Press B 274: Ball X Pit Surprise Hit?

Another round of Steam's Nextfest has ended, with thousands of demos one clearly stood out for us. Ball X Pit is a surprise release with an interesting premise. With a dose of Vampire Survivors, a dash of Arkanoid, and a whole lotta balls.

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00:00 --> 00:15 What's more exciting than the Toronto Blue Jays vs. The LA Dodgers World Series game? By Indie games and Roguelikes. Of course. We all love those. More Ball X pit. Sorry, Ball cross Pit. No, just ball. Ball pit today.
00:36 --> 00:38 Why you throw shade over the intro?
00:39 --> 01:01 There's no shade I hate. I just disliked both teams. Is that the best way to go? At least I didn't say Gojo. Go, Jay, go. Just the one J. I hate them all equally. I disdain. I wear my sleeve for both sides. Mostly because I don't want to pay for Sportsnet. Goddamn. $30 a month.
01:01 --> 01:03 The pain is still fresh. Jesus.
01:03 --> 01:08 Just so much money. I know, I know. Your Mariner's always got next year.
01:08 --> 01:16 We've been saying that for 40 years. Anyways, today on.
01:18 --> 01:31 Welcome everybody, another episode of Press Me to cancel your favorite baseball adjacent podcast. Apparently I'm your host. This week's Sick Jake and I'm joined by two good friends. Chart. How you doing this week? Besides the Jays beating your Mariners, I'm.
01:31 --> 01:43 Not ready to love again. Guys, we're doing okay. Honestly, I'm pretty excited to talk about this game. This game was. We'll talk about it. I. I found this game on our fantasy critic and the rest is history.
01:43 --> 01:44 So this is.
01:44 --> 01:47 This is a pretty cool game. I'm excited to talk about it.
01:47 --> 01:52 And Wolf, you're also here with us this week. What? How's it. God, it's been a week. Wolf, how you doing?
01:53 --> 01:54 This guy are sick.
01:54 --> 01:55 I are sick.
01:56 --> 01:57 This guy are sick.
01:57 --> 01:58 He is our sick.
01:58 --> 02:00 For you Final Fantasy VII fans.
02:00 --> 02:48 Yes, the best translation in video games. Okay, so this week we are talking about Ball pit. Not ball X pit, not ball cross pit, but ball pit. I guess they threw the X in there for branding or IP purposes. I don't know, but I'll tell you. So we had another round of Steam Next Fest, which, which for those who don't know, that's Valve has been kind of regularly doing these events week long demo fests, basically games you can try out for free on Steam. I think we did an episode on one of these a few months back and it was fun and I thought maybe do that again this time. So I was kind of like trolling through the storefront looking all the demos and I noticed real quickly that two things with the current Next Fest that was going on, I won a whole crap ton of adult games and that's fine, I'm not judging. But I can't play those.
02:48 --> 02:49 Not that there's anything wrong with that.
02:49 --> 02:50 Right?
02:50 --> 02:51 Yeah, not that there's anything wrong with that?
02:51 --> 02:58 You said earlier that doesn't go over well at the work break committee functions when you're trying to look those games.
02:58 --> 03:22 So can't play the adult games. And then the rest. There's a lot of AI crap and slop on the store this round. Like it's surprising how many people have embraced Generative AI to throw out games. And I didn't want to try those. So there wasn't as much there I felt. And then somebody pointed me towards a game called Ball Pit. The demo was there, checked it out, and three hours later I got my credit card and I'm buying the damn release because it actually came out last week.
03:22 --> 03:22 Right.
03:23 --> 03:43 So I played a ton of Ball Pit, really got into it. And then I mentioned you guys and I think you guys fell down that hole as well. So figured, you know what, let's talk about this this week. It is a very fun game. So somebody want to give the. The basement pitch pitch. Baseball. I'm on a roll. May want to give the basement pitch. Description of what Ball Pit is.
03:44 --> 03:49 It is Vampire Survivors meets a Vertical Shooter.
03:50 --> 03:53 What's the one that you keep relating it to, Jake?
03:53 --> 03:55 Arkanoid. Kind of like Arkanoid.
03:55 --> 03:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
03:59 --> 04:05 I didn't play a lot of Arkanoid, but I know where you're going with that. To me it reminds me of King's Night on the nes.
04:05 --> 04:07 Is that like a ball and paddle type game?
04:08 --> 04:17 No, it's. You're a character cruising around as a vertical shooter and it's. It's kind of an RPG ish. It's got some RPG funk rubbed on it.
04:17 --> 04:18 Yeah.
04:19 --> 04:31 Different characters play differently, things like that. So it reminds me of that. But yeah, it's like that mixed with Arkanoid and then throw some Vampire Survivors weapon doodles on that, you know.
04:31 --> 04:32 Yes, yes.
04:33 --> 05:16 Yeah. Very much. Vampire Survivors inspired. Or was it Magical Survivor, I think was the original origin. Originator of that genre in that you're a character on a screen and there's constant waves of enemies. And while you can fire manually, why would you. When you can just turn on auto fire, it's much. It's much easier to play that way. So you're automatically attacking the enemies with your. With various balls. And like Wolf said, there's a large number of weapons or big balls in this game that you can choose from and you can actually as you level them up while you play in the run that combine into other different kind of big balls and do all kinds of wild effects. There's Also passive items that you can, you can gain during a run. And again, you can even combine some of the passives as well, which I was able to tinker with.
05:16 --> 05:17 Yeah.
05:17 --> 07:03 And all that gives you like a nice roguelike run. But unlike Vampire Survivors, where you're kind of statically moving around or moving around this giant map, they are. You are in a lane very much like Wolf said, a shmup style game. But when I say Arkanoid, mostly because the enemies themselves, as they come from the top of the screen and start moving the way down, they are all square, is shaped or Tetris shaped, I guess. And the balls themselves bounce across the field and if you catch them, you can shoot them back faster, I guess is the idea. But unlike Arkanoid, if the ball goes past you and to the bottom of the screen, you don't lose any life. You don't. You don't take any damage, nothing like that. So it's kind of like a little bit of an Arkanoid spin, but is very much a shmup like you like you explain. And definitely a Vampire Survivors. Like there is actually a character you can unlock later that is literally a dude with a giant shield that looks like a paddle. So you can have more of an Arkanoid feel if you want. So it's kind of neat, but that's half the game or I guess maybe three cores of the game. The other half of the game is kind of a farming town builder ish kind of thing where after you lose or win a run, you go to a screen where you can unlock various plots of land on a field and within there you can build farm fields for wheat, rock quarries for stone, woods for forests, you know, so your resources, you can build buildings that will unlock other characters that you can use other buildings that will impact various things. Things like getting more goals from a run or making the default level of a ball be level two instead of level one. Ability to upgrade stats, the whole nine yards. There's quite a number of buildings and characters unlock in this game, but the overall goal of Ball Pit is to finish each of the stages. I think there's eight stages. Do you guys know Offhand?
07:04 --> 07:05 I believe so, yeah.
07:05 --> 07:07 I think it's eight. That was like six or eight.
07:08 --> 08:04 Yeah. So like you have these different stages you go to and you to unlock the next stage you have to beat. Beat one with more than one character usually. And you get cogs and then you kind of work your way down to the different stages. And honestly, I'll tell you, I was not really expecting to be hooked by another roguelike right now. I mean, I just came off. What did I just finish? Oh, Silksong got credits. Very proud of myself. And then I also have been playing Hades 2. That's another roguelike that came out. I'm putting a lot of hours into Hades 2, and I'm kind of burning out on it. So when I was playing the demo for Ball Pit, I'm like, I really don't want to play another roguelike. Not right now, but three hours later, I kind of got into it, and 20 hours later, I got credits. So, I mean, some of this game, oddly enough, hits with me harder than Hades2 does. I'm actually kind of burnt out on Hades, but I loved Ball Pit, so I want to go with you guys. What is your take on Ball Pit? Like, what was your first impressions of this game? Who wants to start?
