The First Great Game of 2026

Oh, time to be real. Too late. I already was. Shit. Shit, it meant for the app. I got too real with you guys. You guys got anything real you want to say? Yeah, I got something real to say. I know we went through a time, and certainly that's still the case, that GoodRust makes very good handheld gaming content, things like that. But I found a new source. The fact that you're calling him GoodRust now makes me very happy. 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. Yeah. We will drop a link in the newsletter post. We will. But if you're looking for chief pro bidet content. Because 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. Is this not the cold open? This is the cold open, but it's not the show. Let me just say. The cold open is just stuff we recorded randomly before the show started. Yeah, I understand. You know what I'm saying? I do want to say it's actually not a cold open. It's a very warm and misting open. Yeah. Oh. 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. And it's like you're a caveman at that point. It is. It's like, yeah, on a cold seat. 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. Gotta have a warm seat. You would not have a warm seat. I want it to feel like a big guy was just on there. That's how I like it. Thank you. Yeah. You would have to sit on top of a fireplace in the past to have that experience. Not a good pooping spot. Justin, it's too blue in your room. That's not for them. It's for us. Justin made it very blue. I stole that magical gum. It's his blue period, and now he's turning into a blueberry. I'm turning violet, violet. Is that better? So nice. Now we can do a show. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Proshik. I know the best game of the week. This week, we were talking about Mio, or Memories in Orbit, if you prefer. Russ, what's that? I was about to ask Chris. Did you start in here, Chris? Russ. Russ, what's that? 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. We'll hear about a lot more of that right after this. Mio, Memories in Orbit from Deux Dizien. He practiced so much before we started recording. I did. I wanted to do a good job. not one that was on my radar I don't think it was on either of your guys well maybe Russ because you're sort of a subjection pervert I heard about it like three weeks ago just from you know through the grapevine but that was it just as sort of like a jumping off point the feeling it gave me the comparison I think is sort of most apt is Ori the first Ori was the first Ori Blind Forest the second was Will of the Wisp it is extraordinarily lovely the game is you are you're a little guy Mio who is a tiny autonomous unit in a big space arc that has started to fall apart and you go all around this sort of like space arc that was transporting humans to a new habitable planet but really you're just kind of seeing the computer robot parts of the ship and meeting AI who have really gone mad in the time that the ship has been falling apart. You're going around and you're seeing this kind of ship where everything has lost its purpose and the robots are all dying and pretty sad. And it hits that hard with the visuals and the music. But I think you can- Why are robots, why are broken down robots so sad? They're so sad. What purpose do they have? robot that's it 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 didn't oh they were made to pick apples and now they can't pick apples yeah but who makes apples no nobody's yeah even sadder than that in this game it really doesn't give you a lot it gives you nothing when you yeah i'm actually impressed that you were able to glean that much from what you played because i was like this robot's here i've played a lot i think i'm getting close to finishing okay well reason orbit uh it has really sort of captured my uh 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 um the reason i think the 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 uh that would just punctuate like these challenging platforming sequences with like a nice beautiful moment of repose like this game does that constantly uh and very very very effectively but also it handles um 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 search action games is in Memories in Orbit, you start with the double jump. That's great. I love that shit. I don't have to go hunting for the double jump. I know that it is. 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 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 architecture itself and trying to find like lines that you can get through with the power that you have. It's physics-based in the way that even like Silksong is not. so 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 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 movement. 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 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, having to like think outside the box a little bit and trying to- Like hidden caves and things like that. Yeah, hidden caves or things that aren't very clearly part of the architecture that you can like make your way through that. I thought that was kind of cool. Like it really forced you to, I think, slow down and really look at the environments. 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 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 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 uh tech to this game that is uh really really rewarding and probably i think probably it's 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 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 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. 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. 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. Yeah. This game does not have a souls-like recovery mechanic for the currencies that you possess when you die. When you die, the nacre, which is 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 are there other unlocks that happen from just i've lost quite a bit of nacre to the magic spring and i have not gotten any other just the map boost from them i'll also say that happened to me not through dying but through making my way back there and just handing my nacre yeah yeah you do have that option eventually there's some signposts that lead to but like i don't know playing the game without a map sucks yeah 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 yeah and i wasn't going back to give my it doesn't make it clear you're supposed to take your nacre back to that thing and i don't know man it's a weird it's such a weird sort of stylistic choice and it it feels uh a bit half-baked 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 yes 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 like one option you can use the nacre 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 false obfuscation as a way of building difficulty when you could signpost mechanics well and then build your difficulty in more humane ways. Because for me, these things are happening. I don't know the ramifications of them. It's