you should know how you feel about Nubby's Number Factory.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  I bought it sight unseen, just based on the words, Nubby's Number Factory.

• 13:59Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, branding wise, they fucking crushed it.

• 14:01Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, they did. What else have you guys been playing?

• 14:04Chris Plante?

  Who's talking sulfur?

• 14:07Russ Frushtick?

  I'm talking sulfur.

• 14:08Chris Plante?

  I am curious about this game. I feel like I've seen it kinda lingering around and I don't really know why I haven't picked it up because it seems my shit. Can you explain top level what it is?

• 14:17Russ Frushtick?

  Sure, top level, it is a FPS extraction shooter RPG. Basically, you are going through randomly generated environments with various weapons and throwables and pickups and armor and shit like that. And getting as far as you can and bringing some of that stuff back and upgrading it and improving your runs with meta persistent abilities and things like that. I think this all sounds very familiar. What appeals to me about sulfur, cause like the nitty gritty, you know? Kind of fits with stuff we've certainly played before visually speaking, it looks like fantastic.

• 15:00Russ Frushtick?

  It looks very much like a Adventure Time brought to life. So you have that paired with like, like these little goblins like showing up around the corner and they're charging at you. And you've got like a cartoon gun that you're trying to like desperately reload and you're low on ammo. And, and you have all those moments, those like tense moments that you have in a, in a rogue like shooter. But because of the like playful aesthetic, it makes it much more approachable. I think why you've been hearing about it, Plant, is just because they did a bunch of Steam Next Fest demos. And they've been in early access for about three or four months, I want to say. And they've been doing updates in early access as well. So, so there's been some churn.

• 15:43Russ Frushtick?

  It is not out of early access. I think it's pretty smooth for early access, but obviously there's, there's still room to grow.

• 15:52Chris Plante?

  I was trying to remember why I didn't play this and I found the screenshot that, that scared me away. Tell me what I'm, I'm looking at here. I just dropped it in the Slack.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 16:03Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, hell yeah, baby. What are you talking about? That's my shit right there.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Man, I see a steak and pizza. This looks, and yeah, man, good game.

• 16:11Griffin McElroy?

  Deus Ex ass grid based inventory system all day.

• 16:15Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, that's, that's what Plant has shared with us.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  I see like three shotguns, a bunch of rifles. This looks fun. What game is this? I want to listen now. What are you guys talking about?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Hey, sorry, I sold out. I sold five guns. What is this?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  I said, I heard Plant talking. I assumed it was French. What are these, all these guns?

• 16:36Russ Frushtick?

  Everything has inventory space. It's as, as Griffin alluded to, it's like Deus Ex where things take up grids in your inventory. So a shotgun's going to take up a lot more space than a little pistol. So you're making those tough calls of like, what am I bringing versus not? And then back at home, you have like a kind of a home base inventory that you can stock up with random shit.

• 16:57Chris Plante?

  So do I have to spend a lot of time in this or do I spend more of my time shooting and like? Causing chaos.

• 17:04Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, that's up to you. Do you want to min-max your runs to the great success that you might see in doing that? Or would you rather just like kind of fuck around? You can do both.

• 17:13Chris Plante?

  Okay, that's good. I want to.

• 17:14Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, you might not find as successful runs there. I kind of like the satisfaction of like building a run out of like all this stuff, as you know, but it is not for everyone. It's not a boomer shooter. Like, you shouldn't look at it like that. It is more like a tactical.

• 17:31Griffin McElroy?

  What does that mean?

• 17:32Chris Plante?

  Boomer shooter? Are you real?

• 17:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I don't know what that means. But Justin and I don't work at Polygon anymore. So like, we don't.

• 17:37Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, we're cool jocks.

• 17:38Chris Plante?

  We're the target audience. A boomer shooter is a shooter that is inspired by the era of like from Doom to Quake to Unreal, but now we're getting modern versions of it. So I think, like, what would be the classic?

• 17:51Griffin McElroy?

  More of a Gen X shooter, if you really want to.

• 17:53Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I think it's more that you do booming. It's not that you are a boomer.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  But that is a bad, add it up to another classic bit of video games industry slang that doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense. Put it on the pile with Rogue Lights.

• 18:10Russ Frushtick?

  I kind of agree, quite honestly, but I mean, it's a Doom-like, but it's not in this case. It's not a Doom-like.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  That's good. If you said Quake-ish, if you said it's Quake-ish, then I'm with you.

• 18:22Russ Frushtick?

  Hexiness.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Hex-sex. Hexagonal.

• 18:25Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, hexagonal. I like that. It's a cool game. My one minor critique, and I hope they kind of evolve this over time, is it feels like the level design is like pretty simplistic, which doesn't allow like a lot of, like, you're kind of like churning through, I wouldn't say corridors, but a little more linear than I would prefer. I kind of want a little more room to explore and find random shit off the beaten path. But it's cool. I've been enjoying it.