08:06 --> 08:26 My first impressions were, this is kind of neat. I can see how this is interesting and fun, and, you know, a couple hours later, I was like, maybe I should get the game instead of keep playing the demo. Which I was a little bummed that the. The file didn't transfer over, but that was fine. But by the end of it, I was done.
08:28 --> 08:29 Okay, that's very.
08:29 --> 08:34 And fortunately, the game made it easier for me to be done while I finished it up.
08:37 --> 08:47 We'll maybe explain that toward the end of the episode about some of the spoilers on some of the unlocks that do change up quite a bit. Yeah. So you beat it. You saw credits. How long did it take you to get to the credits?
08:49 --> 08:56 Well, keep in mind that I sort of found ways to cheese the town sim aspect.
08:56 --> 08:57 Okay.
08:57 --> 09:06 And so I want to say, after, like, the fourth level, anytime I got a new building, I was able to immediately max it out before I did another run.
09:08 --> 09:12 Okay, maybe we'll save that for spoilers. Sounds like you had a good company.
09:13 --> 09:36 Since I spent a lot of time in the town sim. Let's see, my playtime is about 39 hours. It looks like some of that was like. A lot of that was, like, literally yesterday. I left it just running on my PC for four and a half hours while I was upstairs. It was just gathering resources, and I had forgotten about it.
09:38 --> 09:43 Okay, all right, we'll come back to that. Char. Char, what's your first impressions of Ball Pit?
09:43 --> 10:56 Well, I only have eight hours in this thing, but I've been playing it. I play it when I'm, like, winding down or trying to. Just very vampire survivory. And the idea of just Playing it to kill time kind of thing with. With no, like, distinct direction on finishing. And it's just, I'm gonna run some characters and play with it. I was, I was in a position where I was like, I was on Fantasy Critic and I had picked a couple games that I wasn't so, like, super sure about. And then I saw a ball pit on there and I read about it and I was like, this seems cool because it was like, it's a. Like you said, it's like a roguelike farming shooter simulator thing. And I went, that's. None of that makes any sense. None of that should go together. Like, who. Who thought of that? And you know what? And I thought I him and Hot over Ball pit for a long time, picking that on my Fantasy Critic. And I finally said, you know what? I'm just going to go for it and see if the. If the critics actually like this because that's so weird that it's either going to be a complete failure or a huge success. Well, thank God it wasn't the Mariners because this was a huge success and it got into the mid-80s, I think.
10:56 --> 10:58 So I got like 87 actually right now.
10:58 --> 11:13 Higher 80s. So wow. Pretty stoked about that. So I was like, cool, I got it. And then Jake's like, hey, btw, you should play this ball pit. This Ball X pit game. And I went, that's the one. I picked a fantasy critic. I was like, I know. Play it like, okay.
11:13 --> 11:13 All right.
11:14 --> 11:15 So surprisingly good.
11:15 --> 11:27 Yeah. So he was playing the demo. He's talking about it on Netflix NextFex. Jesus Christ. Yeah, well, he was talking about an MP about it on, oh, the Steam.
11:27 --> 11:29 Next Fest, one of the Next Fest offerings.
11:29 --> 13:15 Gotcha. He's all, the demo's really cool. You should try it out. And I just said, screw it, I'm gonna buy it. So. Because it was 15 bucks. Not breaking the bank on that one. And I needed something that wasn't Story Driven or Hollow Knight because that game pisses me off. I wanted something that was mildly mindless and this felt. And he was like, it's got a lot of Vampire Survivor theme to it. Feel to it. It's not Vampire Survivors, but there is definitely Vampire Survivor esque ness to it. And I just needed something that when I'm done with work, I'm not thinking about the story. I don't care about what's going on. I'm just playing to have fun. And this one, it hit all those buttons for me. It did a great job of having some more action to it than Vampire Survivors does. But also being super simplistic, I love the fusions and the fissions and the cool things that you could do with the weapons where it's a lot more complex than Vampire Survivors where like everything can fuse and turn into something better. And, and when you fuse something, it clears up a slot so you can pick up another big ball that has cool stuff, then you can fuse that one and it clears up a slot. And it's just this kind of like ongoing improvement to the game. And the RPG aspects were really neat and it was fun to play. And I just, I just sit on my steam deck and I think the first day I got it, I probably played it for like two or three hours straight, not even thinking about it, waiting for my wife to get ready to go to the the Oddities convention. And I, I just was like buried into that game. I didn't realize that I'd like unlocked two or three levels in my first sitting. But then I have this problem where all my characters need to complete the stage. So every time I unlock a character, I go back to the first stage and play it through with a lot of that too. I just kept.
13:15 --> 13:16 I did a lot of that.
13:16 --> 13:52 And that's why I have not beaten the game yet. Because every time I get a new character, I start over and I start going down the map or the maps with the new character, leveling them up and trying to get whatever they drop. I. I think it's great there. I mean, it's not Game of the Year. It's not blowing the doors off or anything. It's not Kronos or Silent Hill, F that or. Or Cla Obscura that has been released this year. But for mindless, like Time waster, vampire Survivor type games, perfect. It's perfect for. I don't know what to play. I'm gonna play ball pit. Perfect. This will kill a couple minutes or hours or whatever. And they're short stints. So it's not like.
13:52 --> 13:53 Yeah, it's like 15, 20 minutes for.
13:53 --> 14:00 A stage and you could speed them up. You could do the faster ones that are like 12 minutes or 10 to 12 minutes or something. So you do a few runs.
14:00 --> 14:01 Yeah, once you beat it.
14:01 --> 14:32 Yeah, you do a few runs, you unlock a few things, you plant some wheat, you farm and then you're done for the night. Then you go to bed. Like, there's no commitment to it like there is with Hollow Knight. Here's a commitment to beating this goddamn bus. I'm going to stay up all night till I beat this bus or this area. Silent Hill F. I want to know what's happening in the story. I'm very focused on what's going on in the story. This has none of that. This is literally just. I'm going to do a few runs. I'm going to go to sleep. Perfect for post. Yeah. Manufacturing nine hour days of work is perfect to come home to.
14:33 --> 14:47 Yeah. The story. The story is basically almost non existent. Right. It's. It's. It's no Elden ring. There's no items of story. The story literally is the opening to the game. Just tells you that I guess It's a city called Balonia has fallen.
14:47 --> 14:47 No.
14:47 --> 14:48 Balon Crater.
14:49 --> 14:52 Babylon. I like Bal. Balonia. That's way better.
14:53 --> 15:11 It's okay. But it falls in the sky. Basically. The moon falls in the sky. Craters in the earth and survivors have gathered to. To basically mine its riches. And that's. That's the premise of the game. Even the ending is really just. It's just like a trippy little animation. Much like the intro to the game. It's not. Not a game you play for choreographed thing.
15:11 --> 15:12 It was kind of a trip.
15:13 --> 15:27 Yeah. With a lot of 3D you know spin arounds and stuff. But the graphic design of the game overall is pretty solid. Is definitely. I'm going to compare it a lot to Vampire. Vampire Survivors. Guys. It has been a day.
15:27 --> 15:28 There it is.
15:28 --> 15:43 You're compared to that game. We did it because it's. It's the same. We did it. We made it through the week. I will compare it a lot because it feels like that in a lot of ways it's a genre and it fills that niche for me. Right. When I'm on the Steam deck and I want something to play. I like those kind of games.
15:43 --> 15:44 Right.
