The Besties - Journey to the Savage Planet

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

The boys head into space and gather a heck of a lot of resources...and laughs? Russ somehow justifies his love for Jojamart, which may be the true good guy of the Stardew Valley universe. 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!

Griffin, you replaced the sun, I hear. I have an alarm clock that simulates the sun. It's a simulated sun that lives on my nightstand, and it wakes me up when my body feels ready for it. You have this alarm clock that's like, hey, Russ, hey, come on. And that's not how human beings are supposed to wake up. That's not how God intended it when he made the sun for us.

That was a really good impression of my daughter. I'm actually extremely impressed. I have a little virtuous sun and it pops up right on my bed stand. It doesn't burn me terribly as the real sun does. So that's another mark against real sun. And it wakes me up when I'm damn well ready to

start my day. How does it know when you're ready though? It just knows, man. It knows you. It knows me. It knows me inside, out, spiritually, physically. Did it interview you when you turned it on for the first time? Was it like, what's your favorite food? What's your favorite color?

Yes, it did do a survey. It was delivered by a man in a white suit. Sorry, I should have mentioned that first. The man in the white suit, he wanted to know everything about me. And so he sat me in a special chair. We shouldn't be talking about this part on the air, though, because he told me not to tell anyone. And he lives in your house now. He does live with me.

Yeah, he's more of a roommate. And when I set alarm clock, it's just him. At 621 a.m. every morning, he rustles me gently from my bed. His name is Phillip. His name is Phillip. And I love him very much. He is your son. Do you have to feed him or take him for walkies?

Oh, shit. I gotta go. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Plant, and I know a game this week. My name is Russ Rostig,ing out of the best game of the week welcome back to the besties a weekly game of the year podcast a a book club for video games as we like to say here there's got to be a better way to say we like saying that i don't think we like saying that i think we're just forced out of my tongue. This is a show where we talk about the latest and greatest in video gaming. And this week we're going to talk about Journey to the Savage Planet.

Is it possible that I wrote the title down wrong on the rundown when I was writing the rundown? I have seen you type both. You did, and then I corrected it. It is not Journey to A Savage Planet. It's Journey to V. Journey with my savage planet. Journey unto my savage garden. Who's gonna like, who's gonna,

I don't think we nominated a leader to speak about this game. Justin seemed kind of smitten by it. Maybe Justin should lead the charge. Yeah, I did. You know what? I did like it. Can you set it up for,

because I feel like this one is uh more than a lot of games we've covered this year like came in pretty under the radar if you weren't like really paying attention yeah so okay uh journey to the savage planet was developed by typhoon studios which i'm currently looking uh at their website to see where they are based. They're out of Montreal, Canada. Right. And they are now owned by Google Stadia as of December 29th. Wow. Okay, cool.

That's great. This would have been a good Stadia exclusive. It's a shame they couldn't pin that down. Is it a shame? It's a shame. Everybody with Stadia could have enjoyed this great game. Okay, so Journey to the Savage Planet is a open world game where you're a spaceman who's stranded on the titular planet and must brave its dangers to rebuild your craft, refuel it uh find out the sort of mystery at the center of this this planet unearth the the uh reason that it seems to be have been visited

by intelligent life at some point and to get home you are being overseen by a, you know, that sort of post-capitalist satirical corporation that seems to be in some permutation of which seems to be in every game. You know, your aperture sciences, that sort of deal. And the main thrust of the gameplay is split between there's a lot of, I say a lot of metroid prime dna in there yeah there's a lot of uh scanning your environment to learn about how it ticks and a lot of first person platforming which is like for me the like the thing i think about when i think about metroid prime because it's what that's not a knock against it it's maybe the only game that's ever done a good job with it except for jumping flash on the playstation one uh yes and i i think if you return to jumping flash now you would find yourself disabused um that was at a time in video games

where jumping very high was enough to just like i don't know guys put it on the disc uh we got phil hartman we're calling it blasto. Put it on a disc. It's ready to go. Um, so there, yeah, there's a lot of, uh, you do have a, a one weapon. You have a blaster that you upgrade with like, you know, better battery and, and more damage, et cetera. Uh, and, and you get some sub weapons, some items that you collect in the world, grenades that do like shocking and, shocking and acid and explosions and stuff that you use to explore different puzzles and what have you. There is a lot of platforming. There's a lot

of exploring the world. You have a jetpack that you can upgrade with more sort of boosts. It's never like a free floating kind of thing. It's like a jump extender and you also can get a grappling beam of sorts that lets you connect to certain points scattered around the world.

