The Besties - Assassin's Creed Mirage Fills Us With Nostabgia (feat. Ron Funches)

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

See, "nostabgia" is the experience of feeling nostalgia for an old-timey way of stabbing, which Assassin's Creed Mirage revels in. It's a return to sneaky form for the franchise, but how well do the old ways hold up? Let's find out with beloved guestie, Ron Funches!Also discussed: Chants of Sennaar, Pokemon TCG Live, "Shift," "Audienceology," Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways, Keith Haring Exhibit at the BrodeSubscribe to our newsletter at besties.fan! 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!

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That was my fuck up. That was my fuck up. I still know the number. I think we're good. He loves both of them. It's been 10 years of me being four. 10 years.

So the fact that I got moved up the shot list is really scratching me up. They're giving you a shot and you're bombing. How many times have you been in my office begging me for a higher number? Begging me, Russ. Please, I'm ready for three. I'm ready for the show. I blew it. I fucking blew it. Show and prove

time, man. You really collapsed under pressure. What was that? I guess we're going to have to stop calling you Hard Rush Rush Day. The four spot. My name is Justin Macra, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy.

I know the game of the week. My name is Ross Froschek, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the best. No, no, no. What? Ron gets to say it. He's been here a hundred times. I did it last time.

Yes, Ron gets to say it. That's true. Yeah. Wow. My name's Ron Funches, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties. We're so pleased to be joined by our fifth bestie, our honorary bestie, Ron Funches, the star of stage and screen, and screen's large and small.

He's all over the place you can catch him in all manner of projects but the important thing is he's here to talk about assassin's creed mirage uh i'll randomly pick russ to tell me what assassin's creed mirage is assassin's creed mirage is like the i don't know 13th Assassin's Creed usually plant does this any researches and stuff it's like the 13th or something Assassin's Creed game this series has been going on for 15 years and this game is a return to I guess the original Assassin's Creed at least the pacing and style of it more stealth heavy it's set in Baghdad, and we are going to jump into it. All right, let's go. Ron, before we talk about this latest iteration,

I'd love to know sort of where you're at with Assassin's Creed broadly. Like, what's your history? Well, I think like most people, I really fell in love when it was the Ezio. I really fell in love when it was the Ezio and just going around Europe and having fun times was always just beautiful. And especially at a time where I never traveled overseas before, it fulfilled a lot of voyeuristic fantasies for me to just see the way these things were and bring history to life and assassinate people like i liked all of those things and the stealth it was a really fun series for me um i i think like most people got my feel of it um i think everyone has a different time where they did i feel like my high peak was with, and I think this is a little later than most, but my high peak was with syndicate.

Oh, I truly enjoy that game. I think that's a, Hey Ron, that's my favorite too, man. I love it. I don't remember.

That was the like British. That's the Victorian. Like their themes and stuff. Yeah. Like Jack the Ripper era. Yeah. Like pre-World War. Yeah.

It's very cool. it's so cool you get to ride around with just like great characters some of the greatest side historical characters in the series to me and i love evie fry i just don't even think the brother exists so i just play it as a evie game and it was my uh video game crush for a long time and before i think because it came out before the arkham knight series um at the time i was like oh this is like the batman game i never got it was so like you really snuck around stealthily there's a grappling hook that you got to use you felt a lot like batman and i think one of my issues with the series had always been motivation which even comes to play with this

newest one um but i felt like it had the strongest motivation because a lot of times you were just like freeing children who were being forced to work in factories and you're like oh yeah I'll kill these guys that felt great here you go kids yeah be free oh we're on love the kids don't look at the ground

we had to crack a few eggs to make this kid on but the kids are happy yeah look up keep walking oh what are you guys supposed to do for work now to make this kid on one. Kids are happy. Yeah, look up. Keep walking. Oh, what are you guys supposed to do for work now? I have not thought that far ahead, but please enjoy your freedom.

Maybe you can get a job in like a pickpocket army, like Oliver Twist. Start a gang. I know one that's hiring. That's what it should have been. It should have been you taking them straight

out of the workhouses and right into your employ. Yeah, like a Pikmin-style mechanic. Little kids murdering for you. Did you play... The big question for this game is, did you play like a lot of Assassin's Creed Valhalla? Because, boy howdy, I hope so so because the dude in this one was heavily

featured in that game apparently which i did not know because i did not stick with valhalla long enough to really get to know him yeah no i never met that man yeah i played it too and i do not remember i mean he was i was not paying attention game i i mean if you look if you look at the uh the wikipedia page for for valhalla he was very present throughout that that title um i i have kind of like i i am not able to hold the assassin's creed mythos or its leading characters in my head i remember desmond miles that's about the the original like uh present dayday protagonist. And he died like 15 years, like 10 years ago, legit. Like he hasn't been a thing. Basim, who is prominent in Valhalla,

and at the end of Valhalla, Basim enters the Animus to find the missing children of Lokiki so basim as i understand it has entered the animus but is living his life 20 years ago uh when he first joined the assassins so it's a prequel slash sequel in as much as that ever matters and in an assassin's creed game but but that i don't think it matters at all like i really if if he was a more engaging like his his whole like vibe of this game

and again i do not really remember him from valhalla i'm sure he was lovely but his vibe in this game is like i want to help the people who are being whatever slaughtered or enslaved or whatever the people are having done to them. I'm going to help them.

And I'm going to do it kind of in the most bland way possible. But I am going to do it. And it's going to be great. And that's the extent of my absorption of this character. And mostly everything else is just like, I'm going to fucking run on rooftops and pickpocket and stuff. Hey, Ron, we talked about this a little bit. But I wanted to ask you first

impression how did uh how did mirage hit you oh i really enjoyed the setting most of all i thought it reminded me a lot of metal gear solid five um and just the loop of me marking my targets, moving into different encampments, and then going in and picking people off. And I've enjoyed that gameplay loop. And I hate to ever bring this into play, but especially right now when so many games go between $60, $70, $80, and $100, to have a game that's like $50. And I'm like, it does give me a little where I'm like oh yeah this seems like a 50 game beautiful it's a beautiful in the vistas and then some of the you know character models aren't that great yeah but overall i think it was like a lot like when you see like a x that you really had a good time with you know and you ended okay and then you see them years later and they still look kind of good and you're like oh

like i kind of missed you this is like you know this was all stabbing people in the necks again we're not worrying about the level i have to be to do it yeah yeah it just brought back a lot of like nostalgia for me and i was uh pretty stoked to get into it i was really high on it within the first couple hours of it um but then did you like the beginning run the like very beginning and you know it's kind of slow it's a bit slow yeah it's a bit slow i might have called it fucking glacial in an email to ron just like prepare him for how slow the intro is it's like an hour and 10 minutes of like very very dull tutorial stuff and then after that once it gets to the open world i was having a lot more fun with it better yeah the problem is that this is a sort of as we've discussed a return to form

uh for the assassin's creed franchise so that's great i'm happy to see that because i miss you know i miss going around and stabbing people in the neck with etzio and friends as well but it's like doing a tutorial for a gameplay loop that is at this point uh would be in high school is kind of a tough kind of a tough it uh you expect if you're gonna slow it down that much and teach the basics that much there's gonna be some sort of big departure from the standard but it is not i mean it's pretty pretty standard i think the world is stunning like it it gets this feels as close as any of these games have to like filling that sort of secondary Assassin's Creed motivation of like historical tourism. I think that it's really successful in the sense of like making you feel transported to another place.

They've got a lot of like these codex entries gathered around – scattered around the world that you can pick up that are just historical in nature like it's not about the game world it's about the actual history of the area um and and different facets of the culture and stuff like that so when i read the first one of those i may i decided to try something i was going to read every single historical codex thing that i found yeah um i did it about three times and kind of forgot, but boy, those three were really interesting. That was a special time, a special eight minutes in Justin's life.

Those three were good. I learned about alcohol production. It's fantastic. I do like that it's a game that's set in, like, I can't remember another game that's set in Baghdad that isn't just like, here's a, whatever,q war recreation or like just soldiers like this is like just baghdad the culture honestly and it's yeah no it's really

great to see that game i've ever seen set in baghdad that actually has brown people yeah it's fun i mean that was one of the things that impressed me from the get-go it's just and i know it won't hit for a lot of people but as a as a black man watching the thing and just being like oh my god i never really get to see this many faces of color in a game just because this is the setting and i feel like it's just it's just fun to see for me and i love that it doesn't pay into anything it's just you know it's just accurate as you know which is usually only held in the reverse way where they're like okay well this place wouldn't have black people so we're not putting any right right you don't normally see it go the other way where you know where they're like well

we're in japan but there's a there's a white ninja here um it's interesting that you know it is definitely return to form with stealth uh it does like have a system for you know if you want to play a more aggressive style what is interesting I think it's something I actually kind of dug about this and it again with three year gaps uh it's hard to remember how much has changed between this and the last one. But I like the scale of if you're sneaking around and you get caught in a – when you're trying to sneak through a place, you're not going to bring like the entire base down. They make these guys like pretty bad at actually like seeing the world around them. Like they keep a pretty narrow code of focus. actually like seeing the world around them. Like they keep a pretty narrow code of focus.

So you usually bring in like a small skirmish three or four that you can typically usually handle and then return to it. It's not like the entire thing's blown. Um, if you get spotted one time, which I appreciated because sometimes the, uh, ability to assassinate people from like around corners or rooftops or

whatever is a little bit finicky, like getting the timing right and and knowing exactly when that's going to pop up before you get spotted uh i found to be tricky sometimes there are definitely moments where i like thought i was going to jump down and stab someone from above but actually ended up just doing a pull-up which is really bad so it is it is uh the stealth stuff in this game I think is great. I love shooting, sending my little hawk up in the sky and scouting places out and marking all my enemies so that I have like a route I'm going to follow. The social stealth stuff is great.

