The Besties - Justin LOVES Clubhouse Games

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

That's right Justin absolutely lives for the compilation Clubhouse Games on Nintendo Switch. He can’t get enough of the 51 classic board games, card games, sports stuff and even a piano keyboard! Somehow they manage to shift gears and also discuss the Playstation 5 box design aesthetics and answer fan mail. But it wasn’t easy to stop Justin from talkin’ club. 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!

So I have an issue and I wanted to see if you guys could help me through it. Irritable bowel syndrome? It's not that. I'm just guessing. I'm just assuming. I'm so glad you're finally admitting it, Russ. For 10 years, Russ has constantly been telling me, I'm just nervous right now. I'm just nervous.

Now, my issue right now is that I have too much juice. I've been making selected trips to the supermarket and i don't want to make too many trips but i really need orange juice in the morning to wake up and right i overbought and now the juice is expiring and i need to really plow through it well have you tried asking lizzo like what she did with the juice that she had because she did a big song that uh the sort of took the world by storm that was sort of her you know confession slash sort of anthem about having just the exact situation you are in right now yeah so did you even listen to it did you even think what sort of the upshot of that well summarize it griffin's not liz notes you can't just like yeah bring it boil it down

for you it takes three minutes just listen to the lizzo track it kind of if i were to try let me let me try it's kind of more or less about that it's a good thing that she has as much juice as she does and she likes having and she has like a every morning she wakes up i guess and has juice with her breakfast and um i'll be honest there's a lot of sort of metaphorical language used about the juice that went completely over my head. Russ, have you considered maybe, New York has so many fixtures,

maybe you could be juice guy and you could be in like a How I Met Your Mother kind of thing where it's like, oh, that's juice guy. If you walk past, he'll offer you a cup of juice. Yeah.

But you have to have your own cup or you can make a cup out of your hands, but he will offer. The problem there is the juice still goes bad, right? But if Russ just drinks all of the juice today, he would become engorged. Hey, Russ, I realize we're running long here for a cold opening, but this is a pretty boring game this week, so I don't really care that much. Would you run and just get a huge bottle of juice?

Would you run and get some of this mystical juice and just drink it on the show for me? Just see how much you could drink in one sort of go. I already have my glass. It's not a good idea. You don't need a glass. Not for what we're doing here. He wants it straight from the bottle.

We're talking about like you're getting ready for an MRI, but it's juicy. I just want to watch you chug some juice on the show. I want to help you through this problem by helping you to watch you chug juice and inspiring the show. I want to help you through this problem by watching you chug juice and inspiring you to chug more juice. That's the solve? Yeah, I just want to watch you chug juice on the podcast.

He needs it. No, you'll be fine. You'll be fine. Be good for your body. Siri just said, I'm sorry, I don't understand. I'm right there with you. I'm serious. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best games of

a thousand years ago. My name is Griffin McElroy and and I know the best games of a thousand years ago. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best 51 games of the week. My name is Chris Plant, and I know a few of those games are pretty good. My name is Buzz Fraschig, and I know the best game of the week. Justin is hiding under his desk. So, so badly does Justin not want to talk about Clubhouse Games. He is hiding under his desk. I'm so excited. I Justin not want to talk about Clubhouse Games. He is hiding under his desk. I'm so excited. I'm so excited to talk about Clubhouse Games.

Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and outest and most available-est in game entertainment, electronic delights. This week we have a veritable cornucopia of your great-grandpap's favorite

games. Holy shit. I feel like this is going to be my Super Mario Galaxy week, where I'm, like, fighting off you three demons. No, I like this. I'm on board with Griffin. Yeah. I also like going to Cracker Barrel now and then, you know?

Yeah. You're no Eggno-Raymoose. You love that, like, jumping little pegs over the thing. Right. Clubhouse Games is 51 games and I'm hold on let me try again for video purposes if you're watching the video version of the besties.

Clubhouse Games is 51 games. Right. That one had air quotes where you can some annoying people pretend to play them for 10 seconds and then you play them and a lot of them are the pits uh who wants to start i will give you this clubhouse games on nintendo you already gave me this you gave me this

assignment to play the very boring listen i'm gonna meet you halfway i'm gonna meet you halfway okay clubhouse games is a collection of 50 games yes the piano the piano game the piano game i'll give you the quotes on that one is nothing it's a it's one octave on a little virtual piano it's nothing that's one of the 50 now the other 50 games i'm gonna there's there's some stinkers in there so if i'm gonna meet you halfway and by meeting you halfway i'm going to give you a nokia flip phone and 20 minutes on a free app store and that will get you halfway to clubhouse games with another 20 minutes you'll have the whole thing on your phone okay absolutely maybe you'll get some you'll have to watch some ads for some russian match three games but other than that it'll be gratis okay let me let me set

