The Besties - Death Stranding

Episode Date: December 6, 2019

Who likes walking? Justin likes walking! Hideo Kojima's long-awaited walking epic captures Justin's heart, but will the other Besties be as charmed? Also: What other games would be well-served by entering the "Strand" genre? Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I'm worried about Death Stranding. It's a bold new vision, a great new genre, but I'm worried it's going to flop because it doesn't have a good tagline. Only tagline so far is it's the world's first Strand game, and as we all know, that doesn't fucking mean anything. So I'm going to float this one by you guys, and you let me know if this is going to move the product,

but you're going to have a whale of a time because this one has bad whales in it. Are they bad? I don't know. They're covered in oil. They seem like they need help. Some of the worst whales. Here's a list of a time because this one has bad whales in it. Are they bad? They just, I don't know. They're covered in oil. They seem like they need help. Some of the worst whales. Here's a list of bad video game whales.

Obviously, top of the list, that's Sonic the Hedgehog for Dreamcast 1, a real day job. Yeah, he was a jerk. I think we can all agree. Then we have these inky nightmare whales. You're in for a good time. That's good.

Good. Yeah, because there's a lot of pee-pee. This time, Normanedus is pissed off and he's pissing on the bad whales i'd buy that game My name is Justin McElroy, and I'm Norman Reedus. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I've seen an uncomfortable bout of nude Norman Reedus this month. My name is Chris Plant, and when I die, my body will explode and destroy half of civilization. My name is Russ Froschek, and I am brought to you by Monster Energy Drink. Welcome back to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home video gaming, if I may.

If I may be so bold. We are here to talk about the latest gift from Kojima, if I may. On behalf of me and all the other fans, he's graced us once again with a new gift. It's Death Stranding. This may be the first episode in our sort of reboot here. So you may be wondering, are all the episodes that we have from here on out,

is it like a big part of the 2.0 besties ethos talking about Norman Reedus' poopy and peepee and blood and all that stuff? The answer is a strong yes. The answer is yes. So Pokemon, I'm gonna find a way to talk about Norman Reedus' poopoo bombs in there. Hey guys, I've been looking forward to this one.

Have you? Yeah, this was a wild video gaming experience for me, the likes of which I have not had in my life. And this was such a gift. Thank you, Kojima, for this. Griffin, since you've been looking forward to this, I'm going to offer you the very, very special opportunity of trying to summarize what this game is in under 20 seconds.

Death Stranding is Metal gear with not as good did you hey let me start over i want my seconds back hey everybody did you play metal gear solid 5 the phantom pain yes you have a good did you have a good time what if there were what if there were ghosts that could make you stop for a while and also all your guns were heavy and real and also there was a baby crying which is cool when you have an actual child and uh norman reed said i had i mentioned the poopy poopy bombs uh so that's good you throw those at ghosts let me start over i can do even better than that wow even better than that it doesn't seem possible instead of big robots that are maybe actually uh hive mind controlling the government,

what if they were ghosts that you had to throw your piss at? That's dead stranding. What's impressive is you did not mention that also your mother slash maybe daughter slash aunt cousin is the president of the United States. You're your own grandpa and you have special blood. Man, this is a good game wow so it's a very good video game and that's the important thing and i think how far are we gonna go in terms of talking about the story can i can i explain what people uh the name like what that even means yeah i yeah i've played 20 hours of it

and I would love to hear this. So the Death Stranding, this took me a while and I had to write the review for Polygon and that like just narrowing this down into like a parsable format took a good three hours. So appreciate it, if you will. Okay, so there was an event called the Death Stranding. What that was is ghosts showed up.

The ghosts killed someone. that person turned into a ghost and then exploded at the same time that explosion caused other ghosts to show up they killed other people and caused even more people to show up and everyone exploded and became ghosts it was dope yeah. Yeah, it was pretty dope. It was dope stuff. I'll say this about, well, just to clarify, when you say explosion, give us an idea of the scale. Okay, so according to the game, and you can actually witness this in the game if you want to,

the explosion is like probably like three acres, I want to say. It's like a good-sized sized explosion it's not a nuke it's not like a huge nuke it's like a city block is what i would describe it as okay the size of the explosion it doesn't it's not especially relevant we have not i mean it was the people caught by the ghosts if i'm asking yeah they didn't enjoy it they cared wow wow griffin it's supposed to griffin it's post-apocalypse ghost the ghost world blended into our world it was very bad and now you're norman reedus and you have to uh carry packages from city to city and bring the whole country back together uh and that's why it's a strand game is because in this

one it's not about hurting people, although you definitely do that. Yeah, you do. It's about bringing us all back together. It's a strand game, so you carry packages from place to place in this post-apocalyptic America. Okay, so Griffin, you did a great job with your five shots at trying to describe the game in 20 seconds. Justin, I know that you've been enjoying the game.

