Cairn Is a Climbing Game for the Real Ones

I'll tell you the problem for me. And it is honestly sort of a deal breaker because I don't like a lot of mess, you know? You're a clean boy. You're so clean. Yeah, I don't like having stuff on me, right? And so all the chalk while playing Cairn, it's getting all over my Roggele IX. It's getting all over my pants. It's getting all over my couch. It's getting freaking everywhere. I don't know why the game comes with a big bag of chalk and says you have to do, you have to have this on while you play it yeah i also didn't appreciate that it came in like writing chalk for it didn't come powder it didn't come like lebron james you gotta squish it up yourself exactly it's like why do it that way why do it why even do it at all i think i know what went wrong here you yeah so you're actually only supposed to use the chalk on your hands you're not supposed to fully disrobe and cover your entire body in chalk okay see that's the okay so that's the i've never climbed a rock before guys how am i supposed to know i know i think i was watching just recently i was watching the live free climbing uh what is his name alex harnold was climbing the honnold was climbing the mountain and and or the building not a mountain the building so you didn't watch this at all i want to be really clear i was watching it and he used his butt crack at one point to leverage a windowsill. Yes. And I guarantee that butt crack had at least a little bit of shock. A little chalkiness. A little bit. Maybe a touch of gold bond. A skosh. A skosh of gold bond. To get that extra grip. You got to sometimes. Yep. And also, wintry powdery freshness feels great. Gotta be real. I'm not caring for this conversation. No. No. No. No. My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Freshnick. I know the best game of the week. Justin got pulled into his toilet into Narnia but this week, welcome to the Besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year club and just by listening, my friend, you have become a member. Hope that you are staying safe and warm. We've got a game for you that is maybe not the best for feeling safe and warm. It's a game about being quite cold and in peril. Carol and Hungry and Inheral and Thirsty. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and give it the Besties Award for Worst Imaginable Game to Play while iced into your house with your two children. It is Cairn. Hey, Chris Plant, what's Cairn? Some people are calling it the latest strand game. I'm calling it a climbing, bouldering, rock climbing simulation. you put one foot and one hand in front of the other and you go up a mountain it's as simple as that not quite as uh foddy-esque as some other climbing games we've been playing but we'll talk about all of that but still very very very funny when you fall down off the mountain we'll talk about all that and more with karen after this short break okay so karen is a mountain game you are climbing a mountain you are a expert climber and you've got and kind of a butthole i will I will say, Ava, I think, is a great character, but kind of hugely unlikable for quite a bit of the game. But I will admit that, like, having watched Free Solo, the documentary about Alex Honnold, I think that's kind of part and parcel with the activity. Yeah, there's something. The game is a real love letter to bouldering, rock climbing, the whole world. there is a sort of detachment that one must possess in order to become a rock climbing weirdo. You need to not be worried about the pain that you would inflict on others because your passion is so great. Humongous selfishness. Thank you, Russ. I think that's what we're all dancing around. I think if you heard the description and even I think if you played 30 minutes of the game, you would say it's baby steps, but with double the attachments. It's baby steps with hands, baby hands, baby feet. Only not really humorous in nature. And I think that that is, I don't know, I had a pretty negative first reaction to this game. It honestly was not until I started to go up the mountain and get into the rhythm of it that I felt like, okay, I get what this thing is doing and what this thing is doing is actually pretty cool. It has grown on me, that's true. I think it overwhelms very early on because it's presenting you with pretty tough, just like mechanics within the first five minutes of like use your piton and use the grip and make sure you're filling up your thirst meter, whatever it is. But I do think you get there. Let's kick in to that, like literally the moment to the moment. It's weirdly almost closer to QWOP, the other Bennett Body game where you control each different appendage with a button here. they've tied you can cycle between your two hands and your in fact you have to i don't think there's a way to control two limbs at the same time no correct i don't think so and and there is an auto mode so you don't have to um be like making sure like okay do i want to use my right arm or my left arm and i and it recommends the auto mode where it's picking what is probably the best appendage to move at that time yes i think it is the way it weighs there's so much stuff going on under the The climbing mechanics of this game are the fucking star of the show, I feel like. Clearly the thing that the most thought and effort went into. And it really is an accomplishment because it is weighing so much stuff all the time. Like it's not just enough for you to have your hands and feet both like pretty well embedded, you know, in like a nice grip. As you're climbing the mountain, you'll see little alcoves and little cracks. And you've got to really look at that stuff and figure out. Love those cracks because they're just an easy little path for you to follow. But also, like, if your legs are twisted up or, like, if your butt is sticking out too far, like, there's a lot of kind of