• 18:54Chris Plante?

  Great.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  I've, I had a couple of little small things that I thought were kinda neat, more and more public service announcement type things, cause I feel like this is another one that won't, these two don't require a lot of explanation, you're probably gonna know if you wanna play these or not. First is Spilled, which is a little independent game that is just very recently released, 26th of March, I think this, this was released, so it's, it's fairly recent. It is a, I guess you'd say a cozy game where you play the captain of a little, a little vessel that's cleaning up waste in a body of water. So you cruise around these pools of water and you clean up oil spills and find trash with a big scoop, and then

• 19:40Speaker 03

  you push the scoop and the, all the oil and the trash into our cycling station where you are paid for it and given, you guessed it, a bigger scoop and a bigger tank to store the oil and some speed upgrades and stuff. And it's, and there's like, if you run across like oil on rocks, you could spray the oil off. There is no difficulty to this. It is, it reminds me of a little bit of like a game about digging a hole. This idea of just like a pleasant sort of bonsai tree that you could pluck away at and just unwind if you're in the market for something like that, then spilled by Lente, L-E-N-T-E is the developer

• 20:25Speaker 03

  there.

• 20:26Chris Plante?

  What would you call the, the visual style here where I assume it was made in 3D, but it looks like it's pixels?

• 20:32Speaker 03

  Gosh, you know what, Plant, the nearest I can say is it kinda looks like, like the, like a more detailed LucasArts kind of like, like it's like a more-

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Dialed in, but same aesthetic senses like a day of the tentacle almost?

• 20:53Chris Plante?

  Yeah, like a scum game made in three.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a bit of a scum game, I think, I think vibe to it a little bit. Like Dirk Smallwood or something like that. If you want to get real old school, but yeah, it's very nice, relaxing experience if you're in the mood. Uh, the other thing that came out, uh, this week is called the chef's shift.

• 21:14Chris Plante?

  Oh, sorry, I'm, I'm just very glad you're bringing this because I have a million questions about this one. And like literally, how does it work? Sorry, I cut you off.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  No, you didn't cut me off at all. So it's a, it's like a, uh, I'm similar to like overcooked or other sorts of like, um, you know, keeping the different, you got a customer that you're in the, in the, you're working a restaurant. And you've got customers coming in, you're also trying to hide the fact that you're a criminal, which is story relevant, but like not really gameplay relevant. But the way that you interact with the things in the kitchen with your customers with like, uh, for example, if you want to make an espresso, you have to go to the espresso machine and grind it. And then you have to go to the brewing machine and brew the cup and then you serve it. But from the moment the game begins, it's all keyboard. You don't, if you try to use the mouse, it says, use the keyboard. Like you don't touch the mouse again, it's all keyboard.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  So all interactions, everything you're doing is through typing. So like you're practicing your type and you're trying to type as fast and accurately as possible. And that is how you are like balancing and keeping everything going. So.

• 22:19Chris Plante?

  A word you chose to use there is practicing. And that's my like big question around this game. Is this a game that is a game first or is it a teaches typing? Practice typing game first.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  I think this is very much more about like the, um, the, the, the balancing, the different, um, things that you've got going on in the kitchen and like time management, definitely. I think that the typing is like an added layer of interactivity. Where you're like, uh, there, there are some extra, you know, some extra difficulty in its way for the game to balance difficulty. And for you to feel like you're more involved in the cooking process and all these different tasks.

• 23:00Chris Plante?

  Some of it's a little bit more. Mechanic than like a, oh, we are doing this really as an exercise for you to learn typing.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  It feels like a hook in a, in a real sense, but it does, it also feels like if you were good at typing. It would be more pleasant to play, like it would probably be a little easier to play. This is not reinventing the wheel. It's not particularly like you. You probably have a pretty good idea what it is. The art style is nice. It reminds me of it's a little bit like washed out pastoral a bit like Professor Layton. I want to almost say with with the aesthetics. It's like, um, it's very nice, pleasant to look at, calm.

• 23:38Chris Plante?

  Kind of like diner dash by way of Professor Layton.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  That's yeah, that's wow. That's such a good call. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Professor Layton started in a diner dash game that was powered by typing. It would be, it would be the chef shift.

• 23:51Chris Plante?

  Man, that's awesome. I'm definitely going to check that one out. Um, cool. Uh, hey y'all. I finally played a game that I've been wanting to play for like, I don't know, two months now it feels like.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Halo three.

• 24:04Chris Plante?

  Got it. Halo three. I played Kingdom Come Deliverance two, which I will like bash out the backstory here. We, uh, did not get code for this when it came out, which is a little unusual. Polygon specifically. Polygon didn't, but then I don't think we did either, right?

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we get ignored all the time.

• 24:25Chris Plante?