15:44 --> 16:07 But when it comes to things like the graphics. It's pixel art graphics. There's a CRT filter slapped on top and it's a very I think nice looking game. The artwork has done really well. It is October. I feel this fits with the Halloween theme. All of the characters if you notice have no eyes. Just sockets. Where are the eyes? Those are the balls they're shooting. Which I thought was kind of a grim.
16:07 --> 16:09 I did not realize that.
16:09 --> 16:09 Great too.
16:10 --> 16:10 Okay.
16:10 --> 16:13 That's cool. Ah you really noticed. That makes sense.
16:13 --> 16:15 One of the items. Oh my gosh. That makes so much sense.
16:15 --> 16:17 One of the items is literally an eyeball.
16:17 --> 16:32 Or you. It helps you dodge better. I. You notice that with the co inhabitants. Like those two are super creepy. I Just thought it was very Ed Gein. You know, mother says we can play this game. You know, it's that kind of craziness. You know what I mean?
16:33 --> 18:03 Well, and that's, and that's the thing is there's a good variety of characters and they all look pretty interesting, the character designs, but even the enemies themselves. Across each of the eight stages, each one has its unique set of enemies, unique bosses. There's usually a mechanic that's different as well. To give some examples. One stage has voids that will pop up in the field, field, fall into the void. You randomly teleport in that screen. There's the desert area has some enemies that will fly, so they will hop up in the air. So you have to wait till they come down before you hit them with the balls. A good variety of mechanics, I thought. And I, I felt like as it went through stage, through stage, I. I felt like it was enough changes there that wasn't. It didn't feel stale. I enjoy going through the stages, but I'm glad, like you said, Wolf, I'm glad that it ends. I. I don't think I'd want to play this one forever. Right. Like, I. As much as I like Vampire Survivors, the issue I did have with that game was I did eventually burn out and I didn't unlock nearly everything in that game. Yeah, like there's a whole post game egg thing in, in Survivors I never touched. Whereas in this game, I got everything. I didn't 100 it, but I did get all the characters and buildings and I feel satisfied with that. If they ever did a DLC with more, I'd probably check it out. But I like that I don't need to grind very much in this game. And I do like that the stages, like you guys said, was 12 to 15 minutes. It's where Vampire Survivors is freaking 30, 40 minutes. Right. Depending. So this is a much shorter run and it definitely has that one more run mentality where it's like, oops, it's 3:00am I gotta get up in a couple hours for work. Where'd my time go?
18:04 --> 18:08 Easily, easily distractible game. Very easily distracted.
18:09 --> 18:40 Yeah. And the overall mechanics is how many balls are in this game. There's. There's at least 12, if not more. Because I think the neat thing with this is that while not every ball will fuse together into a new ball, you can fuse every ball together and it will take the stats from both of them, combine them. So to give an example of one I was using a lot, there's lasers There's a ball, it's a laser. And when it hits something, it shoots a vertical or horizontal laser beam that hits all the enemies in a row or column. Yep. There's another ball that is. I want to say it's egg sack.
18:41 --> 18:41 Yeah.
18:41 --> 19:09 And it has. When the egg sack hits an enemy, there's a chance of spawning small balls, baby balls, little ball, whatever they call them. So you level them both up to three. They don't normally evolve together, but you can still fuse them. And when you do that, suddenly when my laser goes off, every enemy hits in that column or that row has a chance of spawning baby balls. So it takes the two effects and merges them together. And you can get some pretty broken combinations by merging balls together. So I thought that was pretty awesome.
19:10 --> 19:10 Yeah.
19:10 --> 19:16 And then factoring character abilities, was there a combination you guys found that was kind of fun or game breaking?
19:16 --> 19:51 The. The bleed ball and the poison ball. Turning into Virus is badass. That's probably one of my favorite combinations that we have on there. It. It. Whatever. Everything it hits, it just poisons out everything and everything gets sick. And it also causes bleed damage on all the. The things around it. Watching. Watching the green colored enemies just spread because the ball's just touching them. It's really, really cool. That one in the. The cross laser when you get the vertical and the horizontal balls together and they turn in the cross laser. That thing's cool.
19:53 --> 19:59 My favorite is probably the light crossed with the. The fire.
19:59 --> 20:00 Okay.
20:00 --> 20:04 So that it's just constantly burning anything that's in its. In its line of sight.
20:04 --> 20:05 And blinding is too.
20:05 --> 20:06 And then.
20:06 --> 20:07 And blinding.
20:07 --> 20:14 Yeah. And then you get the, you know, the op. The item that makes you crit. Anything that's blind.
20:14 --> 20:14 Yeah.
20:14 --> 20:22 And you get the item that lets any ball that hits a burning enemy take that burn and assume burning on its. On the ball.
20:23 --> 20:24 No.
20:24 --> 20:57 It's total destruction. This game you can. You turn into a. A one man wrecking ball really fast with the way you level up and, and, and certain combinations and certain synergies that you grab really make this game. It's fun. It's a lot of fun. It's. There's not a huge difficulty spike like you feel like when you first play Vampire Survivor where you're kind of getting your feet wet. Vampire Survivor is still the king. It's still going to be the king. Ball pit does not overtake that by any stretch of the imagination. But I mean we're using it as a perfect example because it's such a decent example. Just a Different game style.
20:58 --> 21:32 Yeah, it's. It's a great change up on the format. Yes, I do appreciate that because a lot of them, you know, they'll. They still feel a lot like, you know, just the G. The general survivors vibe. Right, right. Like we, we say vampire Survivors. But I think kind of when I say vampire survivors, I'm not just talking about vampire survivors. I'm including all the other Survivors likes that are out there that play pretty much exactly the same. Just Vampire Survivors has a bit of charm that a lot of them don't for me.
21:32 --> 21:32 Right.
21:32 --> 22:04 But ball pit. I do like The Low Poly 3D characters and models and all that. I do like the pixel, the low resolution pixel art that's applied to those low poly models. Yeah, I dig the look. It's. And like you were talking about graphically, it just, you know, it's got the vignette, it's got the CRT effect, the color aberration. I turned all those off after a while because I was like, okay, I just want to be able to read this because I'm tired and I'm sick.
22:05 --> 22:06 That's fair.
22:06 --> 22:06 Okay.
22:07 --> 22:20 But they can all be turned off, which I like. But the music is good. One of the stages. Oh yeah, one of the stages has like a really good tune. There's like a swamp stage or something. I can't remember what just unlocked that.
22:20 --> 22:23 I haven't gotten into that one yet. I'm excited to go see, check that one out.
22:23 --> 22:30 But the music in there is awesome. But yeah, like playing this, I'm like, man, I don't want to play Dragon Spirit again.
22:33 --> 22:34 Yeah, I don't.
22:35 --> 22:37 But it's scratching that itch.
22:37 --> 22:37 Yeah.
22:37 --> 22:44 And that's the thing. I think it scratches the itch. And then I guess when I'm playing, we should talk about the farming thing real quick. And I'm going to pull that up.
22:44 --> 22:52 I, I mean, I get, I get the idea of the farming thing, but it's such a weird way to give you stat boost. It's just a bizarre.
22:53 --> 22:54 Yeah.
22:54 --> 22:54 Setup.
22:56 --> 22:59 So the town sim to me feels like a bit of a chore.
23:00 --> 23:00 Little bit.
23:00 --> 23:21 And I would. Instead of just doing town for like one use, you know, one harvest and then just go back to gaming. I hit a point where I was like, well, I can do this over and over and over and over again with, you know, I, I get more money out of doing it than I spend doing it.
23:21 --> 23:23 Right, right.
