The First Great Game of 2026

MIO: Memories in Orbit is competing in one of the most crowded genres in video games: the Metroidvania. Sorry, "Search Action Game." But trust us, this one's worth pulling from the pack. It blends the aesthetics of Nier, Citizen Sleeper, and oil paintings into something surprising and beautiful. Plus, the boys return to their Animal Crossing islands for the big Switch 2 update.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Oh, time to be real. Too late, I already was.

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Shit.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Shit, it meant for the app.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  I got too real with you guys. You guys got anything real you want to say?

• 0:13Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I got something real to say. I, um, I know we went through a time and certainly that's still the case that Good Russ makes very good handheld gaming content, things like that. But I found a new source.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  That you're calling him Good Russ now makes me very happy.

• 0:27Russ Frushtick?

  A new source for content and it's a guy on YouTube who just tells me how my bidet seat works. And man, this guy knows his stuff.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:38Russ Frushtick?

  We will drop a link in the newsletter post.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  We will.

• 0:41Russ Frushtick?

  But if you're looking for chief pro bidet content.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  Cause this is in the cult, like we're not, this isn't in the show. So I don't know who you're talking to.

• 0:51Griffin McElroy?

  Like, is this not the cold open?

• 0:52Speaker 00

  This is a cold open, but it's not a show.

• 0:54Russ Frushtick?

  Let me just say, it's a really.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Stuff we recorded randomly before the show started.

• 0:58Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  You know what I'm saying?

• 0:59Russ Frushtick?

  I do want to say it's actually not a cold open. It's a very warm and misting open.

• 1:03Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. Sometimes my little son makes us unplug the bidet seat on our toilet downstairs because it makes a noise that freaks him out a little bit sometimes. And then I'll forget to plug it back in and I'll come in, you know, for a middle of the night sesh and I'll sit down and the seat is icy cold. Instead of wonderful warm because I forgot to plug it in. It gives me a jump scare every time.

• 1:25Russ Frushtick?

  And it's like you're a caveman at that point.

• 1:27Griffin McElroy?

  It is like, yeah, on a cold seat.

• 1:29Russ Frushtick?

  It's like you're traveling back. That's really the reason never to travel back in time. I know people are worried about changing history, but really.

• 1:36Griffin McElroy?

  Got to have a warm seat.

• 1:37Russ Frushtick?

  You would not have a warm.

• 1:38Griffin McElroy?

  I want it to feel like a big guy was just, just on there. That's how I like it. Thank you.

• 1:45Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, you would have to sit on top of a fireplace in the past to have that experience. Not a good pooping spot.

• 1:52Griffin McElroy?

  Justin, it's too blue in your room.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  That's not for them.

• 1:57Russ Frushtick?

  It's for us.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  It's for you.

• 1:59Russ Frushtick?

  Just made it very blue.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  I stole that magical gum.

• 2:03Russ Frushtick?

  It's his blue period and now he's turning to a blueberry.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  I'm turning violet, violet.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Is that better?

• 2:12Russ Frushtick?

  So nice.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Now we can do a show.

• 2:32Speaker 00

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

• 2:35Griffin McElroy?

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

• 2:37Russ Frushtick?

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

• 2:42Speaker 00

  This week, we're talking about Mio or Memories in Orbit, if you prefer. Russ, what's that? I was about to ask Chris.

• 2:49Griffin McElroy?

  Did you throw it in, Chris?

• 2:50Speaker 00

  Russ.

• 2:51Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, no. I don't know if I can deal with this. Memories in Orbit is a search action game from a French developer that is very, I would say, minimalist and vibey and pretty to look at and also challenging.

• 3:08Speaker 00

  Well, we'll hear about a lot more of that right after this.

• 3:12Russ Frushtick?

  This episode of The Besties is sponsored by Lisa. You know, we are starting to get into the cooler months of the year. And you know what I love in the cool months of the year? An incredibly cozy mattress that you can just cozy up into. You got the blankets and everything. And I will speak from experience, but maybe not my experience, because Lisa sent me one of their mattresses. But it was timed as such where actually my son, who was becoming a toddler and needed like an actual bed, needed a mattress. So we had him use the Lisa mattress. And every time that I get into that bed to read him a story at night,

• 3:53Russ Frushtick?

  I am incredibly jealous of his mattress because holy cow, that thing is incredibly comfortable. Lisa was awarded the Best Hybrid and Best Memory Foam Mattress by New York Times Wirecutter and is featured by West Elm as their go-to mattress partner. You can go to lisa.com for 25% off select mattresses. Plus, get an extra $50 off with promo code BESTIES, exclusive to our listeners. That's L-E-E-S-A.com, promo code BESTIES for 25% off select mattresses, plus an extra $50 off. Let them know we sent you in the survey after checkout. Lisa.com, promo code BESTIES.

• 4:34Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, Mio, Memories in Orbit, uh, from Doz diziam.

• 4:39Russ Frushtick?

  He practiced so much before we started recording.

• 4:42Griffin McElroy?

  I did. I wanted to do a good job. Uh, not one that was on my radar. I don't think it was on either of your guys. Well, maybe Russ, cause you're sort of a suggestion pervert.

• 4:51Russ Frushtick?

  I heard about it, uh, like three weeks ago, just from, you know, through the grapevine, but that was it. Yeah.

• 4:58Griffin McElroy?

  If, just as sort of like a jumping off point, the feeling it gave me, uh, the comparison I think is sort of most apt is Ori.

• 5:08Russ Frushtick?

  Yes.

• 5:08Griffin McElroy?

  The first, the first Ori, was the first Ori Blind Forest?

• 5:12Russ Frushtick?

  Blind Forest was the first one.

• 5:13Griffin McElroy?

  The second was Will of the Wisp.

• 5:14Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Griffin McElroy?

  It is extraordinarily lovely, the game is. You are, uh, you're a little guy, Mio, who is a tiny autonomous unit in a big space ark, uh, that has started to fall apart. And you go all around this sort of like space ark that was transporting humans to a new habitable planet. But really you're just kind of seeing the computer robot parts of the ship, uh, and meeting AI who have really, uh, gone, gone mad, uh, in the time that the ship has been falling apart. You're going around and you're seeing this kind of, uh, a ship where everything has lost its purpose and the robots are all dying and pretty sad.

• 5:59Griffin McElroy?

  And it hits that hard with, with the, the visuals and the music and.

• 6:02Russ Frushtick?

  But I think you could.

