The Besties - Dead Cells, Sea of Thieves and More From the Grab Bag

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

In lieu of some big blockbuster release to discuss this week, we've decided to once again firmly grip the handles of the grab bag and upend it all over the dang place.Games n' stuff discussed include: Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania, Destiny 2: Lightfall, Patch Quest, Sea of Thieves, Pizza Tower, Chained Echoes, Octopath Traveler 2 Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

you're trying to think of something cool to say not something cool something funny something funny and cool is that too much funny things that happened in games this week did you find anything funny in games this week by googling um no i mean here's okay so here's a parade.com article called 100 funny things to say when you Want to Make Someone's Day, which is kind of like... Can we, like, make those gaming, though? Yeah, that's a good idea. Cool. So here's one that says,

after Tuesday, even the calendar says WTF, because I guess it's like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Yeah, sure. Okay, but it's not very gamey. I'm so glad we have brown cows, otherwise there wouldn't be any chocolate milk, is the number one funniest thing to say, according to this Parade.com article. Okay.

But how are gamers going to associate with that? Well, okay, so I'm so glad that we have Master Chief, otherwise there wouldn't be any chocolate milk yeah that's true i i i'm trying to help you so i looked up the funniest moments in video games and i did find an article from 2012 okay and I can't imagine that much has changed. Yeah, sure. So what's it? Oh, God. Give me what's in there. I'm so worried.

Number four, the bear transformation in Altered Beast. Okay, so I thought that this was going to be like a sort of Duke Nukem. No, no, number one. Uh-oh. The king saying, my boy, in Zelda, the wand of Gamelon. Gamelon. Gamelon is it.

He says, my boy. Don't worry if plan A fails. There's 25 more letters in the alphabet. No, no, no. Number eight. Maybe you remember this one. All your base are belong to us. Fuck yeah. Do you feel like one. All your base are belonging to us. Fuck yeah.

Do you feel like maybe we live in a different world 10 years later? I think so. And I would go so far as to say a better world. Yeah. I think you're right. Number 11. Toasty. You know what?

I hope that this is a list and there's no context below it it just says and people just have to know how funny that was i'm on a seafood diet i see food and i eat it yoshi and then i poop it out into an egg does the wait is he is there babies in those eggs is there babies in those eggs so i i see you found the funniest thing in video games does yoshi poop babies or poop yeah because he's eating food i don't think that's it i think we're close though guys god dang i feel like we're really close we're gonna crack it do we need another 10 years before we can crack it i mean who knows where society will be in 2032 um um if a picture is worth a thousand words what is a mural god dang parade none of

this is anything man if anyone said any of this bogus shit to me that would be the end of our friendship immediately amuro is a picture it's the same thing it's just a big one it's just a big picture are you ready yeah i did go to jokes for us.com and great please got anything i looked up some gaming knock knock jokes here we go. Knock, knock. Who's there? Ocelot. Ocelot who? Noobs ask a lot of questions. Do you know what that means?

Do you realize what that means, guys? Knock, knock. Who's there? Juicy. Juicy who? Did you see that kill streak? Fuck yes. That one good. Yeah, that's a good one. That one actually goodicy who? Did you see that kill streak? Fuck yes. That one good.

Yeah, that's a good one. That one actually good. Okay, we're going to end on a high note. Plant, bring your egg in. Bring it home. Bring the fire. Knock, knock. Who's there?

Koala. Koala who? Koala the duty black ops for. Yeah, we got there. I believed the whole time. My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant,

and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Froschek, and I know the best game of the week. And welcome to The Besties, a show where we talk about the latest in great state and home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year club, and just by listening, you, my best friend, are a member. We are running one man light this week,

as has been the case for the last few, but I like the three-person energy person. Yeah, yeah. After that, that's all open. Even when I was gone last week and it was me who wasn't here, I like that energy. You like the one-person, you-alone energy, is what you're saying that i mean

yeah sure why not that would be a wild version of this podcast if it was just one of us like and then in um the tetris uh l block you can turn it left or right um we don't really have a subject this week we well we do because we have a lot of dope shit to talk about we have too many subjects this week we have a great deal of subjects and we're going to dive into the grab bag and just sort of speak our truth cool in just just a moment i would ask chris plant to set it up but like i don't know what else there is i mean well to be clear we're just talking about games that you might have missed awesome games you might have missed from the last couple months maybe oh i don't know if that was the subject of what i prepared but that's fine that's fine

and we'll start it right after this griffin we gotta start this in the place that everybody wants us to start this. Which is? Destiny 2 feelings from you. Yeah. Last week, it was a wild choice. You were out, and we said, well, Griffin's out. What if we did Destiny 2 in a game that's a lot like Sekiro? Yeah. And only Justin had played it.

So had either of you guys also played Destiny 2 Lightfall? Okay. I imagine Justin was quite down on the Lightfall. I mean, he wasn't that down. He still likes the combat. I think we're all in agreement that it is a spinning plates, you know, hat on a hat situation with that game right now. Yes.

