The Besties - Kicking it Super Hard with Mario Strikers: Battle League

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

You know Mario, from Mario? He's so much more than a jumping plumber, you know. He's doing soccer now, too. I mean, he's been doing soccer, and a lot of other stuff, and we're going to be talking about ALL that while we share some thoughts about Mario Strikers: Battle League. Games discussed: No Man's Sky, Rogue Legacy 2, Path of Exile, Fortnite, Vampire Survivor, Yakuza 0 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!

Yeah, I watched Blue Velvet for the first time. Oh, boy, we're just jumping right into the David Lynch, huh? This just feels like the most sort of, it feels like a parody of somebody coming on this show to be Chris Plant. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's so on the nose. Wouldn't it be more me if I had already seen it?

Yeah, that's a fair point, yeah. But did you like, it has King Koopa in it. Yeah. Like Dennis. Oh, Dennis Hopper. Dennis Hopper. No, no, no, no. It has, no, sorry.

He is playing King Koopa. I mean, basically the King Koopa character that Dennis Hopper plays in Super Mario Brothers, the movie, and the character he plays in blue velvet kind of the same pretty much the same character huh same ambition yeah to kill the mario brothers and it's really weird because everybody else is like doing the movie like everyone else is like okay guys let's get together and david brought us all together for this one we're gonna do a great job and then dennis hopper just walks in it's like bring me the mario brothers heads and it's like whoa whoa this is so avant-garde yeah it fits man anything goes with david lynch you can't beat him well and dennis hopper he's like a roaring mississippi river right like the best you can do is kind of take energy from it with dams, right?

But you can't steer the river. The river's gonna go where it's gonna go. It's gonna- The Dinosaur River? No, you can't. It's gonna try to kill Mario and Luigi. Hey, should we do an episode where we just covered the Super Mario Bros. movie?

Because it feels like we are trending in that, like that's the next logical evolution because it blends a lot of our favorite stuff here, which is to say those great plumbers and also cinema. I mean, how many times can we talk about John Leguizamo without playing the entirety of, is it the nerd, the jerk, the idiot? Oh, my God. Oh my God.

It's too bad Hoops isn't here. I feel like that's what we're missing. We're missing Hoops. If Hoops was here, we would have listened to that song like five times before the end of this cold open. Yeah. Oh, let's say other things to antagonize Justin

since he's not here. Hey, do you guys remember that Jimmy Buffett song, Where'd My Cheeseburger Go? Oh, do y'all remember Sewer Shark? Yeah. Oh my God, I love FMZ games. That game sucked. All FMV games are bad.

You know what I hate? Woodwork. Oh, gross. I'm all about metallurgy. Well, we did. My name is Christopher McElroy. I have the best soccer game with Mario in it that came out this week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Froschek, and I know the best game of the week.

Welcome to the best of your show. We talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It is a video game club, and just by listening, you're a member. It's a game of the year show that goes all year round, and just by listening, you're a member. It's a game of the year show that goes all year round, and just by listening, you're a member. And this week, we're talking about Mario Strikers Battle League, the newest

soccer Mario game to come out of what? Is this only the second or the third? Because there was the GameCube one, and then there was a 3DS one? This is the third. The original was on GameCube, then there was a Wii one, and this is the third because there was the game one and then there was a 3ds one or this is the third the original was on gamecube then there was a wii one and this is the third this is the third one and this one's got really hard kicking in it really hard kicking like the other ones had pretty hard kicking in this one the kicking's gotten so much harder i think we're also going to tier list our

favorite mario spinoffs yeah um because maybe there's not much to actually talk about vis-a-vis the way that Mario does kick the ball. Chris Plant, what is Mario Strikers Battle League? Oh, it's Mario Soccer, but this time the kicking is really hard. Thank you, thank you. Sorry, I did step on your toes there. No, no, you did great. And we're going to be stepping on Bowser's toes

as we tackle him to the ground violently when we come back from this quick break. So Mario Strikers Battle League. I always confuse it with the other. What was it? Charge was the second one, and then just Mario Strikers was the first one. It sounds like a collectible card game.

It does. Which I would have maybe preferred. Well, it's soccer soccer it is more soccer uh and i think well here's what i'm gonna say i think of the people on this podcast i have the fondest memories of it because it became a a pretty big staple just as a local multiplayer game when the original came out on GameCube. I think, I want to say it was my college years. And as a local multiplayer game, it is pretty spectacular. I think it sort of captures the same fervency that you get from a game like NBA Jam, obviously in a soccer milieu.

