The Besties - Everybody Loves Nobody Saves the World

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Things come full circle as we once again dip into the Drinkbox catalogue with their newest Action RPG title, Nobody Saves the World! Also, we discuss the enormous and dumb implications of Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard. Also discussed: A bunch of old Activision titles that will definitely never be revived, Station Eleven, Peacemaker, Hawkeye. 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 guys go ahead and do some jokes. I gotta get my gunners. Okay. That is a joke, but that is a joke. Like, that's a joke. That's true. Right there. Like, we could just go off of that for the next two minutes

and bada bing, bada boom. What is it about yellow, seeing yellow, that makes you a better gamer? It's the opposite of blue color. It's the opposite of blue color. So blue color tries to get in your eyeballs yeah but the yellow sunglasses are like no way dude only yellow for me because doctors love yellow light they say it's great for your pupils and corneas and retinas and good enough

for superman's good enough for me so you think fish are terrible gamers i think for a number of reasons yeah fish aren't very good gamers. Except for that one fish that beat Pokemon. That was dope. Counterpoint, Trey Anastasia whips ass at Vegard. Oh, no. You tell me. No, no, no. Man, that's a great joke.

No. What percent of our audience do you think is going to enjoy that joke, Juice? Do you run the math like that any time you say anything on the show? Because I do. I'm sorry, Griffin. I'm an artist my name is justin mackerel and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Frushing and I know the best game of the week.

Hello and welcome to the Besties. It's a video game club. And just by listening, my friend, you are a member. Today we're going to be talking about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. And today that will take the form of a new release from Drinkbox, Nobody Saves the World. But Chris Plant, what is Nobody Saves the World? Well, this week we're actually doing something a little different. Chris Plant, what is Nobody Saves the World? Well, this week we're actually doing something a little different.

Instead of talking about the game, we're just going to jam band our feelings to the game the whole time. A little fish style. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah, it's going to be good. You didn't think I was going to talk about fish and Grateful Dead? You know I want to talk about that. That's all I want to talk about now. I left my jambay at home.

Fine. Nobody Saves the World is the new game from Drinkbox Studios. You might know them as the developer of guacamole and uh mutant blobs from outer space which i believe was talked about in one of our very first episodes this game is a uh kind of a diablo dungeon crawler uh kill and loot type of game except and here's the big, you can play as lots and lots of different characters, like a slug or an egg or a magician. And, y'all, it's fun as hell. I can't wait to talk about it.

I mean, either. In fact, let's not wait. Let's just, well, let's wait briefly while we sell things and then come back and stop waiting, because we'll be too i just also want to mention that um drink box did severed you guys remember severed oh yeah great that was so cool that was a cool game what a great studio what a great studio man they're great and you know what i feel like they have sort of like been off the radar for a little bit and they're they're one that i always really really liked um and uh i'm so happy to see them doing stuff again i i was not the biggest fan of guacamelee

too i think we talked about it here i'm pretty sure but it's been four years since guacamelee too and now they're back with nobody saves the world and uh guys i'm wild about this one. Yeah. I got to say. It's really, really fun. So, okay. It's the most sort of like basic premise, but you are the titular nobody who kind of pops up out of nowhere with no memory of who you are or why you're there or any of that. All you know is that there's this wizard that has gone missing and this threat called the calamity that's trying to destroy the world. And you, at the very beginning of the game, come into possession of this magic wand that lets you transform into other

characters. And the first is like a mouse, right? And so the mouse has the ability to poison enemies by biting them. And he's also got this consume ability that lets you heal yourself by attacking enemies, right? And then you have these little quests that involve those abilities. And then as you complete this quest and level up, then you unlock other forms. And that sort of branches out in a, I not technically a skill tree it's sort of a

you unlock more forms just by doing these quests and then that's where you get new powers and the progression of the game sort of comes from that basically and the and the powers and the the characters are all like drastically different i mean like feel completely different yeah i i uh when i started playing this game i played for like the first hour and i was like yeah it's cute like i like the art style it's cute it's very light-hearted but i was not immediately grabbed by it and it wasn't until i started unlocking more of these like very diverse different classes i guess you would call them um that it started clicking for me and the one that was like the game changer and then more interesting ones came after that was the horse you unlock a

horse class where you're just a horse and his horse abilities are you can kick with your hooves and you can run run into things and those are his horse abilities but it was something so bizarre about you know i'm so used to seeing like a knight and like an archer and those are there those are in the game but just like you're a horse now brought me a lot of joy you have to move backwards with it like yes the gimmick is like the horse's kick is very powerful but it goes the wrong direction yes yes there's also as soon as you unlock the horse you get a sub quest to fall in love with another horse yeah yeah which happens immediately like immediately and you and and it it provides

like this narrative dialogue of like you've never felt this way before like it it really paints a beautiful horse on horse love picture um it really paints a beautiful horse-on-horse love picture. It doesn't paint a horse-on-horse love picture. I should be clear. With words. With words. Forever. Probably.