That's sort of where it's at. To summarize my position and i can dive into this more if it's not uh already boring um i think that they have made a lot of changes to the core gameplay and the quality of life stuff um that is kind of perfect for someone who plays Destiny like I do, which is to say, like, I am nowhere near the, like, top echelon hardcore player, like, level. I simply do not have the time for it. And so a lot of the things that sort of gameplay-wise people weren't so wild about like they've sort of simplified loadouts um and sort of removed a few of the options for like some of the wilder builds that existed last season um i don't really care about that because i always felt like there was a pretty steep barrier of entry um before you could go like into build crafting and yeah all that shit um they have made that so easy now and i think i talked about that a little bit maybe two

two weeks ago like how fun it is to just like make loadouts um and i i mean all the stuff that they've added the new subclasses are really fun to play as the, they've added a bunch of weapons. But you like can't use the grappling hook if you want to be like the, I don't know. I don't even remember the void, like a void hunter. No. Yeah. You have to be playing a strand to use the grappling hook.

But honestly, like the, the the a lot of people had complaints about the new like uh subclasses being like super weak when the game launched because they hadn't unlocked all of it yet and within like a couple of days bungie realized like yo people are not enjoying this and they just unlocked everything so instead of having this like bullshit pointless time gated thing like they basically threw open the floodgates. And I feel like that's when you started to see like a lot of the opinions start to reverse a little bit. Do you think you'll ever do the raid? Yes, I do.

The raid came out last Friday. And it, again, this is like another thing where I don't necessarily align with that the the one percenters um but that's what bernie's complaining about right apparently it's like kind of on the easier side yeah um they do this when they when they when they launch raids they do a race to see who can be the world's first to complete it and the winning team did it in like a little over two hours which is that's pretty short really short um last wish is probably the rate i have the most experience with and that took people like a day yeah just pounding their head against it so it from what i've heard it seems like a a very beginner friendly raid uh that is just like a lot of ad clear or just, like, killing big waves of enemies while doing, like, a lot of, like, platforming objectives.

So they've, you know, it seems like it's way, way simpler to kind of comprehend than a lot of others. This is another thing where, like, I know I will need, like, a few hours to, like, sit down and get in with a group and learn uh i mean destiny lfg there's there's yeah i would play with randoms they are adding lfg stuff like into the game at some point this year but um i'm not sure when that's gonna happen yeah all that said i i am really enjoying playing destiny i think it's fun i think that the hooks are there i think there's a lot of stuff to chase i missed out on like all the weapon crafting stuff which i think is brilliant and great and it uh cuts down on a lot of the tedium of just trying to like grind out that weapon that has the perfect stats and perfect perks on it and all that um the story is the the worst it's ever been.

Don't you think the only... And it's really hard to land what they're trying to land, which we talked a little bit about this before. It's basically the Thanos moment of MCU where everything is culminating to this grand battle for evil good, right? I mean, conceptually, I think it's supposed to be that. In practice, it would be like if in fucking Infinity War,

Thanos rolled up and was like, what's up, haters? I'm about to kill half your planet. And then Thor and Captain America and Iron Man and the gang were like, that's great. We're gonna go to Neptune. You have fun here. Like, this seems super dangerous. Like, I do not want you to kill half the planet.

We are going to fuck off to Neptune for a bit. And there's some new, they're having a crazy sale on Funko Pops up there. We just got to get there. It is bewildering how bad it is. They're having a crazy sale on Funko Pops up there. We just got to get there. It is bewildering how bad it is, except that it's not all that bewildering because I think a lot of people have spilled a lot of ink about the fact that this expansion is kind of a weird stopgap, unintentional filler expansion. Yeah. There's the subclass that they added a lot of people think like hey narratively that would have made a lot more sense in the last expansion so they might have just over scoped it kicked it kicked the can down the road a little bit uh there's a cut scene at the beginning of this expansion that is like hot shit uh in a good way and then you fuck off to neptune and do nothing

for a while and then at the end of it it sort of just picks up where that first cut scene left off so you could literally just watch the beginning and ending cut scene and not missing it's it's it's worse than you could possibly imagine yeah the writing is bad the characters are bad the complete diffusal of all the time and i don't get me wrong i haven't in traditionally cared about destiny story the problem is that they started to do it really good um so like the last season uh was called the season of the seraph and it had all kinds of great shit with like the war mind rasputin and like all these characters that you had like seen and now only guess what they have personalities and um it was it was getting really good and then jesus christ it's it's it's rough stuff i think fresh is fresh is infinity war point actually feels kind of spot

on here because we all remember end game right yeah but there was that Avengers Infinity War movie that came right before it. Oh, yeah, of course. That was set up extreme garbage, right? No. That movie was terrible. Come on. You're out of your mind. That was a good movie.

No, I'm sorry. No, it's okay. You're right. Jean-Luc Godard didn't direct it, so I get the why you're speaking to it. Who's a high Godard? That doesn't even make sense. There wasn't a sad clown crying on the streets of Paris. I get it.

I like Endgame. What are we talking about here? I like these movies. There is no analogy that works here. I'm going to say this. In defense of Plant, Plant is right for 90% of that movie is pretty bad. And then at the end, you have a little actual conflict and then people start dying off

and it gets more interesting. But 90% of that movie is like, now we're in Tibet. It's the filler. It's the setup to the thriller. But also like, on the other hand, the other side of that coin is Empire Strikes Back, right?