it up for folks at home who have not played clubhouse games on nintendo switch it's a sequel to a nintendo ds game that was essentially the same thing a collection of uh board games card games and thank you justin let me get through it and then you can continue to open up your wide wide butthole to continue shitting all over it collection of card games board games from all around the world as well as a sort of erratic smattering of other stuff uh in this Switch version, we're talking about sort of lightweight versions of a lot of the Wii Sports titles. We're talking about things that integrate the touchscreen

like a little air hockey game. There's like a collection of sort of toy games. So there's like toy tanks and toy boxing. I have played this game a fucking a lot, like a whole, whole lot lot i've been trying to

beat all of the ais and all of the most difficult difficulties which is for some of the games is like a fucking maniac griffin i fucking love this game but the uh griffin's also immortal so yes true where it is most successful i think is in the card and board games categories a lot of the like here is here is darts but you play it by swiping your finger at the screen and hoping for the best like those aren't especially sort of successful for me but man i don't know these fucking card and board games are good and that's why they are you know the classics that they are i'll play chess i'll play back game and i'll play you know whatever not checkers checkers isn't a good game but there's just a lot of games on here it's a good value how much multiplayer have you played

i played quite a bit yeah i think that's where it really holds its own it's great so the multiplayer works like you hop into like a menu that shows you all of the games that have multiplayer in them and then you can select anywhere from one to three of them and kind of just queue up and it'll match you against somebody else who is wanting to play those. And it'll show little icons to show you like who's currently looking for partners on which games.

So like I've been playing a lot of chess on there and there's almost always somebody playing chess. So you click chess and boop, you're playing it online. What I like about playing chess and clubhouse games as opposed to chess.com, because I sort of cycle in and out of chess.com because i enjoy a good game from chess from time to time is the people who play chess on chess.com are really fucking good at chess and the people who play chess on clubhouse

games uh are really good at mario kart and so it's pretty it's pretty fun to go in there and just let hulkamania kind of run wild uh yeah so the multiplayer is good i haven't played with like friends you can like set up like a friend lobby and just like you know, play a bunch of shit. But like it's kind of fun picking a few games that you feel like playing right now, not really knowing which one you're going to get into and then doing it online. Yeah, it's funny that you

mentioned online. I mean, I realized having people over to houses is kind of a problem right now, but I was actually talking about the local multiplayer which I think makes this game totally 100 worth it and again this really at this point just applies to like if you have a big family at home uh or other people like you have roommates at home but if you happen to have that i think there are very few uh switch games that are like this easy to just like jump into for multiplayer like even

smash brothers which is obviously a great multiplayer game requires some setup and like who am i gonna pick and who i'm gonna like oh this stage or this stage and what settings we're gonna use whereas this you are in a fucking game like that and you don't have to like deal with like card boxes and shit like it seems like so much easier and light lift i i think you can share i i've not done this uh i i should probably try with uh rachel because she has her own switch but i think you can just like if you own the game you can play multiplayer with other people even if they don't have the game in a local setting yeah that's fucking cool like that's i can't think of another switch game that has done that yeah yeah there's like a multiplayer free multiplayer app on the e-shop for people that don't own the game oh where they

can basically download the like that and it has it'll allow you to play all the games but obviously you can't like start the games yourself you have to be right sure player a local multiplayer but that solves the problem if you happen to have two switches in the house it's like great for that but i also wanted to set up because we talked a lot about the multiplayer the single player is arranged and basically just like a big list of games that you can pick from and then uh each game will have different difficulty settings usually four difficulty settings and then sometimes like some occasional like trophies like there's a golf mini game that's like you get a trophy for finishing a three hole around under par or a nine

hole round under par um so like those are the kinds of things i've been chasing the other way that it's sort of arranged is you have a big globe and you pick a little miniature piece for yourself that you design and then you plan it where you live in the globe and then you can pick what are called guides from all around the world and these are like little ai people although you can set yourself up as a guide by picking your favorite games and they will hand you like a selection of games based on a theme so these games are all just based on luck and there you play like the card game war or you know other games that are just essentially chess a luck yeah what's takoyaki is another one it's just like there's no skill involved it's

just a luck based game but then there is like these are the worldwide strategy classics and that's where you get like chess and you get shogi and mini shogi which i like there are a lot of games in here that i know about like shogi and uh hanafuda that like i'd never played before because like there's very little opportunity for me to play that but these games like have a really great tutorial and then also pretty much all the games have guides where like you you can turn them on and it will show you like really really helpful info while you're playing it so like rishi mahjong has like what like 50 different like hands that you can try to put together and that's impossible to keep track of if you're not like an extremely experienced mahjong player but it makes it approachable and i think that that's

kind of incredible like that alone is sort of a a pretty great uh you know achievement of the game chris you were going to say something yeah this is just my dullard uh take on on video game design uh modern video games are um they're like designed for fun um where you can play them alone and like have fun um classic games they're designed to uh destroy people like that's what they're designed for they're designed to there are two people and one of them is going to come away from it unhappy and the other one is going to come away from it feeling good because the other one is unhappy. Right.