But what we haven't touched on and what I think is really the, like, the thing that makes this game sing is as you unlock more forms and you level up, there's like four ability slots and then four passive slots. And each form has like one attack that's locked to them, right? So I'll use the Magician, for example. The Magician can use a card attack and basically like shoots out a card and it attacks the enemy and refills your mana, right? like shoots out a card and it attacks the enemy and refills your mana right and then he the second thing he unlocks is a ability to like pull rabbits and tigers out of his hat to attack your enemies like working independently as familiars but as you go on you unlock i'm trying to think of the best one oh the zombie the zombie is a perfect example yeah yeah yeah the zombie so with the zombie you

can then you fight uh enemies and there are tons and tons and tons of enemies on screen and once they've been bitten and they get killed they get replaced by zombies that work on your side and they their health quickly declines so say that you've already released you know five or six bunnies and tigers as your familiars now you also have 15 or 20 zombies on the screen and the entire like stage is a war between this like army of zombies tigers and bunnies versus whatever enemies are coming it really it's wild it goes from this like diablo style action game to like uh a very pared down dynasty warriors like because then you get an ability where you can heal your familiars right so then it's like okay well i can use this card

attack to heal my familiars and all the abilities swap out with all the other ones so like the necromancer has chain lightning that will heal familiars. So you can give the magician chain lightning and zombie bite. And then he's just like walking around this huge army and healing them with all his like magic lightning. In individual dungeons, some of them have qualifiers like heals that you do also heal enemies. And then enemies, individual enemies also have these wards, which are like specific barriers that you need an element like light or dark or force or whatever to defeat. So it's like each dungeon is sort of this question of like, what is the best, like most optimal setup that I can do?

What character will absolutely, like is perfectly tuned to demolish this and you can also switch on the fly um between eight of your forms um there's there's many more than that did any of you have like a favorite setup that just the game just really clicked when you were playing that that type of character i don't think i got to the zombie so i was still a little bit earlier than you guys, but just mixing the, what was it? The horse with the rat. I think I was.

Oh no, no, no. I was, I was mixing the, the, the poison dealing of the rat with the horse charge. And that's sort of like that sort of combination makes me think that this is a game where, you know, we look at a game like there's a

lot of looters like diablo or even borderlands where a lot of attention is placed on balance and like oh i want to make sure that like each of the classes are balanced and it's fair and you have a reason to play this class over the other class and this game sort of throws all that out the window to the point where your creativity allows things to get very overpowered very quickly. And that is very rewarding as a player. Like it's fine. Like I don't expect them. I don't think they want people to be playing.

It's not a living game. It's not going to keep going for ever and ever, but this allows people to like have a lot of control over their experience. Um, and you know, that's not even mentioning the online play which allows for a co-op which is right you know you mix two class two of those player created classes together and it starts getting even more bonkers i i would say though that imbalance element is a blessing and a curse because I really enjoyed like finding which mixes worked the best. But at the same time, there were a few times where I felt like, well, I need to play this class either to get more of the, you know, star points that you use to unlock new

dungeons and stuff, which is like the sort of major gates in the game. As you complete those missions, you get those star points that you need to unlock different dungeons. And sometimes I felt like, well, I need more star points to do this. And, you know, I haven't at all played as this guy, so I'll be able to complete a bunch of missions a bit quicker than grinding out a bunch of stuff

on a class I actually like. Or like the class I've got now sucks, but by getting it to rank B or whatever, I can unlock a class I actually want to play. And anytime I kind of felt obligated to play as a class that I did not really enjoy because they are like so different, you know, it was kind of like having to eat my vegetables a little bit.

I did find that you could alleviate, the more abilities you have, the more options that you had, the more you were able to alleviate that sense. Certainly early on you're locked into three or four different options and some of those are a little less

fun than others. But like, I didn't like the ghost at first. The ghost has this aura of fear that is just all around him and he just scares enemies and the more enemies you hit with it the faster it recharges so you can cast it again and make it bigger um which in your opinion of the ghost i'm assuming changed a lot well i got an ability that anytime an enemy was afflicted with status they would explode knives out of them i was like okay well this

works like that yeah this is a good ghost now i like this boy this is a good ghost they also are smart because they have those like main dungeons that basically tell you oh you can't progress any of the quests so pick your absolute best situation oh yeah that's a smart choice which is a really smart design thing where it's like you won't feel guilty because you can't progress any of the quests. You have to pick your best setup and if that works, if that helps you to power through, that feels really, really good.

