The Besties - A Fun Time at the Movies with Immortality

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

This week, we're discussing the latest Sam Barlow FMV game, Immortality. It's all about the history of cinema and auteur theory and, tragically, Chris Plante isn't here to explain what all of that means. Also, what other FMV performances have stolen our hearts? Also discussed: Dark Souls 2, Dark Cloud 2, Alan Wake, Simulacra, Diveki Games, Jetpack Joyride 2 Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

do you think something is missing from the pita okay yes so you have felt that too yes i was gonna say from the peanut butter cup and to be specific i'm talking about the standard size okay normal pita butter cup not the seasonal one not the mini one the standard size do you think something is missing what on earth do you what do you mean i feel like there's too too little density in the whole experience and the middle part just feels like like something needs to be going on there like there needs they need to throw a peanut in my wife has been banging this drum for a long time she's 100 right the basic reese's uh shape does not match your, like, it is not the ideal conveyance for that flavor combination. You need a thick hit.

That's what I need. You want a big cup, the big cup with potato chips, any big cup, the eggs, a Punkman, any Reese's cup. Like, Reese got so close, Mr. Reese. Do you know what happened there? He actually burnt the peanuts, you see. Oh. Then he made it into peanut butter. He's like, this is fucking good.

I like it. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I'm going to get rich. They're like, but your name's Reese. Won't that be confusing? He's like, make my butter. Then they made it, but he fucked up because he did the peanut butter cup he's like that's pretty good and he stopped there and he didn't think about eggs or punkmans or trees

i don't know what a punkman is a pumpkin the pumpkin oh he said i thought you're saying punkman you're actually weird for not understanding it russ because it was pretty normal i thought the way every shape every shape is better than the Reese's Cup shape. Is that a regional West Virginia thing? Punkman? What are you saying? Pumpkin, Russ. Pumpkin.

What are you saying? Check the tape. Check the tape, people. Hey, Reggie, check the gate. See if I said Pumpkinman. I can't even say it. Can't say this wild thing you made up. My name is Justin McElroy, and I did the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Froschig and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home Interactive entertainment interactivity Here being used rather Loosely This is our episode on Immortality This is a video game club And I don't

This is basically I guess I don't know This is technically a video game Called immortality Russ what's immortality Good luck baby good luck baby immortality is let me start you it's like doom but immortality is a live action fully acted series of film clips and movies and it's sort of presented to you in totally a mishmash order and you have to eventually put them all together

and make sense of what exactly is going on in the overarching narrative of one actress's life. That's the best I can do in a very short span. Not actually that bad, but somehow we'll find more meat on this particular bone right after this. It's one of them Hersteries. I feel like I didn't know.

I got Sam Barlow and the Max Payne guy confused. Well, they do both love acting in their games. That's true. Who's Sam Barlow in this game? I mean, they love putting real actors in their games. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair.

Although Sam Lake is the face of original Max Payne. That's true. That is weird and true. So yeah, if you played that game, then that's kind of what you're getting into here in that it is watching videos to try and figure out what the fuck happened. And just to build on the Her Story comparison. Yeah, and remind people what that game was because I feel like there are people. So Her Story was a game where you were investigating a,

I guess it was a murder, right? Or a disappearance or something. Some of the details are lost to me. But it's all through like tapes of like an investigator's interview. And the way you, it's all little clips. It's all cut up and out of order. And the way you find new clips

is by searching a term, a word. And the clips in which that word appears then pop up for you so you're trying to find like new key phrases that appear elsewhere in the script her uh immortality is kind of a i mean it is i think as close as san barlo would ever get to doing like a direct sequel. There was a game in between these called telling lies that I was not wild about that, that didn't really click with me as much. But Sam Barlow to, to catch you up was sort of the lead on silent Hill shattered memories. Is that what it was?

Silent Hill shed the way I Wii one that was really good. His career. So Sam Barlow worked on that, and then Sam Barlow made her story. Sam Barlow worked at an interactive video company called Echo for a while at UKO, and I think worked on the War Games series that they did. And then, and I think Telling Lies is actually somewhere in between there. And now it's Immortality. Rather than searching for words in the script, what you're doing is clicking on people or objects in these clips,

and it is surfacing another clip. Not all the clip, but it's surfacing another clip, I think at random. Yeah, well, it seems, okay, so I'll give you an example. Wait, let me finish the sentence. Where that object or person appears in another clip. Right. Which is mechanically bewildering. Yeah.

