The Besties - Pikmin 4 and the Art of Little Space Guy Farming

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

There's never been a better time to hop aboard the Pikmin train! What does Pikmin 4 add (and subtract) to make it the series most digestible entry to date? Also, how well does a classic DS Match 3 RPG hold up in 2023?Also discussed: Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes - Definitive Edition, Gravity Circuit, Luck Be a Landlord iOS, Chrono Cross Remastered, UN Squadron, Ridiculous Fishing EX, Matinee, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits, Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I think it's time. We're well over 10 years now. We're closing in probably on 11 years. I think given all the cachet that we've built up, it's time for a rebrand. Oh, thank goodness. It's so fucked up. We've been doing this for almost 11 years and don't actually have any cachet. Yeah, anything to show for it. You know what I mean? When people talk about like like, video game journalism, media that they enjoy, stuff that's important to them, things that, like, shape the industry,

or, like, none of, like, it's just not part of the conversation. You know what I mean? But that's the power of the rebrand. Because, you know, we have nothing to lose. Everything to gain. Reclaiming our importance. Like, I mean, we could do something provocative, you know, like, Four Dad Cuck Party 2023.

The problem with that one is it would age. Four Dad Cuck Party is interesting. That's interesting, Chris. That's an interesting one. That's interesting. Speak on that. The besties is 11 years and 5 months old. Got it. Got it.

Four Dad Cuck Party? Why would we be called that? Yeah. and five months old. Got it, got it, got it. So we're actually at the age of 12. Four dad cuck party? Like, why would we be called that? Yeah. Yeah. Do you think? Oh, well. Let Chris answer that final question. Well, we're four dads,

and we're cucks. Not? Okay. Well, no, not like, no, like, we're like beta cucks like we enjoy going to see the barbie i'm not saying like we've been like cuckolded i i i hope not for all of us but i think i think like like you know we're kind of like taking back beta cuck we are we're going to barbie we're coming back and being like actually actually, you know what? Learned a lot. It's only second wave feminism.

I didn't learn enough. Yeah. I have another approach on the rebrand. And let me just let you guys think. Yeah. You know how in 1920s there were speakeasies and they kind of had to hide them? Yeah. Yeah.

That was kind of the thing. They kind of have to do that. Yeah. So what if we kind of follow that route and we rename it like stacy's knitting circle oh that's cool right oh that's and people are gonna know only the real people who subscribe to the newsletter will know that stacy's knitting circle is actually the best podcast about video games yeah so you make it even more confusing yeah kind of like a miyazaki thing where you're like let's not market it at all right yeah like his new movie where he's just like no marketing with our newsletter

it can just be photos of some of our favorite knitting projects yeah that's it that's the end of the idea well and maybe we can like work in knitting into the show itself yeah and like justin man just justin you've been telling me for a while that you have a kind of big big bold rebrand idea oh yeah what's that juice what the big bowl repan all the i oh the big you've been thinking about this one for like at least two years you've been talking about it with me a lot you say this is maybe the funniest rebrand that you've ever come up with it's called the imagine games podcast okay okay it's pretty good and it's not just that it's kind of like it's about everything yeah let me hit you guys with this one game pots now this one is going to be sort of capitalizing on the fact that people get

game stop and game spot mixed yeah yeah i'm saying let's throw, or we could change it to GameSot. And we can really get in there and just catch some more of that traffic from people who get so excited looking at either their favorite DLC at GameStop or their favorite other stuff on GameSpot. And then we get some of that runoff. And maybe they like what they hear.

I saw Brian Altono in the airport. And do you guys get intimidated by people who look like they thought about what clothes they were gonna wear that day absolutely because it really it really airport no less i just start fumbling my words like oh yeah uh this oh this is uh just something on. Oh, that's it. Four dads who definitely dress themselves. I'm in a knitting circle. That's every podcast. Yeah, that's true. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best games of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best games of the week. My name is christopher thomas plant and i know the best games of the week my name is welcome the best as we were talking about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment it is a video game club and just by listening my friends you have become a member i'm so happy to have you here um because we are going to talk about some video games today kind of break them with the format and these things folks they have come a really really long way since pac-man uh and i'm so excited to dig into exactly what that means and the repercussions of it we're going to be talking about a little game called pikmin 4 and maybe a little bit of discussion about some other i was waiting for somebody to correct me. I'm really...

No, it is Pikmin 4. Yeah, you got it. Yeah, and then a little bit of discussion of Might and Magic, Clash of Heroes, Definitive Edition, Legendary Battlers, Space DX.