23:24 --> 24:23 So I'm gonna ask about that. So what? So to explain how this works after you've Laid down your buildings and built your things. You have the option to harvest. And the way that you do that is. Is kind of like a. Like a mini golf every five, ten minutes. Yeah, yeah. So you basically, you hit harvest and you aim your line like puzzle bobble. You aim your characters at where they're going to go and you hit go. And then they kind of bounce around your map and anything they touch, if it's a construction, then they add a point of build to it. If it's a field or a forest, they mine for it. And then there's various updates, like level ups you can apply to your characters as you play so that they harvest wheat better, or they can go through a forest, like pierce it instead of bouncing off it and all kinds of things like that. Or. One of my best upgrades, I think, was ones that add to the harvest time clock because they don't bounce around forever. There is a timer. I think it starts at like six seconds, which, when you first start playing the game, does not feel like a very long time. And a lot of the time in the early game, I felt like I wasn't harvesting enough because of the short clock.
24:23 --> 24:24 Right.
24:24 --> 24:50 But after you do a few runs and you level your characters up, they add 0.2 seconds to the harvest clock and then suddenly you're harvesting everything. And by the time I got to the end of the game, I think I had 15 seconds. So I was just fast forwarding through the harvest because I was hitting everything on my map anyway and I had a fairly large map, so I didn't. The harvesting was annoying at first, like because of the timer, but by the end of the game, it wasn't even an issue in terms of resources can.
24:50 --> 24:57 Also get a level up that adds time to the clock just outright. So you start with like 17 seconds instead of 15. Stuff like that.
24:57 --> 25:50 Right, right. So there's, there's that. And like, I felt like as much as I thought I wouldn't like the resource thing, I saw how many plots of land you can unlock and like, oh boy, how many buildings, how many fields am I going to need? Am I going to need? You know, 20 fields. I didn't really. I only had ever through the entire game. Nine fields, nine forests, nine stone. And that was enough for the entire game. I never really had an issue with resources. There was a few buildings toward the end of the. Of the game that had obnoxiously large resource costs, like 5 stone or something. But then I got a building that flat out tells you you gain resources when the game is offline. So I took a break for a day because I was working and doing and whatnot. And when I came back, the game has that you just earned 20 wheat. Like well, there we go. So I never had an issue with the resources. I get what they were trying to do with the resource building and I felt it would be a bigger drag than it ended up being.
25:50 --> 25:50 Right.
25:50 --> 25:55 I do feel like it was kind of a fluff piece though. I don't feel it was really necessary. I really just wish I could get back into a run.
25:55 --> 25:56 Right.
25:56 --> 25:57 The meat of the game.
25:57 --> 25:57 Same.
25:58 --> 25:59 Yeah.
25:59 --> 27:38 I. My biggest thing I don't like. I don't like games that give you. It's. It's like a. It's like a gotcha game sometimes where it's like you have this amount of time and then you've got to rest for a day or some, which you don't. You do a run and you get your time back and that's, you know, that's how you can keep going. But it's that similar when we did. Was it UFO 50 when we were playing the game and it's like you can only do so much for so long and then you had to go do something else out. It made sense in that game because there's 3 other games you can play while that game is getting. It's getting your energy back. But that, that, that drives me crazy where you can only do it one time and then you have to go. So if I'm like, if I want to unlock a new character, because that's my thing, right? I really want to get all the characters unlocked. That's what I want to do. Also I'm an idiot when it comes to building my map because I'm spreading out instead of making a hallway because I'm dumb. And I just saw Jake's layout and I was like, that's so much smarter than what I'm doing. What is wrong with me? I have way too much open space anyways. That's beside the point. Point is when you're building the stuff and you want to unlock the character, you have to, you have to do the construction. So you have to have the characters hit the building to bring them up. And then it's like you have five people hit a six spot building and you gotta, you gotta do a whole nother run to get one more hit to unlock this character. I'm like, man, it's annoying. So I personally wish I could just keep doing as much building as I want to Then go back into the game. If I'm trying to unlock a character, I get the point. I'm not. That's just a beef with me. That's. That's a personal preference.
27:38 --> 29:01 So what. What kind of was weird for me was I was. I thought you would have to be fairly deliberate in how you plan the build of your town, but you really don't. You really can't just put books buildings anywhere. So I kept my wheat, my. My force off to the side on my map. But the buildings themselves constantly change because you're either building new buildings or up or upgrading buildings. And the way I was doing it was there's one particular building where if you bounce off that one building, anything within its radius also gets a build point. So I would just stack it. So I ring that with all the buildings that need to be upgraded or built, and then I would focus my harvesting on that building to bounce off it. So I purposely ricochet around that. That building. So with that combination, I was just constantly moving buildings off to the side and then when they need to be upgraded to this special upgrade building. So my town was constantly in disarray. Never looked good, it never felt good. And. And while there is buildings that have certain combinations, like, you know, if you have this building next to fore causes better growth, or if you have this one near other buildings, they gain experience bonuses. I use that occasionally, but for the most part, it didn't really matter halfway through the game. So I just kind of just left the buildings where they were and only moved it when I needed to upgrade something. So I know Wolf, you had said that because there is a way to unlock the ability to harvest more than once. You just got to pay more and more gold each each time. How did you game that system for the harvesting?
29:03 --> 29:17 I had. At First I had two gold mines, and then four, then six, and then eight. And so when you have eight gold mines, you're mining about 2 gold per harvest.
29:17 --> 29:18 Jesus.
29:18 --> 29:30 That first re up is 130. The next re up is like 260. So you're just. You keep making money just less. And so you can do it like times. Yeah.
29:31 --> 29:41 Okay. Because like every character you have on the mine is a character that doesn't do the harvesting. So I never had more than two gold mines. It sounds like it would have been worth it to have more than two.
29:41 --> 30:16 Well, I had a bunch of gold mines and I would leave them unoccupied, and they'd be in a farm or a lumber mill during a run. And then after the run. I'd pull them all and put them back into the gold mines and then do the thing and you know, like a dozen times and then put them all back. So it was. It was tedious, but it got me a ton of resources. My town layout is absolute madness. I just sent it to Jake because I didn't want to spoil it for chard.
30:16 --> 30:16 Thank you.
30:16 --> 30:21 So I sent it to you directly. But if you look at this mess. Oh my goodness.
30:22 --> 30:32 Thank God there's no building code violations in Bolaslavia or Belgium or whatever. Whatever the hell the damn name of the city is there.
30:32 --> 30:41 We'll post this on our discord for folks later to look at. But your. Your town is kind of like somebody vomited in Sim City. You have everything everywhere.
30:41 --> 31:05 There's a. So you. Eventually I, I'm gonna mention that there's a resource gathering mechanic that you unlock later that instead of just using the farms and stuff, you can pluck somebody into that building and every five, eight minutes, whatever it is, they will go on a harvest in the direction you sent them from that building.
31:05 --> 31:06 Okay.
31:06 --> 31:30 And so I set up a ton of those. So I've got one that harvests gold. I've got one. I've got a bunch of them that go through wheat and hit trees and ore and all that. So I'm just generating stuff like crazy. So I've got like mazes of things so that they don't just run back into their building because if they go back to that building, they're done. It stops them.
31:30 --> 31:40 Okay. So you can kind of put up a. Like you said, like a maze so that it. They hit everything and get what they need to before they have to stop. That's brilliant. Yes, that is brilliant.
31:40 --> 32:11 And you just leave it, the game open because it, it spins off every five, 10 minutes or whatever the timer was. I get it now. Okay. I didn't even think about doing that. But yeah, that's one way to break the system and then get the resources you want for sure. Because yeah, that's crazy. But. And then that's the thing. So like is the harvesting and town building stuff kind of a bummer at times? Probably. But you can. It quickly becomes a non issue once you figure out how to break it like wolf or you get the right unlocks that passively gains you resources anyway. And it's. It's not. It's not too difficult and it's.
