The Besties - Putting a Ring On It With Fire Emblem Engage

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

Intelligent Systems' long-running series of strategy-RPGs gets even longer this week with the release of Fire Emblem Engage! Join us as we discuss the evolved tactics in this new installment, as well as the ethics of trapping ghost soldiers in Cracker Jack prize rings.Also discussed: IGF Award Nominees, Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On, Futureport 82, &Juliet Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

Griffin, you and I have known each other for quite some time. Oh, yeah. Where would you put our support level? Oh, geez. I would say, okay, if you sort of struck all Binding of Isaac-related correspondence from the record, it would be F? D? Well, F is not even an option option i think it starts at c d oh i'll invent a d because like sometimes i'll come to you russ and i'll be like i'm really struggling right now man like my uh you know we're having a really tough time with uh with with gus and yeah sure uh you know we're

struggling just just sort of like rebuilding our social circle after moving across the country. And like, I'm so lonely. Like, I'm so, so lonely. And then you'll be like, yeah, well, that's cool. Well, I had a run with Lost Samson yesterday where I made it to mother. But like if we do count that stuff, definitely an A, maybe even an S, like marriage level. Do you think we're ready to have our support conversation now then um yeah sure sure if you could well maybe you could even

pretend to take an interest in my life beyond like the binding of isaac video game and then maybe that could actually let's have that be sort of the topic of our C rank conversation. Okay. Okay. We're going to start at C. I appreciate it. Okay. So you walk in on me and I'm, I guess you're the protagonist.

Sure. Obviously. And I'm like an archer unit, but you catch me and I'm crying alone in a bathroom. And I'm like, oh, sorry, sorry, master. Or like however Fire Emblem characters talk to each other. Oh, oh, it's the divine one. Sorry, I wasn't crying. Griffin, what is wrong?

Oh, it's just, you know, hard times. So just so deeply lonely, master divine one. Well, you have friends all over. Wow, you're right. Anyway, will you eat this cupcake? Everyone keeps telling me my baking is yucky. I will try your cupcake now. It is good, but it is no taste like the eggs that I make every morning.

But anyway, now I will take a fatal blow for Russ in battle. That is what I would take. I thought we were going to get married. No, man, you gotta talk to me way more. You gotta eat a bunch more of my cupcakes and talk to me about some of the common interests. Right. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week My name is Russ Frushing and I know the best game of the week Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment It's a video game club And how do you join? Well, you just give us $500 in small unmarked bills and listen to this podcast And if you're running along cash, skip that part and just listen to the show and then you'll be in the club we do not take crypto anymore we are

don't try to send it we don't want a crypto i don't want to say anti agnostic okay we're crypto agnostic i'm crypto atheist i don't believe it is anything that actually exists which may be the safest position to take with the given landscape. Guys, the price on Bitcoin is just skyrocketing. We're going to have updates every three minutes throughout the show. It's a new feature, so you don't have to stop to check your Bitcoin. But this week we're going to talk about Fire Emblem Engage. Number one. Plant, what about Fire Emblem Engage. Number one,

plant, what is Fire Emblem Engage? It is the, I believe 17th entry in the Fire Emblem series of tactical role-playing games, which means you take turns moving people across the field, you know, kind of like chess or checkers or whatever, but way more complicated.

And in between that, you talk to each other you you smooch and you eat cupcakes and you you chat about eggs sounds like exactly like our podcast so it's half tactical fight half our podcast uh and we'll have more of said podcast right after this oh boy so fire emblem engage the first major fire release since what was that three houses was the last one are you kidding yes yeah but i mean well there was the the there was the what was it called the big big battle one that they do sometimes fire emblem oh yeah they had the crossover with the mozu genre yeah yes but last real traditional fire emblem is that if you're not counting the weird game that like eats up your life for us fire emblem hero are you still playing fire emblem heroes russ yeah yeah that's good no i'm i'm happy for you i wish i could still hang in there um

i uh it's like a good go-to can we can we just as a table setter i because i think we talked about three houses well i mean yeah we've been doing this show for 100 years, so we definitely talked about Three Houses. Set the table. How was everyone feeling about this franchise after Three Houses? Because that's a game that I sort of warmed up to the longer it's been since it was released. I love Three Houses. I thought it was great. I was kind of lukewarm on it, I think, at first, but then I went back and played it again as a different house and liked it much, much better.