But first, did you know we have a newsletter at besties.fan? It's true! And it's great. If you want all of the games that we talk about in one place and links to them plus like you know when we're talking about you know real goose i don't know maybe a redesign of our name you can find all that visual stuff in the newsletter and you should go subscribe at besties.fan also free code sometimes oh yeah sometimes no sometimes free codes sometimes. Oh, yeah, sometimes. No, sometimes free codes. And I'm going to get you a snack mix recipe this next one, I promise.

What are these games, Chris Plant? Well, Pikmin 4 is the fourth version of Pikmin, which is, I don't even, how do you, Frosh, you're a Pikmin person. Can you actually describe what a Pikmin game is? Yeah, it's like you're in a garden and you're a little alien boy and you run around throwing little plant creatures around and they do your bidding. It's like a family-friendly RTS.

Yes. Yeah. That's excellent. Crushed. And then there's the other game, which I also can't describe. Yeah, it's like a... it's kind of like a um... tactics game that has been diluted to the point where it's more of a puzzle thing. So it's kind of like a tactics game that has been diluted to the point where it's more of a puzzle thing. So it's kind of like halfway between tactics and puzzle, I would say.

You're talking about Might and Magic. Might and Magic. Yes. Clash of Powers. Legend of the Crystals. DX. Yeah, that sounds great. These four dads are going to go get dressed and we'll be ready to

talk about it right after this break that's a fucking seamless segue and we should always use that all right so we're back and we're gonna start the show off with pikmin 4 and i'm gonna start the show off by saying this was an instance where you know we're in a new era of besties where we don't force people to play games that they don't necessarily have a direct interest in. And two of our besties did not have a direct interest in Pikmin 4. Maybe three, but the third one was a little intolerant.

So it's really just, I think, me and Plant who played Pikmin 4. Is that correct? That is correct. That is correct. Here's what I'm gonna say it's the best time to jump into pigment yes if you fast forward for the first hour it is the best time yeah so so pikmin 4 here's the hook it's got a little puppy dog its name is ochi and you can

ride on his back and you can jump now which is like a new feature sounds good so far you've never been able to jump before and now you can jump because you're on the back of this dog and real talk the dog defines what makes this game so spectacular because they basically transformed it so pikmin traditionally as i mentioned in the intro is basically an rts right you send these little plant guys around to carry back a tennis ball or a nintendo ds and uh in these like oversized environments because you're very tiny and a lot of it is just kind of managing time because the clock is ticking down to make sure that uh and once sundown comes all your guys will get eaten and killed. So very stressful. They've turned Pikmin now into, it still has those mechanics in it, but it's more of an RPG now where as you're collecting stuff and doing various missions, you're earning currency,

which then allows you to unlock upgrades for the dog or you that make a lot of the previously annoying things not so for example it used to be really annoying if you had a bunch of um idle pikmin like you didn't know where a bunch of pikmin were just standing around doing nothing now you can unlock a horn that'll basically say like yo pikmin come to me without having to like chase them down uh you can upgrade the dog's like charge attack and you can make him immune to fire and he can swim in water and it kind of just turns it into slightly more of an action game than it was previously i do i mean just hearing that they have removed the time limit from it well there is a time limit but basically you have infinite days and there's

no food mechanic anymore so you don't have to worry about starving to death so there are still days like the time ticks down to until night and the time more helps in that it like gives you sessions of play yeah at least i found it was like oh good i now know when to stop yeah Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Frush, I had really only watched these games, like Pikmin 1, 2, and 3, because everything about the pitch just did not seem like my game. Still not entirely sure if it's my sort of series or not. But you're right in that it is a game about collecting in the way that if you took an RPG and replaced combat with collect shit, that would be how I would describe this game. I did not understand just how much this game is exploring environments to find whatever you're going to literally collect with your little dudes and maybe solve a little puzzle

or maybe a little bit of combat in between there. But it really is about like resource management of like what sort of Pikmin you carry around with you because the different types of Pikmin can do different things. So there might be like certain enemies or barriers that you want to break that need to be frozen. So you need to bring an ice Pikmin. I don't know it it feels like a i don't know like baby's first rts game that sounds way more patronizing than i mean it yeah i mean that i think it is the like if someone was like i want to play an rts but i've never

played one before i would start with pikmin because it it grounds it in a way that i think most rtss are very intimidating the way they like introduce you and here you've got a character that you're controlling and they start you off with just a few pikmin and you don't have to stress about managing a bunch of different things in fact they actually simplified the whole game because you can only ever have three types of pikmin at one time so you don't have to stress about oh shit i'm scrolling through 16 different pikmin types to figure out what i need for this scenario is it easy enough to switch like if you're out and you're like oh fuck i need an ice pikmin yeah so they uh you can

now there will be these big maps and previously you'd have to like run all the fuck way back to your base and change out pikmin depending on what you needed now you can move your base at will there are like spots within the map that act as like home base territories and so you can move your base at will there are like spots within the map that act as like home base territories and so you just move your base there and then you can switch them out depending on what you need uh they also added like a drone so you can like fly up ahead and see what you need it it feels like they knew where the pain points were in pikmin games previously and they just tried to like smooth a lot of that stuff out so that you didn't feel like you were just constantly going on chores.