physics calculations that are taking place. And true to sort of the genre, you have a certain amount of endurance as you are finding these lines and trying to figure out where to put your hands, where to put your feet as you climb Mount Kami. and if you run out of endurance you can kind of shake it off once or twice but then you are going to fall unless you put a piton down but you can run out of pitons which brings us to the sort of economy of the game which I am way more mixed on than just the straight rock climbing of it. Yeah, so you are there is a whole survival element to this game in addition to the climbing and measuring stamina you're also making sure your hunger meter is filled up if you don't do that then it's going to impact your stamina and your ability to grip etc same thing with water same thing with i think rest is one of them is that correct you remember i don't know man i i regardless most of that stuff off pretty quick you you fill a bag very early on you have like starting equipment that you find and you've got water bottles and and bars and things like that you can cook you can mix items together and uh you can also find stuff in the wild so i found some raspberries i I found like a little spout that was giving out water from the rock, filled up my gear. And you got to make sure that stuff balances. Now, early on, very early on, maybe the first thing you decide is how you want to play this game. And the second that I knew that there was intense survival mechanics, I was like, no, thank you. And opted out. It's just, it's interesting. The stuff that they are doing with that is interesting. It is like it incentivizes you to be playing the game in a certain way, looking for alcoves and little caves. And you're sort of exploring kind of an abandoned mountain village as you're kind of climbing up and you're finding supplies from them. You're finding straight up dead mountain climbers and kind of getting their resources. Which like score, by the way. Yeah, it's a sweet score. But like that stuff all on top of just the moment to moment, I think incredibly strong, satisfying, honestly kind of puzzly mountain climbing of trying to find your path and keeping it all balanced. I feel like it's just a hat on a hat a little bit and it was not I don't know I turned it off after a couple of hours because it just felt like it was making me want to not play the thing making me want to stop playing the game fully even though I was really enjoying sort of the climbing aspect of it so you can turn that stuff off. To use Baby Steps as a comparison and I'm not saying one is better than the other but Baby Steps has these other alternative routes or you can even go down in a different direction, right? You can go see a pool or you can go intentionally off an edge and find a new path. Or you can not. Like you can just keep going up. You can create that challenge for yourself. When you have this mode on, it is weirdly encouraging you to consider going back down to get other things. So you'll climb up the side of a mountain, right? And that feels like the core of the game. And then you will, while climbing, see a bee's nest. and be like oh once i get to the top i could plant my piton or pylon or whatever and repel down they say piton in the game i had always heard piton but sure i don't know it's a region and go for it but you also in doing that you might fall and lose not just the effort that you made but like more supplies and more energy so i i yeah i i get it it reminds me like death trending one in some ways of like it is way more punishing than i don't i don't want to like spend too much longer because i think we all agree that the survival stuff is unnecessary and kind of detracts from the overall experience unless you're like a hardcore person but we're not and yes so i think and i think the game builds well enough tension yeah without the kind of like survival aspects the the the main thing that you're doing in this game and i think it is something you you do more even than in a peak or in a baby steps is like routing out where you are going to go right sometimes while exploring the world you'll find a map and the map has been drawn by another mountain climber and it will show you kind of potential lines and their respective difficulty settings that's great when you find one of those you're like oh fuck yeah because otherwise like you're going to roll up to the next sheer rock face and go into like the uh you know wide angle view mode that you have and just kind of look at it for a long time until you say okay i think i see where i can get up there because otherwise you may get halfway up a face and you've spent 15 minutes trying to like get up there and the thing just dead ends and you're like fuck but even that like you can have cool very emergent moments where like you put a piton in and you repel and you just kind of swing over to the other track making sort of like a desperate jump like that stuff is so good they crushed it that shit is so so good i keep coming back to play the game because it is really really really satisfying to get up over a thing yeah i i think initially i was put off by the ai controlling like deciding what limb you do right um but i do think that the way it was built you sort of have to do that because it's not visually always the most obvious thing of like where your weight is at any given moment. So having the AI sort of take command of that and say like, oh, you really should be moving your left hand now because there's no weight on your left hand is, I think, a requirement. But there are moments where, there's a few mechanics in here that I think work really well. You get to moments where you have to like reach up and to do that, it'll mean like going on one tippy toe to reach up your hand and be in a very precarious situation for like a second or two before you have to And you really committing