I agree with Griffin for the beginning of the game and I think that's the beginning of the game just in general. I think the first two to three hours of this game, they're not bad. They're where I would most definitely play co-op if you can just to kind of learn the ropes there's a what is it arrow shooter oh my gosh why archer ranger archer thank you um but that that character isn't especially fun and it happens to be one of the

first ones that you get and yeah the grind is slow but i i had the same experiences uh hoops i i really enjoyed the grind of okay i have you know half my characters are level b but the other half are like d or c and i need to get them all on the same playing field and i spent like an hour in a more advanced dungeon where there's just tons and tons and tons of enemies and it would take like a couple minutes to get each individual one upgraded just because they were there's just so much on the screen that you could meet whatever like the quest goal of you know hit 100 things with slow or hit 50 things with a confetti bomb i think in a similar vein to like me not uh loving the you know feeling of having to play a class i didn't really enjoy that much uh the progression like the unlocking of quests which are required to rank up your uh your different classes like it is kind of impossible to just focus one uh especially in the

beginning of the game because there's like you know you'll unlock three or so quests every time that you rank up and then once you hit rank c like you don't get any more quests until you play more of the game uh so you can't just say like i'm gonna get this dude to fucking rank a right now because i love playing as the rat you can't really you can't really do that that seems more like a feature than a bug though no i know yeah that's what i'm saying it's a it is a a positive and and a negative right because the game would be less fun if you did that but that that sort of min maxi level of your mind you kind of have to turn off uh it's also frustrating when

you like early on there's like a puzzle or like something in the map that looks like a nest right and so you're like oh shit okay well i have to get rat to rank b to unlock the egg which i bet will solve that puzzle but you can't do that yet because you don't have enough quests available to you which is yeah i don't know it feels like a little metroidv Metroidvanias, right? Yeah, it's Geargate in a way. And then you just need to remember it for later. Yeah, the egg, the nest puzzle is really hard, though, because you have to take the egg and put it in the nest. Yeah, it's super tough.

And then a big bird comes and sits on you. And that is the only way the egg can rank up, is to be sat on by five different giant birds and his shell cracks a little bit each time uh and he has to unlock the final form which is dragon he has to be s rank so you have to like find a i guess you have to find five different nests to get him uh fully leveled up that is the one that i have not unlocked i've unlocked all the other forms um i just before we started got necromancer and robot oh and robots great he's armor plated and just has a giant drill and shoots rockets like talk about feeling like overpowered the necromancer uh has cast a like

pentagram basically and revives corpses as demon servants so like the more people you kill and then you cast that it just has this huge army of uh demons uh at your at your behest i did want to also mention uh the studio has gotten better with colorblind accessibility for what it's worth uh if that's a concern of yours i played guacamelee and in guacamelee there were a lot of enemies that you fight that have like shields where you have to attack a certain way to do any damage in that game and yellow red blue shield right exactly and that's true in this game as well there are enemies where you need to attack with blunt damage or whatever to break their shields but they uh have added these um icons above the heads that are

colored but also have like very specific art that indicate what damage you should be doing so i don't have to like literally when i played guacamole i was like i'm gonna try every attack until their shield breaks because that was the only way i knew for's a bummer. What do you all think of the humor of this game? Because I find it's very early internet flash cartoon, which I guess is kind of what I think a lot of their stuff is. It's very on brand for Drinkbox. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It's not overwhelming. And I appreciate that.

We're like, there's a version of this game. Man, I wish more people had played Death Spank and were still alive. I thought the same thing. It reminded me of Death Spank. You're right. If you said Death Spank, well, Death Spank's the evil version of this, right? Right. Death Spank's like, oh, I picked up bacon and he gave me energy like

like the it's not constantly silly and irreverent but like the character interact like the i after about 20 hours in i met a knight who's like hey it's good to see you like what he's like oh you don't remember me i i met you at the knight's guild i gave you that quest to kill monsters it's like oh it's really hurt that you don't remember this one guy that this one faceless knight that told you to go kill monsters for a quest um but that kind of stuff it's it's it's silly there's also some like it's not uh particularly like sweeping but there is some interesting stuff as you go through with the the main narrative like there's some interesting like um not thematically but like some interesting little twists that you come across my one of my favorite missions was uh you meet a group you

you eventually have to work for all the different like classic dnd classes of like yeah the knight the magician the uh thief and when you meet the thieves guild uh one of the quests they give you is to rob a dagger store and you go there and the guy is like okay here's what i need you to do i'm giving you twenty dollars and you're like okay and he's like and there's a sale on knives for five dollars each and i need you to get me four knives you're like, okay. And he's like, and there's a sale on knives for $5 each, and I need you to get me four knives. And you're like, wait, what? Like, how's that theft? And he's like, the sale is one per person,

so I need you to look different to the guy every time you buy a knife. But there's actually a little bit of challenge there because he only will serve certain like he doesn't serve rats for example so like you can't go in there with your rat forms you have to figure out the forms that will work uh in in the store it's a clever you know what this game is just good it's i good good music too jim guthrie did the soundtrack yeah it's really catchy catchy stuff you don't mind hearing it yeah he uploaded it to youtube yesterday too um and if you want like a taste of it i recommend uh the ballad of in which is the 19th track on the

soundtrack and you can just search jim guthrie ballad of in but yeah dude is just we should this is on um xbox and pc. I played on PC. Switch would be perfect for this, but I don't know. Also Game Pass on Xbox. It is on Game Pass, yes. And PC. I think there's a certain type of gamer

and I would count myself along these lines that loves a Diablo action RPG like that, I feel like you need to shut off those expectations a little bit once you start playing it because it has the, it looks like one, but it doesn't.

There are a lot of things that kind of set it apart from the specific type of grind that those games kind of require. It's just, you gotta not expect that min max like really very hardcore style of of game because it's it is something different it's good what it is but if you go into it expecting like um a very straightforward get the numbers bigger style game like you you are going to be a little disappointed yeah in a way it's actually more complex than a game like diablo where i play

diablo and i get to a certain point where i just like kind of steamroll everything i just run in with my op setup and whatever but here because it does require you to mix and match abilities and like change up your strat depending on what the dungeon is calling for there is i think it to some extent requires a little more thought process there yeah i actually really also really like in terms of like grinding versus a diablo game like this game i very rarely did i like just grind for grinding sake it's more sort of about like, what could I pick going into this dungeon that's going to like deliver the most payout? But like, that's part of what I found

such a hook about this is that like you're constantly improving, you know, your different skills or your different forms and finding new ways to like experiment with them that are really fun. This is a great game. I don't know.

I really, really like it. And I think that I'm so happy to see Drinkbox, who was here with us at the beginning of the besties. Sticking with us. Yeah. You guys going to take a break? Yeah, let's do it. We'll come back and talk about other stuff?

Okay. So I thought because it's the biggest video game deal in history that we probably should talk about the elephant in the room and that is activision being potentially not yet but on its way to being bought by microsoft is it yeah is it still up in the air i mean it needs to get ftc approval which i think will happen but not guaranteed not guaranteed likely yeah and and i think it's set to close in the summer of 2023 so these things take time uh hey this is a weird deal right fresh how much was it 70 billion dollars i think it was 68 billion with a b why not okay it was like 68.7 billion dollars i think is the exact number why not add

an extra 0.3 billion in it so we can at least like have a have a larf you know oh that'd be nice so we can at least like when we refer to this deal be like yeah man you know how much i paid but they couldn't give that to us could they no fresh do you think this is good bad neutral well okay so i i think for microsoft it's very smart makes total sense they had a shitload of money just sitting around like i think last i heard they had like 150 billion dollars of like a war chest that they've been sitting on and so for them to do this and continue what they started with minecraft and bethesda and uh those acquisitions to continue down that road of another enormous publisher falling in line with microsoft totally makes sense is it a good thing i certainly have worries about the idea of like there being three video game publishers in the world yeah

but yeah that's sort of the end game of capitalism so i don't know how we stop that. Yeah, it's hard to say because, I mean, on paper, the major platform, like hardware platform holders like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have a, I guess, mixed track record when it comes to publishing indies and and providing support there usually i feel like it's they have to have proven themselves in the field of battle before they will receive uh money from one of these these teams but it's not like activision and ea or activision blizzard was like pumping out the indie jams they they basically just had kind of the three games yeah uh and now those are Microsoft's games. Well, and they were also, like, not in a good situation. No. Pretty much, yeah. I mean, with the sexual harassment lawsuit, gender discrimination lawsuit, I mean, part of the reason this deal went through

is that Microsoft got a sweetheart deal because the valuation of Activision had been cut pretty hard. Yeah, that's the thing that I'm curious what the FTC will say here, right? So I guess for people who don't follow the brand names, Activision Blizzard King is the full company. That's great. I always forget about the King part.

And King makes the most money. It's huge here. Yeah, I think it's a big part of this deal. But they make Call of duty um world of warcraft uh starcraft like overwatch diablo diablo gobs and gobs and gobs of stuff and candy crush yes oh yeah king king makes like every mobile game that makes money basically yeah i what okay so what's weird about this for me with the ftc is activision was already doing poorly because of all the uh evil things that have been done by

a leadership across its company um and that is dropping the stock price but then phil spencer for the past you know i don't know six months it's kind of been touch and go whenever asked about activision and being like you know like it's pretty bad and we're not we're not sure what our relationship with is with it which could affect the stock price and make it lower which would make it easier for them to acquire it i'm not saying that was done intentional because i'm don't want to get sued um but it it certainly is a strange look made even stranger when you know like a week or two ago suddenly spencer took this kind of about face stance of you know like you know we're not we're not gonna be too hard on them suddenly and you know i i i guess i was gonna say i don't

know the quote exactly from from spencer i will say that like when everything came out he was one of the strongest voices against my you know being pretty direct about Activision and how this stuff is unacceptable I do honestly think and I don't think this is a reach to say that the second the deal goes through Bobbyby kodak is packing his bags and going to whatever 16 islands he owns and will never be heard from again i i honestly believe that will happen you know that's not to say that fixes all the problems with activision but i do think part of their end game is more or less cleaning house once they buy activision to not solve the problems but address them i can't i just can't get over this image of like phil spencer in a corvette pulls up to activision the things on fire people are throwing furniture out the window and shattering glass and he looks at he's like yep i'll take it i'll take as much of this as you got loaded in the trunk i love this because it literally was a fire sale in that way like it's

it is very devalued it was very devalued and they paid a premium but it would have been a much higher premium if the company was like on the ups i can't imagine there won't i mean the downside of this and there are many obviously this kind of of consolidation sucks for consumers a lot of the time. I think Microsoft is probably a better run company than Activision. It would almost have to be by default. But still, there will almost certainly be redundancies and layoffs with a merger of this size. So that is already a bummer.

On the flip side of this size um so that that is already a bummer um on the on the flip side of this though you guys look at the list of ip that microsoft is gonna own now like it's pretty wild it's like all of them basically it's like a lot of let me let me get let me dig into the like let me let me blow off this dusty tone and get you guys with some some old old ones, and you tell me the likelihood of us seeing them. Okay, Zork? Sure. Zork? Pandemonium?

No, you're not naming them. I'm naming them. Oh, right. Jesus. Zork! Got it. True Crime. What was that?

You guys remember True Crime? Yeah. True Crime Streets of LA? True Crime Streets of LA? Oh, yeah. Hey, Griff, Quest for Glory. Yeah, i doubt that that one's gonna come back king's quests yeah i'm both that actually seems very up microsoft's alley

they love pulling back classics like that for like game pass pc yeah that's the point before justin before you continue this list like the whole point of this is activision has been building itself around the idea of like we need to sell three games and they all need to sell 50 million copies a year and if we don't do that we are failing and microsoft strategy has been we can release small game pass games and so long as it keeps the churn going we get more subscribers so we've seen titles like nobody saves the world for example which is on game pass which is not a game that would ever blow the doors down. But a lot of people will play it now that it's on Game Pass.

I think we'll see smaller titles using these franchises coming to Game Pass in the future. So you heard it here first, folks. Russ Freshdick predicts Gun coming to – Gun 2. Gun 2. Gunning again. DJ Hero is back oh yes i hope dusting it off it's uh the first three tenchu games police quest hard pass i think that's on the that time has uh yeah all the all the sierra games right like all the like old school adventure sierra games are in their library yeah blur blackthorn you know uh there's a lot of wild stuff on this

list world of warcraft is really interesting to me like that's a weird thing for them to to for microsoft to own yeah when they talked about this with the press event and the new york times like focused on this as like oh it's a metaverse deal and i think i don't think that's the main focus but i do think there is some interesting consolidation around games that could be whatever whatever the metaverse means to you, of owning... Which is nothing, by the way. Still nothing for me. Minecraft, World of WoW, and COD are three huge players in whatever this thing could be. But that's like a big could be if.

I think the, hey, this is what you get right now that is big for Microsoft about this deal is the whole goal is to bring new players into Game Pass and to lock them in there. And if they put WoW into Game Pass PC Ultimate or whatever, or if they put COD in there, they're just immediately that same day adding new players. The other part of this that I think has gotten overlooked is king which you know there's a reason rockstar just spent like many billions of dollars to buy zynga even though zynga is not especially okay not rockstar yes take two take two did that because they want to expand grand theft auto

online they need to get those sorts of things on mobile if they want to compete with stuff like fortnite and these other giant platforms you know ginseng impact that are going mobile and microsoft has yet to figure that out so buying effectively the best mobile games publisher or not best the most successful yes is going to one help them get their games onto mobile but, bring in millions of players who have never even thought about Xbox because now they have all this ad inventory on King Games. Okay, so I have an important question,

and I think people listening will be very interested in this question. Okay. Not to set it up too much. Call of Duty, or for that matter any activision game but i think call duty is the most relevant here does the next after the deal goes through does the next call of duty game come to playstation i have a conspiracy theory about this and my conspiracy theory is phil spencer got promoted to head of microsoft gaming which is a very careful wording and i'm starting to wonder if activision will be a brand under microsoft gaming separate from xbox

because it's so big like you gotta hold on to that brand you what you gotta hold on to that branding everyone loves it i mean it's toxic right now no i know you know especially blizzard you know has has a reputation and i and same with king right like is king a mobile game going to be an xbox brand that seems confusing um so i i kind of will be a largely universal thing, but a lot of its games will be best on Xbox. Here's where I'll counter that. Although I think it's certainly possible it could play that way.

I think there is zero possibility that the next Elder Scrolls game, Elder Scrolls VI, comes to a PlayStation platform. Zero possibility of that happening. Really? Yeah, no, I'd be... I mean, they haven't announced that,

but I would be very surprised. This is the leverage that they need to really do a lot of damage, if they want to, to do a lot of damage to PlayStation. Right now, PlayStation has no big, super, super popular shooter outside of resistance resistance follow me i'm sorry you're right resistance fall man and call of duty and to cut the legs out from call of

duty for a plate like on a playstation platform really puts microsoft at a pretty big advantage and encourages more game pass subscribers do you know what we're watching right now if that if that's true because i think you might be right we're watching phil spencer join the nwo like this is his heel turn moment where you know he's like hey you know we just want every game available on every platform you know go where the player is and then he's like yeah yeah we want every game on every platform except for our enemies like that would be yeah it's it i feel like this kind of thing i feel like it used to happen a little bit more and maybe not that of this scale of course but like this kind of like shrewd console war like behavior right this is this is one of the more i would say aggressive actions

that like any of the big players have made in quite a while uh but like i don't know has playstation kind of been sleeping on it have they like really done any microsoft is obviously like was behind coming yeah they were very generation and you know came into this generation also not not necessarily being as uh successful as as the playstation 5 but they're not really doing much with that are they like they're not really making those kinds of acquisitions they're not like well sony had the studio support that microsoft did not have so microsoft has bought its way into having that depth of a studio like bench whereas sony already had that but like what what are they doing with that right now like what was the last big and you know this may be me misremembering but like what was the

last big first party sony game that came out that like really Ratchet probably but did that really like blow the fucking house down like I don't think so I mean Last of Us Part 2 I guess yeah well I mean yeah but also they're not able to sell their hardware right now and there's been a pandemic

so yeah this is why I think I mean you can think about this in the in the short term and i think in the short term they could very much hurt playstation with this although i mean playstation's been doing fine selling the ps5 still can't get those but like this is preparing for a world where hardware is yeah beyond an afterthought they know microsoft knows that the, and they have the war chest to act on this, that the future is what IP do you own?

And I think there's a possibility that Microsoft would love to be freed from the business of hardware and all the supply chain issues inherent to that and just like have this library of ip that they own that you pay them a monthly service fee for that's true yeah i i would not be completely shocked if by the end of this generation you can play like the xbox library on playstation well that's so and I think that's this leverage that they have because Sony would never.

They have the juice to do it now. They would never do it before this. And now there is a possibility where Phil comes and knocks on Sony's door and is like, hey, you sure you don't want to put Game Pass on PlayStation? Are you sure? Right.

And that's a great point, Hoops. And like a good way of thinking about it is like Netflixflix would never release netflix exclusives on hulu you know you know in the future when there's the playstation streaming services and the xbox streaming services we won't see that what i could see is okay if you want to get it for free on the streaming service it's going to be on xbox game pass only and then a year later if you want to buy it like just pay for it directly on other platforms you can do that right it's all very interesting it's all bad let's let's let's agree on one thing it's all bad for the consumer yeah

oh my god did you see the story that came out like shortly after this was announced of like long time wow players like what's in it for us like we've stood by you guys and played your shitty game as long as it's been shitty what's in it for us we deserve a class action no just give them a mount they'll be fine give them yeah give them a mount that looks like a yeah yeah i think it's like i'm less clear on how bad it will be for the gamer because in some ways, for certain people, this will be great. I mean, Game Pass as a deal for a lot of people

is a very, very good deal. Whether or not that means you get as creative games or you get more smaller games or medium games, that's a big question. And how this is for developers, especially developers that aren't under this giant money umbrella that's where it gets super scary i but see i worry about the okay so like if you have a call of duty coming out next month it's exclusive to xbox do you need to pay somebody for a nobody

saves the world you know what i mean like i think netflix got into this arms race early on where they way overspent without realizing it like you know what, we don't need these smaller things are not keeping people around. We don't need our – I think you definitely do because, I mean, look at Netflix now. They still release like 30 things a week. Yeah. Sure, they're not making as – well, actually, they're probably making more artsy stuff now it's just yeah microsoft can't afford a down month in game pass because you you would lose

subscribers that way so the fact that every week you're seeing new shit happening you're that's encouraging people to stick around and the only way to keep that cadence up is to constantly be releasing small and big things i See, I don't necessarily agree because I think that the metaphor is different because I don't need access to my House of Cards Season 2 all the time. Oh, that's where it really gets good, though. Yeah, man, that's where it really, really gets fired up.

I don't need access to that, but there's a difference between like having a library where i need to i want to be able to play this thing for a long period of time versus like like okay i watched all the witcher today what else you got for me like well you know i don't think that that metaphor is exactly one-to-one with gaming because i think that there is value to like having a library of games that like hey we're all you know firing up overwatch you know hop in or whatever yeah where it's it's not necessarily the same sort of like consumption model for for but that's how it works like people's games leave game pass and just aren't in the library anymore yeah i i also think microsoft

doesn't want you to be hooked into just one game from what i understand like well that the data already shows that they see people trying more games if they're just playing game pass and if they were playing otherwise which is not surprising what i think we'll see i don't know in a year two years three years is them creating meta games that motivate people to like switch between stuff and this is a thing that we saw stadia say that they were going to do ish where you could you know like skip right to the level three boss and play that and then go to a different game and finish this race and go to another game and finish blank and that's the stuff that when we do get to the cloud gaming phase of

this where you can just auto load stuff is going to be interesting when you have a platform that lets you just hop between game moment to game moment to game moment. And I think they want to do that because they do know, sure, when you are really hooked on Fortnite, you're really hooked. But once you fall off, you're done. And they need to make sure that you have something else that's going to catch you and keep your attention once you're off whatever your favorite thing of the month is. This is an idle thought because we need to move on, but I did want to ask you all. There was a big phase about a decade ago where everything was episodic.