32:11 --> 32:25 It's not game breaking. Like it's not like, oh, I gotta do farming now. It's just like, okay, it's kind of like something in between, you know, in between each run, right? I'm gonna do something real quick. I didn't get the character. Damn it. Okay, I'm gonna go do a run.
32:25 --> 32:26 And I'll come back.
32:26 --> 33:56 I'll be able to get it after this next run. And the. And the runs are the whole point, right? The runs are the fun thing. I like the setup of having three tiers in each run where you. You stop at one mini boss, then you beat that mini boss, you go up to another mini boss, and then there's the boss boss, like, of whatever, the end of the run. And there's some really cool mechanics in. In fighting some of those bosses and. And what they do. I like. I like that it's not always the same. Like vampire survivors. Again, another. You know, we're going to relate it. The maps look different, but it's all the same thing, right? You're being chased by the same stuff. There's no real trick to it. It's whatever synergies you're working with that particular run, but they all work the same way, right? The synergies work where. No matter where you're at, for the most part, this one feels like the synergies give you a leg up. On the ice level, you want to use a lot of the fire stuff. On the. The snow or the. The desert level, you want to use a little bit more of the ice stuff, so on and so forth. Like there's just some really cool things and maybe that doesn't happen, maybe that doesn't matter, but it just seems like it does because of the way it's laid out. There's, you know, the ice levels, some of the guys have shields in their fronts or on their sides or on their backs. We got to figure out where to angle the ball to hit them properly to take them out. I like. I like that. I like that there's a level of thought that's put in here instead of, I'm just going to grab all these synergies and just crush everything that walks by me. And how many times have we taken an A Marco Polo or a Discord picture of our layout of Vampire Survivors? And it's just like, would you call it technicolored vomit or whatever?
33:56 --> 33:57 And we're just joining pictures.
33:57 --> 34:30 It's just everything dying and everything blowing up around you, and your characters literally just stand and still not doing it anything. Like this one. You can't do that, obviously, because it's on rails, but it's still, you know, even if you have, like the coolest synergies and you're just. There's just little balls flying all over the place, you could still die. Like, you can still up and ruin your run if you don't move yourself. So I. I do like that. It's. There's a much more. There's more finesse to it than there is in just Vampire Survivors kind of like. Or that. That genre that we've been relating it to so much.
34:31 --> 35:09 Yeah, I definitely feel like moving is more of a factor in this one. And if you want to, you can toggle off the auto fire. The reason you would you do that is you. You move faster. So if you need to quickly position yourself somewhere, you just turn off auto fire and turn it back on again. There's also some characters that don't use baby balls at all. They just use the big balls. So in those cases, sometimes you want to manually fire. There's one character that if he catches the ball, he gets a bonus. So in some cases, it makes sense to turn off the auto fire. And. But positioning is definitely important in this game. Depending on the character as well. There's one character that shoots the balls, not from you, but they come from the top of the screen.
35:09 --> 35:10 Yeah, it's. Yeah.
35:10 --> 35:13 So if you. If you have that one, then you learn in that.
35:13 --> 35:14 Very tough.
35:15 --> 35:19 It is tough. But if you figured it out, there's also balls and bonuses that give you backstab damage.
35:19 --> 35:20 Yeah.
35:20 --> 35:42 Well, here's this guy shooting from the top of the screen anyway. And then if you combine it with like the Ghost ball, which means your balls go through the blocks and suddenly shooting from the bottom is at the top of the screen is not so much of a problem. Right. Like. Or like the one I like, I use them a lot was the. The guy at the paddle, the shield, and it feels like Arkanoid. Anytime a ball bounces off that shield, it gets like a 40 or 50 increase in damage.
35:42 --> 35:43 Oh, nice.
35:43 --> 36:29 Well, I'm telling you, you go. You go to the middle of that screen and you're just bouncing balls back and forth. And if you get some really powerful ones and they just build up, their damage is ridiculous. There was. There is. I think it's. I think it's the iron orb, and I want to say ghost, I think, or dark. That makes it an assassin ball. And what that does is it lets you. It'll. You shoot it and goes through the blocks from the bottom, but when it gets behind them, it bounces. So I would send that off the back of the screen, it would bounce a bunch of times and murder things. And if it did happen to come back down, all I had to do is bounce it with my shield and it adds more damage to it. And I was racking up thousands of damage with this ball. It was ridiculous. So, again, it's. It's when the numbers go up and you break, you find, like, a broken combo. It feels like it's a lot of fun. And Vampire Survivors has that too, to a degree.
36:29 --> 36:30 Right.
36:30 --> 36:51 But if you get tired of, like, playing with the one characters very early on, you get a building that's a game changer. Literally. It says you can now bring two characters with you on a run. Yeah, that was pretty surprising to me because now you can take your favorite two and take their abilities and merge them together. Not every character combination is allowed, but most of them are.
36:51 --> 36:51 Right.
36:51 --> 36:55 So how do you guys think about the combination of character system? How was that for you?
36:55 --> 36:58 I didn't even know that was a thing, so I have nothing. I have no comment.
36:59 --> 37:02 I think you unlocked that on the stage you just opened.
37:02 --> 37:03 Okay.
37:03 --> 37:43 Because that stage, the first time I went to it, I went with one of my characters who was kind of strong, and there was no way. Yeah, it just wasn't gonna happen. I got demolished halfway through. But from the first sub boss, I got that blueprint, and I was like, oh, okay. That's gonna make things a lot more interesting. And I love the fact that the characters are wildly different from each other. And so combining two characters one, it makes going back and doing the thing you like to do. I was doing it too. Where you go back to previous stages with your new characters and run through them. Now you can do it twice as fast.
37:43 --> 37:43 Nice.
37:43 --> 37:46 So, yeah. Might want to wait for that building before you do it anymore.
37:46 --> 37:47 Understandable.
37:49 --> 38:15 Secondly, the combinations get really bizarre. Like, there's. There's one guy who has, like, his balls work where it's like. It says it's drawn by gravity to the back of the screen. Right. So he. They don't really just bounce around. Instead, they're, like, drawn up and just bounce off of enemies as they're going. And it's like a pachinko machine.
38:15 --> 38:16 Yeah.
38:16 --> 38:22 And then if you combine him with Shade now they do it, but from the top coming down.
38:23 --> 38:23 Okay.
38:24 --> 38:37 And that was a horrible combination. Front was getting to me and just destroyed me. So some of the combinations nations are just hilariously terrible at playing the game, but they're there.
38:39 --> 39:27 That's funny. The one of the ones I Liked was this is a jester character that actually lets you. Where you move. The reticule is where you throw the ball. So instead of shooting, you actually throw them. So you can literally aim into the packs of the blocks and it lands in the middle of them and bounces like mad and racks up a lot of hills hits. But I combine that with another character, the tactician. When you use the tactician, the runs become turn based. So you get to move a little bit and shoot. Then the enemies get to move and shoot. And that's so crazy. That's how I got the first win through the last level. I beat the last three stages with tactician and Juggler just taking turns as it's playing the game. So from a frantic fast paced game, it becomes a turn based, much like a roguelike, which is hilarious to me. I use that quite a bit. But it's interesting though. Technically it's really cool.
39:27 --> 39:28 When I unlocked that.
39:28 --> 39:58 Yeah. So that's definitely a big change. But it was neat because yes, it was broken, but you also need to use different characters in a stage to get to the next one. So I can only use that broken combination a couple times. I still had to use other combinations of characters to actually beat the game. So that's kind of neat. And then if you get tired of combining characters and you're like, I don't want to do this anymore, I just want to get the last few buildings. Well, there's one of the characters you get late game is the renegade and it literally plays the fucking game for you.
39:58 --> 39:59 Radical.
39:59 --> 40:08 Become the radical and it becomes an auto battler. So is it good? Not always, but enough that it win most of the time. Yeah.