And that is great. I'm a big fan of it, don't get me wrong. But as somebody who is not bright or good at games, I tend to find that I'm the person who comes away unhappy. It should be noted you've never played Call of Duty multiplayer then because that's almost the exact same scenario. I would argue there's a lot of games. Obviously, and that's true, I don't play online games anymore

because I don't have time to get good, so they're just not pleasurable. And I don't know, there are exceptions to the rule i obviously like towerfall i like games that are continuations of a series that i've mastered long ago but yeah i i had never really considered how much and of course that makes sense because games didn't have artificial intelligence they couldn't they had to design with somebody who is counter to you and also games historically were inspired by war or conflict so sure um but yes i think like i fall somewhere between you and justin in this where it's like yeah if you don't have somebody right now like i just don't have a lot of time to play

with steph and she's the only person I could theoretically play this with. I mean, you could probably kick your kid's ass at most of these games. Oh, I could destroy him. Unless you play, like, War. You could play one of those more randomized games. And hope you hit the button. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I think for me, like, that,

I think I'll enjoy this game a lot more. I was thinking like this would be a great game to have in the office at polygon because there are plenty of times where like we would have meetings that are like more brainstormy and you just throw something on the switch and it's like i need something that i'm kind of paying attention to that is like keeps us engaged and has our minds going but we can still like talk and have a conversation and like that's that's where i've always loved card games for i think if i think it occupies like a really incredible space and like i am i am glad to have this on my switch i have a there's been a lot of

shit that has come out on switch lately right and i have been uh excited to have some of it and then like also just not feeling it a lot of the time i downloaded so there's this huge summer sale going on in the switchy shop that i think is still going on which like if you are a lot of the time i downloaded so there's this huge summer sale going on in the switch e-shop that i think is still going on which like if you are a listener of the show and you haven't dipped in uh dip in because the it's pretty incredible some of the stuff like i got doom at half price because i never finished doom and the switchboard is pretty great uh finished bioshock 2 i got the borderlands collection i got like a bunch of stuff uh and they're all pretty much shooters and like with everything that's going on like i i i as as great as these games are like i just

have not it is like a type of gaming experience that like is not great right now and so i keep returning to clubhouse games to just like fuck around with you you know, backgammon. Like I fuck around with and try to learn more strategies for how to be better at Connect Four. And it really has like sort of condensed what I like enjoy about games in a way that like I don't really think about of just like I enjoy getting better at games and you don't think about Connect Four like that

because it's Connect Four. Like everybody I think knows how good they are at Connect Four and assumes they're not going to get any better at games and you don't think about connect four like that because it's connect four like everybody i think knows how good they are at connect four and assumes they're not going to get any better at it but this is a game that is sort of like about those games and about like thinking about them differently and uh improving at them i think it's i think it's a fantastic just sort of yeah off-court buddy i was just gonna say that the one thing that i wish there was more of and hero gamers review kind of get into this and i i don't think it goes quite as far as it should is the history of these games like that is what i know it's it is nerdy but i like i think about this is like any other uh retro game collection right like uh we've seen these like s and k collections and other various collections pop up on the Switch

where it's like, hey, here's the game, but also here's like magazine scans from the time and here's like developer notes and here's all of the stuff so that you can appreciate all of the stuff around the game and actually learn about game history. And this, I mean, this is like an object of game history. That's largely what it is.

It's like, here is 51 games from across the world throughout all of history. And it does a little bit of that, of giving you- Yeah, it gives you trivia at the end of each game. But I do wish, because it does feel so museum-y, that it had just more of that, that they had treated it the same way that all these other retro game collections

have been done in the past. do wish there was more uh the ds version had like a mission-based system that was like more specific like uh you know finish a game of uh memory in under a certain time limit or like get uh get a turkey and bowling like it would challenge you with doing like specific sort of micro games within the collection and this doesn't really have that which is a shame because uh that was like a cool way to play that to do that note i think what bothers me about this uh collection the reason it didn't click for me all kidding aside there's this ios game i love i think we talked about before called cribbage with grandpas where you customize your own grandpa and name him and pick all the

background and features and stuff. And then you play Cribbage with him. And as you play, he is like nudging you towards better plays. He can give you assistance. He's chatting with you about the history or strategy or how your play went and giving you feedback. And admittedly, this is all sort of built around one game that i don't understand that well but now i understand cribbage really well i think what i what would have made this work for me is if it was better at there's like this very okay i played renegade this morning and it's it's othello and that game is very annoying but when it first started they were like uh someone was like i always lose the last second and this dude's like well did you control the

corners she's like what and he's like oh yeah if you control the corners it's a lot easier to flip the script on your opponent at the last second and it's like oh i was like oh wow i never thought about that before if they had something like that for and get rid of a lot of the cruft here yeah and make this a way to really understand 20 games like to really get in there and like have a guided experience i've tried to learn hand food like a literally half a dozen times at this point and i'll try and i'll try to wrap my mind around it and try to keep up with it and it's just like no dice if this has well no it's a card it's a card game there's no there are no dice that explains it i keep looking for the dice now um if that was