I think, and we'll talk about it with regards to Engage because I think there's a lot of comparisons to be made, but I think Three Houses, in addition to having pretty damn good tactical gameplay, also had a pretty engaging, story yeah um which is a rarity it is and again we'll talk about that yeah um justin i i are we the ones who like barely remember playing any fire emblem games i have no relationship to this franchise whatsoever i mean like i did play the mobile one. I know I spent some time with that. I mean, you've played... I've never stuck with one more than a few hours.

Yeah, you've played them. You just basically bounce off of them pretty immediately. I press the stop record button and I use my other hand to delete it from my... Yeah, pretty much. Fire Emblem Engages is an interesting one. I've played, I think, if not all of them, almost all of them at this point. It is a, I would say, return to form to particularly the 3DS era of Fire Emblem Awakenings and Fire Emblem Fates, where there's way more of a focus on the tactical combat, like character building side of things.

Whereas three houses was way more about that almost like persona style daily simulation where you, you know, you, you had to teach your students and you were constantly trying to get them to specialize in these different things in your classes so that you could upgrade them to different jobs and uh all all that jazz which i know for longtime fans of fire emblem games was kind of a had sort of a mixed reception because there was way way more of that than there had ever been in the series before and i some people sort of

complained that the tactical mechanical side of things struggled because of it that is uh that's definitely not true in fire emblem engage because uh i would say they have focused 95 percent of their efforts on the on the tactics and mechanics and everything. And the stuff that you do in this game's hub world, which is called Somniel, which is just sort of a big castle, expanding castle grounds. It's basically menus. It's like graphical.

It's basically menus you walk around. It takes way too long to load. Yeah, it takes a while. I think that the tactical mechanical side of this game succeeds wildly but it so maybe just to get it out of the way i think that they have done a weird half measure with the like non-combat side of things that the game suffers for um because somniel is not interesting or fun to walk around the things that you do there are literally just run around pick up items and berries berries and nuts just all over the place and then sometimes if you have like ranked up a support uh far enough you can go and hunt them down and talk to them to like

get the get the cut scene that boosts your your rank yeah i wanted to hear from chris plant because i spoke to chris plant yesterday and this is the first time that a Fire Emblem game has clicked for Chris Plant. Yeah, Chris Plant texted us apropos of nothing, like, this game fucking rules. I love it. You're my friend. I like to tag my friends. I'm trying to keep my relationships, you know, B, A. I'm ready for marriage for all of you.

Yeah. I'm ready for marriage for all of you. Yeah. No, I am absolutely smitten with it. And I'm wondering why did I not get into Three Houses? Because I feel like I would have liked the story stuff. My only guess is I have been anime-pilled. Yeah. Probably in between.

Yeah. And I am so far gone that I am enjoying the story. Oh, fuck. I'm not loving it. Let me be clear. I don't think it's great, but I'm not skipping the story. Yeah. And I am engaged.

But more than the story would I like, I will, can I walk you through my journey of how I screwed up and listened to the internet? Yeah. I knew I was making a mistake. I googled, what difficulty level should I play? It's an important choice. I don't blame you. And I looked

in multiple places were like, this game is so easy. It's for Goo Goo Gaga babies. And you're not one of the widow ones, are you? And I was like, I guess not. I'm like 30 something. So I think that's older than a baby. And it's like, okay, if you're not a widow one,

you need to play on hard and you need to play on classic at minimum. And I was like- Just a quick definition. There's difficulty settings for like how hard it is to actually fight and defeat enemies there's like normal hard and extreme or something like that and then there is uh you can decide whether or not there's permadeath and that's the classic or classic or casual mode right if you're