Like, which I think this was also maybe meant to be a little bit. Cause like- Are we talking about destiny again minor yeah minor spoiler if this is like even a thing when the expansion ends it's like we lost but you fucking really kind of didn't because you're still like a super powered demigod that's like uh and and everyone's still pretty okay has anyone died since what's his name died uh cade six cade six um like a known and beloved character not to the extent that and that was like six

years ago it was forever ago right yeah no i it's it's you can't they have set up this apocalyptic threat for nine years and then it fucking rolls up and it just the camera just pans away for uh the runtime of the expansion so i all that is so uh like profoundly disappointing but i still am really fun ass shooting game fun shooting game the after after the campaign there's like post uh campaign stuff where you're like fucking around with amanda holiday and like saving earthlings from these like cabal prisons like that shit is pretty cool uh but yeah the story is very very bad okay let's talk about something we we really like and i'm going to start by talking about dead cells return to castlevania hell yes okay uh for those that are not aware i mean we've talked a lot about dead cells i don't know that i need to go super

in depth into what that is but you should give the basics okay basics fair dead cells is a rogue light metroidvania uh basically a randomly generated metroidvania where you run through and collect different like hundreds of powers and have totally custom builds as you make your way through this game and the game has been supported i'm not like in the best possible way did you say obnoxious it's almost obnoxious how well they've supported post-launch because there's been like 30 updates 90 of which are free and they've just added a ton of content and accessibility features and and all sorts of amazing stuff to the game the latest expansion is called a return to castlevania it is a paid expansion and it basically is a full-on crossover with the castlevania franchise konami essentially handed over the reins to the

castlevania franchise to create a handful of areas inspired by castlevania so you've got like outside of dracula's castle inside of dracula's castle you've got some boss fights with death and dracula and medusa you've got like classic bone throwing skeletons and all sorts of stuff the entire castlevania soundtrack like 52 tracks from the history of castlevania you can now listen to in the entirety of dead cells you just change the soundtrack over to just castlevania music and they added a bunch of new outfits and costumes that you can customize your character with, a bunch of new items you can unlock. It's probably one of the best, like, you know, obviously there are a number of, like, IP crossovers that have happened. Fortnite has, like, a ton of them.

This is, like, the perfect example of how to do that right, where it all feels like a very earnest homage to the source material which helps because dead cells was obviously very inspired by castlevania to begin with so it feels like a really perfect combo and i was just like really blown away by it um yeah griffin did you play any at all i have yeah i um i did a handful of of runs once I sort of hit the Castlevania content. Which comes pretty quick for what it's worth. It does, it does, yeah. I played on Steam Deck, which I had not played Dead Cells on Steam before, so I was essentially starting from scratch, which is not advisable.

I feel like I was excited to do that because I was like, oh, man, I want to have this fresh experience. But, like, God, it is... It can be frustrating because there's abilities you just don't have. Yes. But yeah, I mean, it's, that game still feels really good to play. And playing it while, you know, vampire killers in the background is just about as good as it gets. Yeah.

Yeah. I honestly feel like the stuff you unlock from the Castlevania expansion has been like way overpowered compared to a lot of the other stuff. Maybe that's just sort of a recency bias thing, but like. No, I mean, I'm using like the vampire whip basically like heals you and sets the ground on fire and has insane range. Yeah. And you compare that to just like, oh, here's a sword.

It's pretty good. The throwing cross just like shreds enemies. Yeah, it's a great game. It is bewildering how much shit they've added. It's fun. I didn't play it since they added the Everyone Is Here expansion. Oh, that was the crossover with all the indie? That's the crossover with all the indie games.

And so, you know, you get this insane experience of running around and like trying to i'm trying to clear this level in two minutes and get 30 you know uh kills without getting hit so i can get all these bonus cells when i get is that a bench from fucking hollow knight you run up to and it's like here's the sword from hollow knight you just have that now yeah it's it is um it's really really something else man and i and i mentioned it a while ago, but just to reiterate, they added, I guess, assist features or accessibility features that allow you

to like really mess with the difficulty such that like I play on like a lot of those sliders near maxed to make it easier for myself so that I can basically play as an action game. Wait, is this different from the aspects thing that they've added? I don't know what aspects are. Okay, so they added like a thing

that you can activate before any run and they're like sort of super powered perks. Oh, yeah, that's different. And they keep you from unlocking new boss cells, which is kind of like the game's difficulty progression. The number of boss cells you have active at any time sort of adds to the difficulty and rewards that you can earn. So there is a balance to it.

Yeah, so this is different. This is all in the settings menu. You can basically, like, I'm going to say enemies will only do 20% damage to me, and I'll do 200% damage damage to enemies which sounds like it wouldn't be super fun for a lot you know if you're used to the hard game but it allows me who like doesn't really want to spend 60 hours becoming the perfect master of this game grind to play on higher boss cell difficulties so i'm getting more souls i'm unlocking stuff quicker which is

more fun for me and it just lets me like craft my experience so if you're like intimidated by these roguelites i think with those settings this is one of the most welcoming ones out there because it really lets you dominate with those this sounds ideal and like it fixes my biggest problem with these games yeah which is that it's not it doesn't feel skill-based it feels like well how much time do you want to invest in it and will slowly award you you know power to well i will say it is skill-based you know once you unlock everything the game is still obscenely hard on normal difficulty like it's just a very hard game. I think this removes the... That second layer. That layer of like, I need to memorize every attack

and every enemy in order to succeed, which I think is skill-based, but it's... Well, not just that, but like you need to unlock all of these different powers, ability powers effectively to even compete, even if you are great. That's true. Like that's the part that I... It's not bad.