40:08 --> 40:22 Yeah, it's mostly good. I'm assuming what the issue I've run into here with him is on the final boss. I think he's a little bugged because he gets stuck underneath at the bottom of the screen, like he can't move up.
40:23 --> 40:24 Okay.
40:24 --> 40:42 And then something has to happen for him to reset. And then all of a sudden he's all over the place again. But he's like jittery at the bottom most of the time during that last fight. But that's how I beat it today. I was off doing other things and I would come back and check on it because I was kind of done playing the game.
40:43 --> 41:07 Wow. Yeah. So it's. I gotta respect this game where it's like at any point where it felt like it was getting stale, I got a new character or a new unlock that made it feel like A different game or different? Just different enough where I'm like, oh, this is new. And I kept going and I kept going through that all to the point where I was tired of playing the game and I just kind of want to see what it looked like at the end. Well, it's not a battler now. Great. It's fine.
41:07 --> 41:08 That's funny.
41:08 --> 41:36 So, yeah, this is. This is interesting. Like, where's Vampire Survivors? I got burnt out pretty quick early on and I've gone back to it several times, especially with that Castlevania dlc. It's a real good time. But. But the boss in that one is almost. It's always death. Right. 30 minutes, then it's death and that's the end of the run. But in this one, I like. The bosses of this one, I like especially how some bosses, they're all brick shaped or. Right. But some of them have like a pentagon shape where the angles in the front actually do matter depending on the character you play.
41:36 --> 41:37 Yep.
41:37 --> 41:40 If you're playing certain characters bouncing off to the side sucks.
41:40 --> 41:41 Yeah.
41:41 --> 42:02 So you have to rethink how you tackle some runs with a character. So I really like the diversity of the characters in this game quite a bit. And when you combine them, it just. It just. It's amazing. Like, I would be surprised if other games like this don't steal this idea. The ability to combine two characters together. Vampire Survivors should do something like this, to be honest with you. So I was pretty impressed.
42:04 --> 42:28 They. They did some wild stuff with this. And I'm. I'm honestly impressed at how well the Radical combines with other charact. Because you know, it has to. Under that, the AI they programmed into it has to have a basic understanding of what's going on with any given move set. Right. Because it's. It's literally playing the whole thing. There's one character you get who just picks all your upgrades. You're still playing, but he picks your upgrades.
42:28 --> 42:28 Yeah.
42:28 --> 42:49 This is like. It just takes it to the extreme. It's also playing and picking the upgrades. Right. And so you just let it do its thing. But like the fact that it plays pretty well with any given other pair is. Is pretty cool. Like that. There had to have been some time put into programming that character specifically.
42:52 --> 42:52 Yeah.
42:52 --> 43:44 Like the one thing I can say about this game is that it definitely feels like it's been polished really well. Right. I. I know Devolver. Devolver Digital is published. This game, it was developed by a guy named Kenny sun, who I don't know any of his Games. Apparently the game before this was 10 years ago. But it does feel like Devolver took him under their wing and said, okay, give me your game and help them. Or at least give him the resources to. To help make the best game possible. Right. Like, the core idea for this game is really solid, but it definitely feels with the graphics, the. The music. There's definitely a lot of QA went involved in this for all the various combinations. And the tweaking involved must been immense. Like you said, Wolf, tweaking the AI for that one character. So it's. It can handle all the different combinations decently is no small bit of work. The game is very, very polished for what it is.
43:44 --> 43:45 Yeah.
43:45 --> 43:52 When you break the game, it's fun, but it feels like it. The game already knew you were going to do that anyway. And it's kind of meant for that kind of gameplay.
43:52 --> 44:06 Yeah. You don't. It's not like you're cheating. It's. You're doing exactly what it's designed to do. And it's kind of congratulating that you broke it. Like. Like good. You did what we played what we planned out for you guys to end up doing. So that's for sure.
44:07 --> 44:16 But like, some of these combinations are. Are really quite good. Like there's. There's a giant character you get, and he only throws big balls and they do area attack damage by default.
44:16 --> 44:16 Nice.
44:16 --> 44:32 So you can combine him with another character that only does big balls but shoots two of them. So now you're shooting two that do area effect damage. They combine that with the cell ball you can pick up, which splits apart into various other balls. And it's like you don't even miss the baby balls. You're shooting like dozens of the big ones.
44:32 --> 44:32 Yeah.
44:32 --> 45:44 And they're doing AoE damage. Like it's. It's just fun exploring the different combinations and even the combinations of the balls themselves. There's a few I haven't unlocked yet. There's a few that actually require a third level upgrade. Right. Like you. If you combine the egg sac with the spider, I think you get like a. The brood mother or something. And there's other. There's other creature combos. And you combine three of those together, you get Satan. That's one of the unlocks you can do. You get a cheap one for it. There's quite in depth. But even the passive items, there's daggers in the game. There's four of them. And each one gives you a bonus to crit on a certain direction of hitting an Enemy. So hit the enemy on the left side. Get 20 crit. Well, if you get all four of them, which is hard because you only have at the beginning of the game only four passive slots, but you get all four, you can evolve that into a special sword that gives you a big bonus. So there's. There's a lot of combos in this game that's really interesting. There's an in game encyclopedia that tells you what you. That helps you track what you've got. And of course you can look up guides if you want, but a huge amount of variety in combinations and. And like you said earlier in the episode chart, if there's a combination like a ball that you really liked but you're running out of space and you want more, well, you can combine anything together. You fuse them and you get the best of both.
45:45 --> 45:45 Yeah.
45:45 --> 46:08 So well designed. Like really impressed with the gameplay itself. So it's decent. Yeah. This, this game was pretty fun. Like I did not expect to want to like another roguelike right now. Like I have so many games, my plate to get through, Half Life 2 notwithstanding, but I could not put this one down last week. I put almost 20 hours into it and just it just one more run, right? 15 minutes. One more run.
46:08 --> 47:27 This is definitely the mantra to. This is definitely one more run. Just one more run. I'll go to bed after this. One more run and then you're three stages in. You know, it's. It's crazy. It's. It is a lot of fun. It's definitely really good to just burn away some time and not have anything. It's not too heavy. The story is non existent. I mean there's strategy to it, but it's not. So there's not so much strategy to it that you have to like practice it day in, day out and feel like you need to get better. Like it's not hollow knight level. I have to keep doing this until I get better at it kind of thing. You're gonna suck at first. You're gonna die a couple times when you first fire it up. But it feels like you grow with the game. It doesn't feel like there's any point where I'm like, this is a wall. I'm stuck on this. I'm stuck on this port. If you hit a hit any kind of. I would rather not a wall, but more like a white picket fence you can jump over. Just go back to the town and you get some of the perks. You pull some stuff and then you go back in and it's oh, okay. It's all better again. There was never a time where I put this thing down because it was too hard. And. And right now with all the games I'm playing, I need something that I'm not like, this is too goddamn hard. Take five minutes because I'm sick of being playing hard games. So this is. This is a really cool concept and pretty. Pretty ingenious game.
47:27 --> 47:27 I'm.
47:27 --> 47:32 I'm really impressed with it. One of those things that came out of left field and, you know, blows your mind.
47:33 --> 47:34 Yeah.
47:34 --> 47:53 Yeah. I didn't even check out next fest this year. I just. Or this time around. Anyway, I was intrigued, but I didn't make time for it. And then Jake shared that one and I was like, all right, I'll check this one out. And then, of course, take all my money.
47:56 --> 48:09 Yeah. Well, the 15 bucks is also pretty good price for this too. I think 15 bucks is just the right value for this. I got 20 hours out of it. 15 bucks. I'm glad it's not endless. I don't need any more endless games. I really. I don't. Yeah, I like. And I like my time with it.