You spend a coin and all of a sudden you're pretending to be like a delivery man or something that gives you access into the big sort of set piece assassination missions. That stuff is great. the combat is not great it's very uh like super rudimentary i think a pretty big step back from uh valhalla which is fine because that's like you know it's emulating the older assassin's creed style where you didn't have you know endless combos and shit like that uh the movement is not is the is abysmal for me the all of the climbing anytime in the very first stealth mission i had to do i was trying to like mantle over a little ledge so i could hide behind some bags of grain or whatever and i just climbed up on top of it and couldn't get basim to go where I needed him to go, and I was just sort of perched like a gargoyle until I was promptly stabbed

eight times by the guards who were pretty far away. I didn't have much trouble getting around. I mean, I don't know. It didn't hit me too different from most of us. From Valhalla. Yeah, it felt like Valhalla to me in terms... But maybe it's because Valhalla, like most of that game,

is like pretty open areas fields and like maybe a couple buildings whereas this is so dense and small that maybe it's like more clamoring around creates more problems ron do you like the like free roaming around the world climbing that kind of stuff yeah i mean it was one of the main positives of the game to me i i mean it's always felt kind of sloppy to me yeah and it doesn't feel much different where i'm like okay i made a mistake here i jumped off or i just it the game felt like it just didn't know where i wanted to go but for the most part when it works well and you're running you know from rooftop to rooftop from pole to pole it feels really good and it looks the best that's's ever looked to me.

I don't know. I mean, I know it runs on the same engine as Valhalla, but to me it looks, it just, I think the way that it's presented in the more smaller set pieces shows off the graphics a lot better than, I mean, Valhalla was not a bad looking game, but I feel like that I just love the style of this game. There's a lot of brown fields in valhalla was not a bad looking game but i feel like that i just love the style of this

game there's a lot of brown fields in valhalla whereas this has like gorgeous like light and streaming in through like a mosque tower and it's just like man i just want to like chill here i don't even want to like run around you're walking around and you just notice like a little beautiful fountain out of nowhere it's just a real uh pretty area yeah it does it does well for baghdad tourism i'm excited i like the investigation system that's in this game yeah i the story didn't do anything for me but the way that they kind of map out your missions and uh how you sort of progress through the story is through a like uh i i don't know how to describe it like a you

know how they do in uh detectives have like the board with the red string going between the different clues uh sort of like uh outer outer wilds yeah uh i like that a lot i felt like it gave a lot of clarity and like where i was supposed to go uh i didn't feel that sort of uh we've played some really good open world games this year i didn't feel that like constant pull of my attention towards like other little things that i wanted to do as i was running from like objective to objective on the uh investigation board um I, I thought it was a neat sort of concept for organizing. Yeah. They do have a lot of little stuff you can do,

but it isn't that enticing. It seems like. Yeah. Like. I dug most of the little contract things. I was taking some of those. I just, cause I liked the self-contained nature of them.

So I did, I did a good number of those i thought they were pretty varied um yeah there's a lot there's a lot to to do and it's all like pretty good like i haven't found any that's like that are very exhausting there are some times where a stealth entry will kind of fall apart and unless you've been like saving throughout um it is pretty frustrating to kind of be to to be that kind of methodical and then have to go back and do all that ron i i know you mentioned you do that like tagging people before you go you go into a place will you kind of just stick with it if something falls apart or do you like to like restart and get it get it clean and stealthy the

whole way i i haven't had to restart any of the encounters other through then through death um that i played i usually will just go ahead and adapt as it goes it's one i mean i i mean that's one of my favorite things in life is fun it's what i like um and another game that i'm playing the payday three is just like having a plan trying to make it work out and if it doesn't get into a fight and i do like the uh how it does seem to let it bend for you if you get out of stealth like we talked about before where it only sends two or three guys at you and and then you can go back into stealth um and also agree that the combat is not the highlight of this game at all.

It reminds me of a lot of like Prince of Persia, Sands of Time, and the fact that this game feels like other than graphically that it would fit right in the GameCube era of games. Yeah, it's funny you said, you mentioned Prince of Persia Ron. I did just want to mention, i don't know why but when i booted this game up and got into the open world i suddenly had the dagger of time i think if you had the deluxe deluxe edition is that what it is i think that's why i suddenly had like all of

prince of persia's gear and prince of persia he does all right with like if you block if you block a parry and attack with this uh with this gear um you can insta kill the person you just parried and it heals you for 20 percent so yeah it's pretty good it's a pretty good pre-order bonus if i just say so myself um and you can just sort of role play as the prince of version if you want to well i mean that's kind of rude to me that's one of my favorite games of all time in the sense of time series in general i loved but uh and and that happened where i was playing this game and i was like man i wish they could finish that that remake of the sands of time i want to play that game i would love yeah i think that might be dead but they are releasing a new prince of persia in like a couple months.