But you talk about the GameCube version though, and you're talking about like 15 years ago right sure but i but i don't think it's changed that much it has not really changed that much at all um yeah it's it so i had never really played a mario strikers game before um mostly because i am not a soccer fan i realize that that is a uh i don't know a pretty stereotypical thing to say for uh classic americans which doesn't make sense because i love hockey i adore hockey and what's fast soccer it's well or soccer is just warm hockey um but it's it's never it's not my favorite thing, and so it is genuinely difficult for me to divorce my feelings about Mario Strikers Battle League,

which I will say now are quite ho-hum, from the fact that it is a Mario version of a sport I don't have much affinity for. But do you like hockey video games? I mean, not really okay i mean i don't play them that much i i would honestly probably play a hockey video game now it's just never the first thing that i sought out um and i've only been watching the sport for i don't know five or six years now which is i guess enough time for me to look up a hockey video game if i really wanted

to do you get icing now have you figured that out icing yeah it's once that clicks the whole sport really opens up yeah um but i've i've found that okay here's my first experience with the game i loaded it up with henry at my side because me and henry have been playing a lot of video games lately and he has started to like develop more of an appetite for not like super mechanically complex games, but more than, you know, more mechanically complex than, you know,

some, some Paw Patrol. Sure. iPad game. So you load into this and say, Hey, you want to do the tutorial? And I was like,

yeah, we'll do the tutorial real quick. And then it's like this, like eight step, like eight chapter tutorial that like we made it through two chapter maybe even one and a half chapters up before henry was like actually no thank you this this seems uh pretty boring this does not seem like my cup of tea because there is a lot of different stuff you can do vis-a-vis charge shots and charge shot canceling feints and uh even the tutorial starts way

simpler than that it's like it does pass this but pass shoot yeah but it does not take it does not take too long to to reach a point where it was it was placed out of reach of my of my five-year-old although i imagine we don't have many five-year-old listeners so this probably god i hope to a lot of people um but then once i got into the game and i played a few matches i felt like i got it and was having a pretty good time and then i was like okay so what's the next so what's next and then there wasn't like there's not a, I would say, an embarrassment of riches vis-a-vis, like, single-player modes. Yeah, I think the core of it is still really strong, but it is weird to see. Even, you know, I certainly have had issues with, like, the last few Mario sports games, golf and tennis, neither of which I thought had very good single player story modes, but they had single player story mode.

Yeah. And this just doesn't, which is weird. It feels like a thin, but even by the standards of very thin Mario sports games. Yeah. Um, but I would say like,

it, it feels like the sort of game that if you're in the right environment for it, it's great. I would say the same thing about the newest Mario tennis. Um, both of these games are like amazing local multiplayer games i just feel like a lot of people don't necessarily have that experience where they have someone locally that they can play with and get really into it yeah it's uh it's you can play with up to eight players locally which is fun, but also like, I don't think I will ever be in a room with seven people for whom playing Mario Strikers Battle League will be like the activity of choice.

Just the logistics of charging controllers gives me a headache. Oh, it's a nightmare. And then bizarrely, the online multiplayer modes, which you would think like, okay, well, the single player modes seem a little bit scant. Maybe they put all the effort into the online multiplayer. And there's like, there's a club mode where you can have like a club of 20 Mario Strikers players. And then sort of asynchronously, you can, you know, win matches to earn currencies to like customize fields and

all that jazz but if you actually want to play like a quick play match against somebody online it's only one versus one and not four versus four which is wild to to me because it seems like you can do two local and jump take two people locally online to play two other people. Okay. I think that's possible. That is maybe the most bonkers use case for this because I don't know when that would ever come together. Well, you and Henry could go out and game against the world. There's just zero carrotsats here for me.