48:09 --> 48:25 It has a new game plus, and I don't know if you messed with the. The fast. The like the fast mode versions of the levels, but a little bit. There's leaderboards up to a. I got up to a fast plus three on one.
48:26 --> 48:27 Jesus.
48:27 --> 48:39 Before I stopped trying to do more. So they. I don't know how many fast pluses there are, but it seems like it goes up quite a bit. So there's like, it's. It can be endless if you want. Seems like.
48:41 --> 49:09 That'S pretty decent. Well, I mean, I know that new game plus it's eight gears, so eight characters. You have to beat a run to unlock to move the next tier down. But there's no new blueprints, I guess was the thing. Right. Like, once you've unlocked all the blueprints, you're kind of done. And that's kind of when I stopped. I did do the first new Game plus stage, but I was kind of good after that. I kind of felt like it was good to stop. But I tell you, if they ever add a DLC which adds more buildings and characters, I would probably check it out if it. Depending on the price, I would imagine.
49:09 --> 49:13 They would since there are weapons that don't start with characters.
49:15 --> 49:18 Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. I could see them doing a few more.
49:18 --> 50:02 So it seems like they would probably add characters in a DLC or something that would Start with those or. I don't know, but that seemed like an opportunity to me. There's also buildings like that you earn in the last stage because I unlocked every single building in the game. I don't know if you did, but there are buildings that you can infinitely upgrade and they just take a stupid amount of bumping into them to get them to build up, but you can just keep pumping stats into your characters. Strength, endurance, dexterity, whatever, and it just, it just gets more expensive every time. Some of them cost money and a resource. Some of them cost just different resources. It just depends.
50:02 --> 50:36 But, and there's in the, in the main game, when you beat a stage, when you beat a boss, you also get a totem the first time and you build that as a building. It's one by one building. And that totem gives you a passive effect. And that adds up for every single character that you've beaten that level with. And then it happens again when you beat that level on fast. And one of them is like increases area of effect damage. The one is, increases your power. Another one is speed. Those are actually. If you're playing the game and you're trying to do every single character across every stage, you get some massive bonuses to your stats doing just that.
50:36 --> 50:37 That's why I keep going.
50:37 --> 50:39 Definitely lots of ways to passively get better.
50:39 --> 50:39 Yeah.
50:39 --> 51:12 It's also worth mentioning that if you beat a character on with. If you use a character to beat a stage on a fast mode or a fast plus whatever, it will actually if you haven't beaten it with them on lower tiers, it checks those lower tiers for them. This is faster. I'm curious about that. So instead of getting, you know, just the one main bonus and one sub bonus, you get the one main bonus and 2, 3, 4 sub bonuses. So it stacks up real quick if you do that.
51:13 --> 51:13 Nice.
51:15 --> 51:16 Decent.
51:16 --> 51:24 So I, I, I fit. I figured out how to cheese this game because I was looking at the, the mechanics and I was like, I wonder. So I'd try a thing and sure enough.
51:25 --> 51:56 But I think that's the best way. That's what you're supposed to do in this kind of game. Like roguelikes are always about, I think finding the mechanics that you can cheese or exploit to make a broken build. And that's how you, you play these games, I think. But yeah, like I bounce off so many roguelikes over the last couple years like games that on paper I should have loved like Rogue Legacy, which is like a Metroidvania one. I should love that game, I. I just can't get into it, so I was really shocked that I got into this one, so. Especially over Hades 2. Like, Hades 2 is a fantastic game, but, man, I'm. I'm. It's just not for me.
51:56 --> 51:56 This was just.
51:57 --> 51:57 It's.
51:57 --> 51:59 This was such a quick pickup and play.
52:00 --> 52:00 Yeah.
52:00 --> 52:12 And put down like there was no. There's no learning curve. There's no lore, like you said, that you need to really. That'll just really suck you in. It's just. You literally just pick it up. You literally start playing it, and when you're done, you put it away.
52:13 --> 52:13 There's no.
52:14 --> 52:53 There's no regret. There's no, you know, I wish I'd done something else. It's. It's just with. With Hades, there's. There's a lot of challenges. With Hades, it's the dying and starting over thing that bothers the hell out of me. With Hades, which is a roguelike. I get it. That's what it's designed to do. But this one, like, you die, and I don't. I don't know, it just seems different to me. A run. A run on this seems different to me than a run on Hades. Hades. Because I feel like I've made it so far in Hades, and then I die, and I have to start from the very freaking beginning. Well, in this one, I could just go back to the beginning of the level that I died on and start over again and not feel like I've lost, you know, a ton of time.
52:53 --> 52:58 So, like, a freaking hour of your life in Hades, when this is a run is like 10 minutes.
52:58 --> 52:58 Exactly.
52:58 --> 53:00 And that makes all the difference in the world to me for sure.
53:00 --> 53:05 So you guys always talk about games that respect your time, and I feel like this is one of those games that respects my time.
53:05 --> 53:05 Yeah.
53:05 --> 53:05 So.
53:05 --> 53:06 Yeah, I think so.
53:06 --> 53:16 And it also makes it. It makes it a lot less painful when you get a run that's just not giving you the rolls you need as far as, like, the random items it presents you. Sometimes everything you get sucks.
53:16 --> 53:18 Yeah. Yeah.
53:18 --> 53:22 And it's like you're just. That's the end of that run. Five minutes later.
53:22 --> 53:26 Come back to the same level. Yeah. But you come back to the same.
53:26 --> 53:29 Doesn't seem to be a. There doesn't seem to be a penalty for abandoning a run.
53:30 --> 53:30 Yeah.
53:32 --> 53:46 And so, yeah, it's. It's. You may as well just, like, if you're really having that bad of luck, you could abandon the run if it's just going really terribly right. Off the bat. But yeah, there's. There's. There's even buildings that improve your odds of things later. It's. It's kind of nice.
53:47 --> 53:48 Yeah.
53:48 --> 53:53 So the game really gives you odds in your favor as you. As you progress.
53:53 --> 53:54 Right?
53:54 --> 53:55 It's quite nice.
53:56 --> 54:12 Yeah. Yeah. And then like from Steam Next Fest, the only other demo that I checked out that seemed great was Skate Story, which I really hope does well because I have that on my fantasy critic. Although it's gonna have to be in a hundred to make any impact on my score right now.
54:14 --> 54:19 I need Mina the Hollower to be a 90. And then I'll. Then I'll be right there with you, Wolf.
54:19 --> 54:20 I don't expect that to happen.
54:20 --> 54:21 I don't either.
54:21 --> 54:22 No.
54:22 --> 54:35 I heard the demo was not. Is not a good look at the final game. That. The final game is supposed to be quite a bit different. So we'll see. But yeah, I don't think. I don't think Mina is going to be a 90. I hope it's good, though. I was looking forward to that one.
54:35 --> 54:43 I did enjoy the demo, but it seemed. I don't know, something about it just wasn't quite grabbing me the way I thought it would.
54:43 --> 54:50 Maybe they recognized it and that's why they pushed it back. They're going for that. They're going back. They're going for that 90, guys. They're going.
54:50 --> 54:52 When does that come out?
54:52 --> 54:55 It's TB. They pushed it back because they didn't.
54:56 --> 55:03 October 30th, but then they pushed it back. But they haven't said whether it's this year still or next year. I have a feeling it's still this year. Yeah, but I mean, I don't. I don't know.
55:03 --> 55:05 They better be this year. I'm being some trouble.
55:07 --> 55:10 There's always next year chart. Just. There's always.
55:10 --> 55:14 Listen, because I'm a Mariners fan doesn't mean you keep have to say that.
55:16 --> 55:16 God.
55:16 --> 55:18 It's the mantra. It's the baseball up here.