Yeah, like a side-scrolling number. Side-scrolling Metro. Hey, that's the original Prince of Persia. It's a throwback. That's not who I want to see. I think it's the same guy. I think it's the same prince. He's just from the side.

Ron sounds like me through the first 17 episodes of Twin Peaks, the retirement one. This is not what I want. Fix it. This is always sort of the litmus test for me, especially for like bigger open world games. Do you all think you're going to continue to play Assassin's Creed Mirage once we have, you know, once old Dusty, the broom man comes out and sweeps up the mess we make every besties episode.

And we've wrapped this one. we have our martini shot do you think you're gonna go right back to assassin's creed mirage ever or if it was a different year i'd say maybe because i actually do enjoy just like exploring the city and stuff like that but this year is so fucking jam-packed with stuff yeah that it's really hard for anything that's not, like the games that I want to go back to, Baldur's Gate 3, Resident Evil 4 DLC. Keep talking. There's so much stuff that I would rather be playing, and we have Spider-Man waiting in the wings,

so it's like, man, it's really tough. I think that I would want to know that there's going to be some kind of evolution of the the the the loop like i have now been playing for i guess about seven hours at this point um i would love to know that if i keep moving forward there's going to be like some sort of big changes with um i think especially movement is one that i'd like i'm dying for like some sort of way to elevate quickly a grappling hook some sort of like something like that to make it getting around uh a little more fun um or combat wise like the tools that i've gotten have all been

pretty like stealth heavy um and not anything that really changes the combat i have seen clips of like the prince of persia stuff even the like gear push is not that like i don't really care you know if i get like a new dagger or whatever it probably doesn't slow down time yeah i have seen clips of people like being able to use like all of their energy meter and assassinate a group of like six guys at once while like time stops. I completely forget that mechanic. I've never used it actually in gameplay before,

like the focus thing where you, yeah, but eventually you can upgrade that to like kind of ridiculous levels. So that, but I don't think it will dramatically change the game. It's just make it easier. Really. Right.

Yeah. I don't really enjoy that because to me, that's half the fun. Right. Lining, lining them up myself and trying to time it right. And it's just like, well, it's going to auto jump for it. That's not something that intrigues me.

Yeah. How do you guys feel? I think we're at this point in video games where the games become so absurdly expensive to produce. And obviously to buy, it's not cheap at $60 or $70. absurdly expensive to produce and obviously to buy it's not cheap at 60 or 70 dollars how do you guys feel about this idea that we're seeing more of these like it's not an expansion pack it's like a standalone but really doesn't feel like a full sequel are you like is that how you feel about this game so that's how i feel it doesn't feel like a full sequel to me i don't know how you guys feel but like it feels it doesn't feel like an expansion pack but it feels like there isn't enough new here to

really say oh this is like the next generation of an assassin's creed game by itself i i think what mirage is maybe lacking is like there's no there's not much of a meta on top of it right like at least as far as i found you're not like doing the management of a crew you're not doing like sending people out on missions a lot of that like extra stuff um that i have associated with this franchise recently but like i think it stands on its own i mean i i mean i i think it's absolutely a a standalone i know i think it's a standalone too i wasn't saying that it wasn't i more just like you know the expectation of a sequel versus a well this is almost like a spin-off if you will

it feels like it's a rebalancing to me it's like someone who had a like a long super long marriage and now they gotta live in a small apartment and they like they don't have all their stuff yet you know they they coming back this way they're not a hundred percent yet i like the middle ground of it and the fact that i don't for me in my life where it is right now i got a young kid i got an older kid and i gotta move around a lot i don't have time to get into a game where it's like okay well you have to learn this mechanic now and you gotta manage this before we we're you know checkpointing this area your progress so that you have to learn this mechanic right for a while you have to go around and be on a pirate boat for a long time and i'm like i don't i just wanted to assassinate and that

was refreshing to me about this game of just being like okay i just run on rooftops and i just assassinate i can play this game for 15 20 minutes make a little bit of progress and move on but like you said it's not that intriguing i didn't know anything else of it it's not a character that i'm enjoying it's certainly not a story that is holding me and in like you said if this was a different year i think that would be fine and this would be just a solid seven of a game that you're like hey have you checked this out it's actually pretty good and i will say that i mean you know but i would say you could wait wait till it gets gets a little bit cheaper, because especially these Ubisoft games, if they don't sell well, they usually drop in price within a week.

So just wait that out. Get it on Game Pass whenever it comes to that, and enjoy it. You'll probably have a nice little treat, but I can't say you need to go out of your way to play this when there's Spider-Man coming. And like you said, I've been wanting to go back to Bold is Gay. I've been wanting to go back to Cyberpunk. There's a lot of big games to play.