You can't just use it to connect anywhere. It is uncannily similar to Metroid Prime. It really just ever – not the resource question stuff. I think it's much more fluid than Metroid Prime. Yeah, it's much more fluid than Metroid Prime. I think if you return to Metroid Prime, you would find yourself disabused of the notion that Metroid Prime is... They put Luigi in a mansion, put it on the desk. That is the idea of the game.

It's not massive. You know, I did probably 70% of all the stuff. I did all the collectible stuff that sort of interested me. Some of it has a little bit of a narrative component. Some of it's just like getting this orange goo to smash into your helmet and upgrade your life and your stamina.

And before I say anything else, you should know there's a little bit of FMV in there. There it is. That will color my take on the game you have a boss that uh uh you know sends you video messages about your progress uh all very kind of silly and and absurd and uh then there are some commercials that uh i would say they remind me of um you know they remind me of the most like jackbox fake uh yeah products you know it's

still that sort of same satirical type like by way of by way of tim and eric like that idiocracy i got that vibe from it yeah yeah and i don't okay so the gameplay is all i mean none of it feels particularly new none of it it feels particularly like it's challenging. It's not that hard. But for whatever reason, I found this sort of like very mild curve of exploring the world and finding the little collectibles around. Like I just found it very pleasant. It's the kind of game that really entices you to explore. I think it's always kind of like luring you away.

It looks really cool the geography is all really cool and it feels really crafted especially when you're going after some of the more hidden collectibles like there are a lot of con there are paths that are hidden out of the way that make you feel really smart and accomplished for for finding them and kind of zipping around with your with your jetpack and your grappling hook i do want to talk about like moving around because you talked about you said that it's not... You think this feels better than Metroid Prime, which I...

Let me correct that. Once you finish upgrading your jetpack and get all the charges in it... Sure, so at the end of the game... No, no, no. I had it halfway through. Once you get the first jetpack double jump upgrade, essentially, that's when it kind of...

I was not enjoying the game at all until I got that and i was like oh okay like this actually opens a lot of doors and actually it feels pretty good i think the locomotion is like the best thing this game's got going for it yeah it is fun i don't disagree with that but i don't know if that yeah i i don't know i i once i had the um jetpack upgrade i felt like i was like constantly over jumping things and like didn't have a good feel for it i also one of the weird things about it is that the controls are like for at least for me kind of cumbersome and clunky like there was a lot i tried a controller i tried both so i started with the controller and i found myself having to like maneuver like way too many like shifting my

thumbs around way more than i normally would when i'm like oh i need to scan this thing and i need to pull up my tracker and then i need to blah blah it was just like way more complicated than it should have been and then i moved to pc and it was equally complicated because there's just so many inputs it's like okay i'm switching sub weapons and now i'm throwing a sub weapon and now i'm grappling and like there's just like a lot of variables for a game that is really not that complicated but i feel like for whatever reason and now I'm throwing a sub weapon and now I'm grappling. And like, there was just like a lot of variables for a game that is really not that complicated, but I feel like for whatever reason,

they made it that complicated. I don't know. It felt a lot more sensible on controller, I think. I will say it's a little cumbersome switching between your sub weapons. You have to like tap on the D-pad to flip through them. And there's not like a quick, quick select to one of those. And a lot of them, you're in situations

where you need a certain thing right now. And that can be a little bit annoying. quick select to one of those. And a lot of them, you're in situations where you need a certain thing right now and that can be a little bit annoying. I tended to overshoot those. We haven't really talked about the other sort of like vector in this game's DNA, which is probably my least favorite thing about it is that it kind of dabbles in the craft genre. Like when I started playing it,

I thought, oh, this is going to be a Subnautica. This is going to be a- I think you actually just announced it as such at the end of our last episode and said, it is a Subnautica. It's one of those. It's not really one of those. It is not, but like, okay,