Maybe you can describe what you actually do in this game right well griffin kind of alluded to it but the the main thrust of it is you are the the game if you want to know the i listened to a lot of podcasts about this game before i played it and i still could not make heads or tails of it so i'm going to give you my best the it is a game about traversing terrain that is what the game is at its core about pretty much everything is in service of that um that means one managing your cargo you're taking cargo from place to place uh giving people what they need and trying to deliver it safely. And the second big component of that is the terrain itself, by which I mean you're bringing ladders, you're bringing climbing ropes, stuff like that to help you get across difficult terrain. And eventually as you get vehicles, we're talking

like bridges, generators to keep those vehicles charged, whatever. sort of the what i think is one of the cooler hooks is as you build things in the environment those items can show up in other players worlds and vice versa and uh you can leave likes for that equipment uh and so can they which uh is a sort of currency it's like experience you can spend it but it's it's like experience points basically yeah that help you um advance in the game uh i want to mention one thing because you mentioned like you can build stuff in the other worlds and it shows up one of the coolest things that i didn't realize until i was like 30 hours in is it's not only stuff that you build that shows up in other people's games it's places you go so if you end up walking down the same same set of rocks for a long period of time, that set of rocks will get worn down into an actual path that other people can follow.

So even if you're not trying to make stuff to appear in other people's worlds, it does. It's like there's a level of technical achievement in this game that is staggering and super impressive. I mentioned the ghosts that show up, the the beached things the bts um and there are sequences in the game where you have your little baby and he's got a little robot arm that will like look at the ghosts and that's really your main way of knowing where they are so there are sequences where you have to sneak sneak past them using the cues from your baby's robot arm. God, this game kicks ass. Before. But if you get caught, then this big monster whale shows up.

And every time that happens, and let me say also, I hate this and it's annoying and it sucks, but every time it happens, the world kind of like terraforms around you in a way that is like technologically super impressive. And if you die to one of these things and one of those explosions the the the three acre explosions that russ talked about happens that stays there like that stays in the world and the next time you come through there's a big smoking crater in the ground that is like that that that level of uh permanence to the things that happen in the game and the level of sort of like um the the shifting sands

of whatever environment you're walking on like i don't know how they did that that's really really really cool yeah i was gonna say before we go uh into the story because i i know we're gonna get there i i do want to point out i already explained it there was exploding ghosts like let's say the end of it and and uh i don't know the moral fiber of the the game i i i think this game's best comparison is uh demon souls not not the dark souls comparison uh and it's like positive demon souls and by that i mean the the joy of demon souls for people who don't know much about it it was the game that preceded dark souls uh it is this uh role-playing game where you go through the environment similar to a dark souls game uh but there are little uh ghost figures are

opportunities to bring in people from uh other games or for them to leave messages that help you or hinder you but mostly hinder you because people are trolls um and you you people had to kind of go out of their way to decide to do that what i like about this game is kojima figured out a way for it just to be positive and for uh for it to be out of the player's hands in many ways like what fresh is describing with carving out your own path so whether you intend to or not, you will help people. And I think that ultimately incentivizes you to participate willingly in doing good and not just being a troll, which is kind of an astonishing accomplishment in the world of video games. But just really quick, one problem similar to Demon's Souls, boy, does it feel like a rough draft. Wow, does it not explain

any of this to you at all? And it feels like an idea that will be much better used in whether it's a sequel to this game or another game franchise down the line. I actually don't agree. I don't think the game itself feels like a rough... I mean,

the story, don't get me wrong, absolutely 100%, and maybe that's what you're talking about the story's not a draft the story's not the story's not a draft because the draft has some sort of coherence that can be built upon later it's not it is a no it is a kojima final printed draft like it is not a draft of for a kojima let me talk about the gameplay real quick and then and then we could rag on the story which is pretty yes yeah uh i think the gameplay is like the most cohesive idea that he's ever done whether that's it's the most fun idea he's ever done is another story entirely