Let me give an example just so people can wrap their head around. We're getting mechanics out of the way because it's good that you understand them, but it is by far the like, it is not the central draw here. Right. So you're watching a scene and it's in a living room and there's a lamp there and there's two actors there and you can freeze the scene at any time and select the lamp and it'll cut to another scene that also has a lamp not the same lamp but just any lamp or you can click on the actor's faces and it'll cut to any other scene that has that actor's face in it or you can click on whatever a cat or a framed picture in the background and those will

jump to those similar scenes and what you're trying to do is basically uncover new scenes so if you click on a picture frame that you haven't clicked on before it'll maybe let you see a new scene and then eventually you build this collection of like i want to say i have well over a hundred clips unlocked at this point varying from like 10 seconds to like five minutes each um so you build this huge collection and most of those clips are made up of there are set across three different movies that this one actress was in in addition to ancillary clips were like the actress is doing like a press tour talking about the movies that she's in rehearsals uh stuff like that must remind the scenes footage things like that dvd bonus bonuses yeah and blooper blooper so and yeah it's from these three movies and i will just say

because i think you kind of have to say this there are hidden clips that you can unearth in a mechanical fashion that i i will not talk about here but i will say i think is too a little was a little too confounding. Let's go on that at the end because it is sort of like almost secondary to the goal. So that was my first struggle with this game is like, what am I even trying to do here?

Like I spent the first probably hour of the game just like, I'm going to unlock as many clips as possible. And the way I did that was I found a shot where the clapboard, you know that thing that they hold in front of a camera and they snap it and they go take three so i found one of those and then i just like kept hitting the button on that and more and more and more scenes kept coming up because almost all the movie scenes started with a clapboard so i was filling out all these movie scenes and eventually i had like a hundred of them and I had no idea what I was trying to do there

and then I started like trying to like fill in basically the missing gaps of the stories of the individual movies and that kind of gave me a bit more of a goal to uncover maybe an overarching story. It's interesting, the clips are not, you're not assembling entire films but they are selected in which I feel like I have a pretty good sense of what each of these

movies was. Yeah, 100%. You really, you get all the major plot beats of each movie because of the clips that they have. What the interesting thing is that, I mean, finding these clips and then you are watching like scenes from the movies. But there's also like there's so much in the margins. I mean, there's so much like you'll see an actor look right after the clapboard cuts, you know, right after the scene ends in a way that is not commensurate with their character. Or you'll see like a five second exchange of dialogue at the beginning where there's like a sort of meta story that you're discovering, I guess you'd say. And that meta story, I should point out

that I came into this game knowing literally nothing. I thought it was from the Max Payne guy. I was like, bullet time, baby. And then I was like, wait, it's a her story. It's the other Sam. On the main menu, there is an About page that tells you what the fuck you're supposed to be doing. Click that button. There's also a Content Warnings page.

Click that button. This game's got some content in it. Mature themes. For sure. But you are trying to... This actress, Marissacelle has gone missing and none of these films that you're trying to unearth were ever released and so what is kind of the hook is like what the fuck happened and that is that that's the carrot for me i haven't reached i think

what i know that there is a broader hook that i don't think i've reached i played the game for a few hours at this point um but i have started to see where some reasons why these films didn't come out and it makes the hunt like well worth it because you get really invested in basically everyone in involved uh are all, I would say, superbly acted from front to back. Yeah, it's the best acting I've ever seen in a live-action game. I mean, for sure, hands down.

Her story is the number two right after that, right? But it's like, it is the best. It's fantastic. All the performances are really great, whether they're in a movie or like just being themselves. There's really not a wrong way to like experience this, except for I think and I had to kind of discover this, except looking for some sort of like metagame element that is going to like point you towards how the game like what you're supposed to do. Right. If you're going in looking for what should I be doing, I think it's a little,

it will be a little less satisfying for you. Once I let go of that and just started like following my curiosity, I guess you'd say, it's really easy game to just sort of, and I know I'm 41 and I shouldn't be saying this, but it's an easy game to just sort of vibe on. You're just sort of immersing yourself in it rather than having a goal, but getting interested in a certain person, right? And just saying, do they pop up elsewhere?

Have they been in other things? Like maybe this director has done something else and I can find them. It's interesting when you find people you didn't realize were the same person and it's like, Oh wow. Okay. So they kept the actor from this or the DP from this is now the director of, of this.