I guess the more obvious like comparison is like a No Man's Sky. You turn, you land on this planet. It's vivid and bright and colorful and strange. And you think, okay, well, I'm gonna go get all this stuff to upgrade my blaster pistol and then upgrade my scanner

so I can find more minerals to upgrade my jet pack, to upgrade my ship, to upgrade, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to like improve your chances of survival and improve like your way of getting around the world. But like, it's really, it leans a lot, it is much more, scripted isn't the right

word because it is still open open world and you can sort of you know go and explore and find all kinds of different things but like it did not it does not uh follow that pattern necessarily like this system is not pleasurable at all so the way that you actually get perks is there are all these perks that you like just uh griffin's describing that you collect all these different types of materials and then you can unlock the perk that would be fine perfectly fine or like maybe you get level upgrades that can allow you to unlock those instead what they do is you have a journal in your menu and in the journal you have science experiments that you need to do and those experiments are unreliable at best uh i spent yeah an hour trying to do an experiment where you just

shock five creatures and kill them within a certain amount of time or however many creatures and i did it multiple times in multiple places and it never unlocked and then literally after doing this for i'm not exaggerating an hour i went into a new area where it just happened by accident it was like oh great what a tremendous waste of my time um you also have to collect dna from certain creatures you can only do that when you are on that specific layer of the mission so So I went around the whole game wondering why I couldn't collect DNA samples from anything until I realized, oh, I have to collect

just the three it wants me to do now and then later on in the game I have to go back to collect things I've already passed. It's, I mean, it's like routinely frustrating how they design the system. And it's, the bigger thing for me is like, there's the craft element that they have in there

feels so unnecessary, right? So like to talk about the economy of the game, which is like a thing that I find very fascinating in games like this. One of the first missions is like, you need the double jump. If you want to go any further, if you want to find the thing with the grapple beam,

you're going to need the double jump, right? It is very Metroid-y in that way. It says, okay, well, here's a place where we know there is this alien alloy that you need to make the jetpack upgrade for double jump. You can go there. To the game's credit, you could also just go anywhere that this alien alloy exists because it is like a very rare crafting material that you need for like special upgrades. So you could accidentally find it somewhere else. And that's super cool. I went the intended route route i found the alien alloy after going through this cave full of like monsters and lava i got the alien alloy and it was like great you also need a hundred carbon

and it's like that it's so like you're going around i went back to the ship with my alien alloy like let's do this thing it was like oh you only have 50 carbon you don't have 100 carbon i guess i'll go back i guess i'll go back outside and shoot five space chickens and then come back inside and do it. Did any of you come across the green gelatin cube version of Alien Alloy? Yes. Did you understand what to do with it?

Oh, yeah. What did you do to open it? What? I kicked it off a cliff and then I noticed that there was some silicone down there and i noticed it went around sucked it up so i just kept feeding it and i gave it uh and i slapped some of those berries uh that heal you and it ate those and then eventually ate so much that it

exploded whoa that's great i'm glad that you explained it because it's the one time that you i think there are two or three of these in the game um totally unexplained and not related to any of the other allies which just open normally just do you think that's because of your like adventure game dna where you like throw a paper clip at a door and hope for the best absolutely absolutely yeah that's absolutely that and the fucking page on ign that i looked at but like that's what i'm saying it's it is that sounds neat actually i'm into that what i'm not into is like this additional unnecessary layer of well actually you have to go and get this material that like is hanging on some walls and if you break those you get 50 and if you kill a chicken you get five and then you go back and

you can make the thing by going back to your ship, which like you do eventually get access to a teleportation network. But like just like when the chest opens, instead of getting an alien alloy and then I have to go and get a hundred like pieces of carbon. And then I go back to the ship to make the upgrade that you've told me to make. The chest opens and I get the thing and I can do the double. Can you guys drill down on like, OK, I felt some of of these like complaints especially gating it behind the science experiments i thought was so like the science experiments feel like a um one of those like extended in-game like i don't know if you want to do this you can uh but it is gating things like upgrading your weapon and stuff behind the and upgrading your jetpack like behind these it felt like a way to pad the gameplay longer than the game actually was it's what it felt like

i agree with you about the science experience i want to drill down on like what you're saying could be leveled at like a lot of like open world collection games so chris can you like differentiate what's the what what separates this from like from the pack in terms of getting on your nerves i think uh to talk about this game the way i think about this game is um there's a thing that nice restaurants do um where they have like a whole bunch of uh interesting food options right uh you can get like their special fish or they have like i don't know an interesting way of uh i'll have the special fish you know the special fish right or the ratatouille made by the rat i can tell you

a real gourmand but then like every um fancy restaurant also just has a cheeseburger even though it's like a fancy restaurant they're like i don't know like surely there will be people who just want the cheeseburger they don't want to try anything too risky we'll make it it's like a little bit better than you expected and this is the cheeseburger of the video game industry right now where it's like we know this recipe it that we when they set out to make this game it was like we will this is a game we know we can make and ship within this amount of time. It is the most proven formula imaginable. It's a little bit better than you would expect. It's nicer than a traditional, like, indie game, right?

