The Besties - Armored Core 6 Makes us Love Mechs All Over Again

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon might have one of the video game-iest ass titles in the history of games, but that doesn't stop it from being an absolute barn-burner of a mecha action game. Join us as we dive into our history with the series, and extol the virtues of the demo discs of yore. Also discussed: Starfield, No Man's Sky, Baldur's Gate 3, The Righteous Gemstones 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!

I just wanted to share a picture with you. Okay. Can I share a picture with you? Yeah. Not the funniest thing for a podcast. Yeah, but it'll land. Russ, I'm going to send you a picture. Griffin already saw this, but I took a trip to Seattle recently.

Okay. And then when I arrived home, I had a beautiful surprise waiting for me. My kids, my incredible children children had made me a cake can you believe that cotton candy cake just wow can you believe it yeah now russ can you um i just sent you a picture of cooper very proudly very proudly with this cake can you enhance uh you can see the card there's a card yeah i don't even think i need to enhance okay and what and can you just read the cake this was cooper's, and can you just read the cake? This was Cooper's idea.

Can you just read the cake for me? And is that Cooper there? Yeah, that's Cooper there. There's a lovely picture of Cooper smiling, her lovely angelic smile. And on the cake, it says, Welcome home, bitch. What was your gut reaction to this cake, Justin?

It hasn't changed since from now to then. It's pretty much just, welcome home, bitch. You know what's amazing about it is that it's clear that she did not get any help in the lettering. No, she read this all on her own. Clearly her. Welcome home, wrote this all on her own. Clearly her. Welcome home, bitch. She looks so proud. How did you, I guess, what was the punishment?

Because you can't, Justin, this is like prison, man. You can't let that go. You gotta be the big dog. Oh, buddy, that ship has sailed. No. That ship has sailed. I long-seated control. You gotta be the big dog.

Nah, big dog doesn't get called a bitch by his five-year-old, I don't think. I don't think that's so- if I was still the big dog, I don't think that would've happened, eh? I don't think so. I think there's someone pulling the strings. Oh, a shadow master. Yeah. That's right.

It is- it's actually, it is Cooper. I've been in that house, it's uh- Oh, really Master. Yeah. That's right. Actually, it is Cooper. I've been in that house. Oh, really? Yeah. It's like a meet Dave situation where the little thing is controlling the big thing. Oh, lovely. 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 Ross Frosch, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Frosch, 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 without Chris Plant. This is a video game club. He fell down a fucking well. Yeah, it was a big one. He's stuck in it. It's a big well, too. And they haven't found a big enough ladder yet, but they will.

They promise they will. So, unfortunately, Russ, you are the one charged with telling me what our game of the week, Armored Core 6, is all about. Actually, wait, wait, wait. I'm getting... something's coming through on the radio. Whoa. Wait. Yes, it's coming through now. Let me patch it through. Okay. Got a job for you, besties.

From Software has deployed a new video game. You are familiar with their previous software. Dark Souls, Elden Ring, hell, they've even won a bestie goddier too. Their new creation is different. Faster, sleeker, with enough heavy artillery to coup d'etat a small nation. Your mission is simple. Get good. Finish the game and return with recon.

Does it achieve the difficulty Goldilocks? Is it a Souls game with mechs, or something stranger? Where does it fit into the Armored Core initiative? Remember, you will be entering an active battle zone. Be on the lookout for rogue Travis McElroys and personified giraffes. Whatever choices you make in the field are yours, except promoting the newsletter at besties.fan. That's obligatory, along with the ad reads from our generous corporate

benefactors. You have the following ad break to prepare for sortie. Handle or plant. Over. I have always had a spot in my heart for the Armored Core games. Even as a young guy, I played some of the previous entries

in this series, in the Armored Core franchise. It never felt like anything else. It was always sort of an odd duck out. It wasn't like simmy enough for the sim people and it wasn't action-y enough for the action people. But it really used to tickle me. It wasn't action-y enough for the action people, but it really used to tickle me. How is it not action-y enough for the action people? This game is an action-ass game.

No, I'm saying, but you're doing a lot of fiddling with equipment, right? That's true, in between missions. More than in a standard game, it's very much about choosing your loadout and going for it. Do you remember the first one you played? Oh my gosh, okay. I remember very clearly, I believe it was an opm demo disc okay yes that had a demo for armor core on it if you were if you are a young person there were magazines

official playstation magazine and i think what was the other one that did demo discs i can't remember they were demo discs piece yeah official playstation magazine was the was the one though that got us back into playstation yeah for sure um they would send out discs with issues of the magazine that you will need to explain what a disc is as well okay yeah yeah okay uh it would have like a dozen like demos on it similar to how you would you know this is not a novel concept now you just go on the fucking store of

the platform of your choice and if there's a demo available for a game you just download it official US Playstation Magazine demo disc number 2 featured demos of imagine this you get a magazine subscription. They send you a disc.

What a deal. Can you imagine? What a deal. Had Armored Core, okay? Croc, Colony Wars, Ghost in the Shell, Cool Borders 2, NHL Face Off 98, Crash Bandicoot 2, Madden 98. Just on the disc.