And it gets really like, there's so many layers to what you're watching that it almost defies your like full understanding of it. There was one scene where I was watching, God, I'm going to try to get this right. So I'm watching a video game where two actors, two real humans are pretending to be characters in a game that are pretending to be someone else that are pretending to, cause it's a double of someone and they're pretending to be on else that are pretending to, cause it's a double of someone and they're pretending to be on a talk show in the rehearsal for the movie, which is in the game.

It's wild, but like, there's really good, it all looks great. Like it looks like real footage from the time period. There's a really interesting like score that's sort of like pushing you through it. I love the score. Yeah. Really, really good. And the score kicks up when you're doing stuff like scrubbing through footage or like looking for a specific thing.

You can watch the clips at any speed to try to find what you're, what you're looking for. Yeah. I, I, well, first of all, I want to recommend to people,

cause I know Justin, you didn't do this initially. Definitely play with the controller. Yes. The game uses... It's much better with a controller. Well, A, the game uses haptics, like, a lot. There are, like, a lot of haptics in the game, and they tie to the overall thing. And B, I would say, the game is trying to mimic, basically, old-timey video video editing uh hardware like with jog dials and stuff

like that and you just won't necessarily get that same vibe from using a keyboard even though you can play on a keyboard it feels more like you're using one of those old like video toaster machines or whatever right or microfilm or something like that where you're like really scrubbing through yeah it is um yeah pretty cool and especially as you said when the music kicks up and you're just sort of like taking it all in and it feels like you're just pulling bits from this piece and bits from this piece and then putting this all together it reminded me this is like this will be up justin's alley but probably no one else's there are moments in this that very much reminded me of sleep no more or other like live action whatever yeah uh theater where you're kind of involved like walking among the actors

yeah because you feel like you're stumbling upon moments that you weren't necessarily supposed to see um and then and then every once in a while you start to get the feeling that people are aware of you yeah which is very unnerving um yeah guys i don't i don't know if you're getting this sense listening to it and i may be off base but i really i don't feel super qualified to do a lot of passing of judgment on this game i know it worked for me like i i don't know how successful it is in trying to do everything. I have problems with it that I feel like would streamline the experience for me a little bit. But it's so different from everything else.

It's really hard to say, like, it's so singular. It's not like, I don't know, the controls could be tighter. It's so hard. They need to bump up the graphics on level three, I thought. I think conceptually and presentationally, it is through the roof fantastic. it's like so it's so hard they need to bump up the graphics on level three i thought i think i think conceptually and presentationally it is through the roof fantastic um i will say this for myself even though i agree with you like uh the acting is good for video games i do not know it's really good russ i am sorry griffin and i are outvoting you on this i've watched let me just

say this i've watched a lot of television, a lot of movies. I think if you put this in a TV show, I'm not talking about the movies themselves because the actors are like kind of trumping themselves up, but the more grounded moments, I think generally are like not quite on that same level. And, you know, I think the writing can stumble at times on that same, in that same token, but I think it, because the concept is so original and interesting, it pulled

me through regardless of that. And it's not bad. It's just like, not something that I think would be applauded if it was, uh, you know, a movie or a, or a TV show. That's just, I just want to disagree with that. Yeah. I just don't. And you guys also, also isn't an acting show. And I just want to disagree with that. Yeah, I just don't agree with that. This also isn't an acting show, so I don't know. It's good.

It's crazy that Plant's not here. Yeah, it is extremely Plant, because I'm sure he has like, oh, you know, the 1970s monk drama was actually Dario Argento's first take on the blah blah blah question. I'm going to make him do like a B segment on it

next week or something like that. So just so I can hear his thoughts. I'm sure it'll also come up on Resties a little bit. Yeah, but nobody, or I don't listen to that, I should say. I know people do. I don't, I would never. I can talk to you guys whenever I want. If I want you guys to do a Resties,

I'll just call you and say, do a Resties for me. That's true. It's very interesting. Should we kind of scratch the surface on the other thing yeah and the other thing is actually what bothers me more about it okay so the other thing and if you want to go in completely blind which i would recommend and i wish i could say a hundred percent we don't want to talk about it at all but like i don't know that it will click for i i don't know i don't. I don't know what you guys are about to talk about.

I'm saying there are- Legitimately, Griffin? Legitimately, I don't think I know what you're going to talk about. I'm going to talk around it. I'm not going to give specifics, but I'm going to talk around it. While you're watching the clips and scrubbing through and something like that, things might happen to the footage that are not necessarily what you would expect while you're scrubbing through the footage things might change slightly or there might be a different

person in the footage than what you remember um and that sort of has an element that appears in many many of the clips um but only if you do specific things to sort of uncover them i don't want to say much more than that beyond saying like if you feel like something weird is happening or your controller is doing stuff or whatever lean into that and try to chase it down because there's a there's a whole extra layer to this which i only kind of maybe get but don't fully understand and this is coming from someone that like i've seen the credits roll in this game so i kind of maybe know but there's still a lot that i still have to uncover about this game and it i'm very eager for the like many many youtube

analysis videos that are sure to come in the next week or two yeah because there's there's a lot so griffin you've not seen anything that you don't know what we're referring to i don't think so i think i've i so i've not been playing with a controller i feel like i keep glancing off the side of this bigger thing and i've been like i should say have you seen any have you seen any i mean he would know i would i feel like i would know yeah i i after this i'm gonna go tell you to do something and then it's gonna you're gonna kind of have your mind blown a little bit but okay okay i wish that that element was not as well hidden as it is i had to call like rest had to call me to tell me how to like consistently do this thing and and what's weird is like i got it yeah not i didn't get it

consistently until it took me a little while but once i got it i i kind of it clicked for me and then i was able to do it consistently i agree it's a little bit maybe too hidden but i also don't even know because i i don't know how much it ties into the overall story and i don't know is it an easter egg is it a yeah i don't know man it's hard to say um i wish that it was easier just because i think it would be really easy to recommend this to people who are not traditionally like big into games because i feel like it's oh definitely like simple and understandable i i wish that stuff was a little uh easier to to dial into um it's it's so weird it feels so intimate and uh sort of alienating at the same time yeah really and it's very i think it's very sad like i think oh sure it's a very sad it is not an upbeat

no um and i think the broader points it's making are actually like, it has a lot to say about art. I feel like that. I don't necessarily like, I'm not sure if I agree with or see things in the same way, but like, at least it's saying something, which I think for,

uh, it's something we should encourage in, in all video games. Yeah. If, if you're a David Lynch fan, I got some moho and drive for sure out of it a lot of it and and commentary on how hollywood works and how

people sort of go through that as a you know it's kind of a meat grinder but also people are passionate about the stuff they're creating and if you like lynch this is a slam dunk for you it feels like if you gave david lynch a amount of money and was like make a game um it would be more inscrutable than this and you would need a fucking uh tandy to to play you need to get your commodore out of the closet to play but still that is maybe the thing that just to go back on the acting a little bit the thing that i like constantly was questioning myself it's like there's a there's a lynchian like the way that it's not totally grounded performances they are like um up i i guess or out there performances and in a lot of the scenes and i that's like a tonal choice that i'm not sure

it was hard for me to tell if it was intentional or they wanted the performance to be grounded but they weren't able to get there um which again maybe is part of the point um it's wild it is it is i i really i can't recommend it enough i mean if you care about games at all and you want to see one that does like if you like games that are doing something interesting yeah um this is like such a easy recommendation because it is bizarre. And let me also add, it's on Game Pass. And if you have Netflix, I don't know if it's live yet, but if you have Netflix, it will be included with Netflix Mobile or whatever it is where you can play Netflix games with your Netflix subscription.

And that will be one of them. And I haven't played it on a touchscreen, but it would probably work really well on a phone as well. So very interesting. it's so fast it's it's oh if i could just say real quick one last thing the technical aspects of this game where if you're thinking about how much footage i can't imagine how much footage there is there's hours right yeah oh yeah there's like an hour per movie that's in it, I would say. There's a ton of stuff. And almost every object that is in focus, like every object you can tap on, it feels like it reminds me of the first time I played Scribblenauts. That's sort of like, how did they do this? Yeah.

Because there are so many objects that are moving in space constantly that I really, I can't imagine what a massive amount of work it must have been. Yeah, I mean, I'm watching it. They're very intentional, right, about everything that they put in the frame. So some of this stuff will be obvious. We're like, oh, someone hands someone else a rose. And that's weird. You don't see a rose too often. So you're going to be able to find all the other rose moments but then the rose will cut like you'll keep clicking on the rose and it'll jump to like a shampoo commercial where the shampoo is in the shape of a rose

right yeah and it's like holy shit quick update quick update i just booted it up uh just because i wanted to see like what the haptic stuff was all about yeah and i do think it's bullshit that you absolutely it seems based on this very cursory dive i've just done during the podcast that if you don't play it with the haptics it doesn't like you don't get that stuff and there's no there's no indication okay there is there is there's a very there's a an audio component to it is less obvious than the house but there's i also feel like they'd say don't they say early on controller is recommended i did not notice that if so i mean i try to play with a controller because jesus christ yeah yeah i found some stuff okay you found some things welcome back

to the podcast so happy to have you here uh let's griffin if it's not too much of disruption are we we're going to take another break and then we'll come back and and talk about some more stuff is that okay i actually think i want to keep playing immortality but i guess i can wait russ do you have anything to add about this about no no again it is so i would say for anyone with game pass play it it's like the perfect game pass game and netflix as well um and yeah i want more games that are as adventurous as this without being gross like david cage games sorry real quick content thing and just because you never have to like if this is a thing for you like if this is a conservative there's a lot there's a lot of nudity in this game like a real

person nudity i don't think there's ever been a game that has had this much so if that's like you're you know you're thinking yeah i'd say there's nudity there's you know it's seen you know violent scenes blood like a lot it's a very mature game pretty much every a lot of places because yeah so i would say not for the kitties not for kids all right uh that's uh that's immortality we'll come back right after the break and we'll talk about even more uh great live action entertainment justin do you want to talk about the nud D some more? No, it was just a content warning, Russ. Jeez, oh, Pete. It was just surprising. I don't know.

Surprised me. So, Russ, we have taught, is interesting because we talked a lot about acting in the first segment. And I wanted to return, we wanted to return to that to talk about acting in FMV games in general, where we've seen like good and bad performances in fmv games where can you find the good stuff yeah so for me and we've talked a little bit about sam lake previously but for me the some of the best and there isn't that much i mean obviously in fmv games is a lot but in traditional games, FMV has not really stayed around very much. But Sam Lake's games, Remedy games specifically, have used a ton of live action. And invariably, those are the ones that I like the best, mostly because he really leans into the absurdity and

also otherworldliness of like a Lynchian tone. so games like control games like max pain games like quantum break does some live action stuff his performances are like his what he directs or at least writes is always very out there um control most recently has some like incredible side characters um i know some one of our readers uh mentioned dr darling in control who was played by matthew peretta um who i think might have also been the original max pain actor voice actor um yeah i mean i don't know i i think all remedies games do it really interesting quantum break is probably their weakest because it's the most traditional, like kind of felt like it was an ABC drama. But the rest of them are like totally wild and absurd.

And yeah, I love them. I think that the the Devecchi folks have really nailed a sort of like and I think you see this start in Contrad uh which is not a devecchi game but like the devecchi studios who've done they did uh the shapeshift detective infectious madness dr decker um poe and monroe dark nights of poe monroe which uh i am i'm actually in but they they uh the so that's the best one is me but uh their games have like this slightly elevated B movie kind of thing. Like they're not going like super, they realize to lean into the cheese a little bit. Yeah. And it's working, but it's in on the joke a little bit.

Right. And it's not bad. It's just like, they know what it needs to feel like. So it, you know, matches the the vibe of it that you got to elevate it a little bit um to let people know that you know that it's a little bit silly that you're interacting with a movie it's a little bit disjointed which i guess is interesting part of the reason i brought this up and we'll jump to griffin next is when i think about uh like last of us for example last of us 2 let's say the performances are like not

remotely cheesy like they're very intense and grounded and and and feel very like earnest to me and it's interesting that like i haven't seen a lot of that level of performance when it's live action when it's fmv and i don't know if that's because like video game makers don't have that experience in directing actors in that space but it's also weird because like that effectively that's what they're doing last of us they're directing these actors in a in a motion capture studio their voice is being captured while they're acting so i'm surprised that we're not seeing that sort of acting in other games i guess immortality is probably the closest we've seen think about immortality does not immortality i

would not file in this in this category but like some of those devecchi games and the other one like ones that are like fmv first you're asking actors to perform a role or like a take on the line several different ways depending on or due to several different moods, right? Yeah. Depending on what has happened immediately before. So if you think about a regular movie, if you're doing a performance, you can track the line from one to the other. But with this, with a lot of these FMV games, you don't – like it's so sort of – I would assume short takes and that kind of come out of nowhere. Like, okay, now do one where they just asked you

about the bicycle again. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, it's gotta be a big acting challenge. Yeah, but I would also say like a big part of acting, not that I'm an expert, is even though the line will be the same, approaching it in different ways.

Hey, you're more angry or hey, you're kind of frightened by what they just said or something like that. Yeah, but it's about more than like, what what i'm saying is there you're asking people to do that in a bubble right yeah because you don't have an arc of your character because there isn't an arc of the character sure i understand the character is the player what you're saying what was that game where you were in a hotel and this dude was just chasing you the whole time and you had to talk to ghosts till like oh my god yeah that was what was that it was very recent juice juice is

talking yeah we played about it we played it uh oh yeah that does ring a bell actually dead of night that was a good one that one was scary like that one's really scary um i'm gonna say uh a mobile game i don't know if it's on other platforms called simulacra uh oh yeah i don't know if y'all played that one i didn't come on everything that's a neat one okay it's it is a found phone game and i don't want to say much more about it other than that you the game is in the form of this uh user interface of a phone that you have found and it is a young woman's phone and it's up to you to figure out what happened to her and it goes some fucking places uh it is I don't know about the best acting but I think it is my favorite it is the most compelling FMV game I've ever played.

Wow. And because it's pretty short and it's very clever how it sort of recreates the experience of, you know, finding a phone. We've been watching, funnily enough, The Resort, which is kind of a found phone TV show. Yeah. And it's hitting some of those notes too. But I can't recommend it enough. It's dirt cheap and it's good as hell. It's kind of scary.

Very, just a fascinating idea that goes some like really, really wild, fantastical places. There is a similar one. that is a doctor who game um yeah the lonely assassins yeah not silent assassins that was uh i think they may have made two simulacra uh two simulacra games that or there's a another game no yeah simulacra 2 is also i don't know if i've played that one uh but yeah rad game really good acting really kind of scary and neat and the good news is we're going to be getting more live action thanks to alan wake 2 coming out eventually that's wild that'll come out let me just

um jump through some reader mail that we got of other people mentioning live action scenes that they enjoy yeah uh apparently i haven't played this but the this is comes from armored whale the ps1 classic omega boost has a live action opening cinematic that whips ass i guess i'll have to watch that you guys haven't played that have you no it sounds familiar it does sound familiar yeah omega boost uh we also got a call out from internet west for tim curry and red alert three oh any time bless him we we have no choice but to stand um and also uh mark hamill and wing commander three yeah i think that was the first time i don't like when actors are slumming it in fmv games that was the first time i remember an actual actor i recognized

being in a video game but you want to see a you want to see a hell of a one watch walking oh my god this omega boost intro is out of this world god we gotta tweet this because this is sending me y'all i'm freaking out over here i've never played this i gotta get this okay i don't think the rest of the game is F and V is it? probably not you were talking about actors slumming it oh yeah I don't like watch Walken in

Ripper I think is the name of the one that he is in that man is barely there I love he is like does not understand what he is being called to do so where do I hold the controller no you don't hold the controller Mr walken you it is it is out of this world uh kirk cameron and the horde i mean oh boy is that like a left behind kind of thing or yeah basically yeah basically except he's fighting a bunch of demons and he's a young prince got it which i guess is basically left behind yeah yeah uh cool what are we playing in addition to that not much else has changed i i did not play many

games this week uh but yeah i'm still still pounding into dark cloud 2 on the old yeah on that odin pro really dope oh so you're on the pro i actually just saw a video apparently they have a light as well but you're on the pro yeah i i went ahead and got it just because i wanted something that could run like ps2 era stuff and got it in gamecube pretty comfortably which does um yeah that's that's it i've picked up and kind of bounced off a few phone things. I've been looking for a- So hard to find good phone stuff.

It really, really is. I started playing, you know what? Just came out on, I think it's been on iPad, but now it's on phone with like a retooled interface. Is Papers, please? Oh, okay. It works really good. There's a few, you know, that game is all about like doing your job as fast and accurately as

possible. Yeah. And there's like one or two kind of steps that the iPhone version has to add because of the limited screen real estate that kind of get in the way a little bit, but it's in a lot of ways it works really well on the platform. Yeah. And a lot of, a lot of Pokemon go, they just did this huge, like, worldwide event last Saturday that me and Henry played just all day.