Like, it looks kind of AAA-ish. But then, like, you eat it, and after you're done, you're like, I mean, I enjoyed it. I like cheeseburgers, but I'm never going to think about this again. Yeah, there's something cynically dispassionate about it. It just doesn't have like a soul, which is kind of the vibe. The weird thing is I think it does.

I just don't like the soul. But to be like, to specifically answer your question, I think the issue is because the game doesn't really aspire or doesn't feel to me to aspire to anything specifically great, the fact that it's just trying to do uh follow

effectively the formula that it's not even doing the formula very well is maddening to me like it's a 10-hour game and like i have to do mmo grind like padding just to get through that is not particularly thrilling i didn't hate this game like this i mean we talked about like what are good exercise games holy cow is this a good exercise game? Because time sure passes while you are just doing the grind. But I think its flaws are more obvious because I can't do the thing that I would do with, we talked about Kentucky Route Zero last week. But then I can also think about all of the things that I really adore about the game. And for this, when I try to think of things that were really special to me are going to stick with me, it doesn't hold as much weight. I do want to share. I just wanted to share my like biggest pet peeve in the way that the humor gets in the way of like having a good time with this game.

Very early on in the game, like one of the first things you do you pick your quote character you basically pick from like eight different pro uh like images of characters and they're like goofy images like one of them is like a screaming man and they look like 1980s shopping mall like photo booth laser background mullet like that yeah that kind of thing one of them is a dog um which i thought was funny like hey i want to be a dog. So I picked the dog. What I didn't know at the time was that selection actually determines the noises your characters make as they run through this world. That's good. Fucking funny, Russ.

You idiot. That's so funny. It was funny. You picked a dog and then you're mad it made dog noises. It was funny the first time I heard like a dog grunt after like a long fall. Like, that's pretty funny. You picked a dog and then you're mad it made dog noises. It was funny the first time I heard like a dog grunt after like a long fall. Like that's pretty funny. This is a good segue to talk about the comedy because I feel like that's the shit that works in this game.

And by this game, I mean any video game. This like idea of this joke only works because it is interactive. This joke works because it is endemic to like the design of the game itself it is not just a joke that they are shouting at you which this game does sure i would agree with that the problem is and this is also common with games that try to do humor the 60th time i have to hear log a loud dog panting when i sprint for too long i wanted to jump off a bridge it was literally i went back to the ship trying to change my character profile just so I didn't have to hear that goddamn audio clip again.

I played as the dog and I will be honest, I didn't even notice that it was a dog. I just thought this guy was a freak. That's so good that both of those are so funny to me. That's very funny to us now. I feel weird as somebody who like does jokes i feel like i hate criticizing other people's like comedy but they've made it such a centerpiece of the the tone if you remove it there really like isn't any tone to speak i mean it is literally just one speed at first i'll be honest like I found it pretty

grating just because that note of like capitalism is bad but like we're supposed to get you excited about it is like I feel like super played out in video games a lot because the metaphor of playing most games is like direct like one-to-one direct with the metaphor of like being exploited by a capitalist system it's like it's like right like 100% easiest jokeone direct with the metaphor of like being exploited by a capitalist system it's like it's like right like 100% easiest joke you can make I will say by the end I wasn't like laughing it wasn't funny but I did kind of find like it's so eager to please you know like I I just found it like pleasant enough the lead actor is like charming in a weird way he's very watchable this guy who's like your boss i don't think the script is particularly pleasurable but his performance is enjoyable

kind of like the guys who do the sonic commercials i don't like the commercials but i would hang out with those guys in that car they seem like cool guys yeah brilliant improper but you also have an a the other like character in the game is your ai sort of companion throughout the game for me like for me that was the delivery mechanism that was like literally anything you scan any animal you enter any new area you pick up any new upgrade you do anything and she's got like a disinterested ai i don't give a shit if you live or die like quip about it that like like, here's what sucks about it. Sometimes the jokes land so much. Anytime you eat one of the orange goo upgrades, a lot of those jokes were fucking great. The first time I did, like, you, like, first 10 minutes of the game,