part of if this was what this was like something that took the time to like really explain these games in a guided way and help you walk away with a better appreciation both historic and just like strategic um i think that would make it really worthwhile without that it's just sort of like uh i don't know i don't i don't see much it's like a convenience more than it is like something worth seeking out and there's a there's a precedent for that there's like i want to say three games total in the set that walks you through a multi-step tutorial before you can play it so like chess is like let's learn chess step one uh let's learn uh shogi is one of them which is basically like chess i didn't fucking know that like i didn't know what the fuck show he was all about like i guess it kind of looks like chess but i never assumed that and then

there uh rishi mahjong is another one where it's like, let's learn how this game works over a series of like miniature, you know, tutorial levels of it. Like, and that was instrumental in me understanding like, well, I knew how chess worked, but all of the other games and how they work. But yes, like learning pro strats at Connect Four, I only did that because of the internet, right? Like I only got, I was losing to the impossible level ai a thousand times are

there pro strategies for connect four i mean there are there are strategies for literally every board game don't stop at three a skill just keep it going yeah russ that's all it is yes i agree i i if this had been a collection of 20 games and they had put a little bit more care and attention into like teaching you how to be very good at Mancala, which I am having a real love affair with right now, then I do agree. I think it would be a better thing. Because boy howdy, I don't want to play fucking toy boxing.

I don't want to play fishing ever again. It's not- Curling is good. A platinum tank right away. Tank just got wrecked by me. Yeah. The curling minigame is good but it would be better if it was actual curling yeah like it was an actual not and not this weird yeah i i think i

think for most people if you're listening to this the only really good reason for you to pick this up is if you have a local multiplayer person that you can play with because i think most of these games become much much better if you're sitting next to the person you're playing against plant mentioned tower fall which is like one of our favorite games ever it really only works in local multiplayer like ignoring the fact that like i don't think there is online multiplayer but like the experience itself really only works in local multiplayer uh and i think the same is true for games like smash brothers and i think in this because these are easily accessible familiar games if you're in a setting where there's like a handful of people that aren't really gamers you could throw this on and someone will find something hey let's play

whatever this like whatever thing for 10 minutes and it's like way easier than a lot of other solves but if you're just alone and you're maybe i'll play more online or something i don't think it's worth it one more thing it comes with wee bowling uh it's not it's not it's not as uh charming as wee bowling you can't throw the ball behind you uh you don't have like your friends cheering you on but it's pretty similar um and you also don't have the wee motion controller which like well you can play with your you can but it doesn't feel as not the wii mode the joy yeah the joy con yeah yeah be wild if you could use a wii um i i i would disagree with russ because i have played it mostly single player like there is to me there is a great satisfaction in trying to get much much better at these games and

you can do that as a in a single player environment and And I'll tell you, I played Gomoku, which is like the simplified version of Go, which is essentially like basically Connect Five on a sort of 2D plane. I played that for easily a couple hours, just trying to beat the AI on the most difficult difficulty and just getting my ass stomped. But when I did finally finish it,

it was a sense of like dark souls level beating the boss satisfaction of just like yes i'm finally fucking good enough at this board game that i don't have to play it anymore i i i have enjoyed it so much and i again like maybe wait for it to go on sale which probably won't if you're like on the fence about it but like i am i am yeah i feel this weird sense of comfort knowing it lives on my switch and that anytime I don't have anything else to play and I just kind of want something to nibble on, I can hop in and play some backgammon or whatever.

Can I mention one more aspect that we haven't really talked about? If you happen to have multiple switches in your house, there is a thing called mosaic mode. And Griffin mentioned the piano earlier, how it only has one octave. If you have four fucking switches and you put them next to each other and connect them mode, and Griffin mentioned the piano earlier, how it only has one octave. If you have four fucking switches and you put them next to each other and connect them all,

it's a full piano. Well, full piano is eight octaves. Whatever. Maybe it's two octaves on the switch. Anyway, you can do that with a lot of the multiplayer games where there's a slot car racing game and you can arrange the switches

to make your own track across multiple switches. It's really neat. Yeah, four switches laid into it and it's just how Franklin Delano Piano envisioned it when he created his great instrument. The dream is true. Can we not talk about this anymore

and talk about literally anything else? Let's do it. So after being delayed a week, we finally got the playstation 5 launch event uh i guess you or launch announcement premiere announcement event premiere where however you want world exclusive world exclusive and while they were there were some new games on display, so happy to see my dear friends and cousins Ratchet and Clank back on the scene. We also got the first look at the PlayStation 5 box, and that is what we wanted to talk about right now,

the aesthetics of the box that is PlayStation 5. I'm pulling up a giant high-res glossy... Let's pull up the biggest fucking... Yeah, it's... No, 800 by 450 is not gonna do. I need way more pixels than that. I will say what jumped to mind immediately upon seeing it

was inverted ice cream sandwich. Because there's really nothing. I mean, we have the white on the outside and the black on the inside and it's basically an inverted ice cream sandwich. Let's do our, there are probably people listening to this who don't give a shit about stuff like this.