No problem. Just demo all of these. these i mean now you get them for free as part of steam next fest and you don't have to subscribe to sure magazine but but if you like we did not have back then it was very cool we did not have i guess but personally speaking i did not have money to buy games yeah growing up and so these discs were fucking huge so if there was a good demo on one of these bad boys uh i would play the shit out of it and that was the case for armored core which was a real celebration in the house when we started to actually get full armored core games uh so that

that is my you play the first so you're saying you played the very first armored core i'm pretty sure i played all of the ones and looking at it y'all it's honestly it's not that different that was my reaction too i watched the youtube of it i was like this is pretty fucking close it looks like a fucking armored core game this is an armored core game obviously a lot slower than what we have now but yes well and the graphics are worse like if you want to get pedantic about it i don't know i have i again i have a soft spot for these graphics too they're charming they're very charming oh yeah yeah it's not about that early 3d still hits yeah yeah yeah i uh i played this game a lot armored core 6 i i you know as soon as we got our hands on it i

played it a little bit i was like this fucking rules but i had you know starfield and balder's gate and other shit that felt a bit more pressing so i didn't really dive too deep in armor core 6 until we went to uh seattle and i had a lot of time to kill and my steam deck uh which i will will say runs this game miraculously wow that's great i didn't know that it's so good uh yeah it looks great the even the the like the text is maybe a little small sometimes but like by and large it's great it runs smooth like this is this is a game that sort of require it's a very twitchy game right yeah and and so uh you know it is it requires a performance at a certain level uh that i was shocked to see that the steam steam deck

provided also nice to have back buttons for this game nice to have back buttons for sure yeah to be able to use my sub weapons and not have to take my fingers off the the primary triggers is very great it man it's just so fucking fun to play i played it basically my whole flight home for like six hours i just played non-stop armor core and loved it. I just want to one more little like little history thing just to establish the pedigree here. If you're not aware, the last one of these was in 2013. It was a sequel to armor core five called armor core verdict day. And like right around that moment, right?

Like 2013, I feel like there was a late entry into dark souls right like dark souls had built up like the the cult thing and then already in 2013 well dark well dark souls 2 is 2014 and i feel like that was like fever pitch for dark souls 1 right like dark souls one had this really slow burn building up dark souls 2 comes out 2014 and they are like unable to do anything but things in that mold like yeah armored core is like done for for all they just like seen so much more success with the souls games uh demon souls and then dark souls like compared to their other stuff that like it made sense well and the burden i mentioned that was placed on him by by namco bandai uh who all of a sudden had like the world's biggest hit on their hands for the first time in a long time

i imagined that there was a an edict from them of okay so just this then forever the robots put the robots away from. That's what it feels like, right? Okay, you do these for 10 years and then you can do another robot one. Yeah, we'll let you do one. We'll give you a quarter of the budget and good luck with that. I think From Software makes the world's best action RPGs.

I don't think that that's up like, after Elden Ring, I don't see how you could kind of debate otherwise the specific genre that those games belong to there is no one else there is no you know they have spawned their own genre of souls likes and there have been some very good entries in that genre but none that i think approach the bar of quality that from software set it is fucking bonkers to me that they have also i think i've done that with mech mecha games like a whole nother genre not a crowded field not a crowded

field maybe but like i i this is the most fun one of these types of games i think i've ever played okay so if you've never played one of these armor core games and i had this was actually the first one i ever played. going into it, what sort of things are going to be asked of you. And as you complete these missions, you unlock parts for your mech, and your mech is sort of constantly, if you're playing it right, is sort of constantly evolving as you unlock new parts, switching out those parts with different builds. And we're talking drastic differences. There's like tetrapod legs that let you hover.

There's bipedal legs that are super fast. You can get two swords if you want to. You can do dual machine guns and rocket launchers. I mean, there's a bajillion ways you can tweak and alter your loadout. And it's really like figuring out what A is best for your play style and B is best for the situation as it calls. But that is the main thrust of the thing. But it's like it's segmented.

Like the missions are very much like go do this and then complete the missions. And there is some element of like rerunning these missions with better equipment to get better like rankings and finding some unlockables. You also run through some missions, some areas again with different parameters or maybe a different time of day or weather whatever it is you'll see familiar locations maybe from a different angle um which is actually normally i would kind of complain that that feels like they're just like you know padding the game but i never found it to be uh egregious or anything like that it was always like oh we're back at the dam again and i'm gonna like wreck shit the scale of the game helps that right because you're in a giant fucking mech and so the levels are a city like it's they are they feel gigantic and so it's not as i don't know bothersome

when you do return it feels almost like you're cheating like when you first fire up your boosters and are like soaring across the level like superman it almost feels like you've put in some sort of cheat it doesn't feel like you should be able to have this much freedom of movement. Right. Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, the other thing that I noticed while playing it that I think makes it stand out,

like MechWarrior, right, is the other big franchise that has been dead forever. Yes. And I've never been able to click into mech games, and this being my first that I really enjoyed, it's really it just comes down to that speed that like feeling that you have the mobility of like a super ninja you just also happen to be a big robot yeah um and it really makes me uh enjoy the minute to minute a

lot more than like slowly trudging into the battle and then there's a guy and he's hitting my shield and blah blah blah blah like even if you do the heaviest build imaginable it's still so much faster than anything you would see in another secret superpower of all armored core is they're fucking fast yeah they don't look like they will be and it's really fast yeah it's really very very fast and like you know the minute to minute of a normal level is, you know, you dashing around, just dropping these light mechs like they were, you know, just tearing through them like tissue paper. And, you know, trying not to get hit and, you know, maybe looking for a, you know, a little unlockable here or there as you fly through but it's really really fast and not particularly challenging until you get to a boss fight some of which are super fucking hard yeah i just did the one right after your first sort of uh uh interaction with the like coral um that is like a guy with rings of rocket launchers oh yeah balta Balteus. I should remember his name

because I fought him probably 30 fucking times on the plane. But like, now all of a sudden, now is, now, oh, it is from the Dark Souls guys

because this boss fight is taking me a very, very, very long time and a lot of like pattern memorization and recognition to get through and a lot of experimentation.