you go out into this new area, and then on a little hill, you see this orange pod of goo, and she's like, I wonder what that is. I wonder if it could be helpful to your mission. And you've also just learned about the scanner because you use it to scan some animal. And so I just ran right up to that hill and it said interact when I hovered near it, picked it up and just fucking shoved it into the front of my face like a sea of thieves banana. And like my health and stamina increased. And she was like, wow, you just ate you didn't i just told you about the scanner and you didn't scan that and we're on an alien planet and you just shoved that orange alien goo that you found on the ground in your mouth and like that cracked me up because like you probably didn't get that if you scanned it and it's like it that is funny to me like that isn't that is an

interactive joke that i felt like i was a part of and there are a lot of really good ones of those but they are drowned out by just constant jokes there's a lot of that feels like a spreadsheet next to like a list of things that you scan and it's like okay what's like i guess we have to find something i don't know maybe this like maybe this is the joke about it. You know, it feels very mechanical. I think the thing that bums me out about this, the game and the humor,

isn't even the jokes themselves. It is the whole critique on capitalism and also colonialism. I mean, it's not a secret that the title Journey to the Savage Planet, not great. Use of the word savage planet not great um use the word savage not particularly great um but i think i i have to imagine considering the game so clearly is trying to make a commentary on colonialism that like that was intentional that like there's like i

guess some irony to this idea of journey to the savage planet where you are actually just this colonialist figure who is landing and killing i mean i don't know if we talked about this many of the quote enemies don't actually want to fight you you just kill them you need their carbon yeah and you're destroying their planet i mean it's it's very on the nose but the problem is it never really says anything in a way it reminds me of kind of spec ops the line which i know a lot of people love but or it does the thing of like well you've all had fun i hope you feel bad like we we built this playground that that sure does feed exactly the thing that we claim to be against but it doesn't if you finish the game like it doesn't uh which i'm i guess we all did um it

doesn't even like underpin those themes like it doesn't even underpin those themes. It doesn't thematically tie it all together. The tiniest of spoilers here, and I don't think this could even really be a spoiler because it's really hard to spoil this, but again, if you don't want to hear it, skip ahead 15 or 30 seconds. When you have the final boss fight,

the boss in alien language tells you effectively the message of the game but it's in an alien language so it's only understandable via subtitle which is running across the bottom of the screen in tiny font while you're doing the boss fight so yeah good luck enjoying that it's i and then like i just even like the like, the goose on this are so old. I mean, there's a commercial about malls. Like, cool. The 1970s was a really great time for us to think about malls and capitalism.

What the hell? Like, I wasn't alive when that, like, was a trendy critique. Chris, you don't understand. If you go to the malls you're a stupid person i don't want to close this on on this kind of down note uh because i i think everything everybody's saying is absolutely valid um i think it's only frustrating because like it it gets close to a lot of great stuff that it doesn't quite get to but overall i found it to be a very pleasant experience i think it is a bargain priced title

is that is that right yeah 30 bucks i think if you like i think this is the sort of game you'll also see sales on and on sale it's like hey this is a good way to spend a half a day or something like this would be the perfect game for a platform like stadia where if i didn't have to like pay money for it and it was just a thing that i could like pick up and play for a weekend i think uh folks yeah this will hit you it's a great like pass a weekend type of video game but yeah when you when you have to hold it up to the light compared to everything else that's out right now wolf as i'm preparing to transition out of this segment i can i will say this i do feel this game fading out of my mind like rigadoon the moment moment I press stop on this recording, I will go, bye-bye.

And it's like, goodbye, Justin. Yes, it'll journey away from us. Let's go to our break. Kindred is the name of the company that they're working for in this game. It is cut from the mold, like I said of of many other fake video game corporations like aperture science um uh we wanted to talk about some of our favorite video game corporations because i feel like they don't get enough credit they're so often cast as like the bad guy like bad oh scary corporations um but they got a lot to offer sometimes corporations are good and they're

just basically like people and they love us thank you Thank you. When you love them, they love you back. So who wants to go first with their favorite corporation? Look, corporations are people, and they're better than people because they don't make you collect fucking strawberries and melons when it's off-season. And that's why I love Joja Mart, brought to you by Joja, the corporation that should be the hero of Stardew Valley but isn't because those fucking Juminos walk around and think they're so hot, but actually Joja Mart is where it's at.