• 6:03Speaker 00

  Why are robots, why are broken down robots so sad?

• 6:06Russ Frushtick?

  They're so sad. What purpose do they have?

• 6:09Griffin McElroy?

  That's it.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  Robots, really? Like, I think they're kind of like, you know what I mean? Like in principle, fuck robots, but on the other spectrum of that, the broken ones are so sad. I wish they had a break.

• 6:19Russ Frushtick?

  They were made to pick apples and now they can't pick apples.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. But who eats apples?

• 6:25Griffin McElroy?

  No one is.

• 6:26Russ Frushtick?

  Nobody.

• 6:26Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 6:27Russ Frushtick?

  You can sadder than that.

• 6:27Griffin McElroy?

  Not in this game. It really doesn't give you a lot. It gives you nothing when you start the game.

• 6:32Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I'm actually impressed that you were able to glean that much from what you played because I was like, there's robots here.

• 6:38Griffin McElroy?

  I've played a lot. I think I'm getting close to finishing.

• 6:41Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, okay.

• 6:41Griffin McElroy?

  Memories in Orbit. It has really sort of captured my, captured my attention and pretty much all the kind of like gaming free time I have. I've been pouring into this one because it's, it's really gotten its hooks in me. The reason I think the Ori comparison is apt is one, just vibe. Like it is, it really, really is. In the same way that Ori would just kind of like periodically just knock your socks off, like you would come across some new thing, some new set piece, some like cut scene that would just be like, that would just punctuate like these challenging platforming sequences with like a nice, beautiful moment of repose. Like this game does that constantly

• 7:20Griffin McElroy?

  and very, very, very effectively. But also it handles, you know, traversal in a way that is pretty unorthodox, I'd say. Just as like a, this is always kind of like a good binary. I feel like when talking about surge action games is in, in me, in Memories in Orbit, you start with the double jump. That's great. I love that shit. Don't, I don't have to go hunting for the double jump. I know that it is. I've, I've had it in every game. Instead, like the abilities you get are like, you can climb wall, like you form these tendrils that come out of your back and now you can climb on any surface and you can go on ceilings and walls, but only for like a limited amount of time. Or you get like a hover ability that lets you sort of get

• 8:03Griffin McElroy?

  across long gaps. But the feel of it is just like really physical and tangible and it's not like now you have the high jump power. Instead, you're thinking about like how to get around the ship by like using the.

• 8:17Griffin McElroy?

  The architecture itself and trying to find like lines that you can get through with the power that you have.

• 8:23Russ Frushtick?

  It's physics based in the way that even like Silksong is not.

• 8:26Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 8:27Russ Frushtick?

  I think Ori is very apt because you're flinging yourself using momentum to like get across gaps in ways that like most search action games do not do.

• 8:36Griffin McElroy?

  One of the first areas you come to in Memories of Orbit is frozen and when you walk on the ice, you pick up speed and momentum and it really drives it home pretty much right away. Like you feel like you're sequence breaking all the time. Like I felt like constantly I'm getting to a place I should not be able to get to because I ran across this ice, got so fast, jumped across the whole room, did like an attack animation in the air that suspended me just enough so I can make it on this platform that I bet I don't, I'm not supposed to be at yet. It lets you do that kind of stuff a lot because it is not so, I don't know, analog with the, with the movement.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  It seems to really, it takes the search part of search action and I think it gamifies it like more than a lot of games do, right? So it's not merely a mechanical sort of like following the map. You kind of have to, I don't know if this, this was your guys' experience, but I felt like I had to keep challenging the geometry or like fighting against the design. And when I would do that, fight against that flow, then I would find things. Like it really was more of like a search.

• 9:35Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Having to like think outside the box a little bit and trying to-

• 9:37Russ Frushtick?

  Like hidden caves and things like that?

• 9:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, hidden caves or things that aren't very clearly part of the architecture that you can like make your way through that I, I thought that was kind of cool. Like it really forced you to, I think, slow down and really look at the environments.

• 9:49Griffin McElroy?

  It also does a great job of not locking you into like one area and now you're going through there until you get the power and you beat the boss and now you're done. Once you get fast travel, this becomes a whole bunch easier. Uh, there's like a central nexus where you go and you can spend your currencies to like buy, uh, some, some new stuff, uh, for your character. Uh, but like you will go down an area and you'll find some like crazy traversal power and then say like, oh, wait, I needed that for the other area. Obviously, that's like not necessarily reinventing the wheel for search action games, but like, I feel like I didn't have the moment that does happen in the genre a lot where I would see the door. That I can't get to because I don't have the right power yet. I would see that door and I would think like, how am I supposed to get up there?

• 10:33Griffin McElroy?

  But if I spend enough time kind of thinking about it, almost always there's some way to do it. There's some way to like chain an attack in the air to like pause yourself just enough. Like there's so much tech to this game. That is really, really rewarding and probably, I think probably its most, most exciting feature is that I don't feel stuck ever. I just feel like it's all discovery pretty much all the time.

• 10:56Russ Frushtick?

  It definitely has the like thing that Silk Song did, which was an introduction that I think is pretty punishing. Like not super welcoming as an introduction. The first boss you face, pretty fucking hard. You basically have no upgrades.

• 11:14Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Russ Frushtick?

  And they do give you some like shortcuts that make the run back a little bit better, but it's still, I think, pretty harsh.

• 11:23Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Russ Frushtick?

  And they also don't give you, like, if you're not looking things up for this game, which you can do, the game wasn't out yet. So it's not like we even had the opportunity, but like the map, for example.

• 11:34Griffin McElroy?

  So yeah, you don't start with a map and that's cool. Love that. And then eventually, I mean, I think this is like a good, this is a thing that will help you enjoy the game.

• 11:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Griffin McElroy?

  This game does not have a souls like recovery mechanic for the currencies that you possess. When you die, when you die, the naker, which is the, the, the currency in the game that you have on you at the time, just immediately disappears. It goes into a pond, a magic spring, right at the center of the world. And when you have done that enough times, you'll start to unlock some of the like story of the game and the map. And that is not really communicated to you at all.

• 12:17Russ Frushtick?

  Are there other unlocks that happen from just dying?

• 12:20Griffin McElroy?

  I've lost quite a bit of naker to the magic spring and I have not gotten any other sort of boosts from them.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  I'll also say that happened to me not through dying, but through making my way back there and just handing my naker.

