The Besties - All The Games We Loved This Spring

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

With Frushtick on vacation, the gang shares some of their favorite games from the past couple months, including Subnautic: Below Zero, Nier Replicant, the Masst Effect remaster, and Clap Hanz Golf. If you've finished Resident Evil 8: Village and need something to play next, this episode is for you. 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!

Are you still, where are you at? Are you in California now or still Ohio? Still in, or I'm in California now. Right. In Ohio, I ate chicken wings. Oh, yeah. Every meal. Oh.

Every meal, I ate chicken wings. And then I came to here, they don't have chicken wings. Wait, why did it happen to all the chicken wings? That's a sometimes food, as Cookie Monster would say. You would think that. You go to Ohio, at least where my family is at in Toledo, all the chicken wings so that's a sometimes food as cookie monster would say you would you would think that you go to ohio the uh at least where my family is at in toledo they only have chicken wings they used to have more restaurants when i was a kid they had like i don't know four like you know like four chicken wing restaurants per person and now they have like 50 chicken wing

restaurants per person they're inescapable. This is what fucking Midwest besties is like. You get three old boys, old dogs from the Midwest like us. This is what it's like. It's all chicken wings and sports. The first time I took my wife to Toledo, Ohio, she's from California, expects a certain type of fresh vegetable delicacy. And we were like, oh, where can we go that has some food that's not chicken wings? So my family takes her to this kind of like steakhouse.

They all have veggies. And she sees a broccoli salad that's basted in butter. And she's like, hey, this sounds delicious. Could I get it steamed, though, instead of basted in butter. And she's like, hey, this sounds delicious. Could I get it steamed, though, instead of basted in butter? And they're like, oh, no, it comes in the butter bag. Comes in the butter bag? Hachi machi. That's so rad.

God, this is a good country. This is a good country. Ohio's a good state. In a good country, there's a good state. In a good country, there's a butter bag of vegetables. My name is Justin 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 Christopher Thomas Bland, and I'm a Rolling Stone. Yeah, how come all of our pseudo-Russ fresh chicks that we started to do also were Bob Dylan a little bit?

Yeah, it was a little bit Bob. Hello and welcome to the besties, where we profile the latest in greatest in home interactive entertainment. Russ is in here, so I'm gonna tell you, it's like a book club that goes all year long, except it's about video games and it's about friendship, it's about growing as people.

I'm so excited to be here with you. I do miss Rush Frushtick, kind of the heart and more of a mascot of the besties. And it does feel like something of a loss with him not here. He's the spine of the show, but not a great, but not a very super healthy spine. A fragile, fragile baby spine.

Yeah, so this is the besties, and I'm so excited to be here with you all. We are going to do kind of a little bit of a grab bag. We're going to talk about a slightly larger release, and then we'll get into some other stuff. It's going to be an exciting episode. That's what I'll say. We're going to be talking about Nier Replicant. We's going to be an exciting episode. That's what I'll say it. We're going to be talking about Nier Replicant.

We're going to talk about Clap Hands Golf. We're going to talk about Subnautica Below Zero. In fact, let's start there. Now, I talked about this one in February. You did? Yeah, because it has been in early access for a while. And it's been in early access for a long time a while and it's been in early access for a good long time and um i guess this is is this the full release now at this point usually that's the kind of thing russ knows i'm pretty sure yeah this this is the the one point

well i'm not sure the version number but this is the full release it's coming out on switch so you know that nintendo would not mess around they say yeah give us your best or give us your nothing right and they gave them something i've actually what this is actually a good launch launch pad what version have has everybody been playing because i've been playing switch because it's like the only type of video games for the most part i can play right now with a with a newborn yeah i've been playing switch too how about about you, Justin? Yeah, I was on the personal computer. Okay. So we got a little bit of that perspective.

That's where I started. Weirdly, I had played this for a good chunk before, none of my progress had sort of saved. Huh. So that, yeah, I'm a bit disappointed there. Justin, for people who missed the February episode, can you give us kind of a summary of what the game is sure so if you Subnautica original Subnautica was very much

of a wave if you will of these like survival adventures I guess you could say it started with it kind of started with Minecraft but really sort of more started with Rust you had Don't Starve you had I guess Ark you would count

Ark is one for sure wave um and long dark there's yeah yeah there's been a bunch um so you know there was this big the big rush of these survival games and this is definitely one of those um and subnautica below zero is a sequel to that um if you've played the original uh you know it's largely about sort of like exploring an underwater world, collecting resources and food and stuff like that that you need to survive. In Subnautica Below Zero,

the upper world, the surface world, is a bit more of a factor. There's new equipment, new gear, new stuff like that that new story to explore um but you are it's it's frigid so like um when you're on land temperature is constantly a factor uh rather than oxygen which is the big deal when you are uh under the sea uh but that's subnautica below zero how to grab you guys do you think? I didn't get into the original Subnautica. I don't know that I have a huge appetite for this genre,

for the survival genre, which is to say you're dropped into a world with nothing and you're hungry and thirsty and here's a stick and make it sharper so that you can fulfill your hierarchy of needs a little bit easier than you could you know an hour ago uh that is maybe a very simplistic reduction of of what the the genre is about but i i didn't i just really bumped up real hard against the original subnautica uh and I definitely took a much larger bite

out of Below Zero, honestly, because it's on the Switch, which I will say at the top, the performance on the Switch is not great. It's so hard to make an evaluation of that because it's a huge open world game that it looks very vibrant but the frame rate is pretty bad and also it crashes pretty frequently and also doesn't auto save one

one one big caveat though we're playing a build from february at least when when it opens yeah the the pre-release build, when it opens says like February something. Well, I've been playing since an update that says April on it. And yeah, I don't know. It's it's I haven't I guess I did play most of my time on that February build. But I mean, the the frame rate, the performance issues are definitely still there. I don't know about the crashing issues. But regardless, there is no auto save in the game, which is like completely, I literally lost my entire save because I just didn't save my game

because it's 2021. And, you know, I just have become accustomed to not having to do that. So I played for probably six or seven hours and then the game crashed and I was like, oh shit. And then I went in

and there was no load or no continue because I just hadn't saved. So that was disappointing um but that said i kind of get subnautica now this was the one that made me kind of understand it kind of made me want to go back and play the original subnautica because it's just kind of chill to explore the ocean like it's it's kind of cool to just kind of build a you know a sea truck and gas it up and just go on a little excursion and see what you can find and see like what kind of discoveries you can make uh and when i stopped treating it like a a hunt for the critical path i i found that i really actually enjoyed subnautica below Zero quite a bit, despite the performance issues.

Yeah, I wish I was playing on PC, not because of the performance issues, which I didn't have a ton of trouble with. But kind of going off of what Griffin was saying, it's a vibe game. Like, it's a game where I really want to feel like I'm in this space. I want to look as beautiful as possible. And I don't play this sort of game for the, okay, incremental personal growth of skills. If that's really what you dig, yeah, go ahead and play it on Switch. But if you're wanting it to be like, oh, I'm in a new underwater world um it it definitely felt to me like okay i'm swimming around a blue haze and there are like brown smudges on the ground and i need to like

kind of poke at all of them to see if they're items i can collect yeah i had to there's an just a pro tip if you do play on play on Switch, there are several accessibility options and one of them is highlight interactive objects in like bright orange, which for sure throws the vibe off a little bit, right? But on Switch, it's like almost necessary because it's not quite crisp enough for you to tell like which rocks

are just kind of background objects and which rocks are ones you can smash open to try and get copper ore. so yeah, that's that, that is something I definitely had to turn on, but Justin, how was it on,

on PC for you? Um, I had, it was not bad. Um, I did have a surprising number of like getting stuck in the environment is like fairly common and you can usually sort of like wiggle your way out of it um you know that that'll that'll move but like uh surprisingly common one thing i'll say is like the story stuff feels much

more fleshed out than the last time i played it, which is cool. I had a lot of problems in the first one with like, there are places where you'll like unlock a beacon that shows you like, here's a place to go to swim to. And it's like narratively unlocked. And it sort of guides your progression. The first time I played, I had a lot of problems with those not triggering and just like not knowing where to go next.