But I will say it has brought back my interest in the series. I think they should continue to go down this direction and just build it and make it bigger. But what it has done is currently make me on the page to purchase Assassin's Creed Syndicate on Steam, which is actually pretty expensive. For a 13, 15, 100-year-old game. They want $60 for the gold edition. Holy shit. That's bonkers. $30 for regs.

That's crazy. Or I can buy the bundle of the entire Assassin's Creed series for $409. It's a steal. There you go. Anyone who does that should be put on a government watch list. Oh, 100%. You like history that much and assassinating that much? Uh-oh.

And you also don't own any of them. You're going to go in big. I'm going to try one of them. You're going to go in big. I'm going to... Yeah, I just heard. I just heard about it. You're losing money to not buy all 15. What? Oh, my God.

It's, you know, I think we're all on a similar page, like pretty solid. If you've been hungry for this kind of, like, Assassin's Creed thing, or if you are been hungry for this kind of like Assassin's Creed thing or if you are interested in the time period at all like I think you'll really enjoy it but it is not like a big

step forward I think in any meaningful way yeah we got more to talk about though we are going to take a quick break and then we'll be back to talk a little bit more with our friend Ron Funches. Yay! Ron, I don't know if you're a numbers guy.

I don't know if you're a big ranking guy, but do you have a rough idea of some of your top games of this year so far? Your besties, as it were? Yes, of course i i try to keep a tally in my head throughout the year um and and let my emotions decide if i'm like huh this game has come in and displaced um and this happened so much especially this year i went in this year i'd say and it early, and I knew there were things coming, but I thought it was going to be Starfield that was going to knock it out. But at the beginning of the year,

my favorite game was Hi-Fi Rush, for sure. Oh, yeah. That's a great one, yeah. I keep forgetting that came out this year. I know. That's how much of a year it's been. Yeah. Hey, where are you at on Starfield ron i hate it it's nice to get a different viewpoint on this uh no it's it's not ron we

we were all pretty down on it unfortunately you emailed us specifically out of the blue you're like oh at the time i liked it i liked it at the time at that time i had a different view i was like uh i had stockholm syndrome or something where i was just like no it's good it's fine it's oh everybody's hating on it but it's okay and then i played a little longer and went through a few more menus and i was like oh my god this is really all there is to it and then you realize like why it'd be fine if you're like this is what it's gonna be kind of fall out in space fall out but worse but to the hype not even of you can't be like well you guys hyped it up but the hype that they did of like go anywhere do, going throughout space, make it your own.

And there is literally none of that. I haven't seen a single mission that didn't break down into just murdering everyone. My favorite part of the entire game was just filling out a job application. That doesn't bode well. job application that's that doesn't bode well i will say there's a part of me that's like looking at the steam reviews which have slowly crept i think they started at like 81 and it's the most recent reviews are around 69 nice is a little i guess there was a moment i think we all had a bit of a crisis of conscience where it was like,

are we just off base maybe? Or like totally out of the, like for whatever. If you like this game. We were all sort of waiting for the scores to come out. Cause we were all like, Ooh, this is going to be wild.

And then like a lot of the early critical consensus was so strong on it. It's like, Ooh, maybe we were just off base. I don't know. Or sometimes it's an echo chamber, you know, where the four of us are like, I don't like well i don't like this yeah that's pretty bad too

or vice versa yeah but back on positive positive okay okay i was about to go a little longer you got a button to put on on starfield no not really i just i mean mostly just i don't understand how you make space travel boring. Yeah. It's really one of the most usually like, oh, yeah, I'm excited about this. And then you just strip every piece of joy out of it and just make it menus and horrible. I mean, I should have known from the start menu. The start menu is horrible. We can't. Russ and I finished it, Ron.

Yeah, we did. We went all the way through that incredible adventure. Oh, my God. No, thank you. Sometimes you got the homework to do. That's all there is. Okay, but good stuff. High Fire Rush.

Yes. Loved it. Great game. You know, of course, Baldur's Gate 3, which I haven't. I mean, it's so big and deep. I have not even even i still was fighting through a goblin camp i'm oh yeah i'm early and i want to get back into it perhaps start over make a new character now that i know what i'm doing a little bit more what do you think you

screwed up with your character that you need to just not picking anything really i just let the every i let the computer pick for me because i didn't know what i was doing uh and now i'm like okay i enjoy this rogue but perhaps i could add a little more things i'd like some more magic based things those things are fun for me but it's just i mean it's it just came in and displaced everything else as far as like okay yeah this is what i wanted this is a choice-based role-playing game where everything can and anything can happen i can watch orcs have sex i can fall in love i can make a deal with the devil i can do and all this within like the first couple of hours yeah so it's a great game it's truly an amazing game and and um you know just

a departure from everything else you've been seeing as far as microtransactions and people trying to nickel and dime you for everything just to be like hey here's a classic game ready had you gotten into like other either divinity original sin or the other baldur's gate games or is this i played divinity too yeah um but not that too terribly much just a similar amount and i and i think that also because i played it for the first time on the switch and so it wasn't necessarily the best experience but i was like oh i can see what people have been talking about with this game and so i was very excited to see them with a bigger budget and working with the...