but i think it is just like as a full vision it is like it feels every bit like a b and c like every component of it was like really thought out and and's right like it is extremely extremely hard to troll in this game there was one instance i will say some guy very smartly and obnoxiously perpendicularly parked a truck on my highway to the point where there was no way to get through on my bike and i tried ramming it and the physics freaked out and i flew into the sky so that was the only instance but otherwise i think it's brilliant wait wait wait i just want to highlight what you said the physics freaked out and i flew into the sky rough draft um rough draft because the shooting is bad rough draft because you get on a motorcycle and then you have to climb over rocks and you spend 30 minutes

i mean you're not supposed to drive a motorcycle on rocks. It's supposed to be bad. What I'm saying is, no, I agree. I think from a pure, pure design point of view, you're, like, spot on. I think this is his most cohesive game by a long shot. But I'm talking about, like, literally the nitty-gritty basics of things feeling correct. Yeah, that's my big my big like this is a game about there is strategy in how you pack things on your back everything is physical everything

exists right so if you have a ladder you got to find a place to carry it and you get like exoskeleton suits that unlocks like more carry weight and different ways to handle it but if you overload one side of yourself you know it throws off your running uh and you a big part of this game is using the triggers to kind of like counter your weight and lean left when you're going right and so on and so forth you can also just squeeze both triggers to like i don't know clinch norman reedus's butt cheeks or whatever and then he doesn't clear basically like if you're having a hard time you can just squeeze his butt cheeks and just be fine as long as his butt cheeks meter doesn't run out and then i guess his monster energy then you drink a monster energy to refill his butt cheeks meter it makes perfect

sense so that's it right that's the main thrust of the game is is this very physical idea of being a courier who everything in the game exists and you have to be like very very thoughtful about that not overloading yourself uh but still like trying to take risks and making big deliveries when you can big salvage runs when you can the problem is that the the physics model the physics engine for this game is like it's garbage it is super super bad and i was trying to think of a way to like crystallize my thoughts on this uh one of the things that your baby robot arm can do is sort of shoot out like a echolocation wave that will in the same way that like um uh you know ski trails are sort of measured by danger uh or or by difficulty it will do that for just the

ground around you right so it'll show like uh i forget the exact things but like a red x on a surface if it's uh dangerous or slippery or you have a good chance of losing your footing or a yellow triangle if it's like kind of tricky so you got to be very thoughtful when you go through that uh it feels so it does not feel physical to just walk around this world it feels completely mechanical which is to say like when you walk over like a rocky patch it doesn't feel like your feet are slipping in between the cracks of these rocks it feels like the game is saying like well you have this much weight on your back and you're walking on the cracky rocks so now you're gonna do the slipping and falling animation it never feels like that right it never feels that's interesting i did not i totally disagree i i do a decent amount of hiking when the weather is nice and this felt like the most

authentic like actual legit hiking game i've ever played in like the way that they have turned that into a game mechanic makes sense but it's not a physical interaction and i think like if you need any evidence of that just try and climb up a mountain because you can kind of do it sky yeah that's true like you can kind of just like put point your body diagonally at a mountain and keep pressing x and you will go up it like and it shows like there is there are no laws of physics in this game and it's a game about that is how i climb these physical interactions to be fair it's i just this is like the least i mean there's so much more going on here though than like i don't want to discredit it but i just don't think it takes away from or at least it didn't for me i mean

the game for me once i bought into it was much more about the macro of, well, let's see. I know I'm headed down south to drop something off there. Maybe I should pick up a couple more deliveries to make on the way. And if I do that, then I'm going to need the truck. And if I take the truck, I'm going to go ahead and take, they're called pccs things you use to generate larger items in the world so i'm going to bring a couple of those to make bridges because the truck doesn't do great with like big you know real rocky terrain

so if i need to cross any of that i don't need some metal to complete the bridge and like i i just found that process like weirdly sort of satisfying in a way that like it tickled a part of my brain that like games don't normally when youvers that you can feed resources into and will create a long stretch of road, which doesn't seem like a big deal to hear me say that. But it's like an amazing godsend when there's like terrible territory right around an area that you need to get to regularly. It's like a huge time saver. And it addresses what Plant was talking about. We're like, you can't, you really shouldn't and can't drive a motorcycle over a bunch of rocks and that's you know the roads element sort of addresses like okay now you have a very fast way to travel around the world in a vehicle so it's like tied in because you're the items in

