The Besties - Resident Evil 3: Missing the Large Detective

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

The gang survives the remake of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis to tell listeners about the bizarre world design of Racoon City (including a train museum and a very normal toy store with a giant hovering baby head). They also explore why Justin finds watching game character’s heads explode less fun than ever before and how Russ decided to bestow Mr. X his new name, “the Large Detective.” Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

So I got a few jokes to start us off with. Awesome. Sometimes we don't, sometimes we get a little too dry at the beginning, but this time I have a few jokes and I'd like to do them now and you guys can pick what your favorite joke is. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Griffin McElroy. Hey everyone, it's me, Griffin McElroy.

I have three jokes and so here comes the first one, hot and ready for you. What, hey guys, what is Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, his favorite song from La La Land? What is it? Thanks for asking, Chris. City of stars. So that's the first one. And here comes the second one ready for you. What is Nemesis' favorite accomplished actor?

And that one, don't even ask, because it's Peter Sarsgaard. And then the third one's, what's his favorite new wave band? And that one's The Cars. But he would say it in the way he says the other two. I love it. Is he touring or is it just local shows right now?

He better fucking not be touring. How bad a guy is he? Come on. Even Nemesis respects social distancing. Yeah, I mean, he's a bit of a problematic fave, so he is not necessarily touring right now, but he does have a few online specials that people are just going gaga for.

Love this guy. He's also working on something with Gaga. It's a uh partnership yeah um i'm sorry can i can i uh can i share a joke with you oh yeah yeah yeah ladies and gentlemen uh who uh is my favorite investigator no oh no oh okay here okay sorry i got like stage i'm not i'm not used to this like this is okay i feel like I'm in a haunted house right now Spoon some chills around every corner with you guys Here we go

Who is Nemesis' favorite Investigator of the Clinton administration The show is cancelled The show is cancelled That's it Enjoy the next podcast It should be starting right now This one's canceled.

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 Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Chris Plant and I definitely played a video game this week. My name is Russ Rushing and I know the best remake that came out last year, which was better than this one. Welcome to the Best is a video game book club, except it's about a book club about video games. It's a game of the year show that goes all year long. It's the besties. We talk about our favorite books about video games.

Last 15 episodes, we did Ready Player One. This time, we're going to do Ready Player One again because there's a lot of depth there to plumb. How do we make books more interesting, like more badass? That is my concern

because we talk about book club, I feel like people are not gonna be super pumped. Chainsaw gun. Books don't have chainsaw gun in them yet. Nobody's written a book with chainsaw gun in them yet.

Or you can like set a bunch of books on fire. Yeah, that'd be pretty badass. That's not a good idea this week we're talking about resident evil 3 not resident evil 3 nemesis which is a very different game the resident evil 3 nemesis came out in 1999 resident evil 3 came out in friday so that's a different that's a different thing. It's two different games. They both got Nemesis in them, but he

lost his billing. I guess his agent kind of is asleep at the wheel because he had that below the title credit, but now it is gone. Let's talk about what this game is, Justin. Resident Evil 3 is another Resident Evil game. I don't even know how to say it in a way that's more interesting than that.

It is a Resident Evil game. It is a remake of Resident Evil 3, like I said, that came out. And this is a sort of a pseudo-sequel in that sense to Resident Evil 2, the remake, that came out just last year. All the graphics are updated. All the talking is different. All the talking is different. All the puzzles, reimagined controls are different. It's very much a reimagining. It's a remake.

It's more of a remake, because I feel like reimagining would be even more different than this. It is a remake of that 1999 game that came with demo discs of Dino Crisis, by the way, just to tie it back all together. Making it the superior game de facto because this one didn't have any Dino Crisis in it, which is frustrating for me as a consumer.