That is not as much of a problem here. No, there's beacons. I'm probably nine to 10 hours in at this point and i had to like turn off like 15 beacons because it's there's so many different objectives that i could go and and swim to uh to most of which are sort of story storycentric. That I had to start clicking those off because it cluttered up the already pretty limited real estate on the Switch screen. Yeah, that was better this time. I will say, and this is like... I mean, you could say this is kind of playing into Not As Bad As Griffins' situation. And you could say this is like user error and and you are partially right but like i had a a pretty long play session yesterday

and i had to run and do something else and i closed the game out without really like processing what i was seeing on the screen right and it said like i i was just like kind of closing i saw the thing pop up but it's like it's been an hour since something something i'm like okay whatever whatever like because i'm very used to modern games and they're like we're not gonna let you lose your progress like we'll save for you it's fine and i closed without really processing that because i was in a hurry my kids were were fighting or something and like i shut it down and ran the next room and like i realized like as and ran the next room and like i realized like as i was walking the next room like i just deleted everything i just did in the past hour

like i mean it's it's inexcusable i mean like honestly the the save the way the saves are handled currently the lack of an auto save is like it's bad inexcusable and for a game like this where it's like things are supposed to matter, right? Like there's supposed to be consequences for what you're doing. The idea that you wouldn't just save that regularly seems so bad to me. Like it's bad. Bad, bad, bad. There's a mod that came out very quickly on the PC version. I think for the original Subnautica 2, which I don't believe had autosave either, that adds autosave to the game.

So if you are one to modify your PC games, you can modify autosave to the game so if you are uh one to modify your pc games you can modify autosave into it there's a there's a a um i learned about this while googling why doesn't this game have autosave there's a there's a class of gamer that thinks that autosaves is for babies and that if you don't save your game then what's wrong with you you gotta save your game, then what's wrong with you? You've got to save your game. And that's such a buckwild position to take in a, I don't know, an entire medium where autosaving is in 99% of the games that come out. I can understand there being a mechanical reason for you to not include autosaves in your game, right? Like you don't want to screw over the player by trapping them in some sort of unsurvivable situation. And you could conceivably do that in Subnautica, but there's also lots of

ways around that, that lots of video game developers have figured out. It's just, yeah, it is a, the worst thing about this game for me is how much progress I lost, uh, on the Switch version with the crashes and, and there not being any autosave. It sucks. Yeah. Something, I, I, so I didn't have much exposure to the original Subnautica. So I want to talk about like, what's cool about this game to me. Uh, I really dig the like base building stuff. Uh, one of the first tools that you build again you drop into this world with nothing you collect metal to build a knife to collect

you know things to build rubber to build x y and z um and eventually that evolves into base building where like you can build solar panels to power your base and power all these different appliances like a water filtration device that gives you water and the salt that it filters out of it and all of that stuff. I really, really dug that because it condenses down the whole idea of the survival genre into, I'm going to build a very, very functional place that's going to allow me to skip over a lot of the uh the bullshit of

of survival games like my hunger meter and thirst meter which there's a mode where you can play without those which i you absolutely i as somebody who's played a lot of both these games you absolutely should it adds nothing yeah the hunger and thirst adds literally nothing to the game i i i mean it's just like do you like swimming around and catching fish like if you do then like absolutely go for it but like i i turned it off it's very um you have a scanner it's like the first one of the first tools that you build and what's cool about it is you find these other installations usually these doomed like facilities and you go in there with your your scanner and it's a bonanza of things that you can scan whether it's like appliances like

i said like the the water filtration device or uh here are some thermal generators that you can place on vents down at the bottom of the ocean to create like tons of energy or here's like a whole new room design for you to scan and add it like collecting those to like flesh out my base was the hook for me like that was the thing I got really into. And I built a base that I think is pretty radical. I will say I don't, after I finished that base, I kind of stopped playing because I felt like the story

wasn't pulling me along a whole lot. And once I had this like awesome setup that could have very easily pulled me through the rest of the game, I don't know. I felt like, well, now what do i do with it like it felt like a kind of shallow experience a bit more once once i sort of collected all those carrots that were in front of me on the stick i to kind of put a bow on this one because i know we have so many other games to talk about for folks who

are listening to this who are into this sort of game it's worth like saying i think this is a good version it's a good one sort of game like i i think it's like not really our specific thing maybe justin likes it a little bit more but i do i do like it quite a bit yeah i don't think after i lost an hour i'll never play it again but like i liked when i was playing yeah this is different than like some games were like hey this this game straight up just is not great and not pleasurable this game is a solid game it just didn't click with us i don't think um anyway time to talk about a game that did click with us new replicant everybody played it everybody here on the call has finished it you all loved it you did You did all five endings, right?

All five endings. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, the original Nier ruined me as a games journalist and actually drove me out of the space completely. So like I have a pretty hard time even talking about this, but. That's fair. Justin, is you not being able to fish in Nier,

you're eating a banana with the peel still on it is that like what you know griffin that's like a hundred percent like if the comparison you're making is like very very very very very small part of a very very very long journalism career but it's the only thing that 99 people know about you then yes 100 um you know this game rules and i think we spoke about it very briefly but i i really can't recommend it to either of you okay no listen i'm in i'm in a huge jrpg like place right now uh i've been replaying a lot of like older ones and like i have i have uh middle of the night time to like, you know,

remote play stuff on my phone. So like I have a place in my heart open for, I think I have a place in my heart open for near replicant. I just don't know jack shit about it. Let, let me contextualize this a little bit, Chris, before you start talking,

because I want to, I want to, so we can level the playing field and sort of color what you're going to say, or what information you choose to relay. Sure. The, I was so deep in the paint on Nier Automata. You know this. We've talked about it.

I played, I got every ending. Like, I adored that game. Nier, in my memory, and again, it's been a decade since I played it initially, I found it to be basically like borderline petulant in its disregard for the player's time, like in its absolute unwillingness to consider that your time has value and worth that should be respected. That was my big problem with the original Nier that I thought was like handled so much better

in Nier Automata in a way that like, I don't know, light years ahead. The fishing was just a small example. But anyway, that was my Nier problem. How does that, how has that evolved? It hasn't really. I would say that's still true. I mean, Nier Replicant, even going back to it, this is a true remake minus a thing that I will talk about in a moment.

And we'll make sure to put a big spoiler warning ahead of. But Nier Replicant is just a rough draft for Automata. That's how it feels going back to it. So many of the ideas that are there are then done better in automata the multiple endings is the perfect example and i think it's what justin's talking about of like valuing your time and automata you play through the game one time uh and then you play through it a second time and you get the perspective of a different character and that's probably the most repetitive round but all the other endings after that are just new campaigns like they're just entirely new stuff in replicant

that's not the case you are replaying a good chunk of the game over and over and over and getting very little difference um and the difference that does exist, you know what, we're going to talk about minor spoilers here that are going into these endings, so I'm just, if you want to skip ahead to the next section, it's probably going to be like five minutes. But the second playthrough is like, oh,

it turns out that you're the bad guy. Like, it's the exact same stuff, but you get a little bit more of a cutscene where you realize the people that you're going in and slaughtering are like just hanging out and you're effectively like busting into a birthday party um with your katana and and ruining the day um and you get that pretty quickly but you just do it over and over and over again and at the time when near originally came out i think that was, like, pretty inventive. I mean, this was a period when people thought

Spec Ops The Line was profound. But, like, we've come a long way, baby. And it doesn't quite hit as well. That said, the game itself is still fun, and if you're, like, a person like me who just likes seeing how things evolve, like, hey, here's how games grow and become more interesting it's a blast also it does a lot of cool things like it like automata it is constantly playing with genre so about five hours in you're in kind of like a resident evil ripoff and then a few hours later you're in like a Resident Evil ripoff. And then a few hours later, you're in like a Diablo ripoff.

And it's using all these different genres to kind of commentate on itself and video games. And I love that about Yoko Taro's work that I think he's one of the best video game critics working today. He just happens to be doing it with video games. That said, the game itself, all the quest and stuff, is very MMO.

So maybe, Griffin, it'll click with you. Because if you're looking for a game to just grind on, it feels real good. And you can just pick at it endlessly. I would be going for all endings had I not. And here's, again uh making a bad use of your time you only actually replay the second half of the game for each ending but you have to get all the swords in the first half to achieve the final true ending so if you made that mistake of not getting all the swords in the first half you will never get the final true ending which is an entire new ending they made just for this remake. So good.

I had a tab open to purchase this for remote download on my PlayStation. And when you said that, I just quietly closed it. Well, if you hadn't made my mistake. Just like, okay. I reviewed it. I didn't know that I should get all the swords, right?

And like, if I was playing it again, I would waste that time. You've been playing video games your entire life. You get all the swords, Chris. You get all the swords. Well, two things. It's so much money. And two, it really wasn't clear to me that I wouldn't be able to go back and buy those swords. I mean, this is such a

silly thing to say out loud. That said, I watched the final ending, which I think is like an hour, and it rules. It's so good. I'm so mad that I will never get to play it. And there's part of me that's like, oh, surely they'll release like a cheat code or something.

They won't. Just like they didn't with Automata. If you really want to see the ending, you either have to watch it on YouTube or you have to earn it. And there's part of me that respects that. There's also a part of me that's like super bummed I will never get to play this huge chunk of one of my favorite video game series.

That sucks. Well, you got to get into Final Fantasy XIV with me, bud. Play that ring. Oh, man. This is the year, man. This is the year of XIV, baby. This seems like... I don't know that I can hang with Nier with...

I talked about playing JRPGs, but the idea of replaying another... That same J... The idea of replaying Chrono Trigger again idea of replaying chrono trigger again now just to get another ending out of it sounds like uh poison to to me um but the good thing is it's short like i think you're only replaying like you know seven to ten hours or something like that yeah that's pretty that's one resident evil eight approximately. That's true. That's true. Hey, do we need to take a break?

Yeah, let's take a break. Another great break. Hey, you mentioned Resident Evil and you summed up the ghosts of Resident Evil and we talked about it extensively last week. I just want to say I finished it. Me too. And I'm pretty sure it's, yeah, it's goatee so far it's goatee at this point and I know it's mid-May

there's still time it's gonna be a weird year though so I don't know what it's competing with so far I don't know what it's gonna compete with it is very good a full spoiler episode I think on that game I think yeah I mean I don't know people

seem to like the last one. I'll just say it's absolutely fucking peak of the series. Outstand! I mean, it's outstanding. And it stays outstanding the entire time in new and interesting ways.

I loved it. It's rare that I can endorse a game with this much enthusiasm i don't care if you like horror games or action games or whatever you will love this game there were parts of this game towards the back half that i was literally cackling like in my office like seeing what they were doing like it's it's it's incredible it's phenomenal um uh griffin yeah i have a question for you. I've never played the Mass Effect games.

Yes. Because I only like good games. Right. But I've heard that there are people. Are you? Yeah. Who have bad taste. Can you tell me about Mass Effect 1?

Why should I give it a chance? Yeah. First, I want you to tell me more about how you replayed Nier a hundred times and then fucked up because you didn't get all the swords. Yeah, that's fair. So yeah, Mass Effect Legendary Edition came out, which is, I genuinely, you know, I'm pretty unplugged, I would say, especially over the last two months where I've been trying to get a small person to sleep unsuccessfully for 24 hours a day. And I didn't even realize, I i guess that this was a thing that was coming out so soon it is all three games all three mass effect games all the dlc for all the games

uh and they look better and that i would say that upgrade is the most sort of prevalent in the original mass effect which i actually wrapped up this morning um one thing to to know about the mass effect series is that mass effect one is like very uh a very sort of primitive version of what they accomplish even in mass effect 2 mass effect 2 is right juice like leagues better like so much better than the original not even close the original Mass Effect has like pretty bad pacing issues. It had, it felt bad to play. Like the gunplay felt bad. There are these long sequences

where you're in a rover called a Mako that you go around these like unbearably long sort of tracks on planets planets just like shooting at the same two bad guys over and over again like it's it has some issues and those pacing issues have not necessarily been fixed in in the original mass effect but uh it looks a lot better uh and it the most important thing is that it plays so much better. I've seen comparison footage of what using a sniper rifle in the original Mass Effect looks like. And it's just like a drunkard waving all over the place. And the guns don't look or sound especially good.

And it's just really unsatisfying. I finished the original Mass Effect this morning after just kind of rushing through it. And it was kind of fun. Like the pacing issues are definitely still there. But I had more fun just kind of rushing through it. And it was kind of fun. Like the pacing issues are definitely still there, but I had more fun just kind of blowing away Geth like over and over again. One thing I will say is that you can skip Mass Effect 1 because when you make a new character

going into Mass Effect 2, it basically shows you a visual novel, like a comic book style summary of mass effect one that allows you to make all of the major plot decisions that you make in mass effect one i would if you've never played the series i would fully vouch for that because while i enjoyed mass effect one more this playthrough i was mostly just spinning it looking forward to finishing so I could get to Mass Effect 2, where I think Mass Effect 2 is the best of the series. You are losing a little bit of context. If you have not played Mass Effect 1, don't.

I will say it also took me about six hours to burn through the critical path of Mass Effect 1. Oh, really? Yeah, I mean, I did it on casual mode because I just wanted the continuity of the save going into the two games that I actually care about yeah i didn't do like any of the side quests i just like pushed what did you play it on pc uh and yeah personal computer personal computer uh device uh for steam by way of origin because it's the future and it's bad. But yeah, I literally finished it this morning.