It is so weird to me that this is Miyamoto's, I guess, favorite series, or I guess personal sweet spot series. I don't know, but that's the thing you always hear because this feels to me like the least nintendo series in that design and that it is all pain points like it's hard to believe that these things didn't exist for three games before this because the like even a hint of that drives me crazy in this game um i mean visually it is obviously very nintendo yes yes yes but but this is not my personal favorite type of design where it's, we know this isn't fun from the beginning. And you have to play to make it fun.

Yeah. Like, you have to play to unlock it. That said, the further I get in it, the more I'm like, maybe I do like this thing or maybe even love this thing. But, yeah, it really does i mean you mentioned the jump you do not have a jump for the first hour of the game um so while that is like a new feature it's it's not available to you i mean i i agree that uh i i wish that like pikmin had evolved earlier than this i wish it didn't take 20 years for them to realize like hey we should make this a little bit more of an action game and with RPG mechanics.

But I mean, I'm fine playing for an hour and then like because they give you stuff. They make it fun actually pretty quickly. All things considered, like you compare the like, oh, play play eight hours of Final Fantasy until you get to the good part. Like, right. I was having fun within the first hour the one thing i would add and this is very important for people that are interested in jumping in this game skip every fucking cut scene faster than you possibly can yeah i found that out too late are they not good they're actually meaningless i mean i i tried to warn you but

i guess that was too late um you're not missing anything you will figure it out the best part of this game is the gameplay itself the cut scenes are intolerably slow and and rough so yeah just just go ahead and skip that stuff yeah there is a character named russ though i know that's good yeah he's a little science boy i'm a big fan of him he he he kind of reminds me of our russ when once i started just picturing that i was playing the game with russ it was infinitely better i i i agree with you fresh that the personality of the game is so charming that it again i feel like i'm like complaining about it being slow or whatever it's it's real cute it is super cute i mean it is like gobsmackingly adorable point you didn't try to play co-op did you no no i can't decide if i want to try playing this

with my son because it does feel like a game of frustrations and well it's like an assist mode yeah in co-op you really just like you basically have a rock shooter and you could just like help the main player like by attacking enemies and stuff it's very simple see he's too proud and he would want me to play as the rock shooter and him as as a main character that's that's the problem um no i i i'm gonna keep playing it because it definitely well now it feels like i put in the work past the the somewhat annoying part now i'm in the good part and it does seem to get only better and better i mean what would you would you say for that have you found that it kind of um plateaued in terms of like it getting better or is it really become more and more enjoyable you know as you unlock more and more

yeah i think i'm probably i mean i'm probably a little bit further than you are i'm probably six ish hours in um and i it does feel like it kind of plateaued like most of the upgrades i'm getting like i got a you know i can run faster upgrade or i got like uh you know various other upgrades for the dog that make the game feel even better but it does feel like slightly diminishing returns but i do i'm pretty happy with where the core game is at right now. The one thing I would also add is there are these things called Dandori challenges, which I think are meant to be throwbacks to the original Pikmin where everything was time-sensitive and you're starving to death. Because you'll get thrown into these maps that are either

you have five minutes to collect as much shit as you need to. And you're trying to like reach a score limit. And that stuff stresses me the fuck out. And also requires like some level of trial and error because you don't know the best order to go in. And there's also like a weird battles versus AI where it's basically the same idea. But like another AI pikmin carrier is like racing you and those i was not vibing with those like those feel very contrary to the rest of the game which feels like it removed a lot of the stress points smartly and and they kind of put

that stuff in there it does feel very optional for the most part like i think you have to do the first one and then all the other ones feel like oh you get bonus points or whatever but yeah i wasn't as down with those as i was with the main game i think if you hate hate pikmin there's really no reason to try because although it has changed it's not changed probably enough for people that don't like pikmin at all but if you're kind of on the fence i think there is a demo for what it's worth. That seems like a good place to start. And you could give it a shot. But I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it quite a bit more

than previous Pikmin entries. You know, I think we could probably do Might and Magic Clash of Heroes Definitive Edition before. Yeah. I was really looking forward to this one. Very much so. This game originally came out on DS

it was Capybara who made a lot of really great games is Capybara still doing it? yeah what was their last well they did what is it the Apple Arcade game that we all liked

that was a grip ago though oh yeah that's right that was a little bit Low was them? that was maybe a little while ago That was a little while ago. It's a sort of puzzle RPG take on everyone's favorite franchise, Might and Magic. Everybody's always talking about how much they love this thing. Everybody always knows how that one is different.

That's the one with the wizard. Look what that means. And the warriors. Yeah. It is a... So it originally came out on ds and uh i think that it was sort of that was the sweet spot for a certain type of gamer like this game and puzzle quest came out roughly around the same time and we were eating good uh and the the basic thing is you have troops

on a board facing off against an enemy army. Each troop is like a different colored, different type of warrior in your army. And by matching them in a column, they will ready an attack that they will then use after a certain number of turns. After they have charged up, they will run forward. they will then use after a certain number of turns. After they have charged up, they will run forward. And basically you want to smash through your enemy's troops to attack their leader directly, right? Kind of like Magic the Gathering style or Hearthstone.

You can also arrange troops. You can match them in a row horizontally, and they will turn into a defensive wall, a barrier. So you are sort of having to make decisions on like, you know, where you want to use your troops defensively, where you want to use them offensively, how you can set them up to do like chain combos. The different troops have different types of attacks. There are elite troops that do different things. Like the first one you unlock is a deer that can jump over enemy

barriers it does a little bit less damage but you know you can get around defenses that way so there's like there's there's there's a lot of those sort of moving pieces and it is uh i i think that like if you are a fan of the genre of the puzzle rpg genre like it does scratch the itch. I think that it hasn't, this game felt very like special and cool and, you know, on the DS. And I do think in the, however many years it's been, since it first came out,

we have seen like way better games in this sort of genre. Yeah, when it first came out, it was basically the first time that like a match three, or one of the first times, you mentioned Puzz basically the first time that like a match three or one of the first times you mentioned puzzle quest as well that a match three like had any sort of substance beyond get bigger score right um and that would that you know that was great when you know you had your little portable handheld gaming device on the go like this was a a nice fit for this game count game came out in 2009

yeah uh so for 14 years ago um i and i just i have it on my switch and just seeing it sort of in a line with many many many other now mobile now portable video gaming experiences it was really hard for me to stick with it yeah yeah i missed this one entirely when it came out but i i gave it a whirl uh because i really liked some games in this series like puzzle quest was one of my favorites even though that franchise never was good again weirdly yeah they just had the one good one and then they never did another good one. This game throws really a couple of weird things. One, it throws really weird difficulty spikes at you that you really don't have any like from like, OK, you're it's pretty basic in terms of the damage you're dealing and the damage you're receiving. Right. That's pretty easy to like make a wall or do an attack here but then they start throwing levels at you where it's like okay do it just like you

have been doing it but there's one guy moving left and right with each turn and he's the guy that you want to hit so you're having to do this like three-dimensional or four-dimensional hollow chest where you're like, okay, he's going to go three spaces to the left and then back. And in that time, I needed to time someone out so their attack is going to come at the right moment to hit this cat. And it's like really, it just, it was like beyond my capabilities very quickly. And I mean, I'm not the smartest guy but i've

played a lot of video games um it just felt like really challenging really fast they have even done work to balance out the difficulty a little bit because the ds was the ds version was pretty infamous for in a single turn the enemy army would just like chain together like eight different moves and just fucking steamroll you it is better in this version but it is exactly again far from something another kind of like really uh not annoying but disappointing thing that i had forgotten about the original is that the game takes place on a kind of like a track uh you can move between like different dots on a map and sometimes there's random encounters which are never particularly fun but it's not like you're exploring this vast open world and you have this huge

you know selection of activities uh available to you at any given time uh and and you know, selection of activities available to you at any given time. And, you know, compare that to, again, Puzzle Quest, which did have that, did have like you could go and build a castle or siege a fortress or, you know, do a side quest or do, this game doesn't really have that. I don't know. I have a lot of fondness for the original game. It was really cool on DS because on the DS, like it made sense, your bottom screen was your army, the top screen was your enemy army.

So you would just like send your troops from one screen to the other, which was very novel and cool. I kind of just wish they had made a new one of them, like a new Clash of Heroes that had like sort of... But that costs more money. I mean, I guess so.

Because then you got people, how people do it again i'm sorry i don't want to forget i have to call out the most damning thing about this entire product i was playing it and not really enjoying it but like i was trying to give it a fair shake right and then i beat this pretty hard fight this annoying fight where these tree dudes are cutting down a tree these these knights are cutting down a tree and they're moving back and forth and you got to hit these knights. It was so annoying.

And I finally did it and I closed the game out and then I went upstairs and I went to pick it up a little bit later and it did not save any of that because you have to manually save your progress in this 2023 release. They want to give you that classic experience, you know? The classic feel.

Yeah, it doesn't. No, this is a ripoff. Honestly, I don't know how else to say it. Like, this is not a fully featured product. Like, this is not something where they put the time into making this feel like a modern experience it looks uh i think it looks pretty nice but like in terms of how does this compare to like other modern games that have solved a lot of these problems including just like auto say like seriously there's no reason this should not have that it's wild um and and that was really honestly it that was about what put me off of ever touching it again.

Because that's, I can't deal with that. That's annoying. I don't think the visual changes are dramatic. Yeah, I mean, if you look at, I mean, you can look at this game and look at the original DS. And it doesn't look that much better. I don't know. I, this is, I i was also disappointed didn't really play it i actually we went to san diego for comic-con didn't really play oh no i mean i did

play it uh i lost i left my switch in san diego uh i had somebody grab it for me and i left my switch in san diego i had someone grab it to me to mail it to me, but I was like, well, I am not going to pick this game back up on my home Switch and start over again so that I can, like the thought of doing that seemed so abysmal and soul crushing. And that sort of told me like, I think I have gotten everything I need to get

out of this one. I think I want to go get that puzzleuzzle Quest re-release on Switch. That's good shit. Yeah, go do that. It's just the same game again, but that one kicks ass. Yeah. Has there ever been a franchise like that where they did one good one and they never did an okay one? I was just bemoaning the fact that Torchlight, which was, like, one of my favorite Diablo clones.

Oh, yeah. They did two. Torchlight, which was one of my favorite Diablo clones. Oh, yeah. They did too. Torchlight 2 was good as well. And then since then has kind of gone off the rails into free-to-play garbage, unfortunately. Anyway, we're going to have more brightness and light and love and happiness after the break. So first we have from Chase. Hi, besties. The question is mostly for Griffin.

As someone who's never dipped his toe into modding or tinkering with electronics but who is intrigued by the hobby, what would you recommend as a starting point? Is there a good entry-level kind of project that would give me an idea of whether I like this kind of thing? Thanks, Chase. Yeah, I've got some suggestions. this kind of thing thanks chase uh yeah i've got some some suggestions i i think that there are different kind of tiers that you can approach the hobby from and i am still very much an an amateur i think at this um it's been a little while since i've uh done a a big mod project i think the last one i did was um uh the switch Lite that I sadly left in San Diego. I put like a clear plastic shell on that looks really sick.

I would suggest you start with something that doesn't require any soldering because that is such a huge jump in difficulty that I just would not advise trying to take that on first go uh what i did first and i would recommend is getting uh a switch shell either um i would actually start with just a switch proper the switch light is a little bit uh every everything is all sort of interconnected and it's a little bit funky trying to like you have to use a heat gun to peel the screen off if you want to, like, fully switch that out. If you do just Joy-Cons and the back panel of a Switch, it's, like, wicked easy to switch out. Joy-Cons are, like, a little bit finicky, but by doing that, you learn about, like, you know, ribbon cables and how to organize all the tiny little screws and you don't have to solder anything. And then you get something that looks cool and feels cool and you know feels like your own extreme rate has a lot of those um which you can get on their website or amazon they have like a million different kinds of

colors and you can get a a joy-con that you know switches the annoying buttons out for like a d-pad if that's your jam so you can really customize it making your own you can also do that with a pro controller switch pro controller you can do that for or a uh i've done a ps4 controller back when that was still the thing that i was using and then you can step it up you know uh game boy advance not sp but regular old game boy advance is pretty uh pretty pretty easy to mod and there are lots of options that are non-soldier based. So you can put a nice, fancy IPS screen on it and glowing After Effects or whatever the fuck you want. You can get wild with a Game Boy Advance, and it's pretty rugged.

And then if you want to get a little friskier from there there's a bunch of fun stuff you can do with an sp um my favorite mod project i think i've ever done is uh a metal what's called unhinged sp which takes game boy advanced sp the clamshell one and puts it in a solid metal like single uh thing that looks like a like a game boy color or something like that it's pretty sick but that takes soldering and all kinds of stuff. So I would start with a controller or... Yeah, I would start with a controller. Because also, if you fuck up a controller, it's like, you know, $30, $40 that you've lost instead of $200. So yeah. I would also recommend getting a kit, like a toolbox. iFixit has a lot of stuff.

I have a big iFixit kit that I use for a lot of shit, honestly. There's a lot of really handy little tools in there. I fixed the thermistor on my dishwasher, and it was the greatest moment of my entire life. So yeah, I strongly recommend. That's amazing, man. It was amazing. We have another reader mail question.

I guess this is not a question as much of a statement, but Max Ritter wrote in saying, it's Pikmin week. Whoever reads this, please mention that the background noise in Pikmin 4 is dynamic. When the camera is low to the ground, you hear the Pikmin walking and humming.

When the camera is high in the sky, you hear ambient nature noises. That alone buys this game a spot on the game of the year bracket walking and humming when the camera is high in the sky you hear ambient nature noises that alone buys this uh game a spot on the game of the year bracket and all the other amazing stuff in the game is just a bonus tears of the kingdom is great but it hasn't aged great now that we're no longer in the pre-ochi era of gaming uh and it doesn't even have dynamic sound design based on where the camera is so i'm thinking link gets to be runner up this year i maybe i i couldn't i really tried to like listen to them humming and i i wasn't able to hear them but maybe i just wasn't it wasn't cranked up high enough for me planted you only true fans can hear

it yeah that must you know um we have we have another question this one's from steven uh hi besties greetings from the netherlands love the newsletter i have a question. This one's from Steven. Hi, besties. Greetings from the Netherlands. Love the newsletter. I have a question for you. I love games that comment, through gameplay or otherwise, on player agency and the relationship between video games and their player. Games like The Beginner's Guide, There Is No Game, Baba Is You, and The Stanley Parable come to mind. Do you have any tips in this vein? All the best, Steven.

I guess other games that do this i mean yeah i'm gonna beat plant to the punch and say a little game called near automata yeah that's a great pick that game really does uh push outside of itself in a cool way um you know one that thought i thought well one that i've talked about a couple times, I think on this show, it's an iOS thing called Progress to 99, which is like 99 sort of meaningless challenges you do with your phone, but you really have to kind of think through it,

and it forces you to do a lot of nonlinear thinking about what the phone is capable of and what it can do. You know a really cool one that I had not thought about for forever? Do you guys remember the Magic Circle? No. Oh yeah! Magic Circle was this, maybe one you missed.

It's a really cool one. It's where you're a QA tester who is testing a game that has been in development for 20 years and basically you become trapped because there are games within the game because they've been layered over each other

because how long it's been in development. So it's like pushes you through all these different kind of game designs. It's super brilliant. It's not something that had like a super long tail. I feel like people kind of like didn't return to it a lot, but it's so cool also the uh voiceover of

the game is ken levine the director of the bioshock games i didn't know that yeah that's right i forgot about that it's called the magic circle it's really super worth checking out paranormal site does this a little bit too just neat um um i this is i don't know if this is quite it but universal paperclips i would put on this universal paperclips is a clicker game where you are a artificial intelligence that's job is to just make paperclips and that goes to the furthest extent imaginable um but i think that is an interesting game in that it actually puts you in the brain or the computer of an artificial intelligence and makes you think about how they think or process. Yeah, I love that game. We got a lot of honorable mentions here.

Let's get in. Yeah, let's get into it. I super quick just wanted to talk about Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits and its sequel, Zoe Punches the Future in the Dick. These are by Jason Pargan, who was writing under the pen name David Wong when he made John Dies at the End, which is kind of adapted into a film and was kind of a very buzzy sort of read for a while there. is kind of a you know a very buzzy sort of read for a while there um jason was the he founded a site called pointless waste of time with john cheese do you mean like that uh got folded into cracked so this is like very early internet days was a big part of like something awful forums and stuff like that this series these two books there's a third one that I haven't read yet, but it is about a young woman named Zoe Ash who discovers that she has inherited a multi-billion

dollar fortune in a sort of lawless city called Tabula Rasa. And she becomes basically overnight a multi-billionaire, one of the most powerful people on the planet. She has basically a private army of hit people and assassins that work for her. her presence and the vitriol and the toxicity of the sort of like it's like a hyperbolic toxic male internet reaction to a single woman like made real so it's very much in conversation with like the terror of the book is not about her killing people or threats of violence or whatever. It's the way that like the men are driven basically insane by a woman who has more power than them. And the two books are very – the two that I read are very much in conversation about like that gross, like again toxic male reaction to women on the internet. And also it feels like him sort of struggling with some of that, like, early internet culture

that some of his stuff was, like, foundational in and really sort of, like, taking that out and looking at it. And it is often, like, it's very funny. It's very hyperbolic the there is a lot of uh hyper violence and uh and and what have you but it's also got some interesting stuff to say about like what where the internet and and gender and stuff like that so i don't know i found that i found it a really interesting uh. There's a third one. I think it's called

Zoe's Ash is Not Drunk Enough for This Dystopia, but they're two good books. Cool. I like good books. Love books. You like books. Oh, and Play Halls of Torment. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. That one's been hitting pretty good.

I don't want to talk about it because I play it too much is it with twist what is i mean you should talk about it's one of those it's one of those auto shooter games but the it has like uh a gear system per run so you're like putting out like there's gear that you find in the levels that you then have to like, get back to these wells to send back up to the surface that let you like build out, uh, an armor set for all these different, uh, it looks like old Diablo.

Yeah. Like vampire survivors meets Diablo one. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And there's, and the quests are very, there's specific quests for each class and each level,

which really incentivize replayability. And also every time you go in, you can find one piece of gear that you can bring back out and add to your loadout for free, which is a really cool way of doing incremental power. It's got all the usual stuff with upgrading and stuff, but it's a really interesting way of doing it,

and it looks radical. Why didn't you guys do this as your main game this week? Dog, trust me, all three of the games I want to talk about in Honorable Mentions, I would have rather talked about as our game this segment. I guess I can go next. I want to start by talking about Gravity Circuit, a game that Russ recommended to me while I was in San Diego.

I downloaded it, and then I played through all of On the Flight Home, which is a long-ass flight. It is... Russ sort of described it to me as, like, Mega Man or Ninja Gaiden by way of Shovel Knight. Like, if those two franchises had sort of blended into one and then got a sort of spiritual revival in the same way that shovel knight sort of brought back uh ducktales uh it is it is like that super polished super flashy uh great looking action platformer uh you play as a robot uh called gravity circuit and you it's a i describe it kind of as megaman just because it has a lot of the aesthetics but it is almost all melee so you are like using yeah it's like uh x right megaman x uh yeah yeah i guess so even a megaman

right because he has sword well zero had a sword um yeah that's what i meant zero it's kind of like that it's like you know comboing punches and kicks uh you can find sort of passive upgrade chips uh that can change the way that the you know the game handles uh you can find like special techniques that you map to different uh inputs uh and i i i don't know how really to describe it except to say it's just so fucking fun, and it is so well made, and it really does have, I think, the spirit of, it is not Yacht Club Games, it's a developer called Domesticated Ant Games, but in the same way that that shovel might kind That Shovel Knight kind of took something that was already great and explored that to its logical extreme. I feel like Gravity Circuit does for Mega Man and Ninja Gaiden and is just amazing. Just great.

You've got to play it. It's fantastic. I also missed this one, but now it's out on iOS. I know Juice, I think, was into it for a long time. Luck be a landlord. Yeah. I never quite, I really, did they get it to a point where there was kind of a persistent thing? That was really my struggle with Luck be a landlord, was feeling like incentivized to play again.

So I'll start by sort of describing it. Please, yeah, I'm sorry uh it is a slot machine game and uh you spin a slot machine you get uh prize you know coins based on what symbols pop up when uh the thing starts out your slot machine is almost entirely empty but with every spin you add a new symbol to it um And you add different increments, like every five spins, you have to pay your landlord. And if you don't have enough money to pay your landlord, the run is over. The symbols, there's like, there's tons of them. And a lot of them interact in different ways, right? So for instance, there's a cat symbol. And if you land the cat symbol next to a milk symbol, it destroys the milk symbol, but it gives you like 10 coins uh if you there's a raindrop symbol if you get that one next to a

flower it'll double it which then if you get a bee next to that flower it'll double it again and if you get a sun next to that flower it'll double it again so you can exponentially sort of increase your there's there are so many different types of uh, and it doesn't really explain them to you through anything but play. Like, you just have to play, find the symbols, see what they do, so that next time you play, you know, like, okay, well, I'm kind of putting together a bit of a, like, minor ore gemstone strategy here. Let's see if I can build towards that. It's very satisfying. it's very addicting it has been for me um and there's not like you're not unlocking shit uh aside from achievements

um you're not like that was my that was my problem with it i needed like one more layer of progression i think because i would get to the end of a long successful run and it was just sort of like yeah okay well i'm good for a while there are some there's 20 levels essentially like 20 different levels of runs uh and each time you finish one it basically unlocks the next difficulty level um and they do things like modify like uh you know how much the rent goes up each round or, uh, how many of like these helpful bonus items, like there's ones that let you remove symbols, uh, but in later levels you get less of them. Um, so I've made it like level four. Um, I just, I, it's very, it's a very clever game,

very cool, uh, and perfect for iOS. Uh, last thing I want to mention, I've really been wanting to go back and play chrono cross because that's my brain's broken and the radical dreamers edition I think came out I can't believe a couple of years ago well Justin you see radical dreamers was I believe a satel of you I can okay no that's fine uh when it came out it was not good this this like remastered edition like it ran really slow uh the frame rate like dipped below like 20 frames per second in combat it has all these great bonus features like fast forward and note to jocks that's low that is quite low uh but i did just want to give the game credit they have they've updated it and now it looks and runs really really good um and so now you can finally experience the

legend okay which one is this is this the first one no you know it's not the second one chrono triggers first chrono triggers first anyway that's from that's from the that's from the tubular imaginarium edition right i'm done that's it justin the bully the jock has awakened if if us other gamers don't make fun of jrpg kids what do we have that's real gamers i'm gonna talk about ridiculous fishing ex wait did anybody talk did eva email about i'm looking for 2042 people oh no i don't think that was called in the last episode after you dipped out we basically told people this looks like something you will get killed trying to do and so i think we we may have dissuaded people from doing it because your idea of like check out this madcap arg seemed like you will be fucking you for me as a favorite to