to it because you can really go back down once you push yourself up like that Yeah So you make these interesting choices like that that I think feel really good You just have to accept the fact that Baby Steps, we keep going back to it, is a game where every footstep is like you deciding exactly where your foot's going to be at any given moment. And this, you do, it does require a little bit of finesse. yeah i really like that stuff one uh suggestion i definitely have this is not a difficulty toggle i don't think it's just like a gameplay setting you can turn on is uh feedback on like good foot placement so like uh if you uh with that setting on while you're climbing up if you like get your foot on like a nice foothold and it's like pretty locked in a little like square will appear when you do it otherwise like no thing appears and if you have like a couple of limbs that don't have good placement your stamina just like vanishes your stamina also is not a meter that is on the screen it is you see ava's arm like start to shake and legs start to shake and the screen starts darken yeah you get rumble feedback and you know like okay i can shake this off and then maybe i need to decide whether or not to put a pittin down um now you're saying pittin i mean that's what they say in the game right uh i don't like i've seen free solo i watched some of the thing i think this world is really fucking interesting i always think it's really interesting when there exists and i think pretty esoteric athletic endeavor that there is so much like uh so many strats about sometimes i'll get like uh i'm friends i'm buddies with somebody who's like about that life and we'll share like clips of somebody just doing like a bouldering tournament where they're like one foot off the ground trying to like find exactly where to put their fingers on this weird dodecahedron to like get up it or like trying to climb a two foot high rock wall just like with these little tiny i think that stuff's really cool and this is a game about that and i think a lot of care and attention went into sort of courting that community i have to imagine this is this is something that people who actually rock climb would would enjoy because it was made by those people yeah it feels very much targeted to them it's also so different than peak in baby steps and all these other climbing games in that way too, in that those games are about moving up, but basically everything is a ladder. You're always climbing just one hand in front of the other. This is really, you might want to watch some video of people doing free climbing just to get an idea of what it is supposed to look like because you're wedging yourself in weird positions to create that balance. It is not unusual for you to be almost horizontal at points as you are making your way between let's say like a v-shaped crevice of the mountain if you try to just go straight up you will fall because the gravity is against you at that which isn't to say that like the the physics and the like animations don't get a little bit janky at times they definitely do and that's okay that's fine but i don't but i i've also seen it a number of times like get janky and then see it actually correct in a way that seems like a human body would do it's it's really i i think that stuff is a technical kind of huge achievement there's some design issues the writing is a bit uh so so for me like there's scenes that have been like pretty great but i don't know that uh there's a whole lot of development i don't feel particularly attached uh to to the lead character um mostly because i think she does feel this kind of like stand standoffish uh not standoffish but kind of isolated individualistic kind of person which is i don't know kind of tough to root for but then again i also think they are doing something with that that i just haven't gotten to um in the story maybe it's like uh a long what is that a short hike where at the end you just have like a a very meaningful sad call and and everything is uh fixed yeah i don't want that i don't i genuinely don't i around the like three or so hour mark i feel like the game introduces what feels like a i don't know an arc and i i think i'm i'm sort of getting to the uh resolution a little bit it's hard for me to tell where i'm at on this fucking mountain because you look straight up and it looks like you're close and then no yeah they do a lot of false peek stuff i do want to share an anecdote so i was talking to we've mentioned him a few times bennett foddy who created quap and baby steps uh and i was i mentioned to him like my initial reaction to the scheme was not very positive and apparently he is like fully into it uh incredibly engaged with it but specifically mentioned that he's been playing it in free solo mode which maybe shouldn't surprise anyone yes the hardest difficulty and he says he's got about 40 hours into it and he's only about two-thirds of the way up the mountain so if you want to make it last yeah you could make yourself miserable like men at faddy but i think for most people uh probably turning off most of the survival stuff is the way to go free solo mode by the way a mode that exists in the game where you don't get ropes and you do not get pitons or pitons it is just you and it is permadeath yeah so if you fall you're done that's cool guys that's great that that's fucking in there and available there's gonna be some speed run travesties that are done to this game and I'm very very excited to see those. The other thing I wanted to mention if you're interested in this but you feel like it's too simmy or whatever we had mentioned this game a while ago I forget if it was on Rusty's or Besties but the game was White Knuckle which was a first person climbing game with like one bit graphics that is like a very arcadey approach to this idea but still has things about like your hand strength and things