on casual if a unit dies no no problem they come back next battle on classic mode they're gone forever so i i do that and you know it's like a pretty cool like it's difficult it's not easy by any stretch of the imagination i'm losing maybe one or one person in these early early stages and i finally get to the first like real fight where you're it's this large sprawling town and you're there to save like some princess's sister so i guess a princess or whatever who also is there to kick ass and like y'all it is a bloodbath i mean people's eyeballs are on the field like people are like begging for medics and then the medics getting their like chest blown out by like some magical scepter and it's a horror show and i immediately realized there is like no good way because of how i had

saved to undo this afterwards fresh told me that there's like a way to change your difficulty in um in town yeah but i'm not even sure i could even get back to the castle because i had worked the saves so i had to restart and then play it all over again as normal classic which would normally be hey we have a lot of games to play, right? And there's a lot of good games out right now. That does not sound appetizing. Yeah. No.

Playing through this game as a switching from like reality to death god, merchant of justice. Yeah. Rules. This game is fun as shit when you can just be like raining hell upon these assholes who ruined my first two hours of the game yeah i mean just awesome i would say the way to go for listeners who do want to play this game uh you you can adjust the difficulty settings at any time so i would suggest going in at hard which is actually the medium setting which doesn't seem particularly uh intuitive uh because the normal difficulty is i think pretty pretty easy it's pretty easy to steamroll everyone as

long as you're doing like the minimum amount of character building stuff in between battles like you're not going to have too hard of a time with normal i'm gonna i'm gonna add something to that okay because i also did research on what difficulty to play as and i went to the only source that you should really ever go to for questions like these is specifically the fire emblem reddit and i found comments where people who made their entire lives about fire emblem and min maxing fire emblem were like you know what even on hard i was pretty much struggling for a few moments. There are some difficulty spikes that I found to be really, really tough unless I used every ounce of my Fire Emblem knowledge.

And I was like, nope, normal. Normal it is. But you can adjust that without having to restart your whole game. You just don't need to stress yourself out, realistically. Also, did you all do Classic? Yes. you can adjust it. Without having to restart your whole game. You just don't need to stress yourself out, realistically. Also, did you all do Classic? Yes. So,

normal with Classic, I like, because it's like, wow, if I lose somebody with this difficulty, like, that's, I should take that out. And you can also,

there's also a rewind option, where you could just take, go back a few turns, and undo the horror that you did to your team so right even with no response you're you're gonna have options all right that's we're we're in the weeds i i think already um love it that's what this type of game does yeah i know can we talk about i want to talk about the mechanics because like i think that's where the game succeeds we we we mentioned the story very briefly i i i It is a game that pretty much instantly,

I feel like, makes most of its characters completely unrelatable. There's a huge gulf between three houses where you're just sort of like this mercenary who becomes a teacher at your dad's old school and you meet all these students and now you want to protect them and teach them. And everybody is like, you know, a student in school.

That's something we can all relate to. In this game, it's like, you are a divine dragon god who's been asleep for a thousand years, and these are your royal protectors, and everyone's- And you have amnesia. And you have amnesia, and it's like, I don't care about most of the stuff that is happening here what i would say is there are moments and characters in the game that like go way more into embracing like the like cartoonishness of the

world and those are the moments and characters that i'm like oh this is like fun and silly and and but cool and generally speaking generally speaking the story does not hold a candle, I don't think. It's just very serious. Now, the mechanics are tight as fuck, though. They are. This game's really fun to just play in a battle.

There's a few sort of big, I would say quality of life improvements from other Fire Emblem games. There's this idea of the combat triangle where swords are effective against axes, axes are effective against lances, lances are effective against swords. That's been in the game forever,

that kind of like rock, paper, scissors style thing. But they took it out of Three Houses. I think you're right, yeah. In this one, it's there, and it also adds this break mechanic where if you can attack somebody with a preferable form of the triangle, you will break them, and then they can your strongest attacker but can break the defenses of like a big gnarly foe so that your other units can come in and get some more free sweet hits without taking a bunch of damage. Which if you're playing on classic mode is like essential or you will lose units. It's also funny because when you break units, they drop their weapons like doofuses and it's just very satisfying.