55:18 --> 55:22 It makes you feel better. The Jays aren't going to be the Dodgers. Nobody's going to beat the Dodgers. There's just no way.
55:22 --> 55:23 No.
55:25 --> 55:32 Anything else to say on ball Pit? I think it's definitely worth 15 bucks for sure. Honestly, if you doubt it, play the demo. The demo is.
55:33 --> 55:33 Yeah.
55:34 --> 56:04 Yeah. If you want something that, again, respects your time, it's just something you could kind of dabble in for a little bit and then put down and go about your business. This is a great game for that. This is the closest thing to Like a fresher set of eyes for a vampire survivor esque type game that I don't know Press B would in the entirety of the team would recommend it, but I certainly would for 15 bucks. It's definitely a good time waster if you're just like, I don't want to think about anything. I just want to throw balls at shit. And this is the game for you.
56:05 --> 56:15 Yeah. And the demo gives you what, five, six characters that you unlock. So it gives you a taste of what the, you know, the gameplay loop is like. But it only gives you the first stage, I think.
56:15 --> 56:49 Yeah. But within that you get several buildings that you build. So you. Yeah, you're right. You get all the resources and the building experience. You can definitely tell whether this game is for you or not. And I quickly hit the 2, 3 hour mark on the demo and then I'm like, oh crap, I better go buy it. So I was able to get the progress to cross over but I had to copy the save files from one folder to another. Which on the Steam deck was not a fun time. Yeah, it did, it did work. But also this game on the Steam deck, perfect. On the Steam deck, perfect. Steam deck like it's you. I was playing the mouse on my desktop with a controller. It's fine. Steam deck, it's excellent too.
56:49 --> 56:49 Yep.
56:49 --> 58:18 Like it just runs on everything. It's really good game. All right. So yeah. So ball pit I think is great. There's nothing else I'm going to quickly say for Press me to cancel where we're an audio podcast of course you can listen to our episodes every Monday on Apple, itunes, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio and all those great places. Anywhere you listen to your podcasts, you'll find us. Currently I'm using Pocketcast. I would like a better app though. Of course we're also stream live the episodes on Fridays over on YouTube and Twitch so YouTube.com or Twitch TV pressby to cancel if you enjoy that. We also occasionally do some behind the scenes footage and if you'd like to see that, well you got to check out our Patreon patreon.com/pressby to cancel where just as for as low as $1 a month at our insert coin level. You can see the behind the scenes footage and get a cool color in discord if you if you're into that kind of thing. We also have additional tiers with additional perks. Go check it out. With one perk being our circuit Circus Charlie Circus Charles Tier supposedly Charlie Guys Circus Charles at A Circus Charles tier or higher. We will for this episode. We are professional sounding. Yeah. Circus Char. Circus Charles, Maryland. We do have. We do have one of our. We do have a backer at our Presby tier. Presbyterian. God, I love the puns. Presbyterian tier. Von Beardley, thank you very much for your support that tier. Much, much appreciate it.
58:18 --> 58:19 Love you, buddy.
58:19 --> 58:27 But yeah, and if you can't afford to pay for our patreon, that's. That's cool too. Honestly. Tell a friend. Download more episodes. That's cool.
58:27 --> 58:27 Just be here.
58:27 --> 58:29 Tell a friend, just be here.
58:29 --> 58:30 Just be here.
58:30 --> 59:35 Just be here as well. Yeah. I will say our audio list has actually been quite higher than normal. So for any of the folks who have found us, I'd like to know where you found us. Whether it's me spamming on Reddit or somebody's discord, give us a shout. You can check our discord. The link is@presbyterycancel.com or you can shoot us an email, tell us how wrong we are about everything. We just did a tier list of horror games and I got some feedback that they didn't agree with my list. That's cool. Let me know. Podcast, press me to cancel.com. make sure you address those concerns. The chart. He's our media manager and answers all those emails. Or, of course, members of the Super Pod Network of podcast. Super podcast, superpod network.com. next week I'm gonna have more caffeine, so I'm not stumbling in my words. But you can check out that website. We are a member of that network. There's a dozen other podcasts that are also getting related. Some do more games than we do, so go check them out as well. How about you guys? You guys got anything to shout out or something you want to mention you're doing? Wolf, how about you?
59:37 --> 59:46 No, same as last time. Just working on some stuff. But like I said, I'm sick this week, so I didn't get to put as much time into it as I wanted to.
59:48 --> 59:53 No worries. Chard, how about you? You're still streaming? Actually, you're streaming more? Oh, yeah.
59:53 --> 59:56 I do want to mention I burned through two audiobooks this week, though.
59:56 --> 59:58 Fantastic. Holy crap. Nice.
59:58 --> 59:59 There you go.
59:59 --> 01:00:00 There you go. Beautiful.
01:00:00 --> 01:00:00 Were they good?
01:00:01 --> 01:00:12 Yeah, one was clearly. Yeah, one was the Tenant, which is like somewhere between Pacific Heights and the Devil's Advocate.
01:00:12 --> 01:00:13 Oh, nice.
01:00:13 --> 01:00:19 And then the other one was a book by John Fugal saying, I'll leave it at that.
01:00:21 --> 01:00:22 Okay.
01:00:22 --> 01:00:29 Okay. We need to do a. A new companion podcast. Press be to book. That's what we're gonna do.
01:00:31 --> 01:00:36 She'd be all about that. She just got a Kindle, so she's got like 500 books that she's gonna start reading.
01:00:36 --> 01:00:37 Your prison Kindles are great.
01:00:39 --> 01:01:43 Twitch. I'm just playing playing games on Twitch. We're doing Silent Hill F right now which has been spectacular. I've really enjoyed it. Really cool spin on the Silent Hill lore on its in its own right. That's been really neat. I've been trying to work and focus on some of the YouTube. My own YouTube stuff and getting some past stream stuff posted up on there actually went viral with one of my clips the other day. It's up to 14k views. It's pretty crazy. That's never happened before. So you can go check me out on YouTube with the same name charmunk and find me on Twitch playing horror games until I'm too scared to play them or I run out. Whichever happens first may or may not be on tonight. I'm tired, but I still want to play some more Silent Hill F because it's a really freaking good game and I'm not ready to give it up yet. However, this episode has made me want to go play some more ball pit. So it's possible I just go grab my steam deck and get some rest and then jump in tomorrow to more Silent Hill after I'm done with my plasma donation. But and that we'll see what happens.
01:01:44 --> 01:01:51 Sounds good. All right, guys, well, until next week, we are press me to cancel everybody. Have a great night.
01:01:52 --> 01:01:55 But we've got the biggest balls of them.
01:01:55 --> 01:01:56 All of them all.
01:01:57 --> 01:01:59 I think that's way over my head.
01:02:01 --> 01:02:02 Acdc.
01:02:02 --> 01:02:03 It's acdc.
01:02:03 --> 01:02:07 Yeah, of course I I know acdc. They're my favorite band.
01:02:07 --> 01:02:14 After we were done doing the opener, I went, dude, we should just sang the ball song.
01:02:14 --> 01:02:15 Cdc.
01:02:16 --> 01:02:17 That's perfect.
01:02:18 --> 01:02:19 Is that a thing?
01:02:19 --> 01:02:20 It is a thing.
01:02:20 --> 01:02:20 Yeah.
01:02:20 --> 01:02:21 Look at the.
01:02:21 --> 01:02:23 I've got big balls.
01:02:23 --> 01:02:24 She's got big balls.
01:02:24 --> 01:02:25 She's got big balls.
01:02:25 --> 01:02:26 Yeah.
01:02:26 --> 01:02:28 Acdc, we've all got big balls.
01:02:28 --> 01:02:31 Yeah. It's such a dumb song.
01:02:54 --> 01:02:54 Sa.