So let's try and describe the look. That's what I was saying, ice cream sandwich. Who doesn't care about an ice cream sandwich? Inverted ice cream sandwich is useless. Okay, no, no, no. Let me help you. Okay, picture Donald Duck, right? Donald Duck with his mouth open.

He is trying and failing to swallow the black obelisk from 2001 A Space Odyssey. And his duck bill is made out of human teeth. This is still not great. Still not great. I mean, that's pretty clear mental image. I want you to imagine a black router or perhaps even a a very very thin air purifier and then take two sort of white sheets of printer paper and just squeeze a sheet on each side of it trying to envelop it all the way but you can't quite get there can you

you can't quite get there and so you get something that looks like a router that looks like one day its dreams are going to come true it's going to take off and start flying uh i think there are angles at which you could look at it in which it is slightly georgio kifi i think it's a little kifi from certain angles if you wanted to get there interesting well you know that it makes a v which i really like. It's PlayStation 5, and if you're looking at it front on, it's alluding to a V shape. I think it looks cool, personally. I think it's like a neat

it looks different from the other boxes. I feel like very uninspired design for this generation of consoles. So I really, I dig the look. it looks like a like a shock trooper futuristic shock trooper that you would fight in haze it has a very haze which i very much enjoy and alicia and everybody can can do i think microsoft designs everything

to fit into like a kind of a cliche a mid-century modern home like oh this this will look okay especially once they eventually release the like kind of like white version like the xbox 1s right um in playstation for sony they're like what is the most of this moment thing we can make like what is the thing that the day after it comes out people are gonna be like oh no that just feels like a little a little bit like uh of yesterday like look at the playstation 3 with the george foreman grill um playstation 4 is pretty timeless and playstation 4 is it's it's yeah it it felt like it was going closer to the microsoft route yeah and then for playstation 5 they were like psych that was a huge mistake. It looks like this. That looked too nice inside of your living room.

And the best thing about this is, I mean, if all these guesstimates are right on Twitter, this thing's huge. I think maybe this lives like standing alongside your entertainment center, kind of like a tower PC. Yeah. I already have a tower PC, pc though and it's fucking huge like i don't know i don't know where this fella's gonna go if he is very big do you guys remember the other like quote-unquote leaked uh design of the ps5 that looked like a sort of spaceship toilet seat no yeah i think it yeah it was like uh it was sort of v shape it was also sort of v shape but it was

like a god i don't know how to describe it it almost looks like a big hard drive like a big angular hard drive but with like a v cut out in the top and lights inside of the v so it really it just really does look like a light up futuristic uh like japanese bidet toilet seat i hey weird weird thing how one of these has a disc drive and the other one doesn't that's really weird i still classify that as appearance i don't feel like i'm getting out of bounds here that's wild huh is that the is that where we're going is that anybody gonna get the non-disc version if you get one well let's have it let's have a quick mini sidebar discussion because i used to be firmly in the camp of like i like having physical

versions of things i like having physical versions of things i don't know why i did the uh pizza chef mamma mia thing with my hand like physical pizza like a physical pizza uh no like i uh if there's a big game out when the switch came out uh i specifically bought breath of the wild on cartridge because like i wanted to have the box like there was something about that that was um in one way sort of like tangibly satisfying it's like cool it's the reason like you know that i have records is because like i like having the thing uh but also because there is like a level of security there of just like well i know where this cartridge is recently i lost my copy of uh civ 6 first switch like it's just fucking gone

like that little cartridge i'll never see oh yeah forget about that's in your son's tummy yeah it's somewhere uh and but like and then i had like that was when i had the adult realization of just like oh well that doesn't fucking happen in a digital like yeah if i had it digitally then you know maybe when the e-shop shuts down in however many decades like then it'll it'll be gone. But, like, it's good for right now. And I think I've crossed over into the, like, I don't want disc-based games. And I think the PS4 has contributed to that

because I have the PS4 Pro that is, like, supposedly, like, the good version of it that if it does have a disc in it, it still is, like, kind of fucking noisy. Yeah. And that does not happen when it's a when it's a digital yeah i'm i'm very pro going all digital for games this generation i went almost all digital and i like it i don't like the clutter in my house the only reason i'm considering a disc

for the ps5 is because sometimes i'm i'm a member of baftaTA and sometimes I get DVDs in the mail. And do I want to keep a PS4 around just to play those random DVDs occasionally? But for gaming, I think it's totally fine. I also think because of the backwards compatible nature of the PS5, and I think this is going to be the case for a lot of consoles moving forward like i think

the next switch whenever that happens we'll probably still run switch games having all those digital makes it so much easier because you just like go back to your catalog in the way that you can on 360 games yeah so i'm also curious how they do backwards compatibility for like playstation 6 because a thing that we've seen so far and i believe this is the case not 100 sure but i i think if you own games on ps4 and they are disc based so you haven't you haven't downloaded them yet and then you uh want to do back compat on ps5 you have to have the disc version of the ps5. Yes, you can. So, like, if you buy, yeah, if you buy Madden, and you buy the disc version,