It's pretty fun to watch. There's also the engage mechanic, which, do you want to try and explain it? I can do it. Oh, Justin. I'm on the show also, and I'll do it. We love you. You go super Saiyan.

You bind with a ghost from the other people who like fire emblem will nut over every time they see them at least that's how it's edited and then you combine with these ghosts and you can um merge with them to go super saiyan and get superpowers and if you merge the more you merge with them the more you fight with them the more superpowers you get and you can also memorize some of the powers so you always have them and you merge with them, the more you fight with them, the more superpowers you get. And you can also memorize some of the powers so you always have them and you don't have to merge. And merging is like, you get three turns, I think,

to wreck shop and then it wears off. But you can recharge it on the field. Yeah, that was really good, Juice. Yeah, man, it's a pretty fun game, I gotta say. I am curious to hear your thoughts on it. I kind of liked it. At first, I was... I keep an open mind about stuff.

I honestly do. And I'm like, okay, I'm dialed into this. And then at first, it's like the mechanics, I'm all on board. And then it just dumps a lot of stuff pretty quickly. And more than that, it dumps a lot of characters really quickly like you'll go from like there's one dude you're in control of then three

then seven then like ten an army and yeah and it's like oh man I can't really tactics with all these people very well like I can't I don't

this is too much for me to try to wrap my head around when I let go of that though and I just sort of let go of like optimizing and min maxing the mechanics and more just like tried to be smart about how I was approaching it, like try to just relax a little bit and use basic tactics like splitting one group into two groups, so they're easier to sort of manage and stuff like that. I played on easy. I thought it was pretty good. It's pretty enjoyable when you can start to get the abilities to, like, synchronize and you can pace when somebody should run away

and somebody should heal and all that stuff. I just feel like there's a lot. To me, who is not very deep in the series, there's like a lot of, it feels like to me, a lot of cruft, like a lot of statistical cruft that you're trying to like make your way through, a lot of cruft in the UI. But again, if you're knee deep in it,

you probably need and want all these things. But I just kind of, it's like, it felt like when you're knee deep in it you probably need and want all these things but right i just kind of it's like uh it felt like when you're reading a fantasy novel and you're keeping with it and then all of a sudden they introduce like 30 countries and it's like oh man this is too much i think i'm gonna go back to something a little easier for me uh i felt that way a few times but yeah a lot of the ui stuff that you're talking about is important. If you're playing on higher difficulties and like really trying to min max your experience.

So you want to know like, Oh, this 2% crit rate is going to be better than this 4% increase in damage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But if you're playing on normal, more or less, all you need to know is like, Oh, swords beat axes. And, uh, this is how much damage

it's doing which is there's i mean there's you can it's what i think always has worked about fire emblem games i think this has been true of every fire emblem game at least every modern one where you have this you know matrix of difficulty settings all that really means is like how how much are you willing uh to invest in the uh like character management side of things right like there's systems where you can you unlock a blacksmith and then you can go and upgrade uh certain characters weapons i will say joyously uh there is no degradation on weapons just on uh spell tomes uh which is you know kind of annoying but way way way way way less annoying than having to fucking replace your weapon every two battles or even worse have a weapon just crap out in the middle of a big fight

and then you're just boned with that character it also seems like they got rid of like the need to train up on certain weapons like get an s rank in swords i don't think that's in the game i might be wrong you yeah you need to actually have certain ranks and certain weapons to change your uh units classes and there's a there's a ton of classes but that's not really anything you have to worry about for the first i don't know like eight chapters or something like that um i i i enjoy some of that stuff i think it's not as intuitive and i think this may be an issue just with the hub hub world being like super duper duper clunky in three houses if i wanted to make one of my units like a you know mounted archer then it would i would you know look at the i think you had to take an exam, right? In order to do that. And it would say like, well, they're not rank A in this yet. So