We're repping Joja Mart. I have played this game so many times and understand that there is the good ending where you invest your money and resources into the community center and rebuild the town of Stardew valley and uh force jojomart out of business and there is also the like amazon hq2 ending where you instead like invest everything in jojomart uh and i've never had the stomach to do the latter look here's the

deal think of how many people that jojomartploys. There's only like 12 people in Stardew Valley. They probably employ 10,000 people. You shut Jojo Mart out of business? Yeah. There's like mass depression and hysteria in the streets all over the globe. So which is more important, your tiny little idyllic town or the world? The gears of the lifeblood of this country. The gears of war.

I mean, in a similar vein, you know I'm all about that Nook life. It's all I'm thinking about. We're about a month out and change from New Horizons. And it just got me thinking about Nook because I feel like this is the whole Nook enterprise. And my man's got his fingers in- Let's be clear, we're talking about Animal Crossing

for people that aren't aware. Yeah, yeah, who wouldn't know that? My man's got his fingers in the mortgage business. He's got his fingers in just sort of like general contracting. Sure. And also retail, right? Because his kids, cousin, nephews,

I don't know what the, I'm not exactly sure. I think it's the nephews. Okay, well, Timmy and Tommy, Jimmy, cousin, nephews? I don't know what the, I'm not exactly sure. I think it's the nephews. Okay, well, Timmy and Tommy, Jimmy? Anyway, they run the shop, right? And so, like, my man has the whole thing locked down, and that's very good to me. But they don't, the prices are fair. The prices are good.

His loans that he gives you are interest-free. That is a pretty good deal. No down, like, no down payment, or maybe explicitly a down only a down yes it depends on which way you think about it and like for me that's a good business you invest in it it gets bigger it offers you more choices you grow with it that's a good business this is a good raccoon people do dump on tom nook on the regs but he is actually pretty generous all things considered yeah he's a generous, and he's investing

in his community. What the fuck have you done? You built one shitty house, and you planted four apple trees, and then you left, and the town got covered in detritus. He's basically the George Bailey of video games. Yes! Basically. I'd like to talk about an extremely powerful and important corporation to

video games. That's Altor. Altor has the... Laid's Altor. Altor has the, laid end to end, Altor has the wildest arc of any company in any video game ever. You ready? Saints Row 1, Altor is a clothing manufacturer. Saints Row 2,

Altor is five years later, later okay five years after that their business interests looking at the wiki page here their business interests include real estate development power cell phones pharmaceuticals packaged foods casinos and weapon manufacturing wow that's altor in five years that's wild that would be like if in the early 2000s, FUBU was like, we're sending a man to the moon. This is our whole fucking show now. So Altor does that. Later, they get into more, you know,

different, even more industries. And then the head of the company, Dane Vogel, dies. And he sets up a branch of this company in hell. There's a branch of Ultor that is actually in hell. Fast forward to 2050, this company

takes over Mars and controls both the financial part and the governance of Mars by 2050 in the red faction uh video game series all tours is is a huge part of that is that true yeah bub i never put that same universe i never put that together nights the saints row and that's spectacular i never knew that yeah so that's that's the amazing Altor Corporation.

I mean, I can't follow it. The only thing I have is Rapture. I just love the idea of Rapture Inc. that Andrew Ryan one day is just talking with a gang of people at a party and he's like, hey, I'm going to open the same city, but underwater.

And he says it in such a convincing way that everybody's like i yeah i guess so i'll leave my family and friends behind is that but that's not really a corporation it is because it's a private city it's an entirely privatized yeah ryan industries yeah okay that's the name of his uh was his company yeah i guess you would need right because you have to be invited you can well that guy does sneak in but he's also his son yeah i guess you would need right because you have to be invited you can well that guy does sneak in but he's also his son so i guess whatever i mean it's like a it's like a i don't know it's okay yeah let's say yes not let's not spoil bioshock a 13 year old video game

uh that's good i just want to also mention that do we have any uh messages from our uh our listeners about their thoughts on journey to the savage planet uh let's see chase uh wrote in to say the trend of play this game i think it's good question mark the trend of games where you follow stink lines continues this is our second consecutive game in which Stink Lines are followed. And said, glad the world wasn't procedurally generated. It would have lacked a good sense of exploration. And the art style is great.