And it also helped very much that I just recently seen the Dungeons & Dragons movie, which was incredible. God, that movie was so good. Yeah. That movie ruled. So good. So good. Anything else that you've been spending a lot of time on

games-wise, Ron? Day of the Diver, Payday 3. Oh, that was good. Day of the Diver wise ron um day of the diver payday three that was good you know yeah what was what's the story on payday three i i've heard uh like a lot of varying things where's the where's the payday community ad on it now um you know it swings back and forth everybody's mad because it didn't work and it was broken one you know people do hate it when you pay for early access and then you don't get it. They do hate that. I get that. But now that it's working a lot better, it's just a fun time.

I enjoy doing the missions with my friends. It's both slow-paced and can get very hectic. So it's great for my friend group as we like watch wrestling in the background and just play through payday missions and yell at each other when one person forgets to put a silencer on their gun i'm like come on who comes into the mission without a silence yeah it does feel like there aren't a ton of those games the only other one that like i mean there are a bunch but the one that jumps to my mind is deep rock galactic, which I know juice got into and kind of all of us to get into,

but which rules, but it's good to know that there are more games coming into that co-op space. Yeah. It's, you know, it's one of my favorite, we find ourselves just reverting back to playing the same games again and

again, which we do enjoy, but we're like, it gets to the point where we're like, oh man, I would just prefer to play an overcooked sequel, if that were to come out. We play a lot of overcooked. You've tried moving out, Ron? Yeah, it doesn't hit quite the same. Oh man, I like moving out a lot.

I like the, I mean, I get the fun of, I mean, maybe I need to try some of the later levels because to me it just seemed simple to just moving things around but i i love the cooking i like making them i always felt like they're missing out on how big that game could be like to have partnerships with like you know great british bake-off or jordan ramsey i'm imagining he would be very expensive but like if you got a pack where you're like you get to play as all these famous chefs you can be julia child or the swedish chef from the muppets i'd be like man i'd pay five dollars for a julia child skin uh do you do you have a number one where is your head at for your game

of the year so far and obviously spider-man hasn't come out there's a few other titles that haven't come out but you know obviously you know zelda is a big one baldur's gate certainly resident evil 4 yeah i think right now it's a three-way race um dark horse candidate between in my heart and what i feel are likely to be and i think it's between boulders gate zelda and for and dave the diver for me because oh shit have played so much of it it's brought so much joy into it's like my bedtime game my travel game um i can just play a lot of it and it it's um surprised me every hour or two with what it continues to add to it and doles it out in a fun way and it's really and i just i'm a big fan of funny games yeah and i love this game has a lot of great funny writing without being um most games that

try to be funny resort to being very crude or violent in order to be funny and i like that this game just tells funny jokes the cut scenes when you feed like the whatever the restaurant critics the right food and the cutscene that plays is like like visual top notch yeah yeah oh my god every time you just like learn a new skill um with sushi and then like it cuts to that fish in the background terrified for its life yeah it's just it's so funny to me like i, I literally would, like, watch the cartoon if they made a cartoon of that game. I would love it.

David Diver. Yeah, that game rules. Awesome. We have a few reader mail questions. Is that out on, is David Diver out on Switch yet? It definitely is, yeah. I do have a pro tip for David Diver, and I'm curious, Ron, if you did this.

I bounced off of the game initially because I found the, like, button-mashing minigame stuff to be kind of infuriating you can turn that stuff off so like when you're catching fish and you have to like slam the a button to like pull it in i just turned it off it was great um no it's out actually yeah i love that uh october 26th is when oh it's not out on Switch? No, it's not out. There's a demo of it. Yeah, I've been playing on Steam Deck. I just assumed it was on Switch. Too big, too heavy. Yeah.

Okay, we have some reader mail questions. This is a question from David B. Y'all's discussion on Chance of Cinar, very cool game, Ron, if you haven't checked it out, reminds me a lot of Heaven's Vault, which was my favorite game of 2019 have you all covered or played it before it combines my literal two favorite things archaeology and linguistics uh there was a david b added a bunch of other stuff about it but that was the

gist is there has anyone played this game i've heard of it i haven't played it it does seem uh somewhat similar in that there's a lot of sort of translation that goes into it but chance of scenario is from what i can tell a lot more sort of like solely focused on that whereas heaven's vault has more sort of adventure game elements to got it got it looks very good though it's very well reviewed yeah awesome uh we have another question this comes from uh aid um this doesn't have much to do with this week's episode but uh after last week's i took up griffin's recommendation and watched through new world uh i've still got the last episode to go but gosh what a charming