  That's a lot.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  You can't really tell much about a game from from us getting passed over.

• 24:29Chris Plante?

  Anyway, there is a bunch of other games that came out and that's not an excuse to like not try something. It's more that there was a ton of games. So now, uh, finally got a chance to play it and y'all, um, y'all are gonna need to play it. That's like the long story short of it. I know.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  I have to.

• 24:44Chris Plante?

  It is. I think you're gonna dig it quite a bit. Um, it is a role playing game set in 15th century Europe. You are, you might change characters at some point. I'm not sure, but you are basically like the right hand of who would be the hero in a traditional video game. And you two are on your first kind of like quest of sorts back in the day. You're going to deliver a message that might just stop war of some kind. And along the way, things go very, very far south and the game is basically like.

• 25:22Chris Plante?

  You untangling that original sin. So you go from being, you know, a student in all this amazing armor and all these powers to having to kind of work your way back up in this society. So that you can find that original message, fight, you know, the evil doer who slayed your family members and deliver this and accomplish whatever it is you're about to accomplish in the first place. All that is a backdrop to, hey, we want to drop you in a really dense, really active recreation of this world. And that's the cool shit. This is, as far as I can tell, the role playing game for the people who play Elder Scrolls and are like,

• 26:03Chris Plante?

  I wish I could spend more time working as a blacksmith. And they're like, great. We have that for you. You want to go, study. We have that for you. You want to go out and just fight people and have like some really, really solid sword combat? That's there too. Like, we're not ignoring that type of person, but it is an all around sort of RPG experience.

• 26:26Speaker 03

  I want to ask a question that has helped me to more quickly understand what a game is in, in this current landscape. Is this a thing that you're going to play on a Steam Deck that you could do a controller or is this a mouse and keyboard experience?

• 26:41Chris Plante?

  It's a controller game. I don't, I haven't tested it on Steam Deck yet.

• 26:45Russ Frushtick?

  I think it does run, actually.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  I'm more interested in like how one interacts with it. Cause I feel like that's two very different kinds of RPGs.

• 26:52Chris Plante?

  It is not the true old school RPG where you can only play it with mouse and keyboard. It is, it's working just fine for me with a controller. Like it feels, it feels very cinematic. It's a first person game. Action game. The way that the sword combat works is it's effectively like you are leaning your sword left, right, up or down and adjusting against like the person across from you. And the combat feels like really slick because you have to be watching the blade of the person who's attacking you. And if you get surrounded even by two people, which is like real life rules. If you get in a fight with two people, even if you are like really good at fighting, you're probably fucked.

• 27:35Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, maybe.

• 27:36Chris Plante?

  Yeah, it's not good.

• 27:37Russ Frushtick?

  I think I can do it.

• 27:38Chris Plante?

  And that happens, I know you could. That happens a lot in this game where. People will just get on your side or in your blind spot while you were watching a sword and suddenly you're getting your head cut off. It feels like a realistic environment. The really nice thing about this game is there are all these systems and yet the UI is extremely navigable, which I'll spare you like getting into it, but just to say it kind of introduces things to you right when you need to know them. And then it provides the explanation, sometimes with like literal in-game books where necessary. It is a game that you have those games that are like a wave, like a big wave coming at you in the ocean.

• 28:22Chris Plante?

  And you can choose to like dive under it and just ignore it entirely. You can try to like ride it and like just get on its wavelength. And like, that is the way to play this because there is so much that if I, if I fought it or I worried like, well, what if I forget any of that? It would immediately overwhelm me. But if I just like accept like, I'm not very good at this. The game will like lend me a hand whenever I clearly need it. It's right there for me, which is say like, again, tutorials are always like right there when you need it. Whenever you need supplies, they just happen to be around. You're like constantly beaten up, especially at the beginning of the game. But it really wants you to just accept that you like, you again, have been completely lowered in status in this society.

• 29:06Chris Plante?

  So it's okay that you suck and that you're like failing a lot of like your dialogue prompts and getting the shit kicked out of you.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  And you just have to go from like a rest fresh dick type to more of a like a

• 29:17Chris Plante?

  A draft, a New York draft type.

• 29:18Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, yeah, sure. All right. Is it like semi in the way that like you have to eat and drink and shit? And shit.

• 29:26Chris Plante?

  Yes, there, there, there is a fair amount of that stuff, but again, not to the degree that I found it distracting from fun. It never, the easy way of putting that is

• 29:35Speaker 03

  It must be a really good poop in any game than if it didn't distract you from the fun.

• 29:40Chris Plante?

  Press F to shit. It never felt like work doing any of those things. They're, they're like

• 29:47Speaker 03

  We're getting a lot of fiber then because

• 29:51Chris Plante?

  I'm a silly. Husk Man myself, and they just didn't have that in 15th century Europe. So that's a real problem.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  That's actually all they had.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  It's just all silly.