like that are still factored in, but much more like short runs and things like that. But I really liked it. What's your guys' takeaway on Kieran? Do you think you're going to stick with it as we move on to the next game? I think it is starting to get way too competitive for games that I like, sort of like, but aren't like, I'm not totally in love with. Yeah, sure. To stay with it much more than I have. I'm several hours in and I've enjoyed it. It did start clicking with me in ways that I wasn't expecting, but not necessarily in ways that, like, Death Stranding 2 hit. Grippy. Yeah, sure. Were you all able to get it to run on Steam Deck? I'm playing it on ROG Ally X. It struggles a bit. It has some hiccups. I think for the most part it runs pretty soon. I mean, we are at the territory where, like, an open-world 3D game probably is going to have a tough time on Steam Deck pretty consistently. I couldn't get it to start, and I didn't know if it was just an issue with my Steam Deck. And that's, like, the bummer is this is the sort of game that I think I would put a lot of time in if I could play it basically before sleep. I love a game like this. I love a game that is all about just the flow and the feel, and I can tink with the settings and just, like, be in that space. Sure. Or just stranding one. But it would be very hard for me to, like, commit to it if I'm going to be, you know, stuck to my computer when I'm playing it. It is an okay game to play in front of children for the most part. So long as you don't. Not if you're taping up your grody fingers. Yeah, fair. But they should know about that. Your fingers can get all torn up and then you got to bandage them. But then again, you can turn off finger mode. Yeah. So you don't have to look at fingers that have been put through an absolute meat grinder. I think it's cool. I think it's really, really cool. And there are a few things I wish it had done differently. Game Bakers is the developer of this, which is, I don't think I've played one of their games since Squids. and squids wild west which are some fucking banger uh old app store gems yeah i think i played fury they made yes yeah that was pretty good last one uh i i think it's really cool i think it's great i think i'm i if i am as close to finishing it as i think i am i will probably keep going but then again if i play it this afternoon and i climb up and then all of a sudden there's yeah there's gonna be probably another mountain yeah maybe it'll be like a symphony of the night it'll be an upside down mountain yeah damn that would be cool actually parachute in that'd be sick anyway that's karen um let's take a break and then talk about another game um if that's okay cool the game we're talking about in our b segment is pirates of the caribbean strange tides um i don't know why chris plant has brought a i'm at i'm ready to be canceled it's good stuff um uh hey i want to tell you about perfect tides station to station have either of you had a chance to play this game yet no i haven't uh no i haven't not either that's great then i can tell you all about it so perfect tides station to station is actually the sequel to a game called perfect tides it is an adventure series they are more or less memoir They are about a fictional young woman named Mara, but they are pretty clearly inspired by the life of the game's creator, Meredith Grand. You also might know her as the creator and author of the comic Octopus Pie. It was a browser comic many, many years ago. But this game, it is set in the year 2003 in the magical land of Manhattan. and you are Mara as a freshman in college. This is interesting to me because I was a freshman in college in the magical land of Manhattan in 2004. So it feels like I am literally transported back to a very specific moment in a very specific place. Narrow casted to Chris Plant. Profoundly. In that fresh, not every place in this is explicitly named what it is in real life. But like when you keep going to your friend's apartment in this game, when you were like, hey, I want to go get food, your options will be the Celica. When you want to go see a movie, it is the Second Avenue Old Yiddish movie theater. It is full of recreations of a lot of places that don't even exist anymore. Like the High Line before it got turned into the High Line. There are moments in the game where you go up on the elevated subway tracks that have since been converted into a very famous park. It is truly a time capsule of a video game, but that alone doesn't make it great. What makes it great is the writing here is exceptional, and even though it looks like a kind of pixelated point-and-click adventure game, it does its best to cut all of the things that are annoying about that genre so that you can just focus on the story. So you're not doing the, like, I need to find bubble gum and a root beer bottle and that's going to help me solve the puzzle. You're largely just living the life of this young woman over the course of four seasons and experiencing really three big relationships in her life along with what is going on with her mother and her grandmother. And that's it. It is really that simple. It is a year in a person's life the video game but the writing is so good and so powerful that it pulls you through like reading a really great novella is it uh is there like player choice i guess yeah yeah that's a great question so there is the the game itself is very authored so like every day you're gonna experience the story that the game has like you're not gonna be able to choose who your boyfriend is or anything like that. But you also manage your time. So how you spend your time during that day is up to you. You can decide what book you want to read each day. You can literally go to the library. You can buy books from a street vendor. You can trade them with friends. And doing those things will increase Mara's stats, like her