• 12:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, you do have that option. Eventually there's some signposts that lead to it, but like, I don't know. Playing the game without a map sucks. It's not good.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  By the way, that, what you just said took. Forever, probably the biggest reason I didn't make more progress in this game is because I was playing really carefully and not dying much.

• 12:48Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  And I wasn't going back to give my, it doesn't make it clear you're supposed to take your naker back to that thing and I don't know, man.

• 12:57Griffin McElroy?

  It's a weird, it's such a weird sort of stylistic choice and it feels a bit half-baked.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  There is a lot of ways people can spend their time, like, and I feel like if you are, there's ways you can build difficulty that make it intentionally frustrating. And then there's ways you can build difficulty where the player is engaged in the process.

• 13:18Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  And I feel like trying to punish people early on before they have understood the basic building blocks of the world. Because so many of these games, like these search action games are, like the different mechanics on them, much like a souls are like variations on a theme, right? So like in this one, the currency you can use to refill your armor. So that's like one option. You can use the naker for that, or you can go back to the guy and just give it to him, or you can die enough and it gets lost. None of this is clearly communicated in a way that you like understand. And I think that it's, it's very convenient as a, if you're designing a game to hide behind sort of like a, a false obfuscation as a way of building difficulty.

• 14:02Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  When you could signpost mechanics well.

• 14:05Griffin McElroy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  And then build your difficulty in more humane ways. Because for me, these things are happening. I don't know the ramifications of them. I don't, it's not made clear and I understand that can be like part of the mystery, but there's a lot of fun mysteries.

• 14:17Griffin McElroy?

  But.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  I don't think that like deciding what bullshit you call Estes flasks is like a fun way of spending my time.

• 14:23Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I, I think, uh, I, I, that is, I think the reason they made the choice, right? Is like the ship is offline, everything's going wrong, you don't know what the fuck's going on. It's up to you to start kind of like patching this thing together. And so part of that is we're not going to tell you. What is happening to this currency when you die? Or how you're supposed to be using it? Or how you're supposed to be getting your map? Or any of that? But when you die and you lose your naker after you've revived the spring and you've gotten your map, that mechanic I don't think has any impact at all. You just lose it. It's not like, it is like, I was thinking like, oh, they've done a new thing here where, you know, imagine in Dark Souls when you died, instead of your souls disappearing, they went into like a big meter. And when it hits certain breakpoints, you would get, oh, here's a benefit.

• 15:07Griffin McElroy?

  So it's like, yeah, you died and you lost some stuff, but here's a little something for your, for your effort. But that mechanic doesn't really come back. It's, it's just weird and it is a really rough start to the, to the game.

• 15:16Russ Frushtick?

  They do have, for what it's worth, if that sounds too punishing to you, there are mechanics similar to Silk Song, actually, where you can bank your naker.

• 15:25Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 15:25Russ Frushtick?

  So that you can, basically you crystallize it and, and there's no cost to that. So if you're able to go to this NPC, they'll turn it into a rock. And then when you die, you just lose none of it. You will always have it.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  See, that's to me, that's like, that, once I found that guy, it's like, okay, so should I just hang around this guy?

• 15:44Griffin McElroy?

  I live here now, yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  I'll live here and just keep collecting it. When do I have enough? I don't know. I don't know what I spend it on except refilling my arm.

• 15:51Griffin McElroy?

  I'm, I'm also at a point where I have more of that stuff than I know what to do with. And there's other currencies that I'm a bit more deficient in. But I, I think in general, the currency loop, the itemization of the game struggles a bit. For me, that's its biggest like flaw is there's like a system where you are equipping these upgrades and you have a certain capacity.

• 16:13Russ Frushtick?

  Very near Automata-esque. I know Plan is not here, but that's what it reminds me of.

• 16:17Griffin McElroy?

  There's a lot about this game that is very near Automata-esque in a great way. The soundtrack fucking bangs constantly. It's crazy.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  The animations on all the enemies are amazing. They look like robots that are teaching themselves how to walk with like whatever garbage parts they've got lying around.

• 16:31Griffin McElroy?

  It's really, really spectacular. But like, I didn't feel the carrot very often. For me, the carrots were like, oh shit, this, this new traversal ability is going to like really open things up for me. It was less so for like, here's an upgrade that whenever you use your zip line attack, your next attack is going to do a little bit of bonus damage and that's going to cost you 20 upgrade points. And it's like, I don't feel like that's like, oh, boy, that's really gonna get me to the, that's really gonna get me where I need to go.

• 16:57Russ Frushtick?

  Right. It didn't have the synergy that again, like a Silk Song where you can clearly see how the items are interacting with one another. Whereas here it's just like a little bit of a stat boost. I agree with you. I think the, why I was digging this and why my immediate thought was like a Justin or a plant would not be into this is because it does the like little person, big world, we're not going to give you any guidance, have quote unquote fun. And that's my like, my jam, like that clicks in a big way for me, but I know for people that aren't necessarily going to wanna throw themselves at it, which I think is most people, or at least a lot of people.

• 17:35Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Russ Frushtick?

  It can be frustrating, but I feel like

• 17:40Russ Frushtick?

  just the, you know, you talked about what's rewarding about exploring the world, like not only getting those upgrade mobility things, but just like walking into a new area. They did such a good job of differentiating the different biomes to really feel like this is vastly different from anything you've seen before. And suddenly like a new track kicks up of like lofi beats to study to. And I'm like, I'm fucking in like this is my fucking jam.

• 18:06Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Russ Frushtick?

  Despite some of the quirks, which I agree, aren't exclusively like this is, doesn't feel the best.

• 18:11Griffin McElroy?

  It's a shame because like, I think the game is fantastic. I think it's really, really great. And I think you are, you are engaging in an exercise of trust with a game like this when you start playing it, especially when it doesn't tell you fuck all about it of like, it's gonna be worth it for me to figure out what's going on here. And I think it is, but I think also the, if they had tightened up the gameplay on level seven, I think that it would have been, I think it would be a fucking masterpiece. I think it can hang because it delivers constantly sort of aesthetically and emotionally and, you know, those moments of surprise and discovery where like, you see a wall on the like far end of the ship and you think, I wonder if I can actually climb around that

• 18:53Griffin McElroy?

  and go outside the boundaries of it. And you do, and there's a thing out there just for super, people in the super duper smart club like you. Like that moment. Happens a lot. There's a lot it's doing like so, so, so, so well.

• 19:05Russ Frushtick?