show the cast members are a great mix of personalities the challenges are constantly changing so it never feels stale and the editing is a great mixture of cheesiness and hilarity definitely worth a watch thanks for the recommendation my favorite show of the year new world gotta watch it so funny so fun ron have you seen this show no tell me about it it's a korean reality uh show where six sort of like panel show people uh are set get to live on an island that caters to their their every whim be it the food they want to eat or the place they want to live in and they just have to play games every day to earn a virtual currency that they can sort of trade and exchange through a special app on their phone uh and it is hysterically funny it is like uh survivor meets taskmaster it is uh

it is it's fantastic i i have i've watched so much korean reality television programming this year between this and physical 100 and siren and uh it is i think this one is my favorite because it is just it is just delightful we have a topic from Andrew Leifring on the topic of handheld switch grips. I mentioned some switch grips last week. My hands would fall asleep in a lot of positions because of how wide the switch is. What ended up working for me was the Fixture S1, which clips onto a Pro Controller, so you get to keep the 3D rumble, and which holds the switch above it. I loved it so much that I held off on upgrading to the OLED switch so you get to keep the 3D rumble, and which holds the Switch above it.

I loved it so much that I held off on upgrading to the OLED Switch because it wouldn't fit until they released the S2. I'm imagining what this would look like, and I am happy to report it is just as wild as you are. This thing looks so bonkers. It's absolutely bonkers. It looks like a joke. It looks like if,, on like Law and Order,

if they needed like a hacker gamer character to be playing something, it would be this. It really is just a screen that mounts to the top of the Switch Pro controller. I mean, I love the Switch Pro controller. I'm sure this is fine, but. The balance seems like it would be uncomfortable yeah yeah it would introduce a new sort of vector to the weight of the gaming

handheld that is sort of more i don't know the yaw of it would be uh distressing it looks like they do now have one that fits the the oled so oh nice i guess that's the s2 uh okay that's pretty much it for questions thank you to everyone who sent in questions those were in the besties newsletter which you can sign up for at besties.fan do we have honorable mentions uh anything else you've played you've read maybe get some culture in uh i uh what did i oh i finished the second uh silo book book in the silo series called shift um i that series which is uh about a post-apocalyptic world where human beings are confined to silos below the ground, um, is really, really fantastically paced.

Like you don't want to stop reading it. Uh, that was wonderful. And I'm also reading this a little bit more French, but, a book called audience ology by a, uh, um,

someone who does one of the, the big names in the, uh, field of like testing movies, like with audiences and, and heads up a lot of that research. And it is about the process of testing movies and like some anecdotes, but more just like how the testing process works with movies where people

get their feedback and the changes. It's a, I think it's a really interesting idea. Like the, the, the, these are kind of made like synergistically between the audience and the changes it's a i think it's a really interesting idea like the the the these are kind of made like um synergistically between the audience and the filmmaker and a dialogue between the two so i think it's really it's really interesting it's by kevin guts gets who's a big

big name in that field but it's called audience ology and i don't know i'm a nerd but i think it's interesting sounds very interesting i can't believe you talked about nerdy shit on this show juice you made you promised me yeah i know right that was just gonna be cool sports guys but the thing is if you get into the wrong kind of nerd then the other nerds smell it and they start bullying you for it that's true you know what i mean like if i tried to talk about anime here i would get my head right in the toilet yeah that's true just let it fly let your freak flag fly brother uh i finished chance of uh and it's a it is on my top five i would say for this year love wow had a good fucking time with that top five so i'm very filled a little bit of a wall after i finished decoding the first

language yes and i was kind of like, oh man, I'm not sure I could start that again. Like, I don't know. I was, I was, I kind of hit a wall where I wasn't quite ready to like, I don't know. It is, I would say they are very smart with each new sort of layer that you come to and each new language that you discover.

There is usually one big early discovery that lets you start like piecing together uh how like how this new language works uh and it gives you kind of a foothold uh i will say i'm going to revise my statement that i said last time that there are some stealth sequences that are uh the low light of the game for me uh it's particularly in the second layer unfortunately which sort of takes a lot of the wind out of the sails of the thing um but i yeah i finished it in maybe like three pretty long sessions i just could not could not put it down couldn't stop thinking about it when i wasn't playing it uh every time that like i would make some discovery that would unlock some

you know syntax rule for a language or whatever uh i it was it was genuinely very thrilling um and yeah just cool cool presentation neat just neat game all all around um i have also so henry has been getting into pokemon cards uh and a lot of like the kids in his class actually play the game, which is kind of astonishing to me because it is not the easiest sort of game in the, you know, TCG library to wrap your head around. There's a lot of different sort of rules and stuff that each of the cards brings to the table. But he was interested in learning how to play it. So I downloaded the current Pokemon TCG app app which is called pokemon tcg live uh which is great i've been getting into it there's like a bunch of free starter decks that they they hook you up with and i've been

sort of just just dipping my toe in the water a little bit and it's it has reawakened a vicious competitive spirit uh in me. I've been just absolutely destroying what I can only assume to be seven and eight-year-olds on the other side of the internet. And haven't lost a match yet. Maybe bots, but I don't think so because they play like children. And I always know. So, yeah, I've been enjoying it. How do you know it's children? They pick cute cards or i mean