but then you buy the digital version of Madden, it's like, oh, well, now you have to buy Madden again. Yeah. Where it's like, if you just buy the digital version of Madden on PS4, and then whatever PS5 you have, it'll just presumably work. GameStop is fucked, huh? I mean, it's hard not to also feel like

i mean game spot has been the stock has been dropping stop stop you did it i can't believe it's 2020 and you mix up game stop and game spot oh my god it's unbelievable it's 2020 they're all the same anyway the storefront the stock has been doing not good and this feels a little bit like you know they were kind of a threat eight years ago but who's gonna who's gonna stop us well they'll hold on through the console launches and then they're just gonna drop like a fucking yeah but i mean sony releasing a no disc version of the console at launch yeah it's hard to imagine eight years ago because that would be going straight up against the the storefronts yeah and now it just seems like like who cares tough shit hey we've gotten so far away from the design i'm so mad at you guys i only want to talk

about how it looks on our the best thing to talk about in an audio podcast is how something looks we've discussed this over and over and over again, so that's kind of a brief look summary of specifically what the PS5 looks like, but we are going to do an intense, extreme, head-to-head battle royale between the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 in a very exciting special in July. We're going to do a whole episode

where they're going head-to-head. We're going to decide the winner. We're going to do a whole episode where they're going head to head. We're going to decide the winner. We're going to decide the winner right fucking now. Because you don't need to buy both of these dang things. So we're going to tell you which one to buy.

Yes, so get excited for that. Oh my. Has anybody been playing anything else? I feel like weirdly we are in a pretty like dense release time right now i say that but it's mostly switch ports that i'm playing yeah i have also been playing switch ports the most recent one that i've been playing uh which i can talk about because the embargo lifts today the day this

episode comes out is burnout paradise on nintendo switch i'm so fucking jealous i want that so i do not really get into racing games at all but i've always loved the burnout series we've talked a little bit about on the show burnout paradise i was very nervous because i have such fond memories of that game and i was worried it coming to switch it might not go great and it goes so great it runs so great it's 60 fps steady all the features are in there all the dlc they release is in there. The only caveat is if you would rather play it on any other platform, it's going to be like so much cheaper.

It's like $5 on PC. But, you know, Switch, obviously you can play it portable. It looks great in handheld mode. It's absolutely superb. So I highly recommend it. I have been playing a little bit of Destiny 2, new season, pretty good. That's all I'll say about that.

Also, Slay the Spire is out on iOS. If you have not played that game before, you have no excuse. I didn't know this earlier this year, they came out with a fourth character, The Watcher. Yeah, it's a pretty cool, I know this seems like minutiae

if you've never played the game before, but like it completely changes how you play it and it's all about switching between these different stances it's it's really cool um but i also wanted to shout out bug fables oh yeah nintendo switch the the everlasting sapling uh put simply it is a it is a paper mario game literally it has that sort of like uh 2dD paper craft aesthetic to it. But it is like a completely original story about this world full of bugs. You control a party of three different bugs and it has like, you know,

that timing-based, turn-based RPG sort of combat like you would see in the Mario RPG games. But there is also like a level of sort of Lost Vikings-esque puzzle solving because you have these three different bugs that can do different things and you are switching between them in the world to like you know use the magic bug to freeze an enemy and then the beetle to like push it into where you need it to be as a block so you can jump up on it and throw your boomerang as the b but like there's

a lot of like it it elevates i think that that paper mario idea uh in a way that is very very cool i will be honest some of my wind uh in playing this game was taken out of the sales by seeing the announcement of a new paper mario game coming out next month so they're part of me doesn't want to spoil my dinner a little bit but it's it's really great it came out on pc i think last year and got kind of rave reviews there and switch is just kind of a perfect little platform for it so if you're hungry for just a really well-made RPG uh bug bug fables is where it's at I'm just still playing monster train it's still exceptional if you if you uh find yourself enjoying slay the spire or other rogue like deck building games like that uh you should play monster train i can't believe we talked about clubhouse games this week instead of monster train i've been playing uh assassin's creed origins

it's very good but uh my my my my real answer uh is actually tied to two things from reader mail so i'll just dig into that and then tie it to what I've been playing. From Nerd Piggy, we have, what are some hidden gems from that Itch.io racial justice bundle? And from Escaped Muppet, found any gems you'd never played before in the bundle for racial justice on Itch. I just finished Quadrilateral Cowboy, which led me down a rabbit hole playing Blinda's other games, Gravity Bone and 30 Plates of Loving.