not made clear. And I understand that can be part of the mystery, but there's a lot of fun mysteries. I don't think that deciding what bullshit you call Estus flasks is a fun way of spending my time. Yeah, I think that is, I think, the reason they made the choice, right? Is like the ship is offline. and 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 nacre after you've like 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 break points, you would get, oh, here's a benefit. So it's like, yeah, you died and you lost some stuff, but here's a little something for your effort. But that mechanic doesn't really come back. It's just weird. And it is a really rough start to the game. They do have, for what it's worth, if that sounds too punishing to you, there are mechanics similar to Silksong, actually, where you can bank your nacre so that you can basically, you crystallize it uh 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 yeah 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 here now yeah 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 i 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 um 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 very near automata-esque i know plan is not here but yes i mean 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 animations on all the enemies are amazing they look like robots that are teaching themselves how to walk with like whatever garbage parts it really 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 gonna like really open things up for me yeah it was less so for like here's an upgrade that whenever you use your zipline uh attack your next attack is gonna do a little bit of bonus damage and that's gonna 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 going to get me where I need to go. 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 want to throw themselves at it, which I think is most people, or at least a lot of people, it can be frustrating. But I feel like 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 lo-fi beats to study to. And I'm like, I'm fucking in. Like this is my fucking jam. Yeah. despite some of the quirks, which I agree, aren't exclusively like, this doesn't feel the best. It's a shame because I think the game is fantastic. I think it's really, really great. And I think 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. It's going to be worth it for me to figure out what's going on here. And I think it is. But I think also 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 and go outside the boundaries. 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 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 uh great assist options too really really great ways of sort of tempering the difficulty. You didn't fuck with those, did you, Justin? Any of the excessive voting stuff? 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 next time you fight it. One is pacifist mode, which makes it so that enemies won't attack you unless you attack them. 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 um so i've i've i 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 it does seem like the kind of game that people who aren't necessarily like hardcore massacre people yeah would enjoy so it's really terrific that they put that stuff yeah in there much easier than Silkside. Yeah, I think that I actually started, if I could give one piece of advice to people that do want to play it, I started enjoying it a lot more, I think, when I started meeting it on its own level rather than trying to extrapolate mechanics and assumptions that I would make from other search action games like this. It's like trying to sort of take it one screen at a time, really, and thinking about it. Because a lot of it is structured differently 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 yeah you really can that's my advice is i mean first of all just die a bunch get the map like don't around get the map then you can really play the game and enjoy it um 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 just if they were like hey if you donate slash die and give me 200 an acre something cool will happen that's really all it needed at the beginning just give us some scientists should we take a quick break yeah 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 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 um but it was weird i'd like to circle back to it because it does look cool but uh i think we're going to talk about the new animal crossing stuff uh instead right yeah you guys the newest horizons i haven't tried it yet um but animal crossing was updated for switch 2 but a lot of the features i know came to the original switch as well yes uh 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 five dollars which seems so weird like some kind of consistency on this thing would be great because sometimes it's a ten dollar thing sometimes if you have a nintendo switch online account it just gives you the upgrade for free yeah and then this one is just a fight it's just going to slide a fiver um but the switch 2 edition stuff is like mouse controls uh i think 12 player multiplayer obviously some performance enhancements, game chat like being able to see your avatar. Did you try mouse controls? I didn't know that was part of it. Did you try? 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. But it makes, you know, you're just using it I think mostly for designing pixel art and shit like that. Yeah, I think that's mostly. That's cool. Yeah, but I would say the exciting stuff, the cool stuff is all in the 3.0 update which is free. There's a hotel. Yeah, it adds a hotel to the island. It seems sort of redundant with the Happy Home Designer stuff. That was my immediate thought as well. Was it Happy Home? The island thing, right? Where you were designing? 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 people. But that was also the DLC for Animal Crossing. 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 neat. It's cute. the biggest thing that Juice and I did together with Travis on a stream just the other day is the slumber island that is I think the most sort of exciting part of the update are you familiar with that at all Russell is that the like create your own do whatever the fuck you want there's like no real impact yes yeah it's a creative mode right so it's like if Minecraft you know like where you can pull out whatever and lay down whatever and there's not an economy to worry about. Does it only pull from the recipes or items that you have? Yes, it only pulls from things that are in your catalog. So things that you have picked up before or crafted before. But it also lets you like, the creative mode comparison is super apt because you can also just put down a tree. You can just like get a tree and you can pick it back up. You don't have to get an axe or a shovel or whatever. You just pick it up like an item. Yeah, everything everything's pretty easy in that regard. I do wish. Moving around still sucks. Moving around sucks. 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. 