  I also, it does something in combat that I've never seen before, which is it uses grapple points as like, instead of a dodge, instead of like a, you do get a dodge later, but instead of like a typical dodge, as a way to enhance your mobility, you'll like constantly be like latching on to dodge attacks of like giant bosses, which I thought was like a neat thing that I hadn't seen a lot.

• 19:28Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, great assist options too. Really, really great ways of sort of tempering the difficulty.

• 19:32Russ Frushtick?

  Fuck with those, did you, Justin? Any of the accessibility stuff?

• 19:34Griffin McElroy?

  I have fucked with those. There's three options you can choose from to sort of like make the game easier to play. One is decaying bosses. So it's just like kind of the opposite of Hades 2, where every time you die on a boss, the boss will be a little bit weaker.

• 19:47Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 19:48Griffin McElroy?

  Next time you fight it. Um, one is pacifist mode, which makes it so that enemies won't attack you unless you attack them. I haven't, I haven't messed around with that one. But the other one I think is really great is called ground healing. You have like a certain amount of like pips of health and you know, when you lose those, you, you die and go back to the last respawn point. But what that one does is if you stand on the ground, if you're on the ground without jumping, you can be running around, walking around. As long as you're on the ground, you will regenerate one extra sort of like health point. And then if you get hit and it goes away, as long as you stay on the ground for a little while, you can get that back. Um, so like it's not overpowered. It's, if you're in a boss fight, odds are you're not going to be able to sort of stay put in that way. It's just a way to kind of like make the more punishing exploration sequences a lot more, you know, bearable.

• 20:33Griffin McElroy?

  Um, so I've, I've, I've found those to be like really smart ways of kind of like making the game a bit, a bit less punishing without really like throwing the difficulty curve like completely out the window.

• 20:43Russ Frushtick?

  It does seem like the kind of game that people who aren't necessarily like hardcore massacre people.

• 20:50Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Russ Frushtick?

  Would enjoy. So it's really terrific that they put that stuff.

• 20:53Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Russ Frushtick?

  In there.

• 20:55Griffin McElroy?

  Much, much easier than Silksun.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think that I actually started, if I could give one piece of advice to people that I, that do you want to play it? Like I started enjoying it a lot more, I think, when I started meeting it on its own level, rather than try to like. Extrapolate mechanics and assumptions that I would make from other search action games like this, like trying to sort of take it one screen at a time, really, and like thinking about it, because it is like, a lot of it is different, structured differently from, from a lot of games like this, especially the momentum stuff. I feel like it, it does feel like a secret that you will forget constantly. And then it's like, oh, that's right. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Right. Momentum. Yes. Let me try again.

• 21:33Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. You really can. That's my advice is, I mean, first of all, just die a bunch and get the map. Like, don't fuck around. Get the map. Then you can really play the game and enjoy it. But also, like, just doing things like jumping and attacking, doing a combo in the air on nothing, but like, getting that extra inch and a half of like, height is enough to get you in a lot of places that-

• 21:52Russ Frushtick?

  Just if they were like, hey, if you donate slash die and give me 200 nacre, something cool will happen. That's really all it needed at the beginning. Like, just give us some side fun.

• 22:03Griffin McElroy?

  Should we take a quick break?

• 22:06Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Griffin McElroy?

  Let's.

• 22:08Chris Plante?

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• 22:46Chris Plante?

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• 23:27Chris Plante?

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• 23:43Griffin McElroy?

  We were going to discuss Pathologic 3. That is what we decided at the end of the last episode. But Chris was sort of our man in the field on that title and was not able to make it to the recording today.

• 23:55Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I tried playing a little bit, but I got motion sick from the first-person sequences. I think it might just be the FOV or something, but it was weird.

• 24:03Griffin McElroy?

  I'd like to circle back to it because it does look cool, but I think we're going to talk about the new Animal Crossing stuff instead, right?

• 24:10Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, you guys.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  The newest horizon.

• 24:12Russ Frushtick?

  I haven't tried it yet, but Animal Crossing was updated for Switch 2, but a lot of the features I know came to the original Switch as well.

• 24:19Griffin McElroy?

  Yes. Yeah, so it's a 3.0 update came out at the same time as the Nintendo Switch 2 edition of Animal Crossing, which you can upgrade to if you have the original for $5, which seems so weird. Like, some kind of consistency on this thing would be great because sometimes it's a $10 thing. Sometimes if you have a Nintendo Switch Online account, it just gives you the upgrade for free.

• 24:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Griffin McElroy?

  And then this one is just a fight, it's just going to slide a fiver. But the Switch 2 edition stuff is like mouse controls, I think 12-player multiplayer, obviously some, some performance enhancements, game chat, like being able to see your avatar.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Mouse controls? I didn't know that was part of it.

• 25:01Griffin McElroy?

  No, because I was mostly playing the Switch 1 edition for the streams because I couldn't do the Switch 2 without destroying my son's island.

• 25:09Russ Frushtick?

  But it makes, you know, you're just using it, I think, mostly for designing pixel art and shit like that.

• 25:14Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I think that's mostly.

• 25:15Russ Frushtick?

  That's cool.

• 25:16Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, but I would say the exciting stuff, the cool stuff is all in the 3.0 update, which is free.

• 25:22Russ Frushtick?

  There's a hotel.

• 25:24Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it adds a hotel to the island. It seems sort of redundant with the happy home designer.

• 25:28Russ Frushtick?

  That was my immediate thought as well. Was it happy home, the island thing, right? Where you were designing?

• 25:33Griffin McElroy?

  Happy Home Designer was a standalone 3DS game that took away the life sim parts of Animal Crossing and instead was just like, you're just designing houses for, for people.

• 25:41Russ Frushtick?

  But that was also the DLC for Animal Crossing.

• 25:44Griffin McElroy?

  It was also the DLC for Animal Crossing New Horizons, which I realized I had not played when I installed it and got a letter like, hey, are you ready to become a happy home designer? And I was like, uh oh, nope. But this is like that, but you're decorating hotel rooms to match certain themes and then, you know, new visitors will come and stay on your island. You'll see villagers who are like, not at the campsite, not one of your permanent residents, just like roll up and you can pick their outfits for them, which is a cool thing to do at a resort. And it's, it's neat. It's cute. The, the biggest thing that Juice and I did together with Travis on a stream, uh, just, just the other day is the Slumber Island.

• 26:24Griffin McElroy?

  That is, I think, the most sort of exciting part of the update. Are you familiar with that at all, Russell?

• 26:30Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, is that the like, uh, create your own, do whatever the fuck you want. There's like no real impact.