they just like you know they don't they don't play their energy cards they discard in weird ways idiots they leave their their their fucking v star pokemon out there for the slaughter so i could just collect all the prize cards it's like come on kids don't you have parents that are teaching you the ways that i am trying to guide my son in and be his shining light um so yeah that's that experience for me ron you have anything you want to call out um i would just say if i mean it's very specific but if you're in the los angeles area um i really enjoyed going to the broad recently and seeing the key tearing exhibit very inspiring very colorful yeah me too and the way everything is displayed and

stuff is very overwhelming if you um bring a slight amount of mushrooms with you you'll have a beautiful time yeah that seems unnecessary quite honestly it seems like overkill it was intense not for the faint of heart yeah and then i ran into a lot of friends and then that was also interesting but i either where however you want to you've never, because I also had never been to the Broad, and that exhibit got me to go and had a great time there. But go see that exhibit if you can. It's beautiful.

It's very inspiring if you're in art or if you're not in art. But especially if you work in any type of art, I think it's very inspiring. So check it out. I feel like Keith Haring and Fortnite would be a good collab. They've done a few artist collabs so far, and i feel like keith herring and fortnite would be a good collab they've done a few artists collabs so far and that seems like a good combo that's what if keith herring stood for nothing else it's for owning noobs uh i wanted to call out i've been playing the resident evil 4 dlc separate ways ways it just started stars ada wong and it's awesome predictably uh it uh pretty much follows

her storyline you know in tandem while the main storyline of resident form is going on which happened uh when they originally released the gamecube version they had the same thing and so now it's sort of like an updated version of that but uh you use her grappling hook a ton in like combat and various encounters so it really changes how you move around the world there's still the like meta game upgrading your gear and and uh completing challenges for the mysterious vendor guy but if you play resident evil 4 and loved it which i did uh and wanted basically just more game it is indeed that can't tell you what annoyed me i played the i played resident evil 4 so so much so many times i talked about that i beat it on professional mode and under the time limit to like get all

the dope shit but then ada has her own like bonuses so you can't use all of like the crazy unlocks that you get for beating the original game. What part of separate ways did you not understand? That's fair, but I mean, I don't understand why she can't just slap on these cat ears that give you infinite ammo that I did. I'd work. So they're just cat ears. Just put them on.

You know what I mean? She has her own pair of cat ears. Why? Why does she have her own cat ears? I don't get it. Hey, Ron, is there anything that you'd like to push anybody to? Any of your work that you're excited about people can check out? I mean, right now, Jessica's promoting stand-up life stuff.

So come see me if you're in Las Vegas November 3rd or 4th there's so many other options it's gonna be probably a bloodbath we've never played out there I just can't see us being a good draw

going amp versus amp against Celine Dion I don't believe so what's the venue Ron? be a good draw. Going amp versus amp against Celine Dion? I don't believe so. What's the venue, Ron? Wise Guys Town Square. I think it's slightly off the strip, which is good. It's also, I think, a pretty big room,

which is bad. It's in Vegas. Like you said, I'm not saying I'm mean, I'm an excellent... I'm a good reason to come out and see your show. You're hilarious. I do understand if there's a lot of other

options in Vegas, including just walking around with a giant alcoholic slurpee. So, I... Please come if you're not here. Ron, have you ever suffered through a casino show? oh yeah for sure I have

in the northwest in Washington Emerald Queen Casino I believe is the name of it I've done a couple real B, C rate casinos never a good time because if they're sitting there watching

your show, it's because they had a bad thing happen to them and they can no longer afford to take them out. Are you able to tune out the keynote numbers being read in the background? But you're there to lift them back up, Ron. That's right. Your craft craft your calling

as a comedian it could not be more pure in that moment that's true that's a good point but hey you may lost it all but at least you're with me and and that's a good place to be um but yeah people just go around functions.com and check out stuff or just follow me on Instagram. And that's what you can do. And then when this drags over, I'll promote a bunch of stuff. I'm a proud union member. Hell yeah. I want to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts.

We have YoLanG. We have Jill Lloyd Flanagan and Skims McKimsey. Thank you, y'all, for writing reviews. Thank you to Ron Funches. Skims McKimsey. Thank you, y'all, for writing reviews. Thank you to Ron Fletcher. Skims McKimsey! Yeah. That was a good read. That person's going to be thrilled to just have that as their ringtone for now.

Next week, we're going to talk about Spider-Man 2. Two Spider-Men. Big one. A big one. Can you handle it? This is what? The PS2 version of Spider-Man 2? Yes, with the pizza song. It's goingMen. Big one. A big one. Can you handle it? This is what? The PS2 version of Spider-Man 2? Yes. With the pizza song. No, Russ.

I would play that one again. So 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!