Because there's gear that you can earn by getting coins for winning cup matches and stuff like that. And then you can customize the, I think, 10 characters that are in the game with these different pieces of gear that adjust their stats. But for every positive point in an attribute that

the gear gives you it also uh like subtracts stats from it from a from a different statistic and so like i get the idea of like okay i'm really gonna you know customize my toad to be like wicked fast but you know a weak little baby if anybody tries to tackle them uh it just doesn't feel very rewarding because there's not like a i don't know a huge benefit to that stuff you know what's kind of interesting is the last few mario like nintendo sports games have been built around this idea of post-release content yeah like you look at uh tennis and golf and even uh wii sports or nintendo switch sports and all of them have like these very robust post launch plans around them we're like the rest of the game comes out yeah we're like the and it like

wouldn't even surprise me if they like filled out of a single-player experience post-launch, which seems so counter to Nintendo's old-school ethos. But I guess they're kind of changing, at least with the sports games, they're changing their strategy. I can't tell if it's clever or not, because it's a thing you always worry about when somebody's like, yeah, we're giving tons of free post-release content.

And it's like, well're giving tons of free post-release content and it's like well is this free content or is this content i would have gotten yeah originally and you spend a little bit more yeah now it's good marketing and in most cases i feel like with most game studios you honestly can't tell like it's like yeah sure this probably is free probably would have not come with the game here it is like yeah flagrantly obvious that they're completing the game but with nintendo does it matter when they're the one studio that five years from now can still sell that game for the original price right like they don't care if you buy the game in the first week or month or year they assume that

most of the people who like it are going to get it later on anyway yeah um i genuinely i think that's all i have to like i don't know what else to say i think it's fun i think it is fun enough i probably won't play it anymore now that i've fulfilled my contractual obligation to play it for the besties podcast i do wonder if we have people listening that like have the setup i don't know absolutely it takes it takes all types right different different shows for different folks it's just like i think that that is a more niche thing that could have been made more sort of accessible if there were more sort of meat on the bones of this game.

I think it's a great time to have a Switch if you live in a dorm. Like between this and I think Mario Golf is a delight and Mario Kart getting just gobs of updates and the new Switch Sports. And Smash. Yeah, if you're in a place where you can play locally, there's always that the ongoing conversation of like the death of local multiplayer and here one of the biggest companies in the world for video games is making solid local multiplayer games yeah the only bummer is that they're charged

full price and they don't seem to satisfy everybody else. The one thing I'll say about this game, and this is more of a wish, which I try not to do, like, ah, I wish this game was something entirely different. Well, it's a monkey's paw can be dangerous, right? I could be getting something bad, but I wish these Mario sports games borrowed from the current fighting game playbook and from Soul Calibur to Mortal Kombat in terms of how they do story games borrowed from the current fighting game playbook and like from soul caliber to mortal

combat in terms of how they do story and how they kind of add novelty between matches so like you pick a character and then as you progress through matches you're just getting little splashes of story for that character and you're getting your gear alongside that and maybe there's like little mini games that are also teaching you how to play like i i think fighting games have just gotten very clever about how they add some meat to an otherwise again similarly simple experience um but whatever i mean that's not even a complaint of this game. I'm not, like, upset with this game for not having those things. It's just... But I personally would like.

Yeah, it would just broaden, I think, the audience a little bit more. Yeah. Uh, um, that's, that's all. It's a short, short convo, but it's a short game. And so we're gonna take a break, and then we going to come back and talk about some of Mario's other non-Goomba murdering travails. I am looking at a tier list with about a thousand Mario games on it.

So maybe let's tighten it up a little bit and just sort of float our preferred Mario, like, side gigs. These are the best of the best we are not even worrying about the shitty ones all s tier basically right all s tier and i think we got to go whole series as sort of uh tricky as that's going to be because of the i would say wide quality range of some of these some of these franchises i i feel like within most series there's a decent amount of consistency there are a few outliers where like paper mario from game to game changes pretty dramatically yeah that's that's a that's a rough one but for the most part i think

they are pretty consistent i would say i would just i would disagree with that in such a major way just because i think uh to to specifically focus on paper mario and not like all mario rpgs because i would say the mario and luigi rpg games are like s tier those are those are consistent like paper mario you get like six sticker star and um whatever the most recent one was was not rough not great um but you know thousand year door is a fucking like iconic game from that era so uh but don't you think that's the aberration like i think in in most cases the series tends to be pretty consistent i would agree with you if there hadn't been in my opinion a pretty steady quality decline in the paper mario series literally i would say since thousand year

door yeah well yeah but that's what fresh is saying it's the uh the outlier everything else right that is the outlier okay i see what you're saying yeah yeah yeah like like mario party is consistently like six out of ten that is generous fuck mario party well I think if you average out the high highs of the early N64 era versus the low lows of a lot of the other eras, I think you could probably come to a six out of 10. Can I put the Mario and Luigi RPGs up in S tier? Because I feel like- I definitely think they are-

Those are exquisite. Phenomenal, yes. I think, and you you know four jokes aside i think bowser's inside story is a really fucking funny game that is very clever and it like is the peak of uh like how those games blend rpgs and platformers and and all the stuff that that series does well i think that game does does the very best. Partners in Time is good. What's the one with the babies?

Partners in Time. I love Partners in Time. Babies. They say babies a lot. It's great. I agree with you, Griffin. It kills me that they more or less killed that franchise with the death of Camelot

as the developer. Is that right? Or Alpha Dream, I think, is the developer. Yes, that sounds right. But it is, man, those games are super good and super consistent, and I can play them a lot. And I think the writing is really great. Like, I want more of that style of, like,

goofy, lighthearted writing that I think originated in Super Mario RPG, which I guess I would kind of bundle these together, right? Super Mario RPG, yeah, it's close. I would say that they have a lot of shared DNA. Well, Super Mario RPG doesn't really have much of an emphasis on platforming stuff. Super Mario RPG kind of splits, basically, right?

I feel like Paper Mario is one part of it, and Mario & Luigi is another part of its soul. Two approaches to an RPG, basically. Yeah, yeah. I feel like we're due for another Mario & Luigi. That feels like a thing that we could see Nintendo announce in June. Wow, we're in June. I mean, they literally closed the studio that made them.

Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, here's the thing about video games. You can keep making them. What? People tend to not be super precious about that sort of thing. Yeah. I'm going to say the very obvious one, which is Mario Kart. Yeah.

Which I think has only gotten better. I know that there is a lot of nostalgia for early Mario Karts, especially Super NES and 64. But here's the thing mario kart 8 is the best mario kart and i think with exceptions here and there they tend to be better each time um especially those like the mobile mario kart era who those are some great great video games what oh no you mean you mean like game boy advanced ds yeah yeah like yeah nintendo ds yeah because it came out on mobile phones and you know it wasn't very good it was not a highlight but those stages are being added to mario kart 8 now many of them and they're great they're like quite fun um i want to call out fucking luigi's

mansion for being pretty excellent throughout i think tonally it is like the most consistent of these series like luigi's scared of ghosts scared of everything and yet he's once again thrown into the wilds of a horribly haunted mansion and they're like very welcoming games they're like kind of slow paced funny uh they feel real the latest mario the latest luigi's mansion game on switch feels fucking spectacular the like vacuum vacuum vacuum stuff is uh feels super good and um i don't know it's so removed from every other mario spinoff um and i just love it i love that they kind of went in a totally different direction with that series uh yeah i would i would i would agree with that. It's not my favorite. And I really bounced off of Dark Moon, I believe, was the 3DS Luigi's Mansion game.

Although I do recognize that it's a pretty stellar accomplishment that they were able to make a game that sort of big and polished on 3DS. So yeah, I think the quality bar is set pretty steadily high there. I mean, of the sports games, I would say Mario Golf is the one that I enjoy the most, even when the game isn't my favorite.

What do you mean? Like the Switch Mario Golf game, I did not think was, like, very good. But I also, I liked playing it way more than I liked playing Mario Strikers. But do we need to include it? I mean, I feel like if we're doing S tier, and I say this as a person who loves Mario Golf, I even like that Switch game probably more than anyone here.

Yeah, that's fair. I think there are two truly great Mario Golf games, maybe the best Mario sports games, and yet the fact that there have been probably three games. Since then, yeah. That's not great. Y'all, we got to include Smash Brothers. Yes, I completely agree.

Are we calling that a Mario spinoff? Because we could also call that a Pac-Man spinoff. But it has Super and Brothers in the game. That's a really good argument. It basically is Super Mario Brothers. They were so excited about fighting, they couldn't say it right. They were like, Super Smash Brothers. Yeah, they got so stoked about smashing.

Super Smash Brothers. Yeah, they got so stoked about smashing. And if you look at the original roster, it was, I want to say, 40% Mario characters, right? It was mostly Mario. Yeah. How weird is it to think that a character from Earthbound

was in the original roster of like eight people or whatever in Smash Brothers? They had some deep cuts. From the very beginning, they had some deep cuts. I'll so hard. From the very beginning, they had some deep cuts. I'll tell you my absolute favorite spinoff in all of these is Super Mario Brothers for the NES.