• 30:01Chris Plante?

  How you can eat.

• 30:04Chris Plante?

  It's, it's really promising. I, I would like you all to play it. I'm trying not to go too much deep into it because there's like a lot of story. And I don't really want to spoil that for people who want to play it, but I think, I think you'll dig it. I mean, I think most people here liked Witcher three, right?

• 30:21Russ Frushtick?

  Loved it.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:22Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, do you think the writing is on par as the Witcher three writing?

• 30:27Chris Plante?

  I don't know. The cool trick that the writing does, it's also just way more realistic than Witcher three. It's not about fantasy beasts. But a cool trick that the writing does is I feel like the choices I'm making are having a tremendous impact on the story. And I don't actually know if they are. They probably aren't, but I think that is the trick of good writing is that it creates a sense that you are. It doesn't really matter if there are like five other directions it could go. So long as I feel like I am telling my story, it's working. And it does a great job of that where when things go wrong in the like top level story, I feel like it was because of decisions I made. And that's to me a pretty great sign of writing.

• 31:11Chris Plante?

  And the dialogue's good, like moment to moment. It knows, it knows when to like get out of its own way.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Well, there's a, an assortment for you. There's a bevy of different games you could enjoy. After the break, we're going to kind of say, take a moment to remember a friend, look at the, his oncoming death. And consider his son's future. We're after this.

• 31:37Russ Frushtick?

  So, uh, once again, we are obviously recording this before the big Nintendo Direct you all are wondering about. But, uh, we did record this after the first Nintendo Direct that happened, uh, in late March. That had a surprising number of kind of crazy announcements in it.

• 31:56Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I think crazy in sort of like every imaginable kind of like read on that word. Every, every possible definition.

• 32:04Russ Frushtick?

  There's a lot of shit in there. I don't think anyone was expecting.

• 32:07Griffin McElroy?

  Um, sure. Yes. No, I will grant you that. Absolutely. It is the, I mean, we were talking recently, I don't remember if it was on show or not, about sort of like the swan song kind of games for a console sort of life cycle.

• 32:21Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, the last games that come out at, right at the end of the cycle that kind of show off all the hardware's tricks.

• 32:27Griffin McElroy?

  And this feels like the Nintendo Direct where they kind of show what that is going to entail. Uh, and there, I, yeah, man, there's a lot of stuff. A lot of it is known quantity like Pokemon Legends, uh, Z A and, uh, Metroid Prime four beyond. Which I guess we haven't seen like actual gameplay footage of until now, right?

• 32:53Russ Frushtick?

  Yes.

• 32:53Griffin McElroy?

  This is the first kind of debut of that.

• 32:56Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I turned it off.

• 32:58Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, really?

• 32:59Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I was like, I don't want to watch this. I'm going to play this game. So I turned that off, but I did know it was in there.

• 33:03Griffin McElroy?

  Okay. Well, I mean, earmuffs, I guess, Russ.

• 33:07Russ Frushtick?

  No earmuffs, it's fine.

• 33:09Griffin McElroy?

  I guess Samus has psychic abilities in this one. There's like psychic powers that you get. Oh, that's fun. And then there's a new Rhythm Heaven. And then there's a new Tomodachi Life.

• 33:20Russ Frushtick?

  Wait, wait, wait. I want to hear about Rhythm Heaven, because that game had only one installment, right?

• 33:25Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 33:26Russ Frushtick?

  Rhythm Heaven?

• 33:26Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 33:27Russ Frushtick?

  Have there been multiples before this one?

• 33:29Griffin McElroy?

  I'm pretty sure. Now, you're gonna make me Google something wrong.

• 33:33Russ Frushtick?

  Little guys running across the screen and they go bah, bah, bah, and you hit the button in time with their bahs?

• 33:38Griffin McElroy?

  That's exactly right, Russ. You got it in one. This is Rhythm Heaven Groove. It's a new, a new Rhythm Heaven game, not a, not a remake or re-release or anything. It's, uh, it's, it's coming out on Switch in 2026. They showed it and it's, it's Rhythm Heaven. It's, uh, it's a basically about as straightforward a rhythm game as you couldn't. Possibly imagine.

• 33:59Russ Frushtick?

  If only someone did an act out to prove exactly what kind of game it was.

• 34:04Griffin McElroy?

  You just did and you crushed it. You did so good.

• 34:06Russ Frushtick?

  Thank you.

• 34:07Chris Plante?

  Tomodachi Life, I think that we should get into Tomodachi Life, which is.

• 34:12Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, let's get into it.

• 34:13Russ Frushtick?

  I never played the original and I don't fully, I guess The Sims made by Nintendo. Is that a fair estimation?

• 34:20Griffin McElroy?

  That is a wild, I think it is The Sims only in the sense that you have a bunch of little guys. And then in any other sense, it's not really that. It is more akin to Metopia. I believe was the name of that RPG that came out where you had all the me's. And in the original Tomodachi Life, you used your me's and the me's that I think you could like download over the internet. And they would live on a little island together and you could make them date and get married. And then they would go and they would sing karaoke and you could change the words that they sang when they did karaoke.

• 35:02Griffin McElroy?

  And it was just an infinite sort of like comedy engine.

• 35:06Chris Plante?

  It's a soap opera simulator.

• 35:07Griffin McElroy?

  Really, really good shit. Yes, that's a very good way of putting it.

• 35:09Chris Plante?

  It's about causing drama between you and all your friends who are represented as me's in this world. And then also downloading like lots of famous models of characters. So it's like you and Batman and Prince.

• 35:21Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, this all sounds like The Sims.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  It's like, it's more, it's a more, it's like a gamier version of it. Like it's, it's less sim and more about like the human interaction and the stories and the narrative, right? Where like you're thinking a lot more about like bathroom breaks and hydration where this is more about like your interests. It's more like, think more reality show kind of, that makes more sense.

• 35:48Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:48Chris Plante?

  Less caring for an ant farm, more drama.

• 35:52Russ Frushtick?

  More watching all the chaos sort of unfold like a Rube Goldberg machine kind of.

• 35:57Chris Plante?

  The hilarious shit about this is it is the final announcement. It looks at first a little bit like Animal Crossing, which is a great way of getting people excited and then throwing them off. And then.

• 36:07Griffin McElroy?

  I was not, I was not fooled for it.

• 36:09Chris Plante?

  Of course not.

• 36:09Griffin McElroy?

  I do not think it looks like it.

• 36:10Chris Plante?

  They announced Tomodachi Life and you're like, wow, great. I mean, this must come out tomorrow. It's that type of game, right? Like 2026. We needed to let you know early. We know that the hype is strong on this one.

• 36:22Griffin McElroy?

  So we got Patapom 1 and 2 are getting a re-release. That's great. I'm here for that. The new Hot Shots Golf game, absolutely.

• 36:32Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, I wanna, this is, this was it.

• 36:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, Russ, go off-chain, go off-chain. You're, you're, you're, you're ready, dog.

• 36:37Chris Plante?

  Let him loose.

• 36:38Russ Frushtick?

  Of all the announcements that happened during this press conference, this was the one that I was most excited for. How obsessed am I with Hot Shots Golf? In addition to playing through-

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Extremely.

• 36:47Russ Frushtick?

  Extremely. I've played through both PSP installments. I've played through the PS4, Everybody's Golf, whatever that was called. I've played through all of them. How obsessed am I? I've been trying to count, when was the last Clap Hands Golf game? Which was the developer of Hot Shots Golf? To figure out like when the next cadence would happen? Which it turns out was folly, because they're not actually making this game.

• 37:13Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, they're not?

• 37:14Russ Frushtick?

  No, they are not involved in this game. Sony hired, I don't remember the developer team, but they're working with Namco Bandai to make this game. Clap Hands has completely been cut out of the franchise they built from scratch. But I kinda hope that at this point, there's enough Hot Shots DNA in the world that people know what a good versus bad game in the Hot Shots franchise is. And maybe they can make a good one.

• 37:37Chris Plante?

  Okay, so this is a Resident Evil, it's called Resident Evil in America. It's called Biohazard in Japan, right? And eventually we got to Biohazard, Resident Evil and Resident Evil Biohazard. Where they, like, the subtitle was the thing, right?

• 37:54Russ Frushtick?

  Yes, they were trying to unify the branding and that's, I think, what they're doing here. Cause it's Everybody's Golf in Japan and Hot Shots Golf in the West.

• 38:01Chris Plante?

  I did not appreciate that it had been Everybody's Golf this entire time.

• 38:05Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 38:05Chris Plante?

  This is wild. So, so Clap Hands is separate from this?

• 38:10Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, Clap Hands is an independent developer. They've basically made every Hot Shots game since 2, uh, since 2. Cause the first game was made by, the Intelligent Systems made the first Hot Shots Golf game. Incredibly. Um, so they've been making all of them since then and they've gotten very good at it. And then they went and made, uh, what is it? Fucking- Easy Come Easy Golf was the iOS version. It was also on Switch. So that was their like spinoff, I guess, because they don't own the rights to Hotshots. So now Sony's doing their own thing. This is the first Hotshots Golf to be multi-platform, so it's coming to Switch, it's coming to PS5, and it's also coming to Steam, which is also very exciting because

• 38:53Russ Frushtick?

  there really aren't any great arcadey golf games on Steam. I've really looked.

• 39:00Chris Plante?

  How do you feel about it being made by people who haven't made these games before?

• 39:04Russ Frushtick?

  I am cautiously optimistic. I think there's enough, you know, I think there's enough on paper to know what a good Hotshots Golf game is, that someone could kind of follow it if they were a capable developer. But who knows? It's kind of hard to say. It is funny though, because like Clap Hands was working off of someone else's work too. Clap Hands came in after Hotshots 1, made by Talented Systems, which went on to make Mario Golf and all that stuff. So, sorry for the rant on this franchise, but there just aren't very many of these style games out there. So whenever one of them comes along, I get very excited.

• 39:43Chris Plante?

  It's this attention to detail that people listen to the show for.

• 39:46Russ Frushtick?

  I guess so.

• 39:49Griffin McElroy?

  I'm also thrilled. I love this series and I'm chomping at the bit for the new shit. Witchbrook, got a trailer. That looks great. Little life sim. I want to talk about, I think it's very interesting, the virtual game card.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, help me understand this.

• 40:08Griffin McElroy?

  So, the way that they are making it sound is the same way that you can take a game, a physical game cartridge out of your Switch, put it in somebody else's Switch and just play it. They are going to make it possible to do that with a digital title where you can eject it from one Switch and then, and then put it on another Switch, regardless of who that second Switch kind of belongs to. And so it allows you to transfer over digital games. I'm assuming it is like a license transfer.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  For a thing, right? Like the, I imagine there's a lot of online connectivity. I imagine there will probably be some gating in terms of how often you are able to do this.

• 40:51Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. So I have some of that background. You need a internet connection when you do the connection to the new console. So you're connecting to another console, you need a connection. And when you do that share, you need an internet connection. But the person that has it does not need an internet connection while they're playing that game is my understanding.

• 41:11Chris Plante?

  Which is the change from right now, which is like you share your games right now, you need the connection.

• 41:17Russ Frushtick?

  So you could have like, you know, if your kid is in the backseat playing Switch, they don't necessarily need an internet connection while they're playing it. But it does automatically revert the game back to you after two weeks.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 41:29Russ Frushtick?

  So you can reloan it, but that's sort of how they suspend it.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't know that part.

• 41:35Russ Frushtick?

  They also limit the, you can only do one game at a time. So your kid is like, oh, I want to play Zelda. Here's Zelda for two weeks. You can play it whenever you want to. I can't play Zelda while that's happening. So it's, it's on your thing. We can't play at the same time.

• 41:51Chris Plante?

  So you can't permanently like sell a game, a digital copy of a game.

• 41:54Russ Frushtick?

  Correct. Yeah. There's nothing, nothing that would remove your ownership of the game permanently.

• 42:00Chris Plante?

  Ah, okay. Okay.

• 42:02Russ Frushtick?

  It's very bizarre. It's also bizarre when you compare it to like Steam, for example, which has the Steam family system, which is like way more generous and not as limited.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Like can you ask for it back from them?

• 42:15Griffin McElroy?

  With physical force?

• 42:16Speaker 03

  No, but like if you loan it to, if I loan a game to Griffin and I'm like, actually I want to play it.

• 42:21Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. I think there must be a way to revert it. That would be crazy if it was just locked on his system for two weeks.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  The whole thing just feels like, I don't know. It's definitely more in line with the way like buying and playing video games is going. But it feels like typical Nintendo like. Glacial shift that doesn't really seem to address what like the the need would be.

• 42:45Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, it it it addresses this, which is a family ownership of a switch. You've got a, you know, in this case, what's going to be a switch to, let's say, and Griffin has the best and brightest, and then he gives the shitty switch to his child. And he can give the games that he already owns to his child on that shitty switch.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  I think the difference is, though, like, when I do that with my kids and I'm like, here's the shitty iPad for you to mess around with. All the games, all the content is like there, it's still just as usable. And like, it's hard, it's it's actually hard to get my kids into like other games because all these like hoops you gotta jump through, whereas with an iPad, it's like, here, you don't have Roblox on there. Well, here, I can log into Roblox in 30 seconds and now I'm on this device too, because it's so much less about the device that you're using it on.

• 43:34Chris Plante?

  Okay, I think I've found one complication here. If you have two Nintendo Switch and they are both linked to the same Nintendo account, then you can switch it permanently, not the tweak thing. So like exactly what you were saying, fresh, like Griffin has a Nintendo Switch that's, you know, daddy's switch and then he has baby's switch and he wants to make it so that the games belong to baby's switch. He can switch those over. This is an insane thing to say. I don't even know what I'm doing here. Then he can, that that will be permanent.

• 44:07Russ Frushtick?

  But you could do that previously. Like, if you logged into the the same account, you could download any games you own.

• 44:14Chris Plante?

  Yes, but you would need the, you would need to sign on online. You would, you could have one, you could have one default, you could have one default switch.

• 44:22Russ Frushtick?

  Right. Oh, and now you could have more than one default switch?

• 44:25Speaker 03

  We shouldn't have to have a boring part of our podcast because Nintendo doesn't know what they're doing. That's not fair.