Those games rule. They are very good. What is Blinda's other games, Gravity Bone and 30 Blights of Loving. Those games rule. They are very good. What is Blinda up to? I don't know. They actually just released the source code for, I believe, all of those games on, oh my gosh, why can't I, somewhere, look on their Twitter and I'm sure you'll be able to find it. Here are some games I think everybody should check out.

their twitter and i'm sure you'll be able to find it here here are some games i think everybody should check out fortune uh 499 by ap thompson and crew that game rules hidden folks is on there uh by friend of the show uh adrian de jong that game also exceptional uh dujana piku niku nuclear throne there's so many that i'm just going to start naming some. Here are two that I had not played but had been meaning to that I really am enjoying this week. Wheels of Aurelia and Wide Ocean Big Jacket. Both are excellent. 2064, Read Only Memories, Minute. I mean, there are just so many games.

Oh, one I definitely want to call a mortician's tale um is a really lovely game about uh basically the culture of funeral homes and morticians and eco-friendly um death services uh it's great there's there's so much here uh i'll let everybody else join in but but one thing that i do recommend everybody do because honestly this is the best way to take care uh advantage of this opportunity is just pick random ones like yeah so much of gaming is uh is this annoying uh marketing drip where you know everything about a game before you play it and the chance to just open up a

pack of a thousand games and scroll through it and randomly try something and know nothing about it is fantastic and it's something that um brush and i get to enjoy each year because we are judges for the independent games festival um and it is i honestly it's something that i look forward to every every november and the fact that uh so many people get to try that out now, and honestly, you could try that out anytime by going to a tryout and just picking a random game. But hey, here you are doing it for a low price and you are doing it for a good cause. And I recommend you give it a try. It did.

It did. At the time that we are recording this, it did end yesterday. The, uh, the, the bundle, but, uh, raised raised eight million dollars which is pretty fantastic incredible it'll also worth noting that humble bundle launched their own uh which is more like triple a or at least uh you know larger scale indie games i think that's uh you can submit 30 hours and you get a crap load of games and that is currently on now so if you miss the itch.io That is currently on now. So if you missed the itch.io bundle,

here's another opportunity. That one has Spelunky, Jackbox Party Pack 4, and Baba is You in the first four games on it. NBA 2K20, Sonic All-Star Racing, FTL, Bioshock Remastered.

I mean, that one, if you don't have a PC, you should just get it anyway, knowing that maybe one day you will stock your pc with all of this stuff yeah this is wild yeah and all of the sales go to the uh local chapters of black lives matter i think in the national bail fund network uh it's it's it's really remarkable uh i don't know you covered a lot of like the great stuff in the, the 1700 games in the bundle for racial justice. But I wanted to shout out a short hike,

which we talked about before. Very, very good. I'm excited to read about Lancer. It's like a pen and paper RPG about like mechs and space stuff. I've heard really cool stuff about that. You just get, there's a lot of stuff in here.

Like there's a hex kit for making maps for tabletop RPGs. There's a pack of just game assets. If you, if you want stuff in here like there's a hex kit for making maps for tabletop rpgs there's a pack of just game assets if you if you want to make games like that's in here too i like all of the sort of uh errata that is in here and also just uh quadrangle cowboy i know you just recommended it but holy shit that game just rips ass it good um i have a question for y'all from uh rips ass it good um i have a question for y'all from uh re or bakery uh what games feel like home to you that's a nice question it is a very good question i mean there's a couple i think there's a way of interpreting that it just like makes you nostalgic for like a better time or like a you know a time from your your youth or is it just like a comfort a general comfort game i will say one thing is that uh i live in an area that i feel

like in west virginia griffin i were raised here and i still live here this is not exactly what this person was asking but like interestingly the first thing that popped in my head when we talked about this is like i don't feel like like the area I live in has ever been particularly well represented in a home, in a game. I can't actually think of a game that has presented the region I live in in a really good – Oh, Fallout. Fallout 76. It did real good. Go on.

It's not West Virginia, but I don't know. Kentucky Route Zero was the only thing that sort of... I mean, that's in a state next to it, but actually West Virginia is not as surreal as Nightmare. So that is not great. I interpreted this as just like a good vibes game that makes me feel good that I return to a lot. And I think for me, it's Undertale i i've replayed that game a lot and it's just like you know the

music and the message and the like writing and the everything about that game is just kind of feel good unless you're playing it like a psychopath in which case it's explicitly a bad feeling game um uh yeah that's the one i that's that's probably mine i think for me it's more about what games can i play now that take me back to like childhood gaming and like what reverts me to that and like puts me in the exact same headspace i was in when i first played that game and it's probably linked to the past for me which i replayed recently on switch because the you get it for free as part of subscribing to switch online right and i mean i've played that game countless times but just that opening in the rain and you're walking alone to the castle and i remember so

clearly like not knowing where to go and then finding this secret little opening in the side of the castle and going down and it was it's just like it really just takes me back immediately so that's probably mine yeah for me it's uh just the games that i remember playing with like the kids in my neighborhood and that was you know tony hawk on nintendo 64 um kirby's dream course we played just a disgusting amount of that game um and then obviously gold and i which i don't really enjoy playing now um but uh even even not really enjoying it now the feeling of playing complex with proximity mines immediately just sends me to a certain place in my life that's a weird sort of memetic because everybody played that proximity minds and

we did temple but i mean pretty much i think it was one of the modes wasn't it complex with proximity minds was great because you had if i'm remembering correctly the like the big plate glass windows yeah right like you had the hilarious like people running past and then you watch the the glass explode but like how did everyone play proximity proximity it wasn't a game mode it wasn't like you click a button no i mean it was you could set the any weapon to be the weapon to spawn but like everybody i know who played golden i played complex just no weapons just running around it's a weird it's a weird time period and i don't know of any other games like that have where, like, you said memetic, and that's the word for it, where modes would spread memetically. Like, outside of the internet, you would have people like, oh, you guys haven't played King of the Bathroom?