your video game podcast hero get murdered in a park for me please for justin get murdered in a park for justin please yeah i don't think people did that i'm sorry justin uh i wanted to talk about ridiculous fishing ex uh i talked a lot about it on the Resties, which came out on Tuesday. But I kind of dipped in slightly into the pro fishing tour mode, which is essentially a daily competitive mode. And every single day I'm kind of blown away by how bonkers the modifiers get yesterday was like all the fish are rare but the the fishing hook goes at like 2x speed and there's like ah so much bonkers shit uh i think one of the fish when you pull it up out of the water it slows down time and if you're again if you're interested in like more of a competitive uh challenging experience

ridiculous fishing and you don't want to just like vibe out by catching fish definitely check out the pro fishing tour which is very good you still need to go into the pause menu to like unlock it yeah it is um if you play the game normally i think you'll unlock it by uh unlocking the infinite reel but if you want to just try it immediately you can go into settings i think you'll unlock it by uh unlocking the infinite reel but if you want to just try it immediately you can go into settings i think it's like settings gameplay and there's a way to just instantly unlock it right from the jump so you can do that cool i also wanted to call out un squadron which is an snes shoot them up uh i don't know i've just been playing it for the first time in years some of it is nostalgia but i

also have very little tolerance for shoot-em-ups but this one has like somewhat of a persistence we're unlocking like planes and upgrades that carry forward to different missions what are you playing it on uh i'm playing it on the on a super nintendo perfect the original super nintendo uh i've had the cartridge for about 30 years now it's still a little dusty but it works if you blow out the cartridge um and it's great i'd highly recommend uh un squad so you just to be clear you play as a un officer who fights the world it's kind of been rebranded i think it started as like a manga uh yeah franchise game that they rebranded when it came to the u.s i don't know the full backstory of it but the as a if you like shoot em ups it's a pretty dope one

and i strongly recommend it also the u.n yeah this is kind of their dream of dreams right to have fucking badass fighter chance instead of just like going around hoping for shit to happen um uh do you have anything else fresh no uh i watched a movie but it's tied to video games have you ever seen the joe dante movie matinee i fucking love matinee this movie is fantastic it is set during the cuban missile crisis but in Key West, and it's about a B-movie horror director played by John Goodman who shows up to town to, like, terrify the locals with his new movie, Mant, which is about part man, part ant. And it is amazing. It's David Fincher's – David Fincher's masterpiece. Mant. Mant.

Gary Oldman is Matt. But the connection to games is it stars none other than God of War director, Cory Barlog. What? And as the role of, I think it's like Sean's friend or something. Yeah, it's not. It doesn't really star him. It's a very, very, very small role.

But very funny every time I watch it. I'm like, hey, it's that guy. Look at him. He'd go on to do different things. Yeah, this movie is fantastic. Fantastic. Also, if you go and see Oppenheimer and you're like, you know what? Maybe something a little lighter would be good in my kind of.

But also about nukes. And also with one of the most upsetting jump scares of a family-friendly movie uh i've ever seen um it's so it is so good and it is streaming on basically everything on vod and according to justwatch.com you can watch it on a service called vix v-i-x with ads but've never used VIX, so proceed with caution. But yeah, that's it for me. Well, that's another episode of the podcast. I hope you all enjoyed yourself.

We've got a lot of games to play now. You know, your coffers should be filled. Your cup runneth over with all these great selections. Can I remind everybody to sign up for the – Your cup runneth over with all these great selections. Can I remind everybody to sign up for the, I know we mentioned the mailing list, but the newsletter, will you please go there, besties.fan, and sign up for it?

It's great. Yeah, it's very good. I also want to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. We have Tintin Vividest, Mr. Dunn, and BigB big b 135 thank you for writing reviews for the besties and thank you to everyone else who's talked about the show or shared it or signed up for the newsletter besties.fan yeah that's where you can get a list of all the things we talked about there too we'll mail it to you just go sign up for so much easier and it'll include links and everything. Next week, Disney Illusion Island.

Fuck yeah. We have a hot streak coming up. We got that next week on Besties. The rest is after that. I'm making Fresh Play, Hello Kitty, Adventure Island. I don't know about that. No, I am. It's gonna be good. He sounds pretty sure.

I feel very positive about this. That's how I am. You know how I am. Should we go? Should we end it? Should we do it? Well, this has been another episode of Four Grown Men Dress Each Other. I changed it a little bit. Now we're dressing each other.

Okay. That's a hit. We got a hit. Call Spotify spotify they're gonna want us back it's been the besties be sure to join us again next week for the besties because the world's best friends make the world's best games Besties!