• 26:35Griffin McElroy?

  Yes. Yeah. It's a creative mode, right? So it's like if Minecraft, you know, like where you can pull out whatever and

• 26:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Griffin McElroy?

  lay down whatever and there's not an economy to, to worry about.

• 26:47Russ Frushtick?

  Does it only pull from the recipes or items that you have?

• 26:52Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, it only pulls from things that are in your catalog. So things that you have, you have picked up before or crafted before. But it also lets you like, the creative mode comparison is, is, is a super app because like you can also just put down a tree. You can just like pick a tree and. And you can pick it back up in the same, like you don't have to get an axe or a shovel or whatever. Like you just pick it up like a. Yeah, everything's, everything's pretty, pretty easy in that regard. I do wish.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Moving around still sucks.

• 27:18Griffin McElroy?

  Moving around sucks.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Turning the items and replacing the items, it's like, it's not a fun way of doing it. And there's gotta be a better way, because it's like, it is not enjoyable to do like this.

• 27:28Griffin McElroy?

  There is a better way, and it's whenever you are decorating your house, you can get an upgrade with your nook miles from like the terminal at City Hall. You can get an upgrade that gives you access to like a decorator mode. And what that does is like, gives you a first-hand view, lets you drag and drop stuff around, turn it around, like with UI, not with like, your guy. And it's amazing. It's great. It's a really, really fun.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Not the default in this mode.

• 27:54Griffin McElroy?

  Well, they, for whatever reason, when you're outside.

• 27:57Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I think it was probably designed for indoors and the engine, whatever the fuck.

• 28:01Griffin McElroy?

  I think it would have been great if they could make that work because what is so cool about Slumber Islands is that it removes all the restrictions of things you're not allowed to do when you have someone over on your island. When you're playing Animal Crossing New Horizons, you have someone over on your island, you cannot put a new piece of furniture down. You cannot move a piece of furniture. You can't add, you know, water features or, you know, land parcels, or you like, really can't touch your island at all. And I think the idea there is like, well, it'd be too easy to grief someone or trap them in a thing or whatever. Having access to all of those tools, being able to like, put down furniture, move stuff around, instantly build bridges and inclines,

• 28:44Griffin McElroy?

  pick up trees, put down trees, all of that stuff simultaneously with other players is fucking fun. It is madcap as hell.

• 28:54Russ Frushtick?

  What did you guys focus on doing?

• 28:56Griffin McElroy?

  We split the island into-

• 28:58Speaker 00

  You can watch our stream, folks, if you want, but I'll say that what we did is we had a little island that we split into four quadrants, and there was like a shared area in the southeast. And then we each took one of the other three quadrants and just kind of did whatever we felt like. For example, I made a toilet museum. So I took out everything I had that could be a toilet and made a little toilet museum. And then the boys came and visited it. And then we took another 10 minutes. You can set a timer.

• 29:23Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  In the game, like you can set a timer in game, then they came and like worked on the toilet museum for a while. And we is, I mean, that, that.

• 29:31Griffin McElroy?

  That.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  I mean, like that.

• 29:32Griffin McElroy?

  And it was, it was really great.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Same shit you do in Minecraft, you know, like I'm going to build a house and burn it down. I mean, that, that kind of nonsense.

• 29:40Griffin McElroy?

  The thing, there's other stuff that like the update adds, like some quality of life stuff that is like frankly bonkers that it, they needed to add. Yeah, you can craft multiple items at the same time and you can automatically craft with materials in your home storage. Without having to like pull it out every time you.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  So fucking ridiculous.

• 30:00Griffin McElroy?

  That's so ridiculous, right? But like they fixed that. That's better now.

• 30:05Griffin McElroy?

  But like the biggest thing is I feel like this is showing a version of this game that I adore. That is like where it should be, like where it. It, when you leave your slumber island, it's like you can save it and you have three save slots that you can pull from. But like then next time you want to play it, I have to go and get in bed and go to my slumber island and uh, start the room and then open up the gates and then they can join me in the gates. Um, and then I can save and it's like its own self-contained thing, right? It's not like the island we share. It's not like, whereas, you know, get me a dedicated server for uh, introuted or Minecraft or like any of these other open world survival craft games,

• 30:48Griffin McElroy?

  which obviously Animal Crossing is not that genre, but there are definitely cozy games like that, that are doing exactly this.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:54Griffin McElroy?

  Where it's like, you have the keys to the kingdom. You can do what you want in this game and it won't be so like, so tightly controlled, uh, so as to squeeze some of the, the fun out of it.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  It, it really makes me very, very curious about what this Nintendo MMO is going to be like, that they've been basically testing for the last, I mean, I'm sure they've been making it for years, but last two or so years, we've been hearing rumblings of beta tests and things like that, that are under NDA.

• 31:23Russ Frushtick?

  Like Nintendo first party MMO with like no franchise attached to it. And like what that means, I mean, I'm sure it's their answer to Roblox, but what that means with the context of knowing Nintendo is like so rigid. With what they allow people to do versus not.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I also, at this point, I didn't wonder if Nintendo is like holding stuff back because their schedule has become so iterative. Like it almost makes you wonder like, well, we got to hold something back for the next Animal Crossing on the next platform and the next time we re-release it like. Where a lot of these games that are released by indies, I think want to be platforms, you know, where the game itself is like, you're just building on to it forever. I think Nintendo is still in that iterative mindset where like, well, when Animal Crossing 10 comes out, we gotta be able to have.

• 32:12Russ Frushtick?

  Well, yeah, they were doing that. I mean, they had the online. I mean, I guess they still do. I haven't touched it in forever, but they have the online Animal Crossing, which obviously doesn't die per se. But you're right. I think with the console.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  What are you talking about?

• 32:23Russ Frushtick?

  The, there's an online, the, sorry, the mobile.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  Mobile.

• 32:26Russ Frushtick?

  Animal Crossing.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Oh, Pocket Camp. No, they did shut that down. That only exists. Yeah, that, that only exists as a.

• 32:32Russ Frushtick?

  In our memories.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Offline. No, they, they released an offline version of the game that you can buy and it's like full price game, but.

• 32:39Russ Frushtick?

  Got it.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Won't go away, I guess.

• 32:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. So like, that's their version of it. I do agree with you, Justin. Like there's an element of that. There's also an element of like. I think that for the next few years, they're going to fill the gaps in their release schedule with just like, here's Luigi's Mansion 3, switch to addition. And maybe it adds one little mode and 60 frames a second, whatever it is. So you're going to see that level of iteration as well.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Dude, what Griffin said, I think, and I'm thinking about it more as we say, I think that what Griffin said about the, all that stuff being confusing.

• 33:15Speaker 00

  And being kind of a moving target about like, this is five, costs $5 to, I think is, is largely because Nintendo thinks that this is the way forward for the future. And they're trying to see. How they make the most money off of it. Like, I think that every one of these is a test balloon. Like, the reason why it keeps changing is because I think they're trying to figure out the most profitable way of doing it. Because it, this kind of iteration makes sense for Nintendo where like, it may not for a lot of other companies, but like. You know, you're gonna buy the next Animal Crossing. You know, you're gonna buy the next Switch thing. You know, you're gonna buy the the constant, you know, like they they feel like they have you pretty much, you know?

• 33:49Griffin McElroy?

  The thing I would, the thing I would push back, though, is that, like, almost all the stuff that is worth doing, worth coming back and playing Animal Crossing for is in the free 3.0 update, which they said after the 2.0 update, like, that's it. And then they, I guess, changed their their mind. Uh, maybe they needed something to, like, accompany this Switch 2 addition, uh, to kind of, like, push, push some more sales of that. But, like, it's a ton of content for, for, for free for the game.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  But you're talking about all this ridiculous quality of life stuff that is included in there that should have been for the, they're, it's Nintendo. They know what would make it better.

• 34:22Griffin McElroy?

  Better, yeah, sure.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  They know what make it easier to play.

• 34:25Griffin McElroy?

  It's, it's, I mean, this is the, this is the, I think, agony of being sort of like a fan of Nintendo's stuff. And I think Pokemon fans probably feel it most acutely of just like, we know what the fuck is up. Like, we know what would be good and.

• 34:40Russ Frushtick?

  We know you want to skip all the cutscenes and click through dialogue really fast.

• 34:44Griffin McElroy?

  Well, I mean, and also like a million other sort of granular things or quality of life things, um, that are just like not being prioritized. Uh, because traditionally people have had the patience to stick it out. And I don't know, I, I, I think that that is less true for, for Animal Crossing, but it is still like, I don't know. If you told me tomorrow, yeah, and they're making the sequel and it's gonna come out next year, I think anybody who is a fan of the first game would be like, okay, I could sit down and write a hundred things that they should do better or differently to get like on par with, uh, you know, where the, the rest of the industry is at.

• 35:23Russ Frushtick?

  But at least it's free.

• 35:24Griffin McElroy?

  It is free and it is nice to go back to. I actually went back to playing Animal Crossing about a month ago. Um, started playing with Henry and it's been, it was very, very fun to go back and play a thing that to have nostalgia for something that is six years old. At this point, and also a relic of a very challenging time. For our planet is is is really a it's a sensory experience.

• 35:53Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, we we went back and started playing it. Don't want to play with my son anymore because it's by far the most exhausting game I play with him. Because he wants me to like verbally tell him every single piece of text that shows up on screen and there's so much fucking dialogue and menus and everything. I want to teach my son everything, but I also have had a long day. Can't read for an hour and a half. Christ.

• 36:17Griffin McElroy?

  You just want to take pictures of Pokemon. No words required.

• 36:19Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, no kidding. Mission accomplished. Okay, we have some reader mail. This letter comes from Sir Lester. Sir Lester writes, I'm old and British. So when licensed movie games are mentioned, I immediately think of Ocean Software. Not a name I imagine means much to the rest of the world, but it was huge in British gaming in the 80s. If a movie came out back then, it was almost certain that Ocean would have released the game license off of it. They're usually very enjoyable. I have fondest memories firing up the ZX Spectrum and playing the Robocop games, Batman, the movie, The Untouchables, Red Heat, Platoon, countless others. The fact that it was a Platoon game.

• 36:57Griffin McElroy?

  It was all right. We had that one. I've never seen the movie, but I definitely played Platoon on NES developed by Ocean Software.

• 37:04Russ Frushtick?

  I'm sure it was very authentic to the movie.

• 37:06Griffin McElroy?

  Ocean Software is one where like as soon as you said the name, my brain produced an ancient file of the logo of Ocean Software. Because it is like peak 90s, like Microsoft Word ass preset. Stuff. Yeah, they had a lot of fucking games, man.

• 37:25Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Griffin McElroy?

  Evil Weapon, Miami Vice.

• 37:29Russ Frushtick?

  They had apparently Navy Seals and Nightbreed got pretty good games.

• 37:33Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, damn, they made Cool World. That game is truly awful. Yeah, they had a lot of misses.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Uh. That actually is gonna, can I do an honorable mention that ties into this and I'll come and we Sure. rest later, but um, I've been messing around this week with Amiga games because I never got and got into the Amiga, uh, never, a lot of those computer things other than if it wasn't on DOS, I didn't really mess with it. Um, like so C sixty four, Amiga, uh, the British stuff, obviously all missed me. So I got into Amiga things and there's this really cool project called Amiga Vision. Uh, it's at Amiga dot vision and it is a, uh, an emulator that has been like configured to have a really cool, well, stat like well configured front end for browsing like the

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Amiga library. So this is a like standalone Amiga emulator that also has its own front end that organizes these games with recommendations and by year and by genre and by all like with history and all this kind of developer. Um, it has pre configured settings for like, uh, how it, how to scale the, the pixels and stuff. So it looks good on modern displays. Um, you still have to find your own like Yeah, I was gonna ask. You know, but that's if you go to archive.org and look for them, I bet it's a, it's a huge repository. Fine. You'll find them. You can figure it out. All right. Also, the conversation of emulation, I think has got to get a little bit past legal and illegal when most of these things are

• 39:07Speaker 00

  abandoned where like you can't get them. You can't buy them, whatever. I think that these like if you, this is like a purely kind of a conservation play, but it's a huge massive library of stuff. I've never checked out before. It's a really cool way of experiencing it. I actually installed it on, uh, my Mister, uh, cause I got, my wife got me a lovely little Sony Trinitron CRT for Christmas. So I hooked it up with that and I've been messing around with that. It's a real fun way of digging through an old catalog.

• 39:38Griffin McElroy?

  I do want to check that out.

• 39:40Russ Frushtick?

  Um, I'll jump back to the reader mail real quick. We have one more licensed game that someone mentioned. James writes, my favorite licensed game as a kid was Dick Tracy on the NES.