I've been remote playing on my phone with the Backbone controller, which is still the MVP. And I've, yeah, I enjoyed my time with it, but I'm really looking forward to two. So I really want that to appear on whatever Xbox calls it. Xbox Cloud Game Pass, whatever. So that is where I feel like

I could see myself playing this. But I don't know if there are other people out there like me. This game had such bad word of mouth for me, despite it being a very beloved game. All the one series or Mass Effect 1? Kind of like as a collection because the first one came out

and people were like, all the problems that you said, it's not there, whatever, they'll make a sequel and it will be good. The sequel came out and it just landed at the wrong time for me. The sequel was the game that got all the praise. I played the beginning. Seth Green is there. I went to a big generic looking space place after a pretty cool looking intro. Didn't have time. I forgot Seth Green's in it.

Yeah. Fantastic. And then Mass Effect 3 came out and that was like a whole kerfuffle. I'm excited to re-litigate Mass Effect 3 because I feel like now that I know what it does, I wonder if I will enjoy it a bit more. Should we have,

I feel like we should do a Mass Effect. I'll play it. Holistic Mass Effect episode. I feel like we should do a Mass Effect. I'll play it. Holistic Mass Effect episode. I feel like I should fill that. I'd love to go back. Yeah. It occupies a really interesting space, especially now that we know

kind of what Bioware does. Like playing the Mass Effect series, especially after Inquisition, is like, I don't know, it's fascinating to see how it kind of fits into Bioware's now kind of weird legacy. I never played Andromeda, so I'm probably missing a great deal of context there, too.

I think it's a rad package. I think it's a series that everybody should try. And with all the DLC, there's some great DLC. The Lair of the Shadow Bro shadow broker for I think it's Mass Effect 2 is like so good and I'm really really uh yeah I'm really looking forward to to playing playing that one again so yeah I'm gonna give it a try and maybe we can do an episode uh during the slow days of the summer I think it'd be fun um good idea can we should we talk about clap hands golf because yeah that's another one I'm excited about okay I know that Resident I think it would be fun. That's a good idea. Should we talk about Clap Hands Golf? Yeah, real quick.

That's another one I'm excited about. Okay, I know that Resident Evil 8 is your goatee, Justin, but I think Clap Hands Golf deserves a seat at the table for this conversation. Clap Hands Golf is effectively the spiritual sequel to the Hot Shots Golf franchise that originated on PlayStation consoles. Now it is available in Apple Arcade. I was skeptical of it because any game that is, I don't know, kind of going for a console game vibe on Apple, on smartphones in general, I just, I don't know. I'm just inherently skeptical of it. I don't expect that type of gaming on this.

And what a bad idea on my part, because this feels as feature-rich as any game I would play on Switch. The way it works is it is golf, but short. So you're not playing 18 holes. You're gradually accumulating a team of golfers, and you can only use one golfer per hole um so you might like do a round of like three holes and you'd have three golfers or six holes and you'd

have six um and as you like win tournaments you get points that unlock more tournaments and more characters it's a very familiar but satisfying loop. The art design is beautiful. It's a really cool cartoon aesthetic. I'm really excited for Mario Golf Speed Rush or whatever it's called. Yeah, there was a trailer. If you're listening at home and missed it, there's a trailer where they announced that it would have a proper adventure mode with RPG leveling up stats and stuff like that.

Which is like what all I have wanted from the Treasure Mario sports games since the fucking Game Boy Advance era. But I'll say this. Going off the trailers for Mario Golf, Clap Hands looks better visually. Like the courses, I don't know. They look more intentional. I think that might be though because they're very different games. From what I can tell from this new Mario Golf, it's kind of playing with, like, open world stuff on top of the golf game. It's a lot more about running between holes.