Now, explain yourself completely right now. Well, as we all know, Mario is just a spinoff of Donkey Kong, so. And now that's interesting. And wrong and not at all what we're doing here. But it is interesting that you thought to say it. It makes you think. No, it does for sure. I don't know.

I don't know. No, I'm sorry. Sorry. I'm not going to allow that. That is pretty good. I don't think that's good. I think that's bad. I mean, but historically, let's just acknowledge that Mario is just a spin-off of Donkey Kong.

I think we could all agree with that. I don't want to agree with that, but I guess sort of technically speaking, you are correct. I don't see anything else on this list. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, actually, you're wrong. That is Jumpman. And his girlfriend, Pauline, who is different. But Pauline is in Mario Odyssey.

No, no, no, no, no, no. That doesn't mean it's a spin-off, because by Mario Odyssey, they're just bringing in characters from other games. Wait, you're saying Jumpman is not Mario. Are you sure it's not like a Michael Jordan situation where that was his nickname? Oh, you're talking about literally Jumpman.

That's his nickname. Well, I thought you meant Michael Jordan was his nickname, and he had some other name before Michael Jordan. And I was like, why did they come up with the nickname Michael Jordan? Yeah, that's not a very good nickname if your real name is Jumpman. I apologize for derailing. I just wanted to make us all think should all think about the deep-seated mystery that is whether mario is a spin-off character to begin with yeah

i want to include i'm i'm very surprised that you didn't say yoshi here fresh well i would not include yoshi because i think yoshi had one truly amazing game which was super mario brother super mario world 2 yoshi's island yeah and then a bunch of yoshi games that were just sort of fun i liked yoshi's story it's okay but a downgrade i like the new yoshi game it's very good um um speaking of donkey kong though i do want to call out Mario vs. Donkey Kong. Really? Those games are fucking great. I never liked them very much.

They're great. Are we going to put it on the list? Is that A tier or S tier? There have been two. I guess it's Mario March of the Minis is part of that series. Yeah, maybe it's not an S tier. That first Game Boy game is great, though. Can I make an impassioned plea for Mario Paint?

There's only been one, correct? Yeah, there's only been one. I would argue that fucking Flipnote Studio had a bit of that DNA in it, but yeah, they just made the one Mario Paint game. If we're going to do a game where it's like there's only one of these, I think Mario and Rabbids would be...

I can't believe I'm saying that, because it has and Rabbids. I'm curious, Griffin, if you have a good argument for Mario Paint, apart from the like LOL they're making you draw the cover to use your illusion to. That's pretty much it. No, I mean i i uh this was a super nintendo

game that you controlled with the mouse and i spent a million years playing it because it was very fun to make music there wasn't anything even remotely like it or has ever been i would say anything like it on consoles maybe since oh where you can do like sprite work and like, you know, it was essentially a very shitty DAW, like an Ableton or a Logic Pro, only you use instead of different virtual instruments, you use babies that go, and you would just sort of tune those to create like really dope song covers.

Also, there was something like it and it was better. It was called Art Alive or Art Alive because it had an exclamation point. And it was on the Sega Genesis and it is fantastic. If you were a Sega Genesis kid who couldn't have fancy Mario paint, Art Alive was all you needed. Yeah. I tire of talking of mario and his exploits i want to talk very quickly captain toad treasure tracker is getting added no are you are you what tier well if we're only doing s tier i do not think he justifies s tier i like him as a character he's scrappy but he's very slow and i find his game

a little boring wow i find it a little boring i i like them aesthetically i think they're gorgeous but as a like you know him waddling around okay okay not for me okay uh okay let's can we talk about some big boy games please yeah let me just call out the S tiers that we've agreed to. It's Mario & Luigi series, Mario Kart series, Smash Bros. series, Luigi's Mansion series, and Mario Teaches Typing. Cool. That last one felt... Okay. All right.

Hey, what has everybody else been playing? I would love to hear about some more video games. I could really use like a new book to read oh gosh we're gonna start here i i want to do one last plug for the book that i've been i've been working on for the last four years it's actually out uh i feel bad for doing one last plug but here we are it's called the book it's hard on this book and it's great thank you so much i appreciate it it's called the book of. Dope stories about the history of fun. Did I talk about the GoldenEye anecdote last week?

I don't remember. There's an amazing anecdote that is terrifically illustrated in the book by Sonny Ross, who did all the great art, basically about the idea that Nintendo, when Goldeneye was coming out on N64, had some doubts.