the world are so tactile and the the like everything in the world has a literal weight um it create it for me it create a real real buy in with the world where like I was, I had so many moments where I would like fill up my truck and I'm ready to go make all these deliveries. And then I hit like it starts raining. And when it starts raining, that means that the ghosts are there and ghosts can like grab your truck and throw you out of it and sink your truck and just make things terrible. So it's like you are really in this scenario where it's like, God, I've been planning this run for 10 minutes.

I can't, you know what? I'm just going to floor it and hope to God I don't hit any ghosts. And it that's, it's thrilling. And when you, and then inevitably you do hit a ghost and then it's like, well,

shit. Okay. I guess I'm going to fight this squid to try to get back my truck. I don't know. I, I, at first I was very annoyed by it because i wanted it to be and i think it's very natural to like just want it to be like other games like to want it to be like anything else but once i sort of understood what the where the challenge was like i've never died i've been playing for 20 hours like i've never had like a game over or a death screen

everything is just like annoyance and frustration and like things getting messed up and not going the way i want them to and having to like come up with a new plan on the fly and that's really cool i i have a quick recommendation for a lot of our listeners i think think, who might not or probably won't play this game, which is just watch it. Like, this is a great, great, I mean, just the prime cut type of video game to watch people play. One, because if you just literally flip through YouTube, you will find people doing truly bizarre things in the game. The other, you watch a stream you're i mean it's it's batshit what happens in this game from a pure moment to moment level um and the boring parts it's great to have somebody who is streaming it and can talk over them and keep you entertained it is yeah

supremely watchable and uh the things that are frustrating about it like getting the controls right they disappear if you're watching somebody who's just very good at video games. In like three minutes, if we can talk story just for a second, I genuinely was super down with the concept. I feel like this game actually, a lot of people say that this game is like a slow starter. I think it opens super fucking strong. fucking strong there is a cut scene at the beginning of this game that establishes the stakes and the rules of this world that i think is one of the best things kojima's like ever ever ever done where basically you're going on a mission learning about this world and learning about the stakes of this mission and shit goes so wrong and it is so terrifying and so cool

um i was like fully fully bought in but the momentum of the game it's separated into chapters and like the first two chapters will take you no time to finish well if you momentum of the game it's separated into chapters and like the first two chapters will take you no time to finish well and then the game doesn't really tell you that it will you could spend 20 hours in the first two chapters if you wanted to okay I may be missing here's a hot pro tip get out of chapter two

yeah this is from I heard that from a lot of people and I was so glad I did because there's a moment at the end of chapter two where they're like hey you should finish up all your side stuff. Don't fucking don't do that. There's no you have you. There are things that will make life easier. The further into this you progress.

But please don't stop. But I also felt like the further into it you progress, the more it was like, I don't care that the character's named Die Hardman. Right. Like, that doesn't bother me. I'm I'm down with that. Right. Like Kojima. I'm down to clown

with like this this big kojima energy that you put down as soon as you start making me try to care about a character named fragile who keeps talking about how she's not that fragile you won't i'm not gonna go with you there because that's dumb and it's stupid and it's not good but like if you finish the game i swear to god if you're about to play... You will be ashamed of your words and deeds. She eats so many magic bugs. Why are you doing this? I'm down with it.

I'm down with the weirdness, and I always have been. I genuinely love that shit. I'm not saying the story lost me because it's nonsensical. I'm saying it's that as soon soon it was like trying to make me take it seriously in a way that i'm not willing to meet these games halfway on like yeah i was again it will be the story is so much better when somebody makes a five minute summary of all of the wackiness and you watch it in one fell swoop versus waiting for five hours at the beginning and another 10 hours at the end can i just just talk about the first, just to give people a sampling, can I talk about the first,

like what happens with your family in the first like hour? Can I just to like, is that okay? That's pretty early, right? Okay. So if you don't want to hear this, you know, skip ahead two minutes. So your mom's a president. President mommy. And she, president mommy calls you to her office and says, listen i really need my boy here my son i need my boy and you're like all right president mom i'm on my way you show up president mom's like actually i'm dying and i'm so sorry about that can you take my body to the incinerator super quick no problem okay take your mommy's body the incinerator you get back there's your mommy is back it's not your mommy it is the same actress bionic woman's lindsey wagner but it's not your

mommy not your sister it's not the mommy it's your sister who looks like a younger mommy but she's a hologram because she's on she's a president now except we're not telling anybody i guess it's very that's not unclear your mom's still in all like the propaganda or whatever. Your mom wanted to reunite America and you're carrying on her dream and also trying to rescue your sister, I guess. I'm down with all that. It's as soon as you're like,

but let's get into this relationship between you and your sister. And what makes that tick? No, I just want president mom, sister. Like that's where I'm, that's what I want from you. No deeper, this far, no further. A little too close. A little bit too close for brother and sister is what I want from you. No deeper. They're also a little bit, a little too close. A little bit too close

for brother and sister is what I'm saying. Okay. Well, that's its own kettle of fish. You'll be ashamed of your words. I beat it. I know. They're still a little too close.

So eight out of 10 stars. Eight out of 10. I think we can all agree on this one that it is eight out of 10 stars. I can't be done talking about Death Stranding. Can we talk about combat? We will have so much time to talk about death stranding during our game of the year conversation because i have no doubt it is just so everybody especially people who are new to this show know justin is what i like to call a fan of the busted puppies uh the puppies

that are at the bottom of the litter box uh and death stranding is they're in the bottom of the litter box that's how busted they are is somebody put them in a litter box at the bottom of it and justin still loves that puppy so much now i'm it is not i'm a fan of celebrating people that are trying to do something like novel and for me like that's what this this i mean beyond anything like that's what this game is. And there are many terrible things about it. If I could just, 10 seconds, the UI is absolutely mind-boggling. The idea that, I don't mind having to fuck around with cargo, but when I'm fighting the UI to get the cargo,

the fact that there's separate menus to recycle your items and store your items and reload your cargo when that should all just be like one screen that you're doing all of that on is mind-boggling the other thing i'll say huge annoyance every time you do almost anything there is like a five second cut scene right so if you make a delivery there's this five second cut scene of of watching the guy from walking dead put boxes on a thing it's like i'm a finite being if you take a shower i can't there's no joke i just watched this video the other day there's there are five cut scenes in just taking a shower it's him and you can and you can skip them but you have to press pause and go over to skip and press x for

a five second cut scene kojima let me press the button, man. Him turning the shower on, him looking up at the water, him looking into his own soul, and him walking out of the shower with a towel. That's five cutscenes. Grenade's getting made out of his sweat and body juices. That's a different cutscene. This game kicks ass. Eight out of ten stars. Let's go to the break.

So I think we can all agree that this is the start of something big this whole strand genre is um it's huge and it's changed the face of everything before this guys i gotta say i just liked these first person shooters i liked these big you know dumb you know military shooter doom shooter shooting aliens and monsters and i got my rocks off like that but this has made me stopped and this has made me think and i'm wondering if there's other sort of games that we can give the strand treatment do you want to define the strand treatment before we uh dive in sure um do you know about the we did spend 20 minutes talking about it right 20 minutes ago i think it's got to be all the components that make Death Stranding

Death Stranding. The physical interaction of carrying all of your shit. Bringing things, bringing America back together is so important. Make America connected again is a thing that they say a lot. Make America connected again.

I know, I understand what you mean. Something honestly springs right to mind um you know i i love pokemon griffin i know you love pokemon the other two are sort of up in the air but the one thing that i've thought that it's always been missing is the realism and yeah now look i'm not looking for you to have to carry around your 600 pokemon you know i understand they need to live in the pc you've only got your six that you can carry around with you. That makes perfect sense. But the six really should be to scale. Like Charizard needs a ball

that could fit Charizard, Snorlax, you name it. So at this point, I feel like there has to be some sort of like ball carrying mechanism where you've got six Pokeballs that are about 10 feet wide straight up on your back yeah and then every time you have to throw one it's kind of like a momentum thing

where you have to roll them off and they boulder down right it's inherently gigantamax is what you're saying i've people listen snorlax a bulked up snorlax is in the competitive meta right now that would not be the case if you had to lug this big man everywhere in a big big ball I think like uh you know Rattata would have a big uh comeback um I would say same same vein I would say Animal Crossing Death Stranding I said I mentioned this Death Stranding is kind of Animal Crossing already right good but instead of somebody like apples somebody like, hey, we need some of your piss bombs down here because it's getting spooky. So, but, like, Animal Crossing, you know,

I catch this big squid down at the beach. I don't just tuck that in my fucking pocket. What? I carry that thing on my back, and I wait for, like, a duck friend to be like, you got a squid? Because we need it to survive. And you can, you know, give them the squid. Just seeing a squid uh because we need it to survive um and you can you can you know just seeing a squid like draped across your adorable animal like like it's a cape oh sounds

phenomenal i'm so in for i don't think my my elephant friend would be like mr mayor mr mayor how are you doing this morning what's up ha ha ha you want to go lift weights if he saw me carrying three actual axes on my body i don't think that i would get the warm sort of uh how do you do i think for me it would be goldeneye because i mean for all of the uh the sci-fi stuff death stranding is about you know bringing some realism back to game like how hard is it to walk you know do you set up a ladder so if we did that with goldeneye having the real technology of a super spy in like 1990 whenever means that you just have to carry around one of those like 30 pound desktop computers if you want to do any hacking um if you want to you know travel to

russia you just sit on a plane for 12 hours oh i love that that's good like the option to read some magazines uh by the time that you know james bond gets you know flirting with the woman at the bar he's like this is nice but i'm gonna go to bed i have had a very long day i am carrying 11 knives right now i have 11 throwing knives in my body so you tell me like how that works safely the only thing i can think is he's holding them out in front of himself, like walking very, very carefully. Here's my pitch.

Madden. So when you tackle somebody, right? A lot of times when you knock over a defender, they just sprawled out on the ground. Oh, no. But think about the ramifications of actions. Now when you knock someone over, you have to pick them up and put them

on your shoulder and you've got to carry them with the ball and if you get another guy you knock another guy down well i'm sorry friend you got to put him on your shoulders too and then if other people in their games knock down players then you'll see them in your world and you could pick up their ghost players for bonus points okay and then at the end of the the end zone you take the football in the end zone you look down it is a baby you've been carrying a baby the entire time i do want to say baby points or bps as we call them i did want to say when you mentioned the ramifications of tackling someone i definitely jumped right to cte which was pretty horrifying and i'm glad you didn't go there but i'm glad i did hey by the way what are bts i've

been playing for 20 hours and i don't know what the acronym of the main bad guy in the game is it stands for beached things fuck i wish i didn't know i take it back i take it all back we're recording these episodes early so we don't have interactions from you, the listeners. But we desperately want that. We have an email address. It's mail at besties.fan. And if you want to send us something right now, what we'd love to hear from you is your games of the year. So what is your number one game of the year and a sentence about why it is the game of the year?

You can send that to mail at besties.fan, and we'll incorporate that into our end of the year extravaganza that we all love to do. Anybody been playing anything else other than Death Stranding, which I know we're all 24-7 on? Yes. I have been playing a game called A Short Hike, which I didn't know anything about, but I'd seen

people talking about it and just looking at the graphics of it kind of looked like it was going to be another one of those like super emo uh like indie games with like really cute characters but then they start talking about like really grim topics and i get like kind of depressed uh it does get a little bit real but by and large it's like a very sweet exploration centric game you're like in this camp and you're it's like wide open and you can like go wherever you want you're like a bird and um it's got this just like very cool looking kind of ps1 era lo-fi art style but it's all in 3d this looks radical it's super just like it immediately grabbed me like it was such a palate

cleanser from like the dark harsh world of Death Stranding what's the platform? It's on PC I believe it's on Mac and Linux as well and it's super short I mean based on the name you should probably guess that but it's probably only takes like an hour

or two at most but I was like totally smitten by it and like played through it in one sitting I'm just like totally delightful light-hearted game if you're looking for something cute what I love about video games is any other medium uh a book a film tv show you'd say oh yeah the main character is a bird and people be like oh uh but you were just like giving a description in an offhand and you're like yeah and you're like you're a bird yeah sure sure of course you're it's magical magical realism um after you play a short hike which you should prioritize dear listener you should play lonely mountain downhill which kind of pairs perfectly with a short hike uh in that they're both games about movement and the serenity of nature.