Well, here's how you play it. And it's a very folk game, almost, within the structure of this game. It's very cool. Any more plans? Yeah, I got one more that i think y'all will have fun with uh this is from uh spinosaurus stan uh what game franchise do you think deserves a dark and gritty reboot a fucking nun like this is the last thing i want is to which is a real shame because boy howdy we're playing a we're playing a a a chipper one next week uh i think it's more it's almost more

interesting to think of it the other way right of like a game that was dark and gritty and how do you reimagine that as like light because the dark and going dark and gritty any i don't know it's so depressing i'll tell you a good a game that does that really brilliantly is house of the dead oh yeah sure um where the the oh my god what's the typing of the overkill overkill overkill yes house of the dead is one that's always been very grim and then uh overhead uh overkill brought in this like very cool grindhouse aesthetic um and made something that was grim like very fun and silly um i think that that's and also typing of the day is great typing of the dead is typing the dead sure yeah so freaking great i cannot i have i've been sitting here trying to think of a

game that improved a game franchise that improved when it had a darker and grittier and like i'm thinking of literally every, I was going to say Zelda, but Twilight Princess is not my, not my fit. I think it has aged fairly well, but it is not even in my top five, like best Zelda games.

yeah, I can't think of a single game that was improved by getting darker and grittier. What about Kirby? Maybe, maybe I'll give you maybe Kirby just because I have not been into those games recently because they're not, I mean, they are designed to be like super easy.

So give me one that's for like a pro gamer, like a big dog gamer like me. Well, it's also just real, right? Like you really have to like put some effort into munching down on everybody to take all the passes. And then it's like some Lynchian body horror where it's like your Kirby bones are cracking to morph into, no, yeah, that sounds good.

I think it's an easy fix to make it dark and gritty is just give Kirby teeth. Give Kirby teeth. Oh yeah. Dude, just give Kirby teeth, everybody. And let me brush him. We don't even need to see, yes please, we don't need to see him chew.

Just we don't, no. He has teeth. want to brush him like i brush my dog's teeth with one of those little finger you know you put the toothbrush around your finger and you just get in there oh yeah that'd be fun that's weird chris yeah that'd be fun so anyway on that note thank you so much for listening to our podcast remember you can follow and listen for free on Spotify where you are probably listening to this right now I have to imagine if you want to share the show

with folks it's easy you just find the link besties.fan and that'll get them where they need to go we should talk about what we're doing next week next week we're playing we're playing The Last dark and gritty we're playing uh the last of us part two which uh yes obviously is going to be a very challenging game i think to play if you i'm gonna have fucking k-pop blasting in the background yeah eating like a bomb pop just like

trying to rave i have i mean uh the the reviews i thought would be like a little bit harsher, I think, just because like there is so much violence in the world that is happening like right now that we are all seeing just more or less constantly at this point that this does not seem like a very welcome games where enemies beg for their life as you stab them. Not my favorite. There's a thing with the dog that i can't wait to talk about with y'all it is yeah so like over the top uh yeah so that's that that's gonna be next week we're only gonna talk about the first well what did we talk about the first five hours we'll talk about at least that if we play more we play more here's a recommendation before we talk about this game for everybody who's listening uh if you're one of those people who goes to metacritic and you which is understandable i you know we all go to metacritic or rotten tomatoes uh to like get an idea of how things are

um if you click on last of us too great you'll see a whole bunch of hundreds scroll down to the bottom and then underneath all the scored reviews there's a bunch of reviews um that don't have scores like reviews from polygon or kotaku or vice and i think you'll see a very different type of review than you might otherwise see and i encourage you to read those i'm not saying that we are all going to inherently be negative on this game i think like no a lot of us might like it. But I do think before you listen to the episode, get a full perspective of what is out there. Because if you just read the first 10 reviews of this game, they all have that kind of inherent AAA games or art energy.

When are movies going to catch up to video games? Am I right, guys? That's not bad reviewers have their own taste i i just think like i personally like having a whole bunch of different tastes uh all at once so get that swirl of flavors and enjoy it and then come listen to us next week but we are going to talk about the coolest guns and what it looks like when you what like the goo that comes out of the heads, um, all kinds of cool stuff. World exclusive.

Sounds so sweet. Anyway, uh, thank you so much for listening to our podcast. Uh, we hope you'll join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. the besties it's a spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley.

And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!