That, the ability to customize your mech mid-mission, like after you fail, is like there is no barrier or friction to it. It's like, well, okay, I got rocked because I don't have enough time to charge up this plasma launcher. So I'm going to go in with two SMGs this time

and see if I have an easier time. There is a slight barrier, which is you can only customize your Mac based on the stuff you've already bought. Yes. And although you can, like, grind out money from redoing old missions, that can be a little bit annoying.

So I found myself, like, getting a little bit frustrated at moments where I, like, knew that I needed a certain piece of gear, but I hadn't bought it yet, and I had to restart the whole mission in order to buy it huh i never yeah yeah it's uh it's this is this is like a sticking point that i was uh running up against that i would love to get your guys thoughts the moment where like you do run into these boss fights and there is absolutely like a learning curve yeah um what was like kind of causing some friction for me is not knowing if I should be investing the time into like beating my head against learning patterns and just getting better skill wise or starting over from scratch with like a different mech. You know what i mean like i don't mind drilling on an enemy in dark souls if i know that like i'm building what i need or sekiro is probably a

better example right the idea of like i'm gonna keep doing this over and over again until i get good enough to beat it because you don't have another option right it's not like there's another like a super sword you can get in the back room that's gonna help you in this scenario and that's something we're like i don't know maybe if i had this balance of equipment and these different things then maybe this fight would be would be easier i don't know or maybe i should just keep working on it you know i don't i don't know that's it's a friction it is a balance between those two ideas i think sekiro is as far from this game as is possible because there isn't really much wiggle room in the mechanics of the thing to let you come back and just storm through this

fight that's that game is just about the learning the patterns and getting getting better at the fights um and this game like it is there is a lot of that right that balteus fight like i could not beat until i learned you know when he comes at you with his flamethrower like what that looks like and what you need to do to get out of the way of it. But also like I had a lot of, I had a much easier time with it once I, uh, you know, really just changed everything about my mech and, and changed it from being like a heavy tanky one that can carry a lot of big fat weapons, uh, with like big power requirements. And then just like kind of got down to a lightweight mech that could move fast enough to dodge all of his rockets and then like i kind of breezed through it because he couldn't touch me yeah what so here's what's funny is that i was having a lot of frustration because i started

with a light mech and was getting smoked and ended up making like the heaviest mech imaginable with dual machine guns and tank treads and whatever and the fight became much easier and there are moments in this game even the fight before baltayus you do like a one-on-one fight against the guy there are moments in this game where i sort of hit this moment where i was like i'm not like it kind of feels like they want me to do a specific thing, whether that's true or not. It just felt that way to me. And when I figured out, and sometimes this involves like going online and being like, Hey,

what's the best build for this guy? When I figured that out, the fights became so much easier that I was like, Oh, so maybe I, I shouldn't be using, like spending all this time dying and dying and dying because there is to some extent a right answer.

There is, I would say, some balancing issues with this game because that build that you just described, I just unlocked the like heavy machine gun tank treads build and it really trivializes a lot of this a lot of there's there are some bosses that you run into that you simply need to be faster to like to to get at and they have shields that like ballistic weaponry just bounces off of harmlessly and so i've had to make minor tweaks here and there but for the most part the build that russ has just described will carry you through

For the most part, the build that Russ has just described will carry you through most of the game. Yeah, it's dual miniguns and dual songbird rocket launchers with tank threats. By miniguns, you mean like Gatling guns? Yeah, sorry, Gatling guns. And these songbird rocket launchers on your back. And there are these arena battles where you fight one guy at a time. And Plant was like, oh, yeah oh yeah no that build is not going to carry you through those arena battles it's they're too mobile and i literally would just like charge in go to the center of the arena they'd fly at me i'd fire my every gun i had

and they were dead in 30 seconds like it wasn't even a thing um can we talk about i i i really like there is a secret complexity to the combat in this game. Yeah. I forget the terminology because it's very jargony and hard to appreciate, but there's essentially a stagger meter. Sure. We'll call it the stagger meter. We'll call it the stagger meter that mechs have. And bosses have them, and you deal way more damage when you have a boss staggered.

But it really only lasts for a few seconds. Yeah. And so there is this tug of war that is going on between, like, laying into one of these harder enemies to stagger them. And then once they are staggered, making sure you have enough in the tank to actually like put hits on them while they are staggered and not like reloading. Or even like just proximity wise, like you might be fighting a boss where like you need to stay far away because they've got insane weapons up close. The second they get staggered, you might need to get up close with a sword or something like that to do crazy damage. So there is a like a really cool, fun back and forth on there uh where you're trying to take advantage of those moments i will say there's also uh i just want to also note uh there are some fucking fantastic set pieces

yeah in this game where they're playing with scale and you're going up against something that it seems like there's no reality in which you should be able to even ding. And the way you systematically take down some of these big enemies and their reaction from it is so fantastic. There was one bit that I played recently where there's a swarm of enemies closing on my location

and they're bringing this big freighter that's about to start dropping them on me. And they're bringing this big freighter that's about to start dropping them on me and they're like get ready another wave is coming and i'm like actually fuck that i'm going up there and so i flew my dude all the way up there till i was on top of the ship just slicing the hell out of the the transport itself and it's like oh it's about to explode you should go and i'm like blasting away from it with the camera behind me as this ship explodes. And it's like, it didn't even tell me to do it. Right. Which made it so thrilling to realize that I could just get up there and blow the whole ship to hell. And there's a lot of moments like that where it's just like, it, it is, it all builds together into something that's like really, really cool. Yeah, I described it as good Earth Defense Force. There are some levels, though, I will say, just converse to that, that are just kind of in like a wet fart.

It's like, why did you have me do that? Like, that was nothing. That was just like a poor little rookie that you just had me murk. There's a lot of that, like, go find this one dude and he's a bad dude for life. And it's like, I got two grenade launchers. He's not that bad right like pip pip pip

dead and then oh wow alright well mission accomplished the story in this game exists I don't yeah there's a lot of companies for a FromSoft game it's like instantly handler Walter is like you gotta

get a license or else the flames of Rubicon will consume the coral this is a coral construction that we and it's like all right man like I don't know what any of that means it's kind of like Miyazaki woke up one night and was like oh fuck that's due tomorrow and just sort of like knocked it out it it has like the vibes are are correct. There's a lot of, like, there's obviously, like, this fun world that exists here where these, you know, biologically augmented human beings controlling these giant mech suits have their own secret language that they use and their own, like, you know, form of street cred that they all kind of adhere to. But you are not really made privy to that as the player of the game i will say though it is like so skippable like they really bend over backwards to make sure you're not seeing a second more of it and the stuff that is in level that the

the moment to moment stuff is a lot more like digestible it's it's a pretty pat like you've got the gunny sergeant who's giving you a hard time and the other dudes are like this rook will never measure up and then you blow the hell out of something they're like i guess you measure it up brooke like that kind of crap but it's fun it's yeah it all just feels like a throwback to like that early 2000s uh era which honestly you just don't see that a lot in triple a games anymore. I've run this on my Steam Deck and on my personal computer, and it has run fantastically well on both. I have not had any issues as far as any of that goes.

And I think it's a representation because the game looks good. It doesn't look like the best game I've ever seen, but it looks really good. And it's further highlighting what I think we all know is how fucking amazing art design can carry a game even if it isn't pushing all the polygons and whatever lighting effects is whatever it is and and obviously from software has shown their art design is peerless when it comes to this yeah yeah i also uh this game I think is hitting so good for me. I'm having an incredible time with it. And I think it is because it isn't Baldur's Gate.

It isn't Starfield. It isn't Tears of the Kingdom. It is not this like grand and sweeping thing that you have to bury your head in for a hundred plus hours to like you know consume it correctly it is fun to just dip in knock out a sortie or two fly around you know light speed blasting haters and you know finally taking down a big boss like that short form very digestible kind of action yeah is like uh i i had a blank and a blank space on my dance card for it and and this game is hitting it so right i was uh my one complaint that i had about this game or not my one complaint i mean i can always find complaints but something that i was struggling

with is i don't really love i i i think it's fun to switch out weapons i don't really love the there you have to do some fiddling sometimes to make sure you're not over the amount of energy you can use or your legs aren't overburdened and i don't necessarily love like getting in there and swapping out legs and and like russ said sometimes it's like selling and buying new legs and then trying those on to see and i don't think that that part is all great i don't necessarily want to like fool with that i just want to find like a cool build and play around with it in the level but what i discovered just yesterday is that you you can download um the uh like cores you can download like other people's

oh i didn't know that designs like i was watching a youtube video yesterday it's like here's a great build for this and you can download it at this link. So if you go to the link, it like shows you still have to buy the parts. Right. Yeah. But you can like download someone else's. That's sick as design. So you don't have to fool with it.

Yeah. That's what I mean. Doing the actual parts. Not that hard. Cause there's what? Six or seven slots. I'm not saying it's hard. I'm saying I don't,

I don't necessarily like engaging. No, no, no. I just want, I know I want to try a fast build. Right right but i don't necessarily want to go through and like well these legs are the fastest but i can't afford these and this core goes over my whatever i can i'm absolutely can see some people want that level of fidelity i'm just

not interested yeah i was mostly saying it's nice to be able to also uh take people's uh mechs that like look insanely good because they spend a lot of time like painting every part in a cool way yeah uh which i'm probably not going to spend a ton of time doing some of the mechs look so cool you can also make one that looks stupid if you want yeah yeah i mean the the tank tread double gatling gun mech doesn't look very that he looks like just a big fucking iron hoagie he looks so fucking goofy like you sent wally in to kill a bunch of people yeah yeah i mean he gets the job done but he doesn't you know i've the number of sort of like uh uh you know mecca anime recreations i have seen people posting

online is uh is inspiring if you want to if you like action games and you haven't touched one of these you want to try something different. This is absolutely that. Like, I don't know. I think it'll click with a lot more people than maybe would think like, this is my kind of thing. I wonder,

I almost wonder if they hadn't called it armored core six, if it would have done there, there is, you do not need to play any armor core yeah no it is not it is so so so not relevant to i was not lost armor core game keeping up no it's so like i don't know why they didn't just call it armored core armored core like it's been 10 years guys i think i think there's a uh a precedent so the plight of the Rubiconians hasn't been like a uniform thing across all of them.