Lonely Mountain Downhill is a dirt road biking game. And there's nothing really like it. It kind of controls. It's isometric view, but it controls a little like the warthog um the car in the halo games where whichever direction you're steering uh with your joystick is the direction that the bike goes um and there are challenges you you can add challenges to get down the hill at a certain speed or yada yada yada but really the pleasure of the game is just gradually working your way down a giant mountain on a bike um there are incentives

to actually find these kind of pit stops and take in nature um it has this really low poly aesthetic that i kind of was not into when i saw pictures of it uh but combined with the music and the vibe it just feels really chill um and refreshingly low stakes it's the game that i have been going back to probably the most all season been playing orangutang lately you guys down on orangutang i have no idea what that is oh man it's this great platforms platform uh table a coffee table this is a board game for little children that i got for my my little boy and in it there's this elastic cord hanging between two palm trees and there's this orangutan and he hangs from that cord you have to hang bananas

and lizards and bats on him but if you hang too much the cord just launches upwards like a fucking monkey crossbow and all the bananas go shooting all over and it scares the boy every time oh it's like mr bucket it's kind of like mr no it's kind of like Don't Wake Daddy. Any sort of fear-based board game where things snap and explode and send bananas flying into the air and scare the boy. But for us adults,

huge competitive element. I'm looking for a more pro scene that I can, a circuit I can join. I'm really good at hanging the bananas on the monkey and it does scare the boy every time and it can be a fun scare. You know there are people that are terrified of balloons and the prospect of them popping?

Yeah, it's like that. And I now know where that comes from. Yeah, it's because of me. Oh, let me sing my jingle one sec. Idle game watch, idle game watch. it's like a game that you don't play idle game watch idle game watch just waste your time away if you've got a tab that's got some work then click on over don't be a jerk and play an idle game it's the idle game watch hi everybody this is idle game watch where i talk about games that are designed to waste your time uh this week's

installment is yeah you're not totally wrong uh anchormanomancer is on Congregate, is in browsers. You can play it for free right now. And it is a game where the screen is a very lo-fi village full of people. And you are able to click to deploy a zombie when your energy is full. And your energy is constantly refilling, So you're constantly spawning more zombies. The zombies then eat the villagers and give you blood and brains that you use in the shop to upgrade the, uh, the, the incredible power of your, uh, zombies. Uh, there are other resources that you collect like bones and, and what have you. And those are used to upgrade your crypt where the zombies come from. Uh it is mainly about the satisfying feeling of seeing, like, starting with, like, three or four zombies

and then eventually having a horde of these little green zombies sweeping across the screen, just destroying the village. And it is thoroughly entertaining if you like an idle game. You can set up stuff to where, you know, the zombies are spawning on their own and, and, you know, you don't have to, uh, uh, stay constantly watching it, which makes it an idle game, but it is a, it's a really good one of these and it's a pleasant little, pleasant little diversion. I had a question. Is there a closing theme? That was the idle game Watch. Thank you. It's much quicker.

Well, this is the Besties. We're back in a big way. We hope that you've enjoyed our bold new genre. This has been a Strand podcast. And the first few episodes here, you can listen wherever the hell you want to, but we

are happy that we are able to revive the show with the help of Papa Spotify, and so go ahead and get that Spotify, get subscribed down on Spotify, because starting next year, 2020, all of our episodes are going to be up on the Spotify platform, you don't got to be a premium member, you don't got to pay anything, just find us there on Spotify and check us out. And again, thank you to Spotify for helping us revive this show. I have missed doing this immensely and I'm so glad that we're able to get going again. Yeah, I do want to also mention there might be some people that are like a little bit grumpy that were exclusive to Spotify. Maybe

you don't want to install a separate app. To those people, I would say this show would absolutely not exist were it not for Spotify. The fact that you were hearing it weekly is 100% Spotify being enthusiastic. Your options for listening to it are Spotify or nothing. Our options for making it are Spotify or nothing. It is a complete level one to one yes so uh yeah don't don't be grumpy don't be grumpy and don't don't wait go go find us there on on 2020 because again uh before 2020 all of our episodes uh are going to be weekly up on spotify so go ahead and lock it in uh and i think that's it you want out, Juice? Yeah, thank you so much for listening. Be sure to listen to us next week when we will join you again for The Besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends

pick the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties! besties