knowledge of music or anarchy or sex. And then you can apply your stats to your- Knowledge of anarchy. I know. You acquire different skills. And then you can apply that to your writing So then when you go to write papers which are kind of the goals of each season I guess you will want to combine wherever your like best stats are So if you've been reading a whole lot about music in the city, you would want to write an essay about music in the city. If you're writing a lot about sex in the city, you would want to write sex in the city, baby. You're going to be rich. Yeah. Yeah, and... I mean, it sounds a little Disco Elysium in the way that kind of ideas would take root and become kind of mechanics. Yes, but with zero sticks. Where Disco Elysium is like, you could die at any moment and all that. This is like, yeah, you might fail. Well, not even fail. You'll do poorly on a paper and you'll get a different reaction from your teacher if you chose a really bad match. or you might not impress a blog editor that you're trying to impress, things like that. But really all of that is there largely to give you just a little bit of mechanical zip in your brain. That way you are pulled through the story. What it wants you to do is just kind of sign on for the ride and go from scene to scene and meet all these characters and really explore the world. So you can kind of touch and engage with anything in the world. I say touch. I mean you can like get a description for pretty much everything that you see. So it is this little diorama almost of these places in this person's life where you can ask like, hey, why is there an X versus Sever poster in this apartment? And if you click on it, you'll get six paragraphs explaining X versus Sever and why someone would steal that standee from their shitty movie theater job in Long Island and carry it all the way to the East Village as a goof. I fucking love the way this game looks, man. It looks. Can you describe like the general visual style? Yeah, it is something that I feel like is not often captured in modern pixel art games. This kind of brief period of, I think about Sega CD pixel games, right? Or it's not necessarily constrained to any particular hardware limitations. And so the pixel art looks a bit more cartoony. it is giving me kind of Willy Beamish vibes if that tracks for anyone it's giving weird South Park kind of vibes a little bit in just like the art and designs Scott Pilgrim beat em up yeah for sure I think that well no even that I think you know Hugh's pretty close to that kind of what tribute games sure kind of high def high detail stuff this this is this is not really that it looks like a i don't know like a a pc game from 1994 or something like that like in that weird transitional period um but it's like really cool it's it's so uh expressive and um just really really well drawn i i also think like if you are a fan of point and click adventure games even though it strips away a lot of the mechanics it's doing some interesting things with how it tells story using that system so like in a lot of the old lucas arts games you have that omniscient narrator who's kind of like holier than our a lot smarter cleverer than guy verse three would what's weird with this is you're playing this game where mara is the author like this is her most of her life not one-to-one but it's her and then the narrator feels like meredith grand today like it feels like somebody who knows what's going to happen in life right so you are kind of this third party and watching somebody argue with their younger self and sometimes the younger person is actually right you know they're it's like we weren't total morons when we were kids but being in that dynamic is unlike anything that you get in a book it feels like very local to what you can pull off in a video game um it's it's so good also just the vibe just very quickly of like so capturing that weird moment when you are in your early 20s and you are both like a kid and adult at the same time and like yeah in a moment you'll be like talking with a crush on the phone falling asleep and then you'll be listening to neutral milk hotel on the subway think you're having the most profound experience of your life and the next moment you'll be buying condoms for the first time and then the moment after that you'll be like having to take your grandma to the hospital or something you know like sort of just a sashimi plate of yeah yeah yeah just a spread a charcuterie if you will um i love it i will definitely want to check this out uh yeah what are you playing it on is it you can play it on um pc or Mac, it works perfectly well on a MacBook Air. So you don't need a whole bunch of power to run this thing. And I believe it is coming to Switch later this year. Okay. Cool. Very cool. Do we want to do some mail? Yeah, we have some reader mail. We had this letter from J-Man 1980 We had this letter from J-Man 1980 about the Game Genie. We were asking how the Game Genie works, if you remember. This is what jman wrote the game genie just intercepts memory reads rights between the game and the console the codes are actually just memory address and values so the game genie people find out where the system in the system memory dick tracy's health is and then every time the game tries to reduce dick tracy's health the game genie is like i got you but then when the game asks what this dick tracy's health is from the system memory the game genie is like it's a hundred and then the game is like you sure okay sounds good so basically i mean that's what we said right it's just a shunt it basically is just it captures the electricity signals changes them a little bit yeah i do want to know what like how you find the like flying mode in mario in the system yeah like i guess is uh is swimming versus not basically in the code probably yeah something like that um i don't think we know enough about