• 39:49Griffin McElroy?

  Yep.

• 39:49Russ Frushtick?

  Not in its out of the box form, but with a couple of game genie codes, it actually makes it playable. It was actually quite enjoyable when you weren't dying every 30 seconds, good music and surprisingly large city to enjoy. I just drive around sometimes finding new locations that I'd visit later.

• 40:04Speaker 00

  I don't think people understand, like, I don't think kids who didn't grow up, or even like adults who didn't grow up playing a lot of games in the eighties. Everyone was cheating all the time. Like you had to cheat. The games were hard and bad. Like, they were broken and you had to, like, Contra had a code that gave you 30 men. Everyone did that. Do you know why? Cause you needed 30 guys to play Contra. It's hard as fuck.

• 40:30Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  We all cheated. The game genie was a, did people know what the game genie, like, it was a

• 40:35Griffin McElroy?

  People have

• 40:35Speaker 00

  half of an NES cartridge and you jam your NES cartridge in it and then you jam the game genie in the NES. And then you put in secret codes that would

• 40:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I don't know the science behind the game genie and I can't wrap my head around it because

• 40:50Griffin McElroy?

  I bet you if you learned the science behind the game genie, you would be shocked at how kind of like brutal and simple it is. Where it's like, we make the metal pins, touch other metal pins to make Mario jump higher. Like, it's pretty

• 41:04Speaker 00

  It's basically giving shock therapy to Mario. We're just like touching different parts of Mario's brain to see what makes him insane.

• 41:10Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's not sophisticated.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  You can die. Okay, good, perfect.

• 41:13Griffin McElroy?

  It's not counter programming knuckles in real time. It's like it fucking shunts a hot wire into the cartridge that makes it so that you have 99 lives.

• 41:22Speaker 00

  Malicious code.

• 41:23Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Russ Frushtick?

  If someone in the comments wants to explain to me how the game genie works, that'd be great. I'm looking forward to reading that. Uh, I think that's it for Reader Mail. I had, I had an old honorable mention that I want to call out.

• 41:37Griffin McElroy?

  What?

• 41:37Russ Frushtick?

  The game is Illusion of Gaia.

• 41:39Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, baby!

• 41:40Russ Frushtick?

  Which I have never played before. Cause I thought it was, I thought it was a turn-based game.

• 41:47Griffin McElroy?

  I've got it right here.

• 41:48Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, you gotta, Griffin has a physical SNES portrait.

• 41:51Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, when I play, when I play Illusion of Gaia, it's legit.

• 41:53Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, I do too, and that's why I'm playing Illusion of Gaia.

• 41:57Griffin McElroy?

  Fucking sure, dude.

• 41:58Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, yeah, it's neat and weird and interesting. And it does remind me, you, you made the comparison to Actraiser. I was talking about Actraiser last week.

• 42:06Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, in the way that like, there's really two games and they sort of bounce between each other. Like one game feels like a, kind of close to like a Final Fantasy-ish exploration, talk to people game. And then the other game is like a Zelda-style action game.

• 42:21Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 42:21Russ Frushtick?

  And they two, the two of them kind of bounce between, and suddenly I'm transforming into like a large man and I don't know why. But really cool pixel art and a great music and just like the game feel.

• 42:34Griffin McElroy?

  And the way that it, my favorite thing about quintet games is how they use almost all the same sound effects. So like you'll play Soul Blazer and you'll hear like a sound effect from Illusion of Gaia that was also in Actraiser.

• 42:45Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, the UI elements are also pretty consistent. You'll see a lot of that stuff as well. They, it's a really weird game.

• 42:51Griffin McElroy?

  It's so fucking weird. It's like, what if there was a little boy who had telepathy and it was a fantasy world, but it was also real earth? And you were having to go collect crystals from the seven wonders of the world.

• 43:02Russ Frushtick?

  I don't think I realized that's what was going on. I mean, I'm only probably six hours in, so I didn't.

• 43:07Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, it is, I mean.

• 43:09Russ Frushtick?

  But that makes sense. They're talking about Inca ruins.

• 43:12Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, like you go to, you know, Angkor Wat and you go to the, the, uh, you know, great pyramids and like, those are now Zelda dungeons, basically. Like, it's just a fucking rad idea for a game.

• 43:22Russ Frushtick?

  So ambitious, especially for back then, running on the SNES. It was really wild.

• 43:27Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 43:29Russ Frushtick?

  You have anything, Griffin, you want to call out for?

• 43:31Griffin McElroy?

  I've been playing a lot of a game that we can't talk about yet that is embargoed. And honestly, I've spent almost all my time playing Mio. So that has been the main thing I've been doing. In my very, very brief windows of leisure time, I did get on Apple Arcade, a game that is called, I believe it's called Power Wash Simulator. And I did get it mostly because Justin went beast mode so hard, but also because I wanted to draw my own conclusions. And I will say, I don't think I would play it on my computer. I don't think I would play it on my Rog Ally X. But as a thing that I can turn on my phone when I'm sitting on a bench outside of Henry's school,

• 44:16Griffin McElroy?

  waiting for him to come outside with his teacher for five minutes and I can power wash, you know, a bungalow, that's all right. That feels pretty good to just kind of vibe out with that.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  I have great memories of Henry's dad. Yeah, he, he would show up early to pick his son up and he would actually power wash the school. I mean, it was only five minutes at a time, but like the gesture was really meaningful and he got a lot out of it. And the building was cleaner as a result.

• 44:42Griffin McElroy?

  I'm currently power washing a playground and

• 44:44Speaker 00

  You're not, you're podcasting.

• 44:46Griffin McElroy?

  Don't get fucked.

• 44:49Griffin McElroy?

  And there's a moment where I was climbing under a slimy grimy slide and I was power blasting, you know, the underside of it and the nasty gloopy drip drops were falling right on me. And I thought like, I'm glad I'm not doing this for real. I'm glad I'm doing this and I get it. No, I get, I get why people like it. It is not the progression hooks, or if you want to call it that, like there is a level of, it feels like almost irony to it, but it is very chill to start with a house that is covered in dirt. And then as you wipe your finger across it, the dirt magically disappears.

• 45:22Russ Frushtick?

  Do you think, here's my approach on Power Wash and why usually after about five hours or so, I usually bounce off of them. And it did, I know, acknowledging everything that Justin said last year about his disdain for Power Wash Simulator. I think that the game, in my opinion, gets less fun the more complexities they add to it.

• 45:42Griffin McElroy?