So Chase is into it. We've also got a haiku from Chance. Great exploration. Every game needs grapple hooks. Fun to fight bosses. now that last bit is they needed to fit the fucking like uh syllable count for a haiku because the boss fights in this game are the pits yeah they're actually i like them i i also asked uh folks on twitter who didn't play the game uh for their favorite funny moment from a video game uh cassandra said call of duty

modern warfare 3 i played with a friend and we hid in a building with only one door and one window for their favorite funny moment from a video game. Cassandra said, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3. I played with a friend and we hid in a building with only one door and one window. Enemies kept coming in and we would panic, but they would always ignore both of us and run straight out the window. We were only 15 or so, but it was the funniest thing in the world.

Wow. At PMC Trilogy says, Assassin's Creed 3. I was tailing some guy and tried to hop a fence, but got shot into the air instead. I failed the mission three times, once for leaving the tail distance, once for leaving the mission zone, and a third time for dying when I hit the ground. Both of those things are funny video game things and not like the great and mighty poo,

like not like a big, just here's a joke for you. We got a joke for you. You like the joke? I have to confess something okay i bought gex 64 from toys r us and yesterday for one day realized how much of a mistake it was i was probably 13 went back the next day they obviously had a policy about not accepting returns like that i made up the most outrageous story about how it like melted my n64 through the floor just so i could get the 60 back and buy something decent man was that game awful oh shit oh man humor games how good are they anybody been playing anything else that is good?

I played a little bit of this game, Discolored. I think it's on Apple Arcade. It's a first-person adventure puzzle type thing, sort of like in the Myst vein. Very cool stylistically. You start off and it's like in a black and white world that's very contained. It's sort of centered on this like diner and a house

that's sort of like connected to the diner and just sort of the immediately surrounding area. So it's small scale, which is good for a phone because I hate walking around in first person on the phone. I find it kind of cumbersome, but not a problem here. on the phone. I find it kind of cumbersome, but not a problem here. And the puzzles are all centered on

restoring color to the world. You find items that can bring color back into it. And in doing so, you gain the ability to interact with other items and so on

and so forth. You collect the thing you use the thing on the thing how do i play this game justin it's what do you mean me physically with my broken eyes how do i play this game i'll have trouble with this game let me see you know what i've got it right here let me see if there's a colorblind mode while somebody else uh i started playing halo reach on pc and you know what older first person shooters are a strange thing to return to and i don't know if that's because so many new shooters come out every year that the genre just evolves rapidly and it makes it hard to go back to them so they don't seem to age as well or what the game is still fun is it is it like same engine as the master chief collection yeah i believe so i mean has

it gotten like basically the same spit shine sort of yeah it's in that collection like yeah oh is it oh okay yeah and it's and on pc i believe it's the only game that you can actually play right now in yes um and yeah it's it is enjoyable it's like more of um it feels like a novelty uh because it really it it's so not like what i remember halo i uh it halo reach has one you don't have the master chief thing right there's like a lot of driving in this like it's not open world but like large open spaces um and you have these very strange power-ups that feel kind of like a tease for what hero powers would later become and stuff like destiny. It really feels like a game between periods. And as a result, it's not especially good at being either of those generations. But if you are

somebody who just likes seeing how video game history evolves i thoroughly recommend checking it out especially since it's a part of this collection which will end up being just tons and tons of games and and the halo multiplayer is still wonderful i loved reach i was crazy about yeah but this is when i was like i was reading like the halo books and so like the reach lore like i knew about and i was excited to like live it that was it was my favorite at the time i think the problem is destiny exists now and while i'm playing it i keep thinking i could be playing destiny sure uh i've been speaking of a thousand year old games uh i i was looking for something to play on switch so i got into minecraft because i thought like

hey i could open up i haven't played it since it first came out and like i could open up a server uh because they like offer a service to do that now you don't have to like you know have a you know a blackberry pie fucking dongle on your computer to run an online server uh and that game has changed a lot and it's got a lot of really cool shit the thing that i'm like kind of into now is like i take a lot of pleasure in like Lego sets like building something with a uh instruction book like an instruction book right like I genuinely uh not a joke like like putting Ikea furniture together I find that to be very like zen like and contemplative fucking screws work am I right yeah sometimes that sucks. And so like what I've gotten into is like finding builds,

like finding YouTube videos of builds that folks have done where they put together like an assembly list, like a list of here's, you need, you know, 116 cobblestone slab. You need like all of these different things. Going out into the world, acquiring those materials, bringing them back, putting them in one big box and just saying like, okay, like let's do this and like building a huge windmill like and it