they're not going to pass this exam. Whereas in this game, it's not quite as, I don't know, quite as easy to parse. But I mean, all that stuff is in the game in such tremendous quantities. But again, like, if you don't want to fuck with that stuff just play normal casual and you really don't need to do a lot of it yeah i was this whole like crazy ring system that is like even me who's like very into fire emblem and cares a lot about this stuff like i found it like i was drowning in the amount of like nitty gritty details that were going on there's also like because there's permadeath I think they dump a lot of characters on you yeah I think that's and if you're not using permadeath I kind of wish that I had just to

make it easier to keep track of people like you know oh that's okay I couldn't remember their name anyway that's fine I kind of wish I'd done that because I ended up with a bunch of characters that I just barely... And honestly, one love to Japanese role-playing game character design. I get it. But just some more variation in body shapes and skin colors and just a little bit of diversity there would really help. Or a little bit more, I would say, would really help that go a long way because a lot of people look very similar and it's yeah you know there's there's many other reasons for doing that obviously but right just from a very practical perspective just a little bit more variety there would be grand yeah for what it's worth i thought

three houses was better at that because it the whole premise of the game was all these different countries were coming together in this school yeah i i got i i got a question about that before we wrap um how is all the fan service cool by nintendo i mean i now by the fan service we should be specific because there's there's like marth is in the game would be considered fan service as well yeah i mean there's huge fan service in the the the very core nature of like these rings possess the souls of marth and uh yeah that's not what i'm talking about i think we all know what i'm talking about the uh like teenage girls who are portrayed in the most over-the-top fashion. Yeah, sure. I mean, again, it is like,

I have played like 10 chapters and some paralogs. I don't think I've hit anything nearly as gnarly as what has been in like Fire Emblem Fates, I think was the worst offender, where it was like, this is your family and your sister's got pretty giganzo bazoingas don't they and it's like oh man fire emblem i just want to get on a horse and fucking do battle against a big army i don't it basically it's been grandfathered into it for nintendo i just feel like modern nintendo i'm just i mean i'm sure this has been discussed endlessly i'm

sure i'm very late to the the fire has always been a nintendo been a Nintendo franchise. Yeah, no, I know. I know. But, like, there are different periods of Nintendo where they're like, you know, the post-Nintendo 64 era where they're like, I don't know. We just need to sell some things. Yeah, sure. We'll do that. And, like, I think of now as the we'll be very cautious with all of our brands because we're on top of the world era. And I don't know. It seems a little like uh

antithetical to like the very like pg brand that they like to portray i interviewed one of the developers of three houses this is probably like five years ago and i asked them this question because it like heroes specifically does not hold back when it comes to this stuff and their response was basically that i've uh basically that nintendo had evolved beyond the period of just being an exclusively family-friendly pg brand and the fire emblem games in particular in addition to having like you know showing a lot of skin and whatever also have like a hell of a lot of violence and like people burning up in front of you and dying and all sorts of stuff so his argument was basically

you know this is a more mature game than what you would give a kid and nintendo allows for that these days yeah i mean that's good to be clear i'm not saying it shouldn't be there or not. I'm just surprised Nintendo, I guess Nintendo's come a long way since Pac-Man. Yeah, that's a good point. I haven't thought about it that way, but that's true. 8 out of 10. Next segment. Next segment.

Well, the nominations that everyone's been waiting for are finally out. Congratulations to RRR for its single nomination. What a crime that it was only nominated for Best Song. I think everybody else had some RRR, just Oscars thoughts in general, I guess. Yeah, it's a shame. Heartbreaker. Well, moving on to the igf the independent games festival awards were nominated uh were were the the nominations were announced rather uh what did

you what do you guys think where were you at well i i wanted to mention i wanted to call out what the uh seamus mcnally grand prize nominees were because i think there's a lot of games here that will sound familiar but as we go through some of the other categories, there might be games that you haven't heard of or games that you might have played very briefly and wanted to call them out. But for the grand prize nominees, we have Tunic, which I believe is our number two game of 2022. Case of the Golden Idol, which I know is in our top 10. A game called not for broadcast which apparently justin brought two besties and i just forgot yeah but it sounds awesome oh cool yeah you know what else that sounded awesome is when i described it in detail it was that was the like

game where you're a producer in a news studio and it's like a fmv thing where you're making like shot decisions stuff like that um neon white which you're making shot decisions, stuff like that. Neon White, which we've talked about a lot. Right now the listeners are nodding like, yeah, we know. We listened to the podcast. We remember. Neon White, Immortality, and Betrayal at Club Low. Have we talked about this game? I've never heard of it.

I saw it once a while ago. It's kind of a bonkers game. The aesthetic of it is uh reboot the tv series reboot reboot set in like a weird dystopian nightclub and it's also like a dice based rpg uh it it looks neat i never really dug into it uh too much but when i saw it on the list i started watching some trailers and it looks it looks pretty fucking wild man you're making a lot of you're making pizzas i was gonna say i think that's the cool thing about the igf awards is basically that there's always stuff that either i haven't heard of or i'm just becoming aware of that has been a big thing in the indie game space

but maybe hasn't necessarily reached like more mainstream knowledge this feels like closer to an equalizer year so i mean the history of igf is like it used to be truly indie games like you know before you could easily buy indie games on steam or like xbox having you know the digital marketplace this was stuff that people were like passing along. You'd have to order from somebody's personal website. I mean, really obscure stuff. And then as indie games grew and grew and grew, suddenly the grand prize for this started to feel like just a game award.

And now I don't know if it's the pandemic releases or what has happened or if even really weird artsy games now can compete with that larger stuff but this feels like a pretty good mix of things like immortality neon white tunic which to me i know that some of those have smaller teams but they feel i don't know polished in a way sure versus stuff like tunic was being developed over like six years forever yeah i mean longer than that, I think. And then Case of the Golden Idol and Betrayal at Club Low, which feel like the sort of stuff that, and we can hop right to this, the Nuovo Award, which is, that's the award that I always like scroll immediately to because that feels like the one place that is the, I guess the remnant of old school weird truly indie igf stuff yeah i don't know man i it's i i that distinction has never interested me particularly

uh because i i do think that the divide between triple a and not triple a developers is still very much a thing. And I don't know. Nothing in the Seamus McNally grand prize struck me as like, wow, that's on here. No, but you do agree that there's a difference between a very small game released on itch versus a Devolver game. Yeah, you're right.

There's still a difference between AAA and indie, but there's a huger gulf inside of indie between small indies and indies that can afford to make six movies in one video game. One surprising thing for me, Citizen Sleeper is just an honorable mention. Yeah, I don't necessarily get that. It is up for excellence in narrative

it is one of the main nominees which makes total sense I don't know I don't have any insight into this there is a pretty cool game in the Nuovo category called Time Bandit where it appears you're playing as a construction worker but it has like Metal Gear

Solid 1 style graphics and stealth gameplay which sounds pretty fucking sick yeah uh it's an anti-capitalist dark comedy uh and uh yeah i mean you know if you ever are looking for like weird or interesting games to play definitely go over to the igf list of nominees because invariably you will stumble upon stuff that either you haven't heard of or just sounds like super fucking wild there's a game on the nuevo i just want to call this out it's called this is the title of the game queer man peeing into rockpool.jpg boy kick ass man do you think it's gonna beat um titanic 2 orchestra for dying at. I don't know what that is.

Well, that's all. It's the competition. Also, he fucked the girl out of me. Oh, yeah. Those are all. Yeah, look at that. Those are the other. No more awards rules.

Kick-ass titles, at least. Yeah. I mean, video games are great. Video games are great again. Hey, can we talk honorable mentions? Because I got a big one. Okay, hit me. Is it that time? Yes. Yeah, sure yes yeah oh russ you got it too baby pocket card jockey ride on this one geez yeah you've been excited i actually had this on my like wish list or

whatever because i knew it'd be mine well it's out baby it's out it's here it's now extremely my shit we've talked about this game a few times, I think. Pocket Card Jockey is from Game Freak, the Pokemon studio. And it's the best Game Freak game that's come out in quite a few years. It's on 3DS. I think it came out in like, oh, Jesus. I don't know. 2014, maybe 2016.