  Absolutely.

• 45:43Russ Frushtick?

  And they have no way to increase the difficulty over time, apart from like, you have to move this fucking girder around so you can walk on top of the roof.

• 45:50Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Russ Frushtick?

  And that shit does not appeal to me at all. So I kind of just want to stand and do easy mailboxes and stuff like that. Like, that's my jam.

• 45:57Griffin McElroy?

  Um, also want to shout out, uh, The Boyfriend is back on Netflix, season two. This is the, uh, extremely, I would say Terrace House vibe-y, uh, Japanese dating show, uh, where I think seven, uh, gay men between the ages of like 20 and 40 live in a house together and have to run a coffee shop. The first season was at, uh, I forget what city it was in. It was like a beachy sort of destination and now they're out in this, in the snowy mountains, uh, having to run a coffee shop and...

• 46:29Russ Frushtick?

  And they're, they're picking, uh, people to...

• 46:31Griffin McElroy?

  Picking people to go work with.

• 46:33Russ Frushtick?

  Or kissing, actually.

• 46:34Griffin McElroy?

  There has not been any kissing so far that I have seen, but it is, it is in so many ways, this show is the heir apparent to the, the Terrace House kingdom, also because it has one of the commentators from the original Terrace House panel. But it is, it's just a, a chill watch. It's a pleasant wintertime watch so far. I do feel like I have to, I'm like three episodes in. I should have put this, you know, warning before any time I talked about Terrace House in the past, but maybe this season goes to some weird, bad places. I don't know, man. But where I'm at now, it's nice to, nice to be back.

• 47:09Russ Frushtick?

  There is something interesting that it didn't occur to me until just now. The like divide between commentator and not in reality TV. Like, obviously Survivor doesn't really have a commentator, but a lot of the...

• 47:18Speaker 00

  It's really a more of a Japanese construction.

• 47:20Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's Japanese. Yeah, a lot of the Korean and Japanese reality shows we watch have, have, have that.

• 47:26Russ Frushtick?

  What's the other, Big Brother, doesn't that have commentators or no?

• 47:29Griffin McElroy?

  I've never watched Big Brother.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  No, there is a host. I think that like in, I think we have seen more active narration in, especially in like the Netflix reality shows, but that idea of like... Checking back in with friends who are watching the same show as you, it does not, that feels like a very like non-

• 47:49Griffin McElroy?

  I think it would be tonally pretty confusing to audiences who have not, because it is like, when we started watching Terrace House, when we were in the hospital after Henry was born, was when we started watching that show and, you know, they would cut to a panel. It was so, it was strange because we were not, we had not watched a show that had that before, right? This idea of, we've got the after show, we've got the companion podcast where we talk about, right, like, Bob the Drag Queen and Boston Rob have a traders podcast that they do, like, instead of that, if they just like between every, you know, commercial break where a commercial break would go and cut to a studio audience where people would talk about what just happened, people who are funny and charming.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  That's also, I mean, but that's kind of a British construction too, right?

• 48:36Griffin McElroy?

  Yep, sure.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  Divide of like a panel and like in the field kind of thing, like that's a very, that's not a construction we have a lot over here.

• 48:42Griffin McElroy?

  It requires a certain, there is genuinely a certain type of celebrity, a certain type of performer entertainer, like this, you know, talent in the Japanese sort of entertainment industry where like you could, it doesn't matter what discipline you're in, you could be a comedian, you could be like a fashion blogger, you could be a musician, or an actor, or whatever, and also have this other talent where like, you're just good on camera and quick on your feet and you can think of funny stuff to say when talking about a show. And I, almost all the shows that we have watched, and we've watched like, a ton of Japanese and Korean reality programming at this point, like, they're all great. And so it's like, does that exist? Here? Like, how do you, how do you

• 49:23Griffin McElroy?

  ensure that you are like hiring a team of people who are, I don't know, collaborative in that way and genuinely invested in the thing that they are talking about? Like, you have to seem like you are a huge fan of the show that you're commenting.

• 49:37Russ Frushtick?

  Whenever they've attempted it, it's always felt very rigid or scripted.

• 49:41Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, right? This is not like, I hope this is not reading like snooty. Well, I only watch, I watch, uh, subs, not dubs, like it's, it's truly not that. It's an interesting sort of like, I don't know, pop cultural divide of, uh, sort of what, what Western reality TV audiences are used to, uh, you know, versus what.

• 50:03Russ Frushtick?

  Or even like watching the like Western, uh, take on Taskmaster, which obviously friend of the show, Ron Funches was in that.

• 50:10Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Russ Frushtick?

  You could see that they're struggling to like jam what is really a feel-good show into a 22-minute thing.

• 50:17Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. So my hope is maybe Western audiences or Western producers will learn some lessons from that stuff because obviously so many shows.

• 50:26Griffin McElroy?

  There's a blue million things that they, I think would, would, could try doing differently. That may or may not be better, but you know, would be worth a shot.

• 50:36Russ Frushtick?

  For sure.

• 50:37Griffin McElroy?

  Juice, you got anything?

• 50:38Russ Frushtick?

  Well, I've mentioned Amigavision. Oh, I see. Yeah, he jumped, jumped ahead.

• 50:42Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 50:43Russ Frushtick?

  What's your favorite Amiga game? Give me, give me a.

• 50:45Griffin McElroy?

  I haven't, I haven't liked any of them yet, but it's nice to play them. It's cool though. Yeah, sure.

• 50:50Russ Frushtick?

  All right. Well, someday.

• 50:51Griffin McElroy?

  They're so, they're so old, Russ. They don't have like cool graphics or.

• 50:54Russ Frushtick?

  I was gonna say like, when you talked about Amiga, I was like, I'm not playing that shit.

• 50:59Russ Frushtick?

  Okay. I wanted to thank some patrons over at patreon.com slash the besties. We have Maggie, we have Sean H, we have Justin C, and we have Snacks Hyena. Thank you for being patrons. Uh, y'all can be patrons over there. Uh, we appreciate everyone that's already a patron. Uh, we have a new, uh, Resties coming at you in the coming week. Uh, new bracket battles, uh, coming first week of February, all sorts of fun stuff on there. So please join us for that party. Nice. Well, that's gonna do it for us for this week. Oh, except what do we do next week? Well, Justin, we're playing a game called Cairn, which is a game about climbing. Sounds good. Uh, well, we'll join us again next week for that, for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

• 52:11Speaker 00

  Besties!