Oh, yeah. If you remember. Yeah, Telltale. I guess it was more like 10 to 15 years ago. But like Half-Life is a bad example, but like episodic gaming was like a big thing, and everybody moved away from it for various reasons. Do you feel like this kind of model, like the sort of like monthly subscription streaming model being the future, like do you think that's more friendly to episodic gaming? Like, doesn't that serve your purposes just as well? If you can release like five episodes month to month of Walking Dead versus like dumping all of it in one week and people play. That's what they've been doing with Apple Arcade.

So Apple Arcade has like shifted into really supporting games that do these updates, content updates every like three months or so. So it's possible. Again, I don't know how they've been doing in terms of subscribers or whether that's maintaining them. But I do think part of the allure of Game Pass is that you feel like you're getting the whole thing right there.

So I don't personally, I'm not personally drawn to that, but people might feel that. I don't think anybody really liked it. I think it kind of irritated everyone. to that but people might feel yeah i don't think anybody really liked it yeah well i think the problem i think it kind of irritated everyone yeah they i think episodic gaming also it was just bad because the games weren't finished so you didn't know how long it was going to be till the next thing we are ofk is coming out some point this year which is a like kind of a memoirish video

game about a band that's both real and fictional. It looks cool, but they're going to release an episode every week. So it's like having that cadence, I think, is the bigger win for episodic gaming than, you know, a platform like this. Yeah. Cool. Future of gaming so bright I gotta wear shades I gotta wear gunners

Got Jeff on the show I got one question I gotta ask Owen asked us Thoughts on Daniel Radcliffe playing Weird Al I think he'll be great Anybody who says differently Is wildly unfamiliar He's very talented

Mr. Potter He's so good i don't the wig i don't know i can't wrap my head around that what that's gonna look like maybe they'll just start with like serious buttoned up you know early aughts weird oh sure albert albert normal albert yonk of it i like the idea that you think that al started in the early aughts no i'm saying he switched his shit around to not be like bonkers yeah he shaved the mustache and no he was more serious get with it get with it i'm sorry trying to come at me for my fucking weird al knowledge like i wasn't listening he's a close friend he was on our tv show that's like i wasn't listening to the naughty stuff while i was, like, at church camp. So, why don't you check your privilege?

Let's get into honorable mentions, shall we? Yes. I want to talk about a show called Peacemaker, which stars Jonathan Cena. Peacemaker is... Yeah, how is this? It's really fucking good. Really? How is this?

It's really fucking good. Really? So Peacemaker is a direct sequel to The Suicide Squad, which was the James Gunn... Which is an indirect sequel to Suicide Squad. Wait, it's a sequel? I mean, it takes place immediately after Suicide Squad. How? I'm going to explain that.

Oh, now I have to watch it. I mean, so if you've seen Suicide Squad, there is a character called Peacemaker played by John Cena. All the events of this show take place immediately after the events of the movie. I liked the movie. It was not my favorite movie. I think James Gunn has done better stuff, but I liked it. You know, he's an I mean, this is not a spoiler to say Peacemaker is a colossal asshole.

And I was not driven to be like, Oh, I want to see more of this guy, but there is something extremely, uh, I mean, first of all, John Cena is maybe the most charismatic person on the planet.

So that helps. Um, but also, uh, he's surrounded by this amazing ensemble cast in the show Peacemaker, which also includes eagerly his sidekick eagle uh who might be the new baby yoda of this generation um if you really liked suicide squad or just like baby yoda kind of liked it this generation have we already moved

on from bait i hate this little well he's done done. He's off on his own adventure. We'll never see him again unless he's in his teens. So anyway, Peacemaker's great. It's on HBO Max. You should watch it. I'll go next because I got another thing on HBO Max. Station Eleven, the TV adaptation of the book. The show is amazing, but it's kind of like recommending The Leftovers

where you're like i hope you're ready to feel really bad with a little bit of good that makes it all worth it see i've heard that it's uplifting more than sad which is why i would be willing to give it a shot because i've more or less put put sad tv out of my life because yeah world is world is already pretty pretty that way so this show it stuck me and it sounds familiar. It's about a flu pandemic that takes over the world in 2019, 2020. And except for in this show, it kills basically everyone. That's good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, and here's where the hopeful part comes. Once you are past that part, the show shifts to being about a traveling theater troupe in the post-apocalypse and why they are still performing Shakespeare. And it's a delight. That part is great.

It's what I wanted The Last of Us to be. I know that in our Last of Us 2 episode, we talked about what I don't like about that game is this idea that like every single human is just in a just can't wait to start killing. Huge asshole. Yeah. Yeah. And like this, there's there's danger in the apocalypse, but largely people are good and they're just trying to, you know, get by. And yeah, I really like the vibe.

The big warning is, one, the first episode is the pandemic episode. It's a hard hang. And two, there are a lot of flashback episodes. So it's not like I can say like, well, just get past the first episode, because that's not the case. You're going to be revisiting the really heavy stuff a lot. But if you do have the stomach for it, I really do recommend it. It's a really beautiful show. Cool. I don't have any. I have not been playing anything except for the.