takes a while and i can do it while i'm you know editing a podcast or something like that and like that is very much scratching the same itch for me i know lego like has things like that too i feel like like doesn't lego worlds essentially have like some also describe dragon quest builders yeah i mean exactly yeah like dragon quest builders has that sort of built into the game right like minecraft it's better than minecraft is what i'm saying sure but what i i'm enjoying minecraft because like also there are now like hundreds of people on this server and so like seeing other people doing that same thing too it's like a genuinely like it is this is the first time that like uh i kind of like get why minecraft is uh or at least was like the biggest game on the

planet uh and uh yeah it's a cool experience okay so i've been playing the same game every day for four years wait hold on wait russ before you do this let me get your can opener because i it looking at the rundown here it sounds like you're about to open up a can of what the ass it says rant right here i was in the middle of my rant you clear the decks put the kids to bed russ is about to bring the fucking heat i've hit him dude i've been playing the same game for four years that is firebomb heroes it is a mobile game i've talked about on the show before represent dropping the heat on firemob heroes here's the thing they just this weekend for after four years introduced a ten dollar a month subscription fee to access

now look i get it if you want to charge a subscription fee for costumes or cosmetic stuff whatever that's fine i get it but they're like locking actual gameplay features behind this subscription wall and it is totally like a major major drag for the it is literally the only nintendo mobile game that is left that has like any sort of goodwill associated with it all the other ones have sort of like devolved into like animal crossing they kind of ruined animal crossing mario kart they kind of ruined mario kart no one still plays super mario run anymore fire emblem heroes was the only one that like had a community and had enthusiasm behind it it was also the only one still making money for them well that's not

true they all that's not true but this was still making a lot of money for them and they were not satisfied so they went ahead and introduced this thing 100 like basically 120 a year to play this game that is like more that is like five times the amount they charge for nintendo online which has all sorts of free games you could buy all the dlc for three heroes you could do so much and this just feels like such a step in the wrong direction and i was just super super bummed about it i cannot in my mind like reconcile how they have a subscription model and a like gotcha game mod like those two things seem because the the whole idea of a subscription model is you pay us this stuff so that like we can continue to support the game,

develop out the game. That's like why MMOs have subscription models. But also if you pay $5, you'll get some orbs that you can use to randomly get like new heroes on your team and maybe they'll all be shitty. It's like, how do those two things coexist yeah i think it's just i think what they're building it for are the people that spend a

hundred dollars a month like gladly on the gacha model and then they're like oh yeah whatever they're killing their whales right like why are they it's just for whales yeah yeah i don't i don't and that would have been fine if i don't know they made such a big deal of it and they were just shoving it in everyone's face and it just felt very gross for a game that I like passionately have enjoyed for this long um yeah so rant over the end

the can is closed close the can it's empty there's no more whoop ass inside um so next week we're going to be talking about... Dream? Maybe?

How's it looking, Plant? Our man on the ground. Here's the thing. We want to talk about Dreams. The new Media Molecule game. Not the game. Not the game. It's going to be the most boring podcast of the year i'm rolling this big donut open up

the game gonna be falling out um will we talk about dreams it depends on if we are able to play it before then here is a game we will be talking about no matter what super mario brothers three y'all don't have an excuse not to participate in the Video Game Book Club this week because everybody has a copy of this game sitting somewhere. Look under your chair right now. Check your pockets. Why are we talking about Super Mario Bros. 3? Because it is the, I believe, 30th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. 3. So we will use that as a chance to talk about that game the the legacy

of that game which i mean don't even get me started on that power glove and everything else uh mario i hope y'all enjoy it i hope that we also get to talk about dreams my teeth keep falling out i don't know what it means if we if we don't get access to dreams and i think like this may be the first time we've done a game that won't be out it drops on the 14th and we'll be recording our next episode on the 12th so like i guess instead of like your thoughts on dreams unless you have beta access which like they were very open with uh like if you have questions about the game uh or anything then let us know uh and if not like we'll definitely talk about dreams at some point right i'd love to hear your super mario brothers memories, too. Yeah. Just like, I think everybody, a lot of people.

It's a you, Mario. Let's just do this one. The wizard. It was in the wizard. And they have fun stuff in the wizard. Okay. Hopefully that headed off the 3,000 emails about the wizard we were going to get. I will read your wizard emails, dear listeners.

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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!