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 a decorator mode And what that does is gives you a prototype view lets you drag and drop stuff around turn it around with UI not with your guy And it's amazing. It's great. Why is that not the default in this mode? Well, for whatever reason, when you're outside, you can't do it. Yeah, I think it was probably designed for indoors and the engine. whatever the fuck. 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 water features or land parcels. You 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, pick up trees, put down trees, all of that stuff simultaneously with other players is fucking fun. It is madcap as hell. What did you guys focus on doing? We split the island into- Well, if you could watch our stream, folks if you want but i'll say that what we did is we had a 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 in the game like you set a timer in game and then they came and like worked on the toilet museum for a while and we is i mean that that that i mean like that and it was it was really great same shit you do in minecraft you know like i'm gonna build a house and burn it down i mean that that kind of nonsense the thing there's other stuff that like the update adds like some quality of life stuff that it's like frankly bonkers that it they needed to add yeah you can craft multiple items at the same time and you can uh automatically craft with uh materials in your home storage uh without having to like pull it out every time you like that's ridiculous that's so ridiculous right but like they fixed that that's better now um 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 when you leave your slumber island it's like you can save it and you have three save slots that you can yeah but like then next time we 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 enshrouded or minecraft or like any of these other open world survival craft games which obviously animal crossing is not that genre but there are definitely cozy games like that that are doing exactly this yeah 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 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 for years but last two or so years we've been hearing rumblings of beta tests and things like that that are under nda about 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 yeah i also at this point i i tend to 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 were 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 the game itself is like you're just building onto 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 well yeah they were doing that i mean they had the online game i mean i guess they still do i haven't touched 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 what are you talking about the there's an online the sorry the mobile mobile animal crossing oh pocket cam no they did shut that down that only exists yeah that that only exists as a in our offline no they they released an offline version of the game uh that you can buy and it's like full price game but got it won't go away i guess yeah um yeah so like that's their a 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 gonna fill the gaps in their release schedule with just like here's luigi's mansion 3 uh switch to edition and maybe it adds one little mode and 60 frames a second whatever it is i uh so you're gonna see that level of iteration as well do what griffin said i think and i'm thinking about it more as we say this is i think that what griffin said about the all that stuff being confusing um and being kind of moving target about like this is five cost five dollars 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 feel like they have you pretty much you know 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 to edition 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 but you're talking about all this ridiculous quality of life stuff that is included in there that should have been for the day there it's nintendo they know what would make it better better yeah like they They know it would make it easier to play. It's, I mean, 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. We know you want to skip all the cut scenes and click through dialogue really fast. Well, I mean, and also like a million other sort of granular things or quality of life things that are just like not being prioritized because traditionally people have had the patience to stick it out. And I don't know. I think that that is less true 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 going to 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, you know, where the rest of the industry is at. But at least it's free. It is free. And it's nice to go back to. I actually went back to playing Animal Crossing about a month ago. 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. 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 all that. I want to teach my son everything. But I also have had a long day and can't read for an hour and a half. Christ. You just want to take pictures of Pokemon. No words required. 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 licensed 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 I think it's very funny. We had that one. I've never seen the movie, but I definitely played Platoon on NES developed by Ocean Software. I'm sure it was very authentic to the movie. Ocean Software is one where, as soon as you said the name, my brain produced an ancient file of the logo of Ocean Software because it is peak 90s Microsoft Word-ass preset stuff. Yeah, they had a lot of fucking games, man. Yeah. uh weapon um miami vice they had apparently navy seals and nightbreed got pretty good games oh damn they made cool world that game is truly awful yeah they had a lot of misses uh that actually is gonna can i do an honorable mention that ties into this and i'll come and we can do the rest later but um i've been messing around this week with uh 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 c64 Amiga uh the British stuff obviously all missed me so I got into Amiga things and there's this really cool project called AmigaVision uh it's at Amiga.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 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 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 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 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 because 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 i do want to check that out um i'll jump back to the reader mail real quick we have one more a licensed game that someone mentioned. James writes, my favorite licensed game as a kid was Dick Tracy on the NES. Yep. Yeah 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 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. I don't think people understand. I don't think kids who didn't grow up or even adults who didn't grow up playing a lot of games in the 80s. Everyone was cheating all the time. You had to cheat. The games were hard and bad. They were broken. Contra had a code that gave you 30 men. Everyone did that. Do you know why? Because you needed 30 guys to play Contra. It's hard as fuck. We all cheated. The Game Genie was a... Did people know what the Game Genie was? It was 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 have your games. Yeah, I don't know the science behind the Game Genie, and I can't wrap my head around it, because he's so wild. 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, it's basically giving shock therapy to Mario. We're just like touching different parts of Mario's brain to see what makes him. Yeah. It's not sophisticated. You can die. Okay. Good. Perfect. It's not counter-programming knuckles in real time. It's like it shunts a hot wire into the cartridge that makes it so that you have 99 lives. It's malicious code. Yeah. 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. I think that's it for Reader Mail. I had an old honorable mention that I want to call out. What? The game is Illusion of Gaia. Yeah, baby! Which I have never played before because I thought it was a turn-based game. I got it right here oh you got a Griffin has a physical SNES card yeah when I play when I play Illusion of Gaia it's legit I do too and that's why I'm playing Illusion of Gaia I'm fucking sure dude yeah it's neat and weird and interesting and it does remind me you made the comparison to Actraiser I was talking about Actraiser last week yeah 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 right 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 uh art and uh great music and just like the game feel and the way that it my favorite thing about quintet games is how they use almost all the sound 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 an act raiser yeah the UI elements are also pretty consistent you'll see a lot of that stuff as well um yeah it's a really weird game 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 uh it's like I don't think I realized that's what was going on I mean I'm only probably six hours in so I don't yeah I mean it's it is uh I mean it that makes sense they're talking about Inca ruins. Yeah, like you go to Angkor Wat and you go to the Great Pyramids and those are now Zelda Dungeons, basically. It's just a fucking rad idea for a game. So ambitious, especially for back then running on the SNES. It was really wild. Yeah. You have anything, Griffin, you want to call out for? I've been playing a lot of a game that we can't talk about yet that is embargoed. Oh, yeah. 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 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 waiting for him to come outside with his teacher for five minutes and I can power wash a bungalow, that's all right. That feels pretty good to just kind of vibe out with that. Check this out. I have great memories of Henry's dad. Yeah, 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 i'm currently power washing a playground and you're not you're podcasting don't well in the game the level i'm on is a playground 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 can't um no i get i get why people like it it is not the progression hooks or 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 do you think here's my uh approach on uh power wash and why usually after about five hours or so i usually bounce off of them in addition i know acknowledging everything that justin said last year about uh his uh disdain for power watch simulator i think that the game in my opinion gets less fun the more complexities they add to it absolutely 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 yeah 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 um also want to shout out uh the boyfriend is back on netflix season two um this is the uh extremely i would say terrace house vibey 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 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 and they they're picking uh people to picking people to go work with and 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 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 anytime 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 there is something interesting that it didn't occur to me until just now they'll like divide between commentator and not in reality tv like obviously survivor doesn't really have a commentator but it's really a lot of a japanese construction yeah it's japanese yeah a lot of the korean and japanese reality shows we watch have have have that uh what's the other big brother doesn't that have commentators or no i've never watched you know 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 non-mercanic. 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 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. That's also, I mean, but that's kind of a British construction too, right? That divide of like a panel and like a, in the field kind of thing. Like that's a very, that's not a construction. We have a lot over here. It requires a certain – there is genuinely a certain type of celebrity, a certain type of performer, entertainer, like this 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. uh and i 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 uh ensure that you are like hiring a team of of people who are i don't know collaborative in in that way and it's 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 Whenever they've attempted it, it's always felt very rigid or scripted. Yeah, right? Yeah. This is not like, I hope this is not reading like snooty, well, I only watch, I watch subs, not doves. Like, it's truly not that. It's an interesting sort of like, I don't know, pop cultural divide of sort of what Western reality TV audiences are used to, you know, versus what they're doing. Or even like watching the like Western take on Taskmaster, which obviously friend of the show Ron Funches was in that. Yeah. You could see that they're struggling to like jam what is really a feel good show into a 22 minute thing. Yeah. Yeah. So my hope is maybe Western audiences or Western producers will learn some lessons from that stuff because obviously so many shows. there's a blue million things that they i think would would could try doing differently um that may or may not be better but you know would be worth a shot for sure juice you got anything well i mentioned amigavision oh yeah he jumped jumped ahead yeah um what's your favorite amiga game give me give me a i haven't i haven't liked any of them yet but it's cool though yeah sure all right well someday so they're so old russ they don't have like graphics i was gonna say When you talked about me, I was like, I'm not playing that shit. 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. Y'all can be patrons over there. We appreciate everyone that's already a patron. We have a new Resties coming at you in the coming week. New Bracket Battles coming first week of February. All sorts of fun stuff on there. So please join us for that party. Nice. Well, that's going to 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. Well, join us again next week for that, for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!