Like, there's a speed stat for how you run, which could be cool. It seems like they've got some Super Stickman Golf, like, race mode stuff going on, which on which is cool but might also explain why the courses have to look a little right simpler um but yeah griffin i know you've been playing it too what have you been thinking uh i i fell off of it i love the hot shots golf games like i have always loved them all the way back to i think the first one i played was on the psp or maybe ps vita uh and it was like that was my fucking road dog i put i think it was a psv i put over 100 hours into that game and it's what got me into like i love golf games i love the like three tap golf games of any of any stripe which is notable because they get rid of that for this uh usually

by three tap i mean you hit a button to start the meter you hit it again to like select your power and then you have to like time it out right with that third tap so that your shot goes straight uh this uses a touch interface where you slide your finger back to like ready the power and you can kind of angle it left or right to put a hook on it and then you have to swipe it up in order to like execute the shot, which takes a lot of getting used to, I will say. And I did not care for it until I sort of learned that, you know, you don't have to swipe super duper duper hard. You don't determine power by how quickly you swipe. And once I kind of came to grips with that, I started to do very well and

enjoyed it. I don't like the team-based aspect of it. The last game that Clap Hands, which is H-A-N-Z, in case you look for this game later, the last game they made was Everybody's Golf. There may have been a number on it, but it was for PS4, I think. And that one was you created a golfer. We did a monster factory on it.

You could fully customize them and level them up and get them gear and do all this stuff but you were funneling all of your attention and and progression and stuff into one character and i didn't it didn't grab me doing that for this roster of characters who you level up through 20 different levels and you can increase that level cap for each character if you just keep playing over and over and over again like that i don't know it wasn't as compelling to me as just having my single character that i leveled up i think if that was in the game i would still be playing it yeah if it was a little bit more like everybody's golf i would i would never put this game down because it's fun as hell yeah weirdly i've really enjoyed the team aspect of it and i can't tell if

it's on my head. The stats for the characters aren't especially visible, except for how far they can drive the ball. So I don't know if all the characters are actually different, or if it is like M&Ms, where I'm like, well, obviously the green ones are the best. No, they are different. They have different specialties like these ones are good at bunker shots and this one's good in the rough but it's like really tough to know like well i know i'm gonna land in the bunker on this one so i better bring my bunker guy yeah and it's like i'm weirdly more confident with certain types of shots with some like um right the hook shots that you're talking about there's one character that like every time i try one it is a disaster and there's another character that

basically anytime I'm just outside of the green I can chip in and not nail the hole but like get very close so I there must be something going on behind it or it is really like golf a confidence game um like I just feel better with my swing with uh with previous successes but yeah if you're using apple arcade definitely check it out i i have to imagine it'll come to like switch or other stuff eventually that seems to be the path for a lot of apple arcade stuff um that it has like you know like a six month exclusive um and i hope it does um i would love to have it on Switch too. But that said, I don't know. I really have like taken to these touch controls. So I don't know if I would actually – I don't know if I would prefer the kind of like three-button moving forward.

But yeah, if you have it, check it out. Hey, let's help some Raiders. Okay. Cool. So real quick, I asked people for some recommendations since we are doing a grab bag episode. We'll let readers help us. Yeah. Here's two of them.

One from Jeremy. I've really been enjoying Retrofit Studios Retro Mania. It's a super old school arcade wrestling with a fun story. I've seen this come across my timeline a few times, and I really need to check it out. And then from Shelby, Cozy Grove was a lovely game I picked up. The art style is charming, and if you're looking for something that won't take a lot of time,

but will give a lot back, check it out. Also the Mass Effect remaster, obviously. A number of people recommended Cozy Grove, which kind of has an indie Animal Crossing vibe mixed with, like, I don't know, that kind of point-and-click hidden object type of game. Yeah. And now questions from Cameron. Any games that you loved the idea of but knew that you would prefer playing later, months or years later, for whatever reason, like either personally not ready for it or the game

wasn't up to par for you yet can y'all think of anything like that i mean a ton right now uh yeah because i'm not not a joke and like i know nobody likes hearing people complain about uh how exhausted they are with their children but my my uh my baby doesn't sleep and so there's a whole bunch of games that like i i don't know any game that is i'm surprised i managed to finish uh resident evil a i think it helped that it's actually a pretty short game uh surprisingly short uh that i managed to get through that but but there's a lot of twitchy stuff that I just can't, I just can't, I cannot do right now. I also, I mentioned Final Fantasy XIV earlier.

They've like revealed a bunch of stuff about the new expansion that comes out later this year, which takes place on the moon. And it looks rad as hell. And there's a ton of stuff that I kind of want to do in that game to like catch up and be ready for it whenever it drops. But there is

no way i can play an mmo or any on destiny 2 also like i would love to get back into destiny 2 and check out this new season and i've heard some great stuff about some of the stuff they've added but like i can't i play games now in five minute increments before i have to like do something else and that's not uh conducive i would say to an online video game at this at this moment i feel like returnal is kind of like that for me although that's maybe more like i think it will get better yeah i really i think i think my hope is and it's hard because it's not necessarily like a live game or whatever where there's this huge impetus to keep improving it but i feel like they got something that's like so close to great um that i'd really love to see them like i that's one i'd love to like hop back in when i have a little bit more patience and and

it is a little bit more like accommodating i guess would be the word that i would use yeah uh mine was i can't remember if we've talked about this before, but I bought Demon's Souls when it came out on PS3 and kept it in the wrapper and said that I would play it once I quit my job. PS3 or PS5? PS3. Yeah, a long time ago. You know that they, you know that they made it. No, I'm sorry, this is, this is in the past. Oh, okay, okay.

Many, many years ago. I bought this game when it came out and I, um, yeah, I said I would play it when I quit or got fired. I got fired. And then I had to, like, just scrimmage for, like, freelance money. So I didn't have time for it. I got a job. And then I've been working a version of that job ever since. So I never actually had time and just never

opened it um so i ended up yeah playing it on ps5 before i ever could play the ps3 version but i i yeah i i there was something about that game that just always was so intimidating and big um that i felt like i couldn't make time for it which is hilarious to me now for the same reason that you're talking about griffin where it's like, I had so much time back then. What was I thinking? I had endless time. I could have played it, but perspective is everything.

One more quick question. I'll just read HRTGPRK. What game ending have you found the most satisfying? Subnautica has, to me, the most satisfying ending of any game I've played all the most satisfying subnautica has to me the most satisfying ending of any game i've played all the way through specifically uh i won't say what happens because maybe people are wanting to avoid spoil these um actually just really i think

they just released the original subnautica on switch also oh uh yeah it's all it's there so i i kind of don't want to be spoiled yeah i will not say that then um uh y'all have uh ending that really clicked for you what's coming from brothers is the one that i still like brothers is is like best like final beats final final act, whatever, Brothers is such a fucking slam dunk. Weird that dude has not been able to recapture that in following it, but fucking fantastic. I mean, that's probably my top two. Man, I have such mixed feelings about Last of Us 2. But when I think about games that have like stuck with me and the sort of boldness of

their endings and how that has stuck with me, like that's for me kind of the gold standard. And that's not even saying like it's so good as much as it is like, I don't know, the choices they made were so wild that I can't help but think about it uh and i mean resident evil 8 ends so good also i feel like um yeah i don't know you can also give a big a big and i mean we've given it plenty of credit but here but hades uh does a really good job of giving you an ending that is most satisfying and makes you want to keep playing Hades. Yeah, I love the end of that game. I'd also put Death Stranding

here. If you're the type of person who can get to it. No one's ever beat that though. And then for everybody else, there's a game called You Have to Burn the Rope. You should Google it. I promise you have enough time to rope um you should google it i i promise you have enough

time to play this game but it has a great ending um and you can like play it over your lunch break uh god that's old i know that goes way back that's a good one though um does it have the song in it is it the one with the song? Yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah. Okay. That was like a joystick. That was a long time ago. Yeah. Any other stuff y'all been playing this week?

No. No? I don't think so. Yeah, same. We talked about some of the stuff. So many games. We don't have a answer for y'all about what next week is. It's going to be a little bit of a surprise.

But we'll let you know on Twitter at the Besties Pod. As soon as we have an answer for you. A few people asked us for a Resident Evil Village spoiler episode. Might give a little more time. Resident Evil Village spoil second half. I guess we do have a second half of the game to talk about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe that'll be next week or maybe we'll give some more time for people to finish it,

but we will keep you posted. Anything else, Justin? Yes. Nope. Well, people can follow us on Twitter at TheBestiesPod if they want to do that. That'd be really nice. Oh, and subscribe and review the show,

help other people find it. That would be very nice of you. We would really appreciate you doing that. We do appreciate being here, though. We appreciate you spending this time with us and enjoying our presence. If you go to McElroyMerch.com, you can find the bestie shirt

if you want to show everybody. Did you see the Twitter poll? Did you see the blowout? The Russ Fresh shit got just smothered. Destroyed. Yeah, people want that. People are ready for it. It's so bad.

No. I'm surprised I mentioned missed it because it's like my fetish is watching rocks get destroyed okay hey that's it there's no more show and we have no more

we have nothing for you so please leave but then come back in a week and be sure to join us again next time for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends

pick the world's best games. Besties!