I think for people, especially people who have lots of time and commit to one game, I think that's true like that's the part that i it's not bad i think for people especially people have lots of time and commit to one game i think that's great because it you know motivates you to keep playing but yeah for me like i do not want to put a hundred hours into just dead cells yeah um does it feel like dead cells 2 is like going to be a thing is this i think i think eventually it wouldn't surprise me if it happened but dead cells is essentially following the same model as games like terraria binding of isaac to some extent where they realize that by just releasing mostly free updates and an occasional paid update they will constantly increase their player base and just support that long term and continue

to make a crap load of money probably a lot more money than they would just like starting a new project totally from scratch i think it'll eventually happen but uh the i could see this game having like five more years of a life cycle which is wild that's wild playing what you've been playing uh i've been playing a game called patch quest have you heard about this griffin so i heard about it from chris plant oh cool earlier this week yeah so it's like um binding of isaac meets pokemon meets nobody saves the world with a little bit of Metroidvania, which is not the most useful way to talk about video games, but I think that's kind of the point.

Because it feels like what a 10-year-old would try to make if they were like, yeah, I could make a video game. Why not? I love all these things. That doesn't sound very good. I'll go and do this. Well, yeah, it's like I love all these different flavors. I'm going to somehow put them all together,

and it's just going to work, right? That's how video games work. They're only speaking in pop culture references. They have no clue how difficult it is to make a video game, and then they go out and they do it. But what's weird about Patch Quest is that it did work, and I don't know how, and I am just absolutely smitten with it so

the basic way that the game works is you go out into a the dungeon finding of isaac style you go from set room to set room fighting enemies that are these cute little animals it's like 2d cartoony animated and you have the ability to use um a hook like a lasso that spins around you to wrangle any animal in the video game and once you wrangle that animal you by going basically making a giant circle around them you mount the animal and then you can basically unlock uh abilities for those animals so you unlock a slug and it has like a special little bonus shooting mechanic that it does. Or you unlock, I don't know, a flying bear or whatever, and it has electricity that stuns all enemies. and tons and tons of different abilities and uh different animals for you to collect and you work your way through the dungeon going deeper and deeper as you you know learn more about all these animals and unlock other paladins i realize the profound hypocrisy of me not connecting with dead cells because here i am saying that i like this um i think the difference here for me with this though is and it's all in the presentation

there's like characters and animals and like new things to see rather than it being like the very blunt i can see powers being upgraded i don't know that if i had to guess that's what i would say is doing it um fun i'm watching a trailer for it now it looks uh it looks very bullet helly very bullet hell yeah it looks very bullet helly very bullet hell yeah so very very bullet helly especially as it goes on and on and on and then it starts just layering stuff on so any animal that you mount you can send back to your home base and they just kind of chill out there as you um collect xp you get this opportunity to turn any like object in the entire world into

a thing called a pin. You can send that pin back to your home base, which means you plant, say it's a tree or a statue. You just have it just hanging out in your home base. Then as the game goes even deeper, there are patches of the world that are missing, and you can drop those pins into those patches

and they add buffs. So if you drop a statue, maybe that gives you like uh makes your ammo extra powerful and maybe if you drop a pomegranate bush it gives you a special pomegranate ammo that is like explosive i didn't mention this but there's also fruit bushes everywhere and each fruit is like a different type of ammo. So you have like a shotgun or an explosion or giant bullets. It's just a lot. It's a ton of mechanical stuff going on,

and all of it really works for me. One other thing, and then I'm going to throw it to Frushchick because I know that he's going to dunk on it, and I think that's okay. I'm not going to dunk on it. You can dunk on it. It's okay. Go, go on it. It's okay. Go, go, go. It's a nice thing.

The last thing is the map is always the same, so it's not a, like, Spelunky-style roguelike. You actually are going deeper and deeper and deeper into the map and unlocking gates the further you go that make it easier to go deeper the longer you play and what i've enjoyed about it is it feels like the game is probably i don't know maybe 15 hours long is a guess with how far i'm in maybe shorter maybe more and it feels like i'm making like very very tangible progress every time i play and that there's like an end in sight uh which i like i

like that it that it feels like its own very self-contained little game it's like 15 bucks i think maybe like 18 when it's not on sale which again matches matches that kind of feeling of investment but fresh so here's the setup i was certain fresh was going to love this game like it felt to me i mean on paper fresh dick game oh on paper it is my kind of game and even in screenshots and video it looks like my kind of game um i played it i didn't hate it let me be clear but i would say that i play like a ton of these sorts of rogue lights and something of a pro i'm just a snob about this stuff so like so for me the game feel of this game was really what was holding it back for me like the the weapons shooting and the you know just moving around the world just felt very

insubstantial which a lot of that has to do with like the art style they've picked which i don't think is a bad art style but it by nature feels like you're just sort of like this piece of paper moving across another piece of paper and everything just feels a little like non-tactile it looks a little um scribble knots yeah yeah i would agree with that and i think it has that similar vibe as being like particularly tight mechanically yeah it just it doesn't feel very uh again tactile or grippy as it were yeah um i think a lot of people will probably gravitate to it just by like you know if they like the art style and they like collecting things that's great um i just wish that it

it just needed a little bit more like you know Nuclear Throne has like this definition of like screen shake that has been like used in other like 360 shooters to like add element of like you know game feel and I think it needs a little more attention on that front

but you know I think overall it's a pretty good game um we gonna take a break maybe? yeah let's come back and talk about some more stuff on that front, but, you know, I think overall it's a pretty good game. We gonna take a break, maybe? Yeah, let's come back and talk about some more stuff. I wanna talk about this new game that everyone's really excited about. Oh, yeah? It's called Sea of Thieves

from the Rare Corporation. And when did Sea of Thieves come out? 1991. Okay. 1975. It is actually almost to the day five years old at this point. Oh, really?

Yeah. That's something. So we started streaming this game a couple months ago for like we do like a Monday gaming stream, me and Justin and Travis. And picked it up and played it some. And I was impressed because they've added like a lot of stuff. I played the game at launch and then didn't because it didn't really they didn't have enough stuff to sort of hold my attention.

And so just sort of casually streaming it, I was like, oh, this is cool. They've added a lot of stuff, but it's still a little bit opaque, it's still a little bit hard to really dive in there. And then I started playing with people who were actually good at the game. I started playing with the crew over at Dead Meat,

which is a great YouTube channel about horror movies, James and Chelsea and one of their friends. And we just started, we hopped on a galleon and we just started pirating. And that is a game that is really special and really cool and it does stuff that i don't think any other game really does and you absolutely need an experienced player to show you how to do it because otherwise there's it's it is uh impenetrable not just impenetrable i think you can actually enjoy sea of Thieves. Like I will, you know, hop in there solo sometimes just to run a quick mission or do one of like the wild story things. I just dove into the Pirates of the Caribbean like quests that you can do, which are very neat if you have any affinity for that for that franchise at all.

for that uh for that franchise at all uh but like the really high level stuff including basically all player versus player combat you really need somebody to show you the ropes or else especially literally in this case yes exactly you need somebody to show you which what the ropes do um if you don't have that then the first first time an enemy ship controlled by other people rolls up on you, you're just going to get flat. And do you think that's just because anyone who's still playing the game is, by their nature, a hardcore seaman? Is a hardcore player. I will say this. The game has a pretty cool community. And I have had lots of run-ins with other ships that could very easily have destroyed me and taken the meager scraps of

treasure that i had earned along the way but uh pretty much invariably they've been pretty cool about it and pretty helpful i think this is uh one of those delightful games where the community actually wants more people to be playing the game sure um. That may be an overgeneralization. But just playing with the dead meat folks and going in for like a two or three hour session of just like sailing and collecting just dozens and dozens and dozens of treasure chests and getting attacked by enemy players and like actually winning in a fight it is some

of the most like thrilling video game stuff that i've done in in forever yeah i mean even when the game launched i like felt that thrill of it of like doing a multiplayer like fight and you're like you know the boat's sinking you're trying to bail the boat out and you're trying to repair stuff. And so like, I don't know how much it's that stuff has evolved or is it really just like, because they've played so much,

they like know the ins and outs of it. Yeah, no, there's a pretty high skill ceiling to the, to the game. So players who know what they're doing are going to be players who don't, no matter like what the loadout is or whatever if you haven't played sea of thieves there is virtually zero like um mechanical progression advantage yeah there's no levels or anything like that

right everything is either like completely aesthetic or it is like resource based and you can just like find those resources out out in the world it's not like oh well my ship cannons are level five so they're gonna you know some more like knowledge based of like more knowledge playing so long that you know how to get to all these different places uh yeah it's like less about that and more about like you know what it sounds like when an enemy player is like climbing your ship ladder to board your ship from the water. You know that if you see, if you're in the middle of the ocean and you see a like merfolk person swimming, that's like the system that you use to get back to your ship if you fall off. So if you see one of those in the middle of the ocean, you can just assume there's an enemy player nearby who's trying to board your ship.

That's so funny. Right? So there's like a lot of stuff like that that is not that you only learn by playing the game lots and lots and lots and unfortunately i don't think that that is a particular a particularly like attractive like proposal if you are doing it alone because it's not it's it's it is not fun to go out and find a bunch of treasure and then just get obliterated instantly. Is there a way to play if you wanted to just play in a server where everyone is solo? Is that even an option?

No. No, I don't think so. You have very little control over that. And that's by design, right? There's a big conversation pretty much constantly in the community, from what I can tell tell of there being a sect of people who want like non-pvp servers yeah because it is demoralizing to go and find a bunch of chess and then like lose lose all that progress yeah they've made this like pretty incredible pirate simulator and granted pirates do fight each other yeah but pvp is like another vibe entirely from just like

exploring an ocean and for sure collecting treasure and like the rest of the game like you can learn some like canny ways of uh avoiding enemy ships right uh i i sail i so i bought a ship that's another big thing that they've added is uh captaincy and once you've saved up like a pretty good chunk of change uh that maybe if you link up with a team of skilled experienced cfds players you could actually probably i mean i knocked it out in like two sessions um but once you own your own ship you all of a sudden like uh your resources that you have aboard the ship like cannonballs and food and all that stuff become like permanent yeah um and you can unlock all of these titles and uh like visual upgrades for your ship

and uh all of these different uh all these different things that sort of make it a more streamlined process oh instead of having to like disembark your ship and then run the treasures to the various factions that they have to be sold to once you own your own ship there's one dealer that you have to deal with from that point on, which makes the whole loop of the game a whole lot easier to get behind. There's so much cool shit in this game. And when it works and you are in it and you are in a furious battle with an enemy ship, there's all of these really satisfying things. there's all of these really satisfying things. This is telling.

I had never gotten in a successful ship fight to a degree where I was launching cannons into their ship and putting in a bunch of damage. But when you do, it plays this violin stinger every time you get a hit that increases in pitch as you go. Fights in that game can be like some of the most entertaining like uh pvp encounters that i've maybe ever had but i think that the stars really have to align for you if if you are coming at the game fresh um so yeah that's that's cf these i i you know it's funny we talked about there needing to be a Dead Cells 2. I feel like if there was like a Sea of Thieves 2, where maybe there was some, uh, maybe a little bit more stuff to do in the game, uh, specifically as a solo player, uh, and people were starting from a more sort of even footing experience-wise, it would be a different story.

But if you can find some people to play with, and I think that the Sea of Thieves community would be more than willing to let people in on that, it is exceptional. And there's always Skull and Bones from Ubisoft. There's always Skull and Bones from Ubisoft if you want to go a different route with it, for sure. Thank you, Russ.

Do you think this is a problem for much, much, much younger people? Like teenagers who know how to use subreddits and Discord to find people to play with? No, I don't think it'll be hard for them at all.

And there is matchmaking in the game, right? you can hop into a server and you know just join a join a crew um i think the game really soars when you have like a you know a few people that you actually know and you are on a captained ship uh and sort of like living out that fantasy um yeah i think it takes some work but i think that it's it is a very very cool game i think that a new season is about to launch uh which as far as i can tell doesn't change the game in any sort of huge transformative ways but you know there'll probably be a groundswell of people playing so now's the time now is the time i bought a ship

and i called it goku because it's the coolest name that there is. And so now when enemy players see my fearsome little fucking tugboat sailing at them with the sails incorrectly placed and they look at me through their little telescope, it just says Goku on it. When you're like blasting across the ocean, would you say it's going super surfing? Yeah, that's...

What is next? What is next? So the mailbag is next. A bunch of people have some other recommendations of stuff that we have not talked about as much. One, everybody recommends Pizza Tower, which I think we've talked about a little bit. I think we might have talked about it on Rest's the wario land looking yeah it plays it plays like wario land a wild ass art style yeah yeah if you if you haven't heard about it uh go to polygon's youtube page because there's a great video by pat gill on on this game i was going to compare it to the art style in liquid television

but i feel like that is not so fucking dating. Anyone would, yeah. I would say it's kind of MS Paint-esque. Yeah. That's fine. Okay, so this one is from Luke. Did any of you give Chain to Echoes a solid play? One of the best RPGs I've played in years.

Do you want to say something? I didn't play a ton of it. Do you want to say something? I didn't play a ton of it. I picked it up when I was in the middle of my Dragon Quest education. And so I had a real hankering for RPGs. But to be completely frank, I burned myself out so fucking hard, unsurprisingly, by playing all the Dragon Quest games in a row. But, yeah, it's really neat.

It's really polished. It's like a kind of mecha JRPG. Oh, like, which Final Fantasy was that? 4, I think? Had, like, mechs in it? 6 had mechs in it. I mean, Xenogears would be the more sort of like direct parallel. And it is presented, it looks a lot like Chrono Trigger.

Yeah, I was gonna say. Which is real good for me. That works. There's really cool sort of ways of building the characters and sort of choosing which skills that you unlock. And then in battle, there is this mechanic where by using different types of skills, you sort of have this heat meter that you need to keep in like a specific range. And if you keep it in a specific range, then like your attacks do more damage and they cost less skill points to use. But sometimes like you'll need to use a skill that's going to bump you out of that range.

So it adds a layer of strategy on top of it that is really interesting. Yeah, this Chained Echoes is one that I am really excited to return to once I have a bit more of an appetite and also time for it. But I think all the hype for that game is pretty well earned. To finish the point that Luke was making, I thought was interesting. He said, truly in so many places, you can tell that they asked, but is this fun when working with trappings of classic RPGs

and made the fun choice? Yeah. Yeah, that's great. I think people frequently are like, well, that's how they did it in whatever, Castle castlevania 2 so we got to do it that way it has to be miserable now yeah i i didn't reach this point but i know you get to a point where like you have these mech suits for your characters and you can just fucking fly over the over the map instead of having to very sort of slowly trudge from point a to point b you just hop in your robot and fly incredibly quickly that's uh which sounds really that's great uh

this is uh from elden lord t-mac didn't you guys didn't hear you guys mention it much but i absolutely loved crisis core final fantasy 7 reunion the remake of crisis core from the psp the upgrade from the psp to ps5 was immense it was such a fun experience and the combat was heavily improved absolutely loved it and loved zach fair i uh i adore final fantasy 7 yeah it's one of my favorite games of all time but crisis core was so fucking bad and it seems like you can remaster that i i am i wrong i've heard great things and went to be like a like a thief in the night i did not know they were remaking crisis core until like a month before the game was out and then it came out without me knowing it and i i am shocked if is

if it's good a 78 on Metacritic.com. That's not terrible. Does it still have the wild materia slot machine system? I have no idea. You're asking the wrong thing. That was the main mechanic of Crisis Core, is that there was this slot machine that was going. And I think you could change what was on the slot machine

based on what materia you had equipped. but it was so clunky and bad. And so maybe they fully removed that. Maybe not. I don't know. This one comes from Into the Aether host and Crisis Core mega fan Stephen Hilger. I'm still early in the game, but 8-Bit Adventures 2 is a really fun take on classic Final Fantasy. I think it might be getting eclipsed by Octopath 2 and Chained Echoes, but I think all three games prove there's more to explore with retro RPG game design than just pure nostalgia. 8-Bit Adventures 2, yeah, I looked it up on Steam. It really does artistically extremely look like the NES-era Final Fantasy games.

Griffin, did you end up playing Octopath 2? This looks like Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, this 8-bit adventures 2 that I'm looking at right now. Did I play Octopath 2? No. People seem to really like it. Yeah, I feel like maybe that'll be something we can revisit in the slow period this year,

which is never. And maybe you guys could play it. I love how these games look. The Octopath games, Bravely, Default, I feel like kind of has that vibe. I've played all of those. Octopath 1, I was so excited for, but the structure of that game

of just like eight inherently, completely disconnected stories kept me from really like... I think eventually they come together. I think you should give it a try. Yeah, everybody that I know who was in that exact same boat is goo-goo-ga-ga for Octopath 2.

The problem I have is the one person who is like so rah-rah about it is Jason Schreier of the Triple Click podcast and I just can't trust his taste. The person that we just quoted Stephen Hilgren and they are like I think it's probably his

game of the year it seems like. Wow. I've listened to a few different people who are really into it. Last one, and I extremely support this one, and we think we briefly touched on it on Rusty's, and hopefully we'll talk about it again later. This one is from Punished Joe. Paranormosite. By God, give a look to Paranormosite.

It's on iOS now. I thought about it. It's on iOS. I would thought about it. It's on iOS. I would definitely play it on your iPhone, or if you have a smaller iPad or a smaller Android tablet, play there. I tried to play it on iPad, like full normal-sized iPad. I was really looking forward to it, and I hopefully update it because the resolution is horrible.

Oh, no. It looks ugly on a normal iPad, which is such a disappointment because it feels built for touchscreen. That said, if you like really cool, weird, visual novel mystery games,

I think you should definitely check this out. And also just basically Google its history um the the main creative behind this game has a long history of making mobile games in japan that like never got released in the u.s but are these like massively popular mystery games and this is the first one i believe to really get a u.s release um so i'm hoping that one this does well and two that that means some of those old games get translated over here um

because wow it's yeah it's it's pretty fantastic also again i think it's like 15 bucks like we're living in a golden age of of much cheaper games at 8-bit adventures 2 1999 all right love it um any any honorable mentions that's what the whole episode's been it'd be fucking wild if we were hold keeping an arrow and i've got i've got one uh i would like to call out the resident evil 4 remake demo which is available on basically all platforms now um the demo is a is a remake of the original demo for resident evil 4 insofar as it basically lets you play through the kind of famous slash infamous um village survival sequence at the very beginning of resident evil 4 you mean the worst fucking part of the game? Do you really think that it's the worst part of the game?

Do I think that the beginning sequence of Resident Evil 4 is the worst part of the game? Yeah. Yeah, clearly. I think that is actually not the general opinion anymore. I think it is a it is unquestionably the hardest part of the game, but I think it's one of the best

parts of that game and certainly one of the most memorable parts of that that's interesting yeah i think maybe just i'm coming at it from a different perspective because i don't think it's fun to have a billion zombies swarm at you when you have uh fucking nothing it's realistic oh it's realistic okay that's yeah that's really what would happen if you were in a european city and zombies were swarming at you it's definitely not uh my favorite part of the game is definitely not when you're shooting at zombie napoleon with a fucking huge pistol that fires rockets that's not fun that's video games sounds like you're a resident evil 5 guy to me

is what five and six are where it's at for me baby uh okay so for those that do appreciate it or are just curious about it i mean the demo is is free obviously and it gives you a look at um how much they've improved the visuals which is pretty stunning you can also get a feel for the controls i know plant bounced off the original resident evil 4 because you couldn't move and shoot at the same time you can do that in the remake don't worry um i was playing through it and you know as, as Griffin was sort of describing, you do get swarmed pretty intensely and a chainsaw guy shows up and you're like scrambling to stay alive. I tried to survive that chainsaw guy by running away. I ran into a barn. There was a cow in the barn, like a normal cow, not like a zombie cow.