I don't know. Probably earlier than that. Pocket Card Jockey came out in 2013 holy shit okay yeah um it is a horse racing game with solitaire you play solitaire to race your horse dang that sounds fun why can't more games use solitaire as a mechanic? It's the most fun thing to play. I agree as well. On each race, you will hit several rounds of solitaire,

and the better you perform, the faster your horse will go. That's more or less it. There's a lot more sort of mechanics to it. In between each round of solitaire, you can kind of position your horse on the racetrack to try to have a more advantageous uh spot in the lineup or try to pick up like these power-up cards that spawn on the track uh and you're having to constantly make these decisions of like well i could go for that card but it's going to put me on the outside which

is going to reduce my endurance uh etc etc uh and it's man i it's really the epitome of like a one more round game for me uh where i will just pick it up and then lose like a half hour instantly uh just playing solitaire it is it is surprisingly deep with the number of systems that are at work here because you're measuring like the horse's stamina how the horse is, where the horse is located on the track. And you're like picking like, like the route that the horse is taking among the pack of other racing horses. And that's all impacted by how well you play Solitaire.

Yeah. It's wild. It's, and then there's like a whole horse breeding thing that you get where you can try to, you know, the thing about this game is when you first play play you get a busted ass horse who loses a lot and you have to kind of get comfortable with that because it's doing well well okay good cool maybe i'm just that good at solitaire maybe you're just really good at solitaire uh but it does make it so that once you do start breeding horses to try and make you know one with better stats and skills uh

you really start to feel it when you get into a race and don't you know one with better stats and skills uh you really start to feel it when you get into a race and don't you know lose quite as much as you used to i also love the art style sure and the story is fucking buck wild you start out the game as a jockey who's just entering the field and you get to try to uh ride this one horse that kicks and kills you yeah in heaven god is like uh yeah sorry man you died but um i'm gonna send you back on the condition that you win the royal crown and if you don't i'm gonna send you to heck uh it's very fun and wild and uh i'm i'm i'm loving it it's been my off-court buddy basically all all weekend and this week and it's really great.

How do we get Game Freak to just give this team Pokemon? Yeah, I don't know. I kind of just want them to make them pocket-punch Pokemon. That's something. Now we're talking.

There's something. I also wanted to give a shout-out to, I've been playing Minecraft Dungeons with Henry. Oh yeah, that's a good game. You guys made fun of me

the last time I recommended it. Well, I would would never play it by myself i think i did actually check it out when it came out on switch um but henry like likes minecraft but you know whenever we play minecraft we just kind of dick around in creative mode he's not really like ready to engage with the deeper systems of of that game um but minecraft dungeons just running around smashing a bunch of creepers and skeletons and stuff and finding loot like that loop appeals to the six year old mind uh just as much as it does the 35 year old mind uh and so we've been we've been really enjoying it and also it's a it's free on game pass yeah it's huge yeah that's a cool game i like the physics they use physics really well in that game where like enemies and creepers and stuff go like flying

when you charge them and very satisfying um i wanted to talk about two things one is called future port 82 uh which is a something you can download on pc for free right now and it is a uh an ongoing project um but but still world war i'm checking out right now um where they are attempting to create uh all of future world which is the futuristic half of of ep, the non-world showcase half of Epcot, as it was on opening day. So when you load in, there's not really a game here per se, but you are able to walk through the park. You are able to look at different exhibits. They've got music playing, all the original signage. You can go into like gift shops and stuff and see products that would have been on offer on that day.

And it's basically like a big museum piece, I guess you could say. It's especially sort of – Yeah, you can click rides and it takes you to like the best YouTube video possible of what the ride looked like then, which is kind of hard to come by because, as you've assumed, a lot of people had cameras back then. Yeah. And few have uploaded them to YouTube. Yeah. But it's especially cool because this park has really strayed

from its original vision from, I mean, it was that when it launched, but it has strayed even more rapidly rapidly in in recent years so it just for people that like don't know the park super well its original concept was basically like this is what the jetsons world would look like basically right yeah i mean the original concept was to have an actual functioning city i mean it was the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. So this was going to be a place where people lived and worked that Walt died before that came to fruition.

So the park pivoted into something that's about a celebration of innovation and imagination and all the world's cultures. And as with the rest of the Disney parks, you're seeing more like Disney, uh, like Disney IP sort of bleed into it. And it's straight from that original version. Anyway, I don't want to get off on the soapbox about this. Uh, it's a very cool thing.

Um, even if you have no memory of, of, of visiting in the early eighties to Epcot, just having this sort of like ability to experience this little thin slice of history virtually is very cool. I know people have done similar things in Gary's Mod with extinct clubs and things like that that aren't in Disney anymore. But anyway. One last closing thing. Is there anything in Futureport 82 that

would not necessarily fly, culturally speaking, today? Not that I, not that I saw, you know, there, there's some goofy ideas about how the internet will be good for stuff, but,

and I also, I really want to briefly mention, because I had not heard of this show. I went and saw and Juliet in Broadway last weekend, but it was playing in, it's also in London, and I think they're doing a Toronto version, so there's probably others.

But it is a jukebox musical about William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway rewriting the end of Romeo and Juliet so Juliet doesn't kill herself and goes on and sort of like lives her life and becomes a fully fledged person. And all the songs are by Max Martin, the Swedish mega, mega. No one has more hit songs than this guy, except for John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Like he said, the show features stuff like hit me, baby, one more time. And I can't feel my face.

And it's my life i mean roar by katie perry is like the big the biggest one at the at the end but uh oh and some backstreet boys stuff i want it that way things like that so like if you grew up with that kind of music and even if you didn't um oh and the show was written by uh one of the head writers on schitt's creek so it's like it's also very funny the way they like tie everything together and the way the songs aren't changed lyrically but make sense with the uh in the context of the show um but it's it's really really fun um so i would check it out cool nice point you have anything uh can i talk just a tiny bit about dead space before next week you tell me i don't i don't know what the authorities are

telling you what do you want to talk about just that it's great and people should play it so they can um i think we'll all enjoy it and and people should not wait i guess until next week to give it a try uh also not that you should spend money on this the uh the special edition costumes or outfits or whatever are absolutely disturbing um and break the entire game um uh narratively because one of them is uh isaac with two corpse hands uh as antlers stuck to the side of his head and another is isaac with his entire uh abdomen gutted and just guts spilling out of his his uh his body lovely nasty with with with ray tracing let me tell you looks really upsetting it's really gross um but separate from that this game is fantastic i next week i think we're gonna have probably a

long conversation around hey what does it mean that like we keep looking forward to in the best games of each year are things that we played you know 10 years ago like is that like resident evil 4 remake is on the way the only thing that i keep coming back to is um like star is born got remade like a trillion times and that was like totally chill so maybe this is just the natural evolution of of games you know like any other medium and it just feels more acute right now for some reason and lady gaga's in fortnite so so there it is everybody right now well just as an emote but sorry it's okay you just got me all kind of excited it's fine i wanted to thank the following

people for writing for reviews for the besties on apple podcasts hair g casual fan of david's us hair g casual fan of david's master of merc thank you for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcast and thank you to everyone else who has written reviews both in the past and in the present and in the future and about our show and on about our show also true they help people reviews help people you know they do they do help people a lot. That's why we do what we do. Help us. That's why we do it. We're here to help. We are. We are talking about, spoiler alert, Dead Space. The remake of Dead Space next week just came out,

and we'll be talking about it next week. So get prepared to be scared. That kind of rhymes. That's the tagline, actually, for the game, is get prepared to be scared. I love of rhymes. That's the tagline actually for the game is get prepared to be scared. I love it. It's cool. That is going to do it for us.

Thank you so much for listening to our show and thanks for joining us. We hope you will do so again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. Besties!