How would you know? How would anybody know? How would anybody ever know? Let's take a break. We'll come right back and talk about more great stuff. Hey, folks, esteemed guests. It's my honor to welcome

the Sartre Andy Rooney of video games, Rush Freshstick, with another one of his twisted takes. You ever notice how the... it's my honor to welcome the sort of Andy Rooney of video games, uh, rush, fresh stick with, uh, uh, another one of his twisted takes. You ever notice how the, I'm not going to do that.

Our listeners are going to love that shit. Um, I, I have been thinking a lot as I'm sure the games industry has been thinking a lot about the concept of reviews. And first of all, scored reviews, boo,

just read it, read read a couple sentences at the end of the review it's not that hard hard disagree go ahead okay broadly speaking what i wanted to say was do you ever find it interesting oh god i just did it again you really did it i couldn't help it if you let's say you were um an 80s boy let's say you were like 13 years old in the 80s and you loved pac-man and dig dug and whatever the fuck and then you trans you time traveled into 1998 and you played gex 64 okay now for those that don't know gex 64 fucking sucks terrible game oh okay but if you played that and all you had played was pac-man and dig dug don't you think it would be like your game of the year a 10 of the 10 out of 10 holy you're suggesting if you

could time travel ahead there's a reason i'm suggesting this but yes i okay my in my opinion that that's probably a no because when i gone backwards, it has not like good games are fun to play still and bad games are not. And that has held up across generations, I feel like. Yeah, but don't you think the nuance of like, holy shit, there's a 3D game that I've never seen. I didn't even know they could even come close to that. And that nuance would be enough to carry you through. You are talking about a different Justin who is not an astute critic of video games. I like to think I'd see through the cruft and see the beating heart.

The cruft of you've never seen a 3D game before and now it's 3D? I can see. You can't wow me with a bunch of doodads and gizmos. Yeah, this is a flawed sort of promise. There's a reason I'm saying this. Well, let me just say if I was a caveman who got teleported millions of years into the future and then saw Battlefield Earth in theaters, I would be like, this is my shit. Right.

So, yes, a time-traveling person would, I think, have quite a shock. What I'm trying to get to, the more grounded, realistic take, is that when reviews are written, as we all know, reviews are all subjective, including everything that is said on this podcast. There is no right answer to good versus bad. Sorry, everyone on this podcast, but that's just the case of it. But reviews are determined by your experience. Right. What you've seen previously will determine how you react to the things in the future.

So if you disagree with someone's opinion about a game, for example, if someone loves Starfield and you didn't like Starfield, you have no idea what they've played or what they've seen before they played Starfield

that influenced their opinion on Starfield. Right. Which is to say, don't get upset about reviews. It's not worth your time. That's really all I wanted to say. Okay, this is actually really, this is actually interesting, Russ.

Thank you. I wanted to talk, let me touch on this as it pertains, because this is something, I used to be a reviews editor of Joystick, AOL's now defunct video game, now defunct AOL's now defunct video game blog. And I have thought for a long time about how if you're talking about a review of a movie, you can control, by its very nature,

it is controlled a lot more variables than if you're playing a video game for review. By which I mean the range of experiences you're going to have watching a film absolutely vary. But by and large, you're going to sit there in a darkened room and watch the whole thing from the beginning to the end. any interaction it brings in um it is it is even more wild to put too much frustration or energy into someone else's experiences because video games like especially with ones of a length and breadth of of you know a big open world game like starfield the experiences are just gonna be different like the experience of playing it is going to be different for everybody. Wildly different when you compare it to a book or a movie. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. This was a weird one, y'all. I did not like I, I, I was, uh, I was very surprised at the general reception to Starfield. Cause I agree with everything you guys are saying. Because everything in a review is subjective. Everybody likes different shit

and games will hit everyone in a different way. But I have always struggled. I was, see, I was reviews editor for Joystick for about three months uh before we left does that make you an epo baby yeah i'm an epo baby for sure um i and and this this would happen you know even before i was reviews editor there or whenever i would write a review for for polygon there would be times where my opinion was dramatically different from everyone else's and that's like a weird and sort of isolating feeling it's it is what is hard for me to reconcile is when i feel like a game's flaws

are so like apparent um and like mechanical in a way that makes them difficult to, if you watched a movie and there, but in the movie there was like a little animated gif in the corner of like Peter Griffin, like doing like a dance in the bottom corner of like, of a movie. And then the reviews of the movie came out and didn't address the Peter Griffin gif in the corner of it.

It's like, well, you guys didn't see the Peter Griffin griffin gif in the corner of it it's like well you guys didn't see the peter griffin gif because it was for me it was pretty distracting the whole movie when like peter griffin was it was weird how there was a picture in picture of a whole ass family guy episode um that was playing at the same time as the movie that you went and saw um but you didn't even address the sort of family guy episode that was happening okay i get i guess so um it's it i that the indignant part of me that is impossible to silence is there of of like really like the bugs didn't okay just well but here's what i say about starfield in particular and if and the reason I did a dig on scores, review scores specifically. If you go and read the reviews, and even reviews of people that gave it 100%, four out of four, you name it, a lot of those reviews are calling out all of the stuff that we called out.

And yet, I guess, in those cases, it was able to surpass those issues to the point, and that's why scores are stupid. It's like, really? That doesn't knock it down a score or anything like that? It doesn't really matter. It's a number. No, scores are stupid in the way that they have been sort of commoditized or commodified by publishers and fans.

When fans, like people being like oh yeah right it's a seven i could write eight but not a seven like right that doesn't mean but it's like it is also valuable if you have limited amounts of free time you know to be able to compare games or movies or whatever a little more quickly if you're trying to make a decision about what you want to take in like if you're gonna spend 70 and you can read the last paragraph of a review or the bullet points at the end of a review that's like okay but i'm trying to like pick a horror movie with my wife i just want to know what the rotten tomatoes you know i just want to know if it's a 20 or 90 you know like that's not but in those instances i don't think it is that difficult to find a reviewer who you click with and whose tastes often mirror your own and whose tastes can even guide your own. Like they have recommended shit to you in the past that has like hit with you in the same way that it apparently hit for them i i think this like wisdom of the crowd

like mandate that exists in the games industry of like fucking go on metacritic and look at all the games that came out this year that have i would say an 84 to an 86 that number doesn't mean anything anymore because it covers such a wide range just like find a person who's takes usually align with your own and then just kind of go go with that and it won't lead you this is this i mean we could talk four hours about this subject the fact that publications have an identity with regards to how they usually come down on games is bonkers because ign isn't a person and it's the imagine games network it's the imagine games network it is a composite of many many people with imagining different tapes the number of times that at joystick or polygon the reviewer of the game would have a wildly

different take from everyone else at the site right uh and then people would come and be like polygon fucking hates this game well no this person didn't like the game and they were the person who was chosen to review the game and then you could get into like well why were they chosen? Why did, et cetera, et cetera. It, like, all of this forcing an outlet to be an entity that can have thoughts and feelings about media is, like, is wild to me. It is interesting, though. I do think about, I was thinking about, I noticed that a lot of smaller outlets, and listen, I'm in no way crying foul in any regard i would never do that about a review because i have no insight and i would never like want to align myself with people who put false intent on on a review i think it's interesting when you see a lot of the smaller outlets who definitely almost certainly only got one copy of the game of Starfield and played it and didn't have anyone, I would assume, to like talk through that experience with or bounce it off.

And like, it definitely shapes your impression of a game when you're talking to other people you respect about their experience, right? Like, it's small. It may not be massive, but I know my take on it was informed by Russ's take talking about it before we recorded the episode. And honestly, maybe that's not the best scenario because most people playing at home will not have a lot of people no of course not no but i it probably makes it a lot scarier to say i'm not going to give this a great score and i'm not it's not occurring to me that some of these issues are real and serious and how many of them because i have written some reviews where i'll go hard on something and it's not a problem for literally anybody else i mean it's no yeah nobody

else cares uh and that that's that's that can be feel very isolating yeah sure but i would also say like before you um criticize us because that sort of echo chamber thing can taint the way that we individually feel about a game i would encourage you to listen to any game of the year episode we've ever done because like i don't think it is a uniform thing that we throw a game into the the fucking tiger pit with the four of us and we just like go in a circle tearing it apart but i do think that we sometimes will push against things that are like we will not shape our own opinions but shape the discussion around some of those like sticking points like it even like uh defending certain parts of the game just to make the conversation more interesting or get to the bottom of how we're feeling about something can shape that. It's a weird conversation.

I feel weird even having it. It feels very eight years ago or so, but it is worth bringing up to just to add the context. I'm not, and I hope this doesn't come off as defensive. I have no idea what people thought about our Starfield episode. Here's what I'm going to say. And a lot of these comments, I'm just like being informed by the newsletter comments which if you scroll to the bottom of the newsletter and you click on comments what's that link again uh besties not fan uh everyone was cool like we did not get a lot of flack for it um and i'm sure there might have been people that were angry about it um or whatever but i think maybe part of it is also like

it's on game pass and you could kind of decide for yourself well i fully think it's because we don't have a score attached to our shit if our shit was dragging down the metacritic average of the game all of a sudden now we are uh attacking the people who make the game that would probably be good for downloads now that I think about it. Yeah, okay, well, let's fundamentally change our shit. That is not on, that's not on us, though. And I don't think it's fair to put that on any part of the media.

The fact that publishers sort of penalize very directly and fungibly the people who make games for the number that appear for the color of the number that appears next to their shit on one website uh is fuck beyond uh beyond repair but i do think that if we had put a number on it and that number would not have been a very good number and would have changed that uh the color of the number on Metacritic, then all of a sudden we are enemies of the state of Xbox. I'll admit to another bias real quick, as long as it's one that is worth thinking about

when you're listening to Besties. Very typically, we do a new game each week, which means that we're having to find the time in a week to play a game enough so that we can form some cogent thoughts on it. And that's in addition to whatever we should want to play for like fun or other activities you want to do for fun. lot me too uh i have less patience for games that are not delivering on something enjoyable quickly yeah sure if it's a game that requires a lot of patience to get into i am bringing a bias against that because it feels frustrating when i have like a lot of like i need to have a lot of this experience but it is really slow and eating up a lot of time and it's taking time away from a

lot of other things I'd rather be doing. That to me is something, is a bias that I know that I bring to it. And I feel the same way about like a TV show, for example, like, or whatever. If you have to watch eight episodes before it starts getting good, like, fuck that. I got better stuff to do. I've found games that I dip back into Starfield a little bit um and i haven't i think i found it more pleasant when i didn't have to play it to prepare for an episode when it is just like i don't know just fuck around see what's going on i i there are games like that that i find more pleasurable when i don't have that burden of time um hanging around and i know there's a certain subset of people who the whole thing with these Bethesda games is that they can like absolutely lose themselves in a game for, you know, hundreds of hours maybe.

And that's cool too. I wish I had the – sometimes I wish I had the bandwidth to do that. But it's just a different – it's a different set of expectations that we're bringing. Yeah. And some of it sucks ass. Let us do reader mail. the first question comes from josh raub are you going to share russ's no man's sky custom setting screen uh yes uh and and there's a bunch of uh josh made a comment about um how they played 100 hours when it first came out

uh and then we're thinking about starting a new game um yeah so in this episode of the newsletter this episode's newsletter uh should have screenshots of my setting screens it's like three screenshots because there's so many settings you can change but uh use those settings and you should be very happy uh you also will get my my uh caramel snack mix recipe i think that was in the last newsletter in the last one okay yeah there is actually a question about that oh okay we'll jump right to it how about that this question comes from jackonian since i don't want to mess with the required ingredients i wonder what the taste difference would be like if you use dark corn syrup instead of light corn syrup would there be too much of a molasses

flavor when combined with the brown sugar okay so you're and for people that didn't read the newsletter what exactly did you provide this is a this is a caramel snack mix recipe that i've eaten it that i've made a bunch griffin's eating it griffin what do you think good as fuck good as fuck uh i would say that with if you use dark it is basically you make a caramel, you dump it over cereal and nuts, and then you bake it for an hour. What I would say is that if you, I think if you start with dark corn syrup and then you cook it down for an hour, I've never tried that. But I do think the flavor caramelizes, you get a lot of caramelization and a lot of dark flavor after cooking it for an hour at 275. So I think you might overshoot it and it might get to be a little unpleasant if you use dark corn syrup. It's also why I avoid dark brown sugar in the recipe just because it's cooking for so long.

I think it might reduce too much and be a little bit too – maybe even better. But, you know. Trust the expert. But also fool around with it. Who cares? One last question. This question comes from Mark. Okay, how does one get started on retro handhelds?

If I'm looking to play SNES, UN Squadron, or GameCube, Beautiful Joe, what's a good handheld to start with? And where do these games come from? Well, first of all all you need a copy of the game the original cartridge needs to be owned and in your possession but with all that said uh griffin do you have a recommendation for i guess we've talked a little bit about yeah i mean i i would honestly just start by watching some videos some youtube videos i love uh retro game core uh on youtube yeah they're on youtube yeah um

i'm trying to remember the other channels that i'm subscribed to wolf den eta prime retro dodo like there's a bunch of like youtubers who just cover this shit and they're i like that wolf den brings sass whereas retro game core is like a chiller vibe like a hawaii vibe there's a lot of there's a big range i the the two games you have outlined could not be more different in terms of like technical requirements of hardware um and so obviously like beautiful joe is going to dictate the console you get because pretty much anything can run snes at this point um and so that limits your options to i don't know i think like uh the odin pro is good for for gamecube stuff um i i got i would i have so many of these things now that i would need to

cross-reference this with the um stuff i have and also i feel like every few months a new leader of the pack comes out like a new best uh handheld comes out you're probably if you're looking around gamecube probably looking at like a hundred dollar or 150 device right right yeah what's that it's a big difference yeah somewhere in that range um it could be 50 or free one of those uh i mean russ has been getting a lot of mileage. I still have not dipped into this, but you get a lot of mileage out of the Steam Deck for this, right? Yeah, a little bit. I actually predominantly use a Miu Mini for playing retro stuff like that.

The problem I've had with the Steam Deck is that the – and I know there's probably a way to not – but the default way when it loads in ROMs is it's creating an entry like in with your other games yeah that can and that's very cluttered i don't need that yeah there is a way retro game core the most recent video where he's talking about adding um emulation to your steam deck explains what step you skip to make sure that doesn't get added to the rest of your games list um i will say my current off-court buddy the one i travel with the one I just have and adore is the Miu Mini Plus.

It does basically everything up to PS1 really, really well. I don't know if it does anything past that, but it feels great, looks great, great build quality. The interface that comes with it, it requires very little tinkering. But if you do want to get in it and make it your own, you can for sure do that too. And I think there's lots of those. The Miu Mini, I think, is hard to find. The Miu Mini Plus, I prefer just because it fits in the hand a little bit better for me and is not that expensive. So that's my current recommendation.

But I fully anticipate this time next year, it'll be a completely different shit. Did you guys know that Link to the Past was not called that in Japan, by the way? What was it called? It was called like the Holy Triforce or something like that. It's hard to translate, obviously, because the pun wouldn't work.

Right, plan worked. I feel like I did know that because I had to download the Japanese version of the game for the randomizer that I used with a trial by theory. Um, okay. Anybody,

can we talk honorable mentions? Yeah. Yeah. Honorable mentions. Let's do it. Cause I want to hear about Justin's no man's sky experience. Cause I know he's been going deep in that. Uh,

yeah, I, I, the talk of like the new updates and stuff made me think about the fact that I've never really given no man's sky, uh, uh, a fair shake um and i have re i really have enjoyed especially as a palette cleanser after um uh starfield the be the the freedom of movement the ability to just like hop in your ship and blast off into space um it's just it's so pleasurable and so exhilarating every time you do it um and and the the ability to like dig

through the land to find it's just if you look at the things that both of these games do that no man's sky and starfield both do i feel like no man's sky has at every turn found the most like pleasurable fun way of doing something like if you're mining for earth's resources you don't like go around with your scanner and then get out your shitty laser you have a cool scanner and a cool laser that rips up huge huge holes in the earth right like you're like terraforming to mine it rules it's great you then there's a lot of stuff that both of these games do that is just so much more pleasant on on no man's sky i and oh man the fact that it makes it allows situations and characters that you meet and uh other entities you interact with to be otherworldly to be foreign to. And like, that is the weirdest difference, I would say,

or maybe one of the most palpable differences between No Man's Sky and Starfield is like, in Starfield, the people you meet are all like stock human voice actors. And they're from all, no matter where in the galaxy, everyone is still talking like they're on Homes and Gardens, like HGTV.

Like it's so homogenous. And the idea that you can't even speak the language in No Man's Sky, and you're like chipping away at your ability to understand this world, that makes it feel so much more like exploration than anything that starfield ever does um and i don't you know i don't want to keep dragging starfield in in in a way of lifting up no man's sky but especially since we did this on rest days for like oh yeah yeah but like i mean it's just great i mean it's like if you haven't tried before it's great it is

a little um there it's like a little more open-ended i would say it doesn't hold your hand as much there's definitely some stuff you gotta like look up to understand better like when griffin told me you can just turn off launch fuel and not have to worry about that anymore that's a delight that's very very good. You must do that. I finished the story for the first time in No Man's Sky. The, I forget what the name was. Artemis, that one? The Artemis Path, yes. And progressed to the next thing in the game,

which is, I'm not gonna spoil it, but uh and then i started to do the new shit that is in this update like the autophage like you meet an entirely new species of of uh inhabitant of the galaxy that have these like little invisible enclaves and they have their own language that they speak and their own currency and their own set of missions and then you can get like a staff that you can use as a multi-tool uh all that shit rips it's so cool and it was so neat to explore and i've done i've like pretty much knocked all of it out and now i'm just kind of at a fun stage where i'm just flying around the galaxy trying to find like a dope planet to settle

down on and like knocking out some of the other sub quests that I've done and going into the community portal to like see these crazy builds that other people have made I haven't even touched the like multiplayer nexus uh missions that that are in the game um it's just a totally different thing it's it's a it's a totally different thing from starfield starfield is you know starfield does shit that this one doesn't it's it is it has you know bethesda uh rpg shit and storytelling shit that uh isn't isn't uh here but i you know i i love this game so much and i'm really i think it is a very special thing to have a game that flopped as hard as this one did to see the level of dedication and just pure just working hours that have gone into it is truly a sight to behold. I've also been dipping into Act 3 of Baldur's Gate 3 three finally and that is also extremely cool and very

overwhelming oh you're doing it finally huh i'm into it yeah i am right at the end of act two okay yeah it's uh it really drops you into a a big old place with yeah i've heard that actually is like dramatically longer than either of the two acts. Yeah, I could see that. Yeah, I'm not going to talk any, I'm not going to spoil it. We'll someday we'll do a spoiler episode on it, but it continues to be the coolest shit ever. Yeah.

My real quick honorable mention, I know I actually brought this up a few weeks ago, but I want to reiterate it because I actually finished the season. The Righteous Gemstone season three is definitely the best season they've ever done and one of the best seasons of television I've seen in a long time. It is like genuinely filled with unexpected, hilarious, just like wacky, like you think you see it's going right and it goes left in like just amazing ways. And I'm just constantly blown away by how good that ensemble is. It's just really, really fantastic. So definitely recommend it.

It's on HBO Max. No comment. Oh, you're right. Yeah, you guys can't. Scumbag. I do support everything that Union is doing. Scabs, come back. Okay, I think we come back. Okay.

I think we did it. Yes. Yes. I want to thank the following people for writing reviews for the Besties on Apple Podcasts. We have Bee Churns. We have Brainus. And we have I Like to Take Naps, which, God willing, is from my son. I'd appreciate that.

A reminder to sign up for the newsletter at besties.fan. Things we talked about. Since Plan is not here, I will attempt to run down. We talked about Armored Core 6, the fires of Rubicon. We talked a little bit about Starfield and reviews in general.

We talked about No Man's Sky. We talked about the Righteous Gemstones. And we talked a tiny bit about Baldur's Gate 3 wow uh i can't wait to do this again really really soon uh and i hope that you will be there to join us for that you want to tell people what we're doing next week next week we're going to do sea of stars i don't know anything about that it's a jmpg from the creators of the messenger pass uh we'll be here with you again next week Until then, my name is Justin McElroy For all the besties, be sure to join us again next week

For the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends Pick the world's best games Besties!