however SNES games were programmed to, but it's got to be in there somewhere. Yeah, probably. Evan said that it's probably some understanding of the wishmaking process. Yeah. So that could also be it. It's about visualization and manifestation. That's very huge for the Game Gene. That's great. Drew also wrote in to say that Fable will... Drew. Drew. Not freaking level 9000. Yeah, Drew, Drew, a Drew Davenport. Yeah. Put some respect on this man's name, Drew. Drew. Fable will have office-style cutaways. Please devote 20 minutes to the next episode to talk about it. Without Justin here... That feels wrong. Feels wrong. So we'll save the Fable talk. But I don't like that. You don't like it? As someone who is genetically kind of linked to Justin, I don't like that. Why? I don't think it will be good. I don't think it will be good to have cutaways in the Fable game. I think I know what would really get you, though. What's that? Office-style cutaways, but they kind of make those silly Monty Python-style jokes. I don't think humor... Jeez! It is so hard for humor to exist in a manner in which the game will stop and say, and now here comes some humor. It's like, that's crazy, guys. I mean but Fable has that Fable's like a jokey game constantly Fable doesn't have the exact thing if Fable doesn't have a thing where like you pick up a chicken and then like the game stops and the main character looks at you and is like mmm extra crispy like he's not fucking Bubsy he's not gex like they're gexing it up I don't think it's gonna be constant I think it'll be during cut scenes you'll like meet a big boss and then the boss will be scary and then it's gonna cut away and he'll be like a nerdy guy making trains that's my guess great I mean Conker's Bad Fur Day did it I don't know why did it? yeah probably they did like two camera well it didn't it didn't do like the documentary cutaway it didn't do documentary cutaway that's fine that's a big difference the office did the office did invent that yeah I just Fable needs to fucking come out Fables make me anxious now I mean they released like a lot of information it does seem like it's actually happening I know it came up during our predictions episode of whether it would happen or not see this is what I get for not being logged into a newsroom Slack channel all the time, is I miss when they actually do come out and say Fable's real. They said some nonsense about, like, there being 1,000 NPCs or whatever, which, whatever, Todd Howard has said that for 1,000 years. Also, we can't trust anything until the game is out. Yeah, for sure. That's a new rule. No trusting video games until they're out. I guess. Anybody play anything else? Well, I've been playing something that I can't talk about, so we're not going to talk about that. I will talk about the thing that I went to, which was Taskmaster Live. Oh, how did you get tickets to that? Jesus Christ. I have some very nice friends that work at the town hall in New York City, which is a very nice theater. And I like them a whole lot. And I was able to sneak on in there. And it was spectacular. It was so much fun. And I was skeptical that they would manage to capture the spirit of the show that I've watched on YouTube many, many years in a live format. And just the charm and the chemistry between Greg and Alex through the roof. Is it a different – what is the format? I know nothing about it. Yeah. So the first half of the show, the live shows at least when they're touring, I think the tour just wrapped. At least for this time, they did a Q&A for the first half. And then in the second half, they just like turn it into like a mini episode of probably a full length episode of Taskmaster where they'll do partially people from the audience as as members of the cast and partially like special guests. Just brought up at random or they actually had tasks that the audience could complete to become a member. So one of the tasks was they handed out when everyone came in, they handed out pieces of paper. And that piece of paper was used for a few different challenges to like make it up on stage. But one of them was make your best paper airplane in a minute and then throw it on stage and try to hit Alex in the head. Great. And whoever got closest basically won. And so, yeah, so they had three random people on stage who were like incredibly fun to watch. They were like perfect for that. it can be a little awkward I would imagine sometimes but those three people I saw was great and then we had Alex Moffat was there from SNL and also Lisa Gilroy who is a very talented improvist and it was just like dynamite oh and Jason Manzuka showed up at the end and had like a little special guest on it that's so stacked that cast that's crazy the night before was John Oliver and Seth Meyers were the were the big guests. So pretty crazy. Yeah. The tickets tend to be very competitive. So I would recommend going to the Taskmaster website to sign up to their mailing list. If something is coming in your neighborhood. Amanda mentioned that they sold out Chicago in like two minutes. She was on a meeting with us when the tickets went on sale. And she was like, sorry, guys, I'm going to be a couple of minutes. Oh, they're gone. Yeah. Like great, like instantaneously. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was great. I was really enjoying myself. Cool. I have been playing. So we've started to stream playing video games individually, me and Justin and Travis, on the MacRae Family YouTube channel. And I am doing a new run of Trial by Fieri, which is my randomized Zelda series. I've done Link to the Past. I've done Ocarina of Time. Both of those games that I know extraordinarily well and felt well-equipped to handle a randomizer for. But we've had people ask for more of it. and so I was trying to figure out what to do next and Majora Mask has been randomized People have picked it apart to a degree where you can do it The problem is I don fucking remember that game Yeah Because I haven played it I would struggle with normal Majora's Mask. Yes, absolutely. I am struggling in a major way because that is the game that I've been playing. It's Majora's Mask 3D, specifically the Grezzo version that came out in 2014. I do think you're supposed to say Grezzo. You're also supposed to say Fieri, by the way. Fieri. Grezzo Fieri. Yeah. yeah I've been playing it just honestly to freshen up because playing it again for stream randomized like you find the Garo mask what the fuck am I supposed to do with that I don't know that was 12 years ago that I played this game there is a restoration mod that has been made for Majora's Mask 3D specifically to address a few you know issues that people have with the game apparently they've fucked up Zora swimming pretty bad in the 3DS version but there's a lot of like really great quality of life stuff in the 3DS version. Like, for instance, when you play the song of Double Time, you can jump to a specific hour, uh, because in the original Majora's Mask, like, if you were waiting for the lady with the bomb bag on the first night in North Clock Town, you'd have to wait around until midnight and it took fucking forever and it was so boring. Like, there's lots of quality of life stuff. But now you're waiting, wait, you wait, and then she's selling like a feather, right? What? No. Because it's randomized? Oh, so yes, I'm not playing the randomized. I'm just playing traditional. No, no, no. I wouldn't spoil that. I'm just playing traditional. Got it. But yes, that is how it will work once it is randomized, is I will go through all the fucking effort to reunite Cafe and Anju, and then as the moon crashes into the world, it'll be like, here is five rupees. Like, thanks, dude. Can you guarantee that it will be completable when you do the randomization? Yeah. So, I mean, this stuff is really incredible. It is incredible how much these communities have been able to kind of reverse engineer these games. There is one for the 3DS version that I'm thinking about doing. But the N64 version of Majora's Mask has been – this software has been available for a long time. When you load it up, the Majora's Mask randomizer, first of all, you have to have like the right file for the game that you put into it for it to kind of chop and screw. But then there's like tons of settings, right? So you can turn on logic is on by default, right? And that just means like, it's not going to put the hookshot behind a thing. You need the hookshot for, right? Everything is solvable, but you can check box. Like I actually know how to do this glitch. I can do the bomb jump to get over the bridge. And so logic will then bend to say like, okay, well, if you know how to do that thing, then we can move some stuff around. Like it's incredibly granular. You can turn on things. Like when I do the stream, I will probably turn on this setting where you can choose, choose which checks which is like the word that they use for like when you find an item it is a check uh you can choose which checks are gonna have guaranteed junk like five rupees you can make it so i don't have to do all the cafe and andrew side quest stuff uh because it's i know it's gonna give garbage and you can like pick and choose exactly what it's what it's going to do so it's like it's it's very detailed uh and and very very cool i thought about doing it for elden ring seems like a fun one to do yeah so the reason i really like zelda for it okay there's like there's a there's a whole suite of randomizer tools called archipelago are you guys familiar with this at all what it allows you to do is set up a multi-world uh which is basically you have a server and the server multiple users are like logged into at a time they are playing different randomized games that are all being piped through this server and you can find items from one game in another game what so this exists already in a like mashup of link to the past and super metroid i saw this like a few years ago so you could find the screw attack in link to the past yes right and but and also like you would go through a door in you know corneria and it exits out of the fortune tellers shop at lake hylia so like that existed but now archipelago is this software and platform where you can do that with fucking like every like hollow night and pokemon red and blue and microsoft paint there's like checks in microsoft paint you have to copy an image only like you have no tools and so as you get closer to getting the image right your canvas gets bigger and you get more like there's all that stuff it is that stuff is really really i think kind of challenging to stream maybe from my somewhat rookie position but like this this world of randomizers is fucking gargantuan and you can do a ton of crazy stuff with it uh and it really is like i've beaten ocarina of times maybe a dozen times uh probably more honestly uh throughout my life i used to speed run it with my buddy clint uh playing it in this way was like a completely different experience it is a completely different experience to find something and be like well shit i guess i'm starting with the spirit temple like it really is interesting uh and i'm really excited to do it with a game like majora's mask where there is you know you have the bomber's notebook and like all of the side quests and like having that tool to kind of like help track stuff yeah so uh yes i have been playing majora's mask 3d with the restoration patch and it has been really incredible very very cool very weird game uh and i think grezzo's 3ds zelda remakes are like absolute top tier great shit yeah I'm looking forward to some of these actually coming to Switch I would imagine they will eventually just cause a lot of people don't have their 3DS's lying around yeah it looks great by the way running on my