Hey, we don't do games anymore. It's all TV here. So mine is two things. One, not the book of Boba Fett. I just want to say, isn't it wild? I wish I could tell myself from 20 years ago that like, don't you guys think it's wild they made a Boba Fett TV show and nobody cared? I mean, people care.

I just don't think it's very good. Like nobody is talking about it really much, I feel like. And it's not like, I don't seen, like, nobody is talking about it really much, I feel like. And it's not like, I don't know, man. I haven't watched it. I don't know. It's just wild. Like, it's a wild time. You haven't watched it?

What? No, why? I mean, I'm watching it. I mean, I don't know. Ooh, a Grand Slam review. No, I'm not saying it's good. I just thought because you said not the book of Boba Fett, I thought you were going to say that because you had watched it

and were not recommending it. No, I'm sorry. I should have been more clear. I don't watch it. I don't know. The other thing that I am watching that is good is Hawkeye. Oh, Hawkeye's great. Hawkeye's fun. I miss it. Hawkeye's great. Hawkeye's fun.

I miss it. Hawkeye's great. I had heard mixed things. I'll give it a check. It's good. It's good. It's really fun. I'll give you, it's just like, I love the direction that MCU, I guess MTVU, I don't

know how they're describing it, but like the Marvel TV shows like really slow down and they're like, hey, this guy's shows like really slow down and they're like hey this guy's cool let's like just see what's going on with him for a little bit jeremy renner is i mean incredibly charismatic much like his friend jonathan cena uh very charismatic it really helps it to um carry the show and hayley steinfeld is out but hayley steinfeld is yeah that's what i was gonna say like that he is met completely by hayley Steinfeld is out. Haley Steinfeld is. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Like he is met completely by Haley Steinfeld. And there's just like it just is able to be a little bit more fun, I think, than a lot of the the big ticket MCU movies. is for example a scene where hawkeye is in trying to track down the the sort of inciting incident is if you remember he was going as ronin for a while with his like armor and a sword and stuff and he

sees the the ronin armor like pop back up on tv so like the thing that draws him in is he's trying to track this down and part of that is that he sees a guy using it at basically like a LARP sort of renaissance festival kind of thing and the only way he can talk to the guy is if he joins the the fracas at this renaissance festival with like foam swords and shields and everything and so it's like him that scene of him like on a battlefield with all these dudes and like starting to get into it and uh it's like great fun like the whole thing's just like it's a hoot he's got the silly arrows and the stakes are low like you're not battling a giant fucking robot that's crushing whatever grand central it's you know he has to get the suit back he feels like he's uh protecting protecting

hayley steinfeld character and chris plant it's a christmas show entirely around christmas that vibe that vibe's real good um yeah i will say that i i i liked basically all of it except the ending the ending felt a little i think it had maybe one storyline too too many going on i wish it also like i think the the what they did with the show is great i think it borrows some of the matte fraction stuff uh yeah but not enough of it maybe there was a lot of like cool shit in the matte fraction stuff uh and i don't know that they necessarily get that that energy with with the show but i also think that they necessarily get that energy with the show. But I also think that they get just enough of it

to make it a really good time. Oh, wait. One other thing I wanted to say. Because it's Hawkeye and they're both Archer people, I get very distracted. This is going to sound stupid. You know once you have a kid and anytime you see parents on the screen

and they don't have their kids, you instantly are like who's watching your fucking kids yeah like where are your fucking kids i have that kind of with hawkeye where it's like anytime they're walking around or doing anything and i don't see a bow attached to them i'm like hey wait you need a bow now why are you walking around without your bow hey get your bow this could at any point this could turn into a fight get a bow there's a funny bit though we're like uh hawkeye has this you know retractable collapsible bow and hayley steinfeld just has a normal ass long bow that she has to carry around with her everywhere like how do you do this how you just carry around this big fucking bow with you everywhere you go this sucks uh it's fun uh i wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews

for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Jewelnader100, Drew Shays, Brent Trow, Servers24, and Grandpa Simon. Grandpa Simon and everyone else who wrote reviews. We appreciate it. Let's see. This week we talked about Nobody Saves the World

and we talked about Microsoft acquiring activision blizzard which means we mentioned all sorts of games like call of duty world of warcraft starcraft uh tony hawk force greater one plus two uh zork you know all the classics uh you know the good the good shit oh google uh we also talked about uh weird al peac Station Eleven, and Hawkeye. And then next week, it says in this transcript, no clue. Yeah, I can't abide what you suggested, so I really don't know what we're doing next week. Danganronpa, anniversary edition?

Yeah, I'll find something else. I was being optimistic. Are you playing Danganronpa, Justin? No? I'll find something else. I was being optimistic. Are you playing Dank on Rope with Justin? No. I've already played it. We will figure out something great for next week. Maybe we can revisit God of War on PC. We'll see.

Serious Sam Sabirian Mayhem. Oh, boy. Okay. Oh, boy. I think it's time to go. I don't know. All right. Chess.

That's going to do it for us for this week. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to join us again next week for the besties. The sugar world's best friends pick the world's best games. Besties!