And that was a lot of fun. Caught a lot of weird, big, big bug Pokemon, like Buzzswole, the big, the big strong buff burly bug man uh which has got to be somebody's thing for sure sure i have such a weird relationship with pokemon go because i played it so intensely like two years right before the pandemic yeah and i played it to the point where i knew all the locals in my neighborhood who also played it. And you'd see them grouped up at the corner when they were hitting a gym or something like that. And I was in a Facebook group with all of them. So when we were like doing multiplayer or whatever, people would meet up on the street.

And I quit basically at the pandemic because I didn't want to go outside. And I haven't gone back to it, but i still see them on the street corners and it's extremely awkward oh like i can i know they're there because i see them with multiple phones and like battery packs and shit and i'm like oh that's a pokemon player and it's just like it's from another time it's like i left left a gang um you know i i did want to mention because i know that there's a specific group of people that will have fond memories, but Jetpack Joyride 2 is out on People Arcade.

Yeah, I grabbed that one. I did too. I will say this. I don't, I think that it's, a lot of the hooks are cool. It feels good to play. It is like fun to play. You're basically side scrolling.

You hold is the simplest controls in the world. You hold your thumb on the screen to activate your jet pack to go up. You let it off to go down. And then you're like careening through these 2D environments and you're shooting the stuff that comes at you getting power ups and unlocks. I thought it was it looks great. It's fun to play. I don't think it's broken up into like levels so like just when you get into like kind of a groove you'll be at the end of a level and that feels weird for a genre that is called endless runner

like it it feel it kind of breaks the momentum for me like the levels are pretty short and then you're dragged back into this the uh not dragged back but you know you head back to the main menu and there are so many different little like micro transaction-y style hooks there's idle like idle gold that you're accruing to go collect and uh login days and stuff like that which is so weird because it's on apple arcade so you're not you can't pay real money for any of this stuff but it does feel like they back their way in from having a free to play game into an apple arcade game so all that stuff just feels like getting in the way of like me enjoying myself because i need to like grind up the power on this machine gun

it's a it's a weird choice that you know i it's apple arcade has had definitely had some fun hits but also it feels like sometimes they are like dipping into this world of like quasi free-to-play even though it's not right they're using the the the mind hooks and not the money hooks like they're they're yeah it is that being said i got a press release from apple the other day. Apparently Tom Hanks is coming to the Apple Arcade with a trivia game. All right. So that's happening.

That sounds great to me, man. He loves trivia. He loves trivia and he's coming to Apple Arcade. I'm going to mention I've continued to play Dark Souls 2. And that game is fucking great. I really like it. It's not as good as 1 or 3, and it's certainly not as good as Elden Ring, but it is really fun, and I've been playing it on the Steam Deck, which I think is a great fit for all the Souls games, just because there's so much, like, oh, I died, or oh, I want to farm this soul, whatever, and not having to stare at a screen and be at a desk or whatever, like having a comfortable couch experience

while playing a Souls game is, ooh boy, super good. So even though it is considered the weakest of the Souls games, it's definitely worth playing if you're a fan of the genre. That was the first one I finished, so it holds a big place in my heart.

Yeah, I'm going to talk more about it on Rusty's just because there's so many eccentricities. But yeah, please don't overlook it. It is very cool. I think that's it. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. We have Darthus, Elisee, JMMM, and Beanlover1017. That's my birthday. Thank you to everyone who wrote reviews

for the Besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to, I don't know, the world at large for sharing the show and talking about it. Yeah, man. What do we have? Oh, we should recap the games we talked about. I guess Plant's not here, so I will try to do that. We talked about Immortality, which is available on basically all platforms it's also available on

game pass and if you have a netflix subscription you can play it on mobile we talked about omega boost we talked about a bunch of remedy games we talked about justin's favorite devecky games fmv centric games grifton talked about simacro, which is a mobile game. I guess there might be a couple of those. A little bit about Tim Curry in Red Alert 3. I talked about Dark Souls 2. Griffin is still playing Dark Cloud 2. Justin mentioned Jetpack Joyride.

I think that's it. Jetpack Joyride 2, yes sequel thank you so much for listening next week we'll be talking with you about the last of us part one remake um so tune in for that and uh be sure to join us again next week for the besties because should the world's best friends pick the world's best games. Besties!