• 44:30Russ Frushtick?

  We are.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  It's not fair that we have to be boring because this doesn't make sense.

• 44:34Chris Plante?

  Oh, can we talk about Nintendo today? Let's talk about a cool thing.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, sounds good.

• 44:39Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, that's what we're into.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  I'd rather talk about Nintendo in 10 years when they figure out internet, but sure, we can talk about Nintendo today.

• 44:44Chris Plante?

  Okay, Nintendo Today, have you all downloaded it? The app Nintendo Today?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Find my Switch first. They gotta come out with an app. If they would come out with a Steam app to help you find your Switch.

• 44:54Griffin McElroy?

  You guys are my Nintendo today, so I don't need it.

• 44:57Chris Plante?

  I, I just like that there, I think it's a great idea for a company like Nintendo to make an app where they say, you know what, you want something to click on and to scroll, but you don't want it to ruin your life. And you want it to only last for like two minutes a day. And they made an app that's just that. You open it and they're like, hey, you know what? Here's a cute Pokemon. Feeling pretty good. Here's a little, here's a little, here's a little bit of news. Here's a little trailer for the C button on the Nintendo Switch 2. You happy?

• 45:25Russ Frushtick?

  I did hear about the fact that they are moving forward with the Legends of Zelda movie and that did ruin my day. So I don't know how you guys feel about that.

• 45:33Chris Plante?

  That'll never happen. Um, I don't know. I like, I like this, this era of Nintendo. I like the console transition because we get the like dump of truly some of the weirder stranger. I can't believe that they decided to put money behind this. I did not think Tomodachi life would be returning anytime soon. I kinda had given up on Rhythm Heaven too.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  It feels like a clearing of the decks.

• 45:59Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, it's not, I don't think it's, I think it's different than that because you look at like, a lot of these games are not coming out until after supposedly when the Switch 2 is coming out. So they, I think their intention is this is kind of like the next year of both the Switch and Switch 2. These are just games that will also work on the original Switch.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  I just feel like it's frustrating to me because I, I, these ecosystems are getting easier to navigate everywhere else. And the idea that I'm gonna have to not only like, I mean, I don't, that doesn't sound good to me because it's hard enough for me to keep track of my Switch as it is. I'm certainly not gonna keep track of my Switch and my Switch 2. Like it feels like, uh, so out of step with the way things are going. If they wanna keep both these platforms going.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  I mean, I, I'm glad they're reducing some of the walls, but it just feels like, uh, I don't know. It feels out of step. But I, maybe Nintendo gets to do that because they're Nintendo. I don't know.

• 47:00Griffin McElroy?

  It's also insane that we're having this conversation without knowing what's going to happen in this Switch 2. Sure, yeah, maybe. For all we know, they could announce in there like all kinds of other wild,

• 47:12Griffin McElroy?

  you know, anachronistic shit, but.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  I think the question is gonna be, to what extent do I need to keep my Switch around? If I have a Switch 2? That is, that to me is like.

• 47:22Russ Frushtick?

  I think the, not, like, why would you? Like, none of these games are going to be exclusive to the original Switch.

• 47:28Griffin McElroy?

  You sure? Like, what about No Sleep, uh, No Sleep Prakaname Date from AI, the Somnium Files? Do you think that that comes out in July? Do you think that'll be Switch 1 only?

• 47:38Russ Frushtick?

  It's gonna be both.

• 47:39Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, you sure?

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 47:41Russ Frushtick?

  Why do you think you need your Swi- apart from like having a kid play it? Why do you think you?

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Do all my, like, are all my, so all my Switch games will, will carry over the Switch 2?

• 47:50Russ Frushtick?

  More or less, yeah. That's my understanding.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  So I might just go ahead and wait for the Nintendo Directs, and you're literally pulling it out of your ass as I'm watching in front of your camera.

• 47:57Russ Frushtick?

  I, I am pulling it out of my ass, but they have been pretty clear about like backwards compatibility being like a big deal.

• 48:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I don't even know what backwards compatibility means in terms of just the Switch, right? Because there's games that don't work because you bought this mini Switch, right? And so the ones that require the free, uh, the free floating controllers.

• 48:19Russ Frushtick?

  Joycons.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  The free floating Joycons like don't, don't work, right? So there's like already a fragmentation there. And I would just like to know if I buy this new thing, can the old ones go away? Or will I need to like, keep them around to, to play some of those like specific experiences?

• 48:35Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I don't know. I guess, I guess the listeners know, but we don't.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Isn't that frustrating?

• 48:39Griffin McElroy?

  Must be nice.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  Must be nice.

• 48:40Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. Should we do some honorable mentions?

• 48:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 48:44Griffin McElroy?

  I wanna, this is a big one.

• 48:48Griffin McElroy?