They were not sure that Goldeneye should come out on the N64, given the fact that Nintendo is such a family-friendly series. Maybe they shouldn't have a game with sniper rifles and Uzis and various other adult themes. To that end,

Shigeru Miyamoto had the idea that maybe at the end of golden eye james bond would visit all of the soldiers that he shot in the hospital and make sure they were okay that would have been a lot better i did this does sound familiar but i don't know if it's because i read your book or because we talked about it on the show last week. But I always found that fantastic, and it bums me out that it didn't happen. But the book is filled with pretty amazing little stories and anecdotes like that. You can get it pretty much at any bookstore that sells books. I would say pretty much I could guarantee most bookstores are gonna sell you a book that that is my hope um yes okay so that's enough about books okay even books we wrote and that's great and i love that in business and you gotta get that you gotta

get that dollar i have two more actual games to mention okay uh i've been playing fortnight there is a new season of fortnight uh it's themed around vibin which i've been assured that kids do quite a bit what is that mean i'm not gonna speculate because that's really their territory but as a contrast so last season was sort of like very military themed and tanks and stuff like that which was bummer timing given you know the world but uh so this theme the quote war that they were having in the game is over and now it's sort of just like a just like a party it's like a burning man style party and it's very light-hearted and goofy and fucking dar fucking Darth Vader's in it and you can make him do Gong Gong style and Fortnite's great.

I love it. It's so much fun. I've also been playing Vampire Survivors on my Steam Deck, which finally arrived. Yay! And I'm so, so happy. I am so happy that I waited because I cannot think of a better platform

than the Steam Deck for Vampire Survivors because it's such mindless but also fantastic action nonsense um and it's just kind of perfect for steam deck it just bums me out but there are only like 50 000 of them in the world so most of the people listening are just like oh great but let's talk about steam deck though because uh last monday or maybe the Monday before last. No, I think it was last Monday. I got the purchase confirmation email.

That was like, hey, your reservation's ready. Now you can pay for the rest of it. And so I did that. And then on Wednesday, I got my shipping notification email that was like, hey, it's on its way. And then on Friday, I got the Steam Deck. So once it starts moving, once you get that first email, it is going to truck. I mean, I guess quite literally truck to the finish line of your hot little hands.

Yeah, mine took about a week from that pre-order email to getting it. Yeah, so I guess it just depends on what day you you get it but yeah uh i i got mine too and it's uh it's it's fucking fantastic what have you been playing on it uh so yeah i've been playing some uh no man's sky uh because they just released a new update for that and i also haven't played it in a few years, and man, there's a ton of shit in that game that is super cool now. How does that run on the Steam Deck? Really well. I have not played a game on the Steam Deck yet

that does not play very well. Another title that is one that I've been sort of curious about for a while but never really dipped into is Path of Exile, which is the sort of Diablo-like from some of the I think original Diablo creators uh it just got a new this is a I think nine or ten year old game it just got a new update uh called Sentinel that adds like some new stuff to the game but one of the big things it adds is controller support so wow it is now fully fully ready to be played on steam deck and um it it handles like a dream and it's really cool it's a neat sort of uh a take on on diablo where like there is a wide

open class system with like a final fantasy style sphere grid that you can sort of navigate around to customize your character. And then like the different skills that you can unlock are not locked to your class choices. They are decided by the gyms that you slot into your armor. So it's all continuing the theme. continuing the theme it's almost got sort of a final fantasy seven materia system where you like slot in the skill gyms and then you slot in support gyms to modify those skills uh the level of customization is is is off the charts and it is yeah this sounds very griffin it's very cool and it's scratching the the diablo itch that was i i would say only you you know, irritated by the release of Diablo Immortal. Yeah.

But yeah, that's mostly it. Rogue Legacy 2 is also great on Steam Deck. Oh yeah, I've been playing that on there as well. Wow. Plant, what have you been playing? Yakuza 0. I've been playing it on Steam Deck, and it's wonderful. Which one is 0? 0 is the prequel he's like a baby what is he a baby in this one he's a young man and he's just well i would

say he's just getting into the yakuza but the beginning of the game is him actually quitting the yakuza because he doesn't want to bring shame to uh the group and he needs to solve a mystery that tells me there needs to be a negative one at this point i i think actually this is just a clever way of explaining why he knows how to like beat the shit out of people right but don't you want to play the game where he actually joins in the first place? Well, that's how you get this, right? It's a trick. Because he's been a member for a short time, he knows how to be a badass. But now he has to, quote, join for the first time, right? Where if you did negative one, it'd be like, okay, he doesn't know anything.

Like, what does he do? Like, he goes to college classes or something and then by the end of the game you know how to like break a dude's nose i mean that sounds like persona quite honestly yeah no persona sounds like oh he adopts like some gaelic myth god that looks like a sex toy and you know gets to fight with it that yeah i'm not hearing anything bad about what you just said no it's good they're just different anyway yakuza actually does kind of feel like persona in that a lot of game is just like chilling you i do a lot of batting practice um some karaoke uh it's a it is a great steam deck game if you have a five to six hour flight

and just want to in the words of fortnite vibe yeah um so yeah and that's really the that's what i've been gravitating to on steam deck is games that like ordinarily i would not have the patience to sit in front of a tv or a computer monitor and play. And those are the games that I would like have been playing way more of because they just fit into my life a lot easier. That's your favorite way to play video games even before you had a kid. Yeah, oh, unquestionably. I mean, the amount of time that I played switch handheld in front of the TV, while we're watching whatever Bridgerton is is definitely kind of my preferred method i mean there are a few games like look if i'm playing last of us part two i'm like doing it like i'm

playing it i'm focused and stuff like that but if i'm playing a like a platforming game or like a power curve kind of game like a skyrim whatever i'd rather do it you know passively to some extent sure um that's one i've actually been thinking about because i never really uh aside from when i did it for stupid video stuff never really messed with like skyrim mods and there's some pretty dope ones apparently i would be curious if i if there is a is there like a curated like list of essential like transformative skyrim mods there's gotta be something like that right where it's like a community made like uh you know super ultra edition you would have yeah i when i wanted to try skyrim vr i it sent me down this rabbit hole of like the amount of work that you

needed to do to actually get it good and running yeah um and that was very intimidating but i'm sure just on a baseline non-vr format best skyrim mods i'm sure there are quite a few yeah i guess i'm just looking for like a curated like uh you know fan-made sequel to skyrim um because i think it's been just i i can't remember the exact length of time that it takes for me to uh have not played skyrim before i want to play skyrim again but i think it's about seven months or so yeah well we've got uh starfield coming out that looks pretty skyrim to me it looks a little little... In space. Speaking of No Man's Sky, it also seems quite a bit like that. Someone was speculating,

do you think they handcrafted the thousand planets they have in the game? No, they goddamn did not. Maybe. Come on, people. They didn't. Todd's got his ways. No, I think they confirmed that a lot of it's procedurally generated.

Of course. But that there are some... That is not a good use of people's time to make a thousand different planets. I mean, it worked for... Yeah. It that there are some. That is not a good use of people's time to make a thousand different planets. I mean, it worked for. Yeah. It worked for the Lord. Well, he made the thousand planets in our excellent solar system.

Thank you for listening to the besties. It sure means a lot to us that you would spend your time with us today. What are we talking about next week um next week we have tmnt shredder's revenge that is a new beat-em-up in the vein of you know all the other tmnt beat-em-ups which i don't mean to sound reductive because those games absolutely rip they rock and it's from dot emu which is a very good studio and i'm extremely excited to talk about i dipped a very small toe into it and it is scratching every nostalgic itch i have it's yeah it's not just nostalgia like it's just legitimately well made is that uh can you play

that on steam deck i guess there's a bunch of like yeah oh really okay yeah i mean not even with work it works immediately of course, that's perfect for me then. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for The Besties. Table Scraps, Rough Gem, Pass Problems, Bavoguard, I don't know how to pronounce that. Excellent stuff. And Your Daddy Gaming,

thank you for writing reviews for The Besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to everyone else who shared the show or talked about it and said how great it is and how much you like it. Yeah. We genuinely appreciate it. And it helps spread the word about the show. Very quickly, we talked about Mario Strikers Battle League and a ton of Mario spinoff games, including Mario and Luigi, Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, and Luigi's Mansion, which were our favorite spinoffs. Book of Fun is Fresh's new book.

You can go get it right now. Fortnite, Vampire Survivors, Yakuza 0, the Steam Deck, No Man's Sky, and Path of Exile. Okay, that's it. Join us next week for the besties because we're going to talk about those rascally turtles, and that'll be a lot of fun. And shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!