computer I'm sure I should maybe shouldn't say but running on my computer with the restoration mod like it looks fucking great I do have a copy I have a copy of Majora's Mask on N64 and on fucking 3DS 3DS wow boom I got the holographic gold card that looks nice This is where we need video. I got the nasty ass faded gray Zelda Ocarina time cartridge because my dumb ass brother gave my gold version to his ex-fiance. What a butthole. Was that how he proposed? Yeah, he gave her my gold Zelda Ocarina time cartridge. I'll never forgive his ass for that. Do you have a Bandra Kazooie copy back there? No, I got Smash, Mario Kart, Mario 64, and Mischief Makers. no yellow donkey kong 64 no i don't have it i don't have a lot of you're gonna want to go get a banjo kazooie because you're gonna want to play banjo recompiled on pc asap because it's that what you've been playing this week sick that is what i have been playing as my bonus this week it is a native pc build a banjo kazooie that takes about 30 seconds to get running and also launched alongside two huge mods including an ocarina of time mod for banjo kazooie it looks bonkers it is wild how good these native versions of nintendo 64 games look on pc yeah they are truly stunning and uh yeah if you have a copy of it i recommend you go and check this one out because a solid game. You know, it's not Mario 64, but it is still pretty damn good. It's also much less of a lift than running an N64 emulator is running these recompiled games. So you'll see a lot of these games running on like relatively crappy handhelds through Portmaster. And like I was playing like Mario 64 at 60 FPS, like running great. so there's a there's an Ocarina of Time sort of version called the Ship of Harkinian yeah that is like a huge fan project that like a ton of work and and love and effort has gone into and there is also a version of Majora's Mask called Two Ship Two Harkinian which is really really very good yeah I'm so fascinated I'm so fascinated by that world hey thank you so much for listening to the besties I had a great time with you guys me too Miss Justin but it was fun talking about Cairn and Perfect Tides Tides to Tides shit, what's it called? Station to Station? Perfect Tides Station to Station is the full name of it What else did we talk about Chris Plant? What else did we talk about? I mean we talked about Cairn we talked about Majora's Mask we talked about Archipelago.gg we talked about Taskmaster Live we didn't talk about how if you want to hear more about Perfect Tides Station to Station you could listen to an interview with its creator on post games. Just put a little plug in there. But now we have talked about that. A little plug in there. Maybe we did. I love that. Can I get a plug in there for the Patreon? Our Patreon. We don't care about your Patreon, Chris Plant. Whatever. I mean, it helps me too. I'm not going to complain. That's true. It is patreon.com slash thebesties. And we have some members to thank. We have Brendan W. We have Alexandra T. We have Drowrin. And we have Evan. Thank you for being members. We have a new Bracket Battles episode coming out on Tuesday. That'll be exciting. We've got new Rusty's coming every other week and all good stuff. Okay, Plant, you can drop in your post-dash games. What is it? Oh, sure. I mean, I already did that. Post-dash games. You can go do that. But I want to talk about the game we have next week because I had a professor in college of my Capstone Ethics class. Yes. who about three weeks out from the capstone paper being due sat the class down and said if you have not started your paper you need to drop this class it is too late it is too late for you to do this paper in time for the due date for the assignment i defied him and i did fucking cram that shit into like three intense sleepless nights but i will say folks if you haven't started playing dragon quest 7 it's too late for you to participate in next week's discussion um this griffin this is a gift that you've given me that maybe uh dwarfs any other gift that you've ever given me griffin i think it might just be me and you for that segment i think listen dragon quest 7 is what we're talking about the remake uh it is freaking rpg comfort food baby we're gonna be talking about that and other stuff there's actually a few uh sort of embargoes that go up next week. So it'll be action-packed, but, you know, Dragon Quest VII is going to be the raison d'etre. Yes. I think it's fair to assume that Justin and I will be doing something else. Yes. And that's okay. Chris and I, dirty dogs in the trenches. Right. With slimes. Fresh, you'll be closer to the journalism seminar that I had in college where my friend Colin and I went and did, what's the death charge is the politically correct term for the drink. I did death charges to back to back. The Guinness with a shot of Bailey's, that one? Yeah. And then went to this class, showed up reeking of booze, showed up 30 minutes late. The professor sat us down in front of the whole class. He said, everyone, pull out paper, pull out pencil. We're writing an essay. right now is going to be very important towards your grade except for you too you don't get to write the essay you both get a's and everybody else gets to learn that this is how life actually works oh my god that's cool i mean it sucks for everyone and it sucks probably the optics of that for you but cool that you didn't have to write the paper it was great you're learning the wrong lesson you're learning the worst possible lesson i was toasted enough that it didn't bother me sure oh yeah of course he used the word toasted yeah we had a lot of fun in college and you're gonna have a lot of fun listening to us talk about Dragon Quest 7 and probably playing Dragon Quest 7 if you live that life so tune in for the besties next week because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games Besties!