cow in the barn like a normal cow not like a zombie cow i guess one of the zombies threw like a knife and hit a um a lantern above the cow the lantern drops the floor the cow ignites in flame and starts running through the zombies like crazy and it was one of the most amazing moments in video games the last like five years for me uh it's on my i captured it on twitter if you want to see it but uh yeah i mean here's what i'll say i'm playing the full version of resident four i can't talk about it yet but i can talk about what's in the demo i think the demo is sick but uh as griffin alluded to uh obviously there's a lot more progression and character advancement stuff in the main game so in a couple weeks when we're allowed to talk about it, we will have a full episode about Resident Evil 4 Remake. But for now, play the demo. It's great.

I can't wait. Chris, you want to try and summarize all the games we talked about? Wait, Plant has an honorable mention, which I'm like half cringing about, but we'll see how it goes. No, I went and saw Cloud Atlas the other night and it's still a good movie problematic yeah i was gonna

say that that's the only reason i was cringing yeah i mean i think everybody knows that part of it but i will also say like the movie for all of its problems is made by the wachowski's sisters coming from a deep place of uh universal warmth and beauty and hope for all of humanity. And I think that's what really stuck out with me this viewing. Also, the book, if any of y'all have not read David Mitchell, you should. I think really anybody who is listening to the show would love his books. And that stuff like Cloud Atlas, but but also black swan green or bone clocks or thousand autumns of jacob dezoa which i think i've talked about on the show anyway it's all good

stuff uh to recap what we talked about i didn't i forgot that we talk about things that aren't games on this show sometimes yeah go ahead there's a new netflix reality show that i like yeah for the called run for the money run and um? And it's a Japanese game show. Yeah. That takes place in this theme park in, I want to say like Nagasaki, that is meant to look like Bruges, essentially. And so it's this huge theme park and they have like 30 japanese celebrities like a mix of comedians and athletes and you know uh anyone you recognized musicians yeah so there's this show

called documental that i maybe have talked about on the show before that is like uh they put 10 comedians in a room together and if you laugh you are kicked out uh and it's very fucking funny it's on amazon i think and i have seen five or six people from there that um that that are on this show uh also a couple people that guest hosted terrace house were have been on it too um and the premise is that these 30 celebrities are set loose in this theme park, and then they release, like, 10 hunters who wear these sunglasses and black masks, and they just chase them. And the longer that you stay alive, the higher the prize pot gets. What are they doing? Do they, like, shoot them with something?

No, it's just tag. Oh. But there are rules about they can't run if they don't see a player. Oh, the hunters can't run. The hunters can't run. Got it. But then they add challenges.

They took drones and put letters on them and you had to find the drones by running around and put together what the word is that it spells. And then they introduce a trader mechanic where two players can tattle on other players to earn money for themselves and so all of a sudden all the players stop trusting each other and the whole thing is presented in this like just delightful over-the-top fashion uh it's it's it's it's really it's been really fun hey griffin can you uh can you check your Slack for me really quick? Oh, sure.

What am I looking at here? Here's a picture of my shirtless brother. Oh, yeah. So Run for the Money is an adaptation of a game show that has been on in Japan since 2008 called Run for Money Tosuchu. I probably did not do a very good job of saying that, but yeah.

It's one of the, like many, many Netflix sort of Japanese imports. It's been going on for a while. You left out the best part. Oh, and there is a Nintendo 3DS game called Run for Money. Oh, is it any good it it looks like it like no it looks like you play as like your wii character yeah um uh yeah i don't know about that yeah yeah it's a fun trailer worked for wii sports That is so true. Shall I recap everything?

Okay, what all did we talk about today? Today, we talked about Patch Quest, Destiny 2, Sea of Thieves, Dead Cells Castlevania. We also had recommendations of Pizza Tower, Chained Echoes, Final Fantasy VII Reunion Crisis Core, 8-Bit Adventures 2, Paranorma Sight, Cloud Atlas, Resident Evil 4 Demo, and Run for the Money

now on Netflix. Thank you so much for listening. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews to the besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to Brago Stinklord, long to the besties on apple podcasts thank you to brego stink lord long friend of the show also thank you to the stuff is good and popo nino thank you for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcasts and thank you to everyone else with certain views or talked about the show or been excellent in any way yeah uh we will be back next week with another episode. What are we talking about next week? I think we're doing Metal Gear Solid 2 next week.

Oh my God. Here we go. This is it, man. This is the big one for me. Is it? I cannot wait to play this fucking game again. What's the best, what's the good version? If we do want to really do this book club thing,

what's the right version for people to play? Can we even make that decision now before we have... I don't know. There's a modded version on PC that I think fixes the camera. Like it puts it behind your back. What's wrong with the camera? The camera's great. The camera's great. I've heard no complaints about the camera? The camera's great. The camera's great.

I've heard no complaints about the camera. Okay. In any of these games. Okay, so that'll be next week. So join us again for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games? Besties!