One game to consume all of your time
Ball x Pit is the unholy combination of Vampire Survivors and Breakout
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Ball x Pit makes an incredible first impression. But whether it’s a great break from the frustrations of life or an overly powerful time suck will depend on your taste in games. The Besties explain why.
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Games discussed:
Ball x Pit, 99 Nights in the Forest, Absolum, Japanese Rural Life Adventure, Puzzle Bobble 2
Hardware discussed:
Steam Next Fest:
Share your favorite demos in the comments!
Hoops’ art discussed on last week’s episode:
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On next week’s The Besties: Outer Worlds 2
The “too many games” problem (w/ Jason Schreier)
Post Games is now available for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and RSS. Watch shorts on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
Bonus links:
Ghost of Yotei Reminded Me of the Magic of the PS5 DualSense Controller (Endless Mode)
Gameplay Loops Are Out, Chains Are In (Indie Game Clinic)
Call of Duty only exists because “EA were dicks”, claims Battlefield lead Vince Zampella (Eurogamer)
Hades 2 1.0 review (RPS)
A review of the Splinter Cell Netflix animated series (PCGamer)
Searching Without Shooting (Unwinnable)
A friend and I have been using a novel way to avoid spoilers while discussing games, and I figured I should share with the club! We've been using this to talk about Silksong without spoiling anything for each other.
We've each collected a number of strings that we've encountered in the game, such as items, location names, and character names, then encoded them so that they aren't immediately obvious to a reader. We then share the encoded lists. If I want to know if my friend has found a particular item, I can encode the name of that item and search for it in their list. If the encoded string is present, I know that the existence of that item is not a spoiler for them.
As our lists got longer, I took this a step further by writing a short command line tool that finds the intersection of the two lists, so that we have a "common" list of things we've both seen. The tool also handles decoding. I arbitrarily chose base 64 encoding and used an online base 64 encoder that encodes each line separately, but any obfuscatory encoding would work, such as a Caesar cipher.
It's been really cool to be able to discuss Silksong together, and I'm extremely satisfied with the high standard of spoiler avoidance that we've been able to meet with this approach. I plan to use this solution in the future.
In talking about Steam Next Fest, I have only been able to play one game, despite downloading close to 14. It's called Desktop Defender, it's Rusty's Retirement (meaning it's an idle game and you can put it on the side of your computer screen) Vampire Survivors and Asteroids. You get a gun that shoots at incoming things, and the more you run it the more coins you get, the more XP and upgrades you get, the more weapons you get, and of course you can sacrifice it all for some special points and start the run over again. It's simple but a good time waster, but it encourages you not to make it your main game by limiting the size of the game.