  Henry got really into Astro Bot. He saw some videos. I don't, I don't know how these things happen. Some kids at school told, told him about it, or he saw a video online. And he saw about Astro Bot and he was like, I want to play Astro Bot. So I moved the PS5 out of daddy's office downstairs. And, uh, he played through fucking all of Astro Bot and got all the bots and all the puzzle pieces. A hundred percent at that thing.

• 49:13Russ Frushtick?

  He did that really hard platforming sequence at the end?

• 49:16Griffin McElroy?

  He definitely needed some help from his old man for some of the, for some of the harder challenges. Um, I did do that, whatever it was called, the master challenge that you unlock by doing. It was like, we turned screens off at a certain time, uh, at night. So we can try and wear the boys out before bedtime. And it was like a few minutes before that. And he was like all stressed out. And he was like, can you do, please? And I was like, man, this level's super hard. I don't know. And I took it down. That shit feels so good. That's that good dad shit. Um, but yeah, just a delightful game to play with other people. I did not, uh, necessarily click with it when I played it myself, but, um, playing it with my, playing it with Henry and, uh, you know,

• 49:55Griffin McElroy?

  Rachel was enjoying watching it. Gus was really, really into watching it. He's still a little too young to play it, but, um, I just had a delightful time. Cruising, cruising through that whole game, seeing all the stuff it has to offer. Um, so yeah, that's not anything new, but that's where I'm at.

• 50:12Russ Frushtick?

  I've been continuing to play Noita, which I know I bored you guys a few times about, but, but I do want to do a shout out. Okay. So I had a clean run of Noita. I beat like a run without mods or anything. And it was very satisfying. I was like, yeah, that was great. And then I looked online and realized that there's so much hidden shit in that game that you could spend like nine hours of a run. Just going through and like finding everything, but you're always at the, there's always the potential of you getting one shot by fucking lava coming out from the sky or whatever it is. So I installed a mod called the meta leveling mod.

• 50:52Russ Frushtick?

  Which basically allows you to level up in the game, pick perks. If you level up like a bunch of time, like 10 times in a single run, you get a meta point that allows you to permanently increase a stat. I see Justin reacting. This is his shit.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  No, it's just really, I'm, Russ, it's like really beautiful to watch you and this community try to make this game fun against all odds. You guys are killing yourselves to try to enjoy this fucking thing. And honestly, Russ, your determination to derive pleasure from this program when by all external signs, it seems hard determined to keep you from doing so. And despite a bevy of electronic entertainment options is a daily inspiration to me. Almost as inspiring as your daily quest to try to rope me in to your fucking Emperor's New Fun situation that you have embroiled yourself in. Not since Biden Isaac have you worked so hard to extract the sap of joy from a stone.

• 51:52Russ Frushtick?

  I appreciate that. It's a good.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Please send the links. I will check it out though. The meta leveling sounds.

• 52:00Russ Frushtick?

  It's, we'll have the link for the, for the mod in, in the newsletter there.

• 52:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's links to like BetterHelp and some other resources. If you just need someone to talk to or whatever your, your particular cry for help is.

• 52:14Chris Plante?

  Man, I can't talk about blueprints yet.

• 52:18Griffin McElroy?

  Next week, baby.

• 52:19Chris Plante?

  Next week.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll mention this next week's episode. Besties. Our first ever four hour long.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Uh, no, we're going to talk about a lot. There's, there's so many great games. There's so much fun.

• 52:32Russ Frushtick?

  Next week is going to be also the Switch 2 because I'm going, I'm going to be there and I'm going to play it.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Hands on.

• 52:39Russ Frushtick?

  So we'll see. We'll see what I think.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 52:44Russ Frushtick?

  And then I'm going to not participate in the blueprints conversation because I can't personally play that game right now.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, hopefully they're they'll figure that out, Russ.

• 52:53Russ Frushtick?

  We'll see.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  We'll see. But that that will be next week. Anybody, anything else we need to make the listeners aware of?

• 53:00Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I wanted to thank some new members to the Patreon. We have John, we have Amos, we have Jenna, and we have Callie. Thank you for being members of Patreon over at patreon.com/thebesties. We love you. You're great. We also have a bunch of merch in the merch store if you want to check that out. Just like besties t-shirts, probably Google that. That might show up when you search it. And it'll also be in the newsletter. And I think that's the business.

• 53:30Chris Plante?

  Hey, Fresh, I dropped a I dropped a game in the Slack that I think you can play for next week. I think you'll enjoy it.

• 53:35Russ Frushtick?

  Really?

• 53:36Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I think it's like

• 53:38Russ Frushtick?

  It's called Flight Catastrophe.

• 53:41Chris Plante?

  It gives you a unique opportunity to become a crisis management specialist aboard the passenger plane.

• 53:48Russ Frushtick?

  Wow, that is where they're like just designed. That's all the training was leading up to that moment.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. Be sure to join us again next week for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Besties.