Right. Big differences from this to RE2. One is rather than picking a protagonist, you're kind of like switching as the story progresses between Jill, Valentine and Carlos who is, is Carlos new at this point? This is the

the franchise mythos that is the hardest for me to keep track of. I think this is the first time Carlos has showed up because I don't think he was in the first Resident Evil game He was in Resident Evil he was in nemesis yeah in nemesis no yeah right no no no i mean at this point in the franchise right there's a lot of overlap between resident evil 2 and resident evil 3 um i think sometimes it kind of starts to feel a little bit like a

sort of a side story uh you return it's a prequel it's a prequel sequel right like there is a time skip in the middle of resident evil 3 during which i believe the entire plot of resident evil 2 takes place if i'm reading there is literally griffin no way of knowing what he just said is true or untrue is unverifiable no the way i know that this takes place in the exact same time is because the book assets in both games are the exact same uh when you walk out to any random book it's the exact same weird collection of books that was in resident evil 2 this is a weird game y'all i i i was shocked that this was going to come out a year after resident evil 2 having played it i am not shocked yeah um this it's wild to play a game that both looks very uh

beautiful and high touch and also feels very slapdash uh like we we're going to get this out the door within a year whether it was like despite everything there's a why here's the question i want to post to you i think we're all before unless i'm completely wrong this is hitting for all of us less than it hit than resident evil 2 hit correct yes is that fair to say yes i don't know is that is it just novelty or is there another aspect to it no there's another aspect to it i think i think okay so if you look at like when the original resident evil 2 came out and then when the original resident evil 3 came out there was a huge gulf in terms of like critical support for one versus the other resident evil 2 was like a

groundbreaking moment resident evil 3 was like it is all right and i don't think it's just because it was like the first game incorrect what resident evil 3 was very well received what you're saying not as well received as two though resident evil 3 got very well received what you're saying not as well received as two though resident evil 3 got four stars from next generation the last good video game magazine 9.4 from ign uh five star game pro five stars opm uh 10 out of 10 from opm uk i mean it's it's nine out of ten from cbg like it was extremely well received i mean in aggregate it's like 88 but i think historically i think one is stood out versus the other i think two remains the like one of the gold standards of the franchise whereas three has kind of been forgotten i don't disagree

also on its legacy uh going off metacritic here not that this is uh the end all be all of criticism, released on the Dreamcast in 2079. By the time it was released on PC a year later, it was 71. So the love for Nemesis had a precipitous drop off. I think once people got off that high of new Resident Evil. It isn't not just new Resident Evil, right? It's like Resident Evil one playstation was like holy shit like a complete literal game changer and like what games could do and then resident evil 2 one upped it in every conceivable way and was so fucking big and cool and good resident evil 3 i think probably just got a little bit of that like drafted off that a little bit of people like yeah more of this cool big good shit but by the time the dreamcast came out like people were like well wait a minute now there's more cool big good

shit so it's maybe not just good enough to be yeah i think it's a bioshock infinite situation to be honest i also think resident evil 3 is the turning point for the series which yes seems silly because it's so early and obviously resident evil 4 still happens and people love it. But if you watch the Fast and the Furious franchise, big Fast and the Furious fan right here. One, deeply grounded compared to everything else. Film, two and three, it's kind of getting out there. Four and five, they're starting to like globe hop. And by like, once you get to six and seven,

they are just superhero movies. They're jumping between skyscrapers with cars they're defying physics right and you kind of hit that point and then you can't recover from it you've gone so high that you can't go any higher saints row and i've saints row has a similar thing yeah and i think the same thing happens with the resident evil resident evil one is is dawn of the dead right it is this small movie that happens in a mansion obviously has some big moments resident evil 2 is the what if that but like big you know in a city um and then resident evil 3 is like rocket launchers right like and that's megamorphs yeah like it

just that's what i wanted to yeah dive into like that aspect, the action aspect. And I think this carries through all of the Resident Evil franchise through and through. Yes. Because the second, like, it seems like there's an exponential connection to more action, worse game. I think the more action they add, I think the games get worse. I do. No, I don't think that's true. Cause I, uh, you can call this a turning point, whatever.

Resident Evil 4 whips ass. I think the question is like- That's a slow game. For most of that game, that's like a slow- You cannot- That's not an action game. Okay, let's establish the scale, okay? And it's funny because on either sides of this franchise, Resident Evil 1 and Resident

Evil 7, those are horror games. Sure. Those are games where you are fairly powerless and you are in small intimate environments that are scary because of the intimacy of them right resident evil 2 i think walks a really fine line especially when you're at the beginning when you're in the police station yeah and you're you don't have rocket launcher the time to grenade launcher in this game is fucking wild because it is not that long uh in resident evil 2 though like you are fairly powerless in this game is fucking wild because it is not that long uh in resident evil 2 though like you are fairly powerless in this police station where the danger escalates like

really quickly and even seeing like one zombie in a hallway is enough to be like kind of scary in the way that resident evil 1 the first time that zombie looks up at you with like gore dripping down its mouth is fucking terrifying resident evil 3 you're fighting a big zombie with a with a literal rocket launcher like fairly early on and then it's like well that's not that's ridiculous that's not scary at all and that's fine because you can also be a badass action game like resident evil 4 was but like you can't be both at that point uh yeah i think the problem is the the the sustaining tension yeah which i think this game is resident evil 3 is still trying to sustain tension even when you have an assault rifle and i think that like if you were to draw a graph the appearance of an assault rifle in a game and a

de-escalation of tension is like paralleled right totally i think i feel like in this game most of the encounters felt uh annoying because it's like oh there's four zombies in here okay well let me systematically kill all these zombies and now wait i have to go to each zombie and execute it with a with a bullet or else it'll get back up in a second and that'll be irritating i don't want to have to fool with that and that is what the encounters sort of felt like and even the bigger enemies were just like a these take a lot more bullets but it's not that interesting in and of itself the from encounter to encounter like the zombies aren't scary if you are methodical about eliminating them and that's not fun yeah um to add one other point to that that that ties into the the methodical like the graphics are obviously modern they're much better than they were in in 1999 and this is partially i i know

you can almost always make this complaint with action games, but like there is something to me. like people like very sick people and like shooting these photorealistic realistic people in the head and watching their heads explode is like not is like less fun than ever before and i feel like especially when they're like lying on the ground i'm like well i gotta go around and shoot all these people in the head now just kind of execute them what in the in the game's defense sometimes it's better to use your knife to stab them in the head. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like you talk about Animal Crossing coming out at the exact right time.

Like the very first words of this game are like, the fucking quarantine's not working. Quick, just start shooting everybody. We're all fucked. It's like worst timing possible. Fresh, what were you going to say? Well, I just wanted to talk a little bit about Nemesis specifically and why he sort of sucks.

You know, he was effectively in 2, kind of. No, Tyrant was in 2. My boy, Tyrant was in 2, and he was scary as fuck. That's what I wanted to talk about. I didn't remember that his name was Tyrant. I always remember him as the large detective, but, like, that's like a big difference i mean he has the fedora and you know he's a large detective my lady there's something this summer he's teaming up with pikachu for big detective small detective so there's something very menacing about a large detective that you hear walking

outside of the door and like you hear his footsteps and you open the door and he doesn't have a like a fucking virus arm he just has a fedora and a coat and he'll punch you in the face there's something more menacing that of that than there is of like this weird like mutant like skin muscly creature thing that has a rocket launcher for an arm, like, there's nothing grounded about that. Whereas, like, I could see a large detective on the street and, like, be really scared because it, like, relates to my personal being.

If you want to talk about, like, what, like, fear is, it is, like, it is the unexpected, right? And Nemesis blends in. So Nemesis is just big zombie and then sometimes he has a rocket launcher and at that point the fear is completely gone. Resident Evil 2, you have these like, you have zombies.

You have these like mutant lizard monster fuckers that like climb all over the walls. And that's all like, whoa, this police station sure is wicked fucked up. But then you just see like a big man with a gray face calmly walking in the middle of that shit that is terrifying yeah that is so scary i think it's a big difference between walking and running at you with nemesis you're constantly running and what that creates is well especially once he starts shooting at you it's like well i don't know where he is but i know he's basically behind me and it's just this annoying guessing game of like when when should I dodge? Like, which way should I go?

I can't, I'm not looking at him. I'm not seeing him. The pacing of Tyrant is like, it's, he is coming in your direction. It's more like it follows kind of. It's like, I think it's scarier to know that he's coming, but like not. And I feel like it was also more procedural. Like, and maybe that's like just like not and and i feel like it was also more procedural like it and maybe that's like just my impression but i feel like it seemed nemesis is much more scripted yeah what were you saying plant um i was going to make a recommendation for everybody uh

have you all downloaded apple tv no yeah yeah none of you okay so on apple tv there's a show called mythic quest it's by apple tv plus you mean oh yeah yeah thank of you okay so on apple tv there's a show called mythic quest it's by apple tv plus you mean oh yeah yeah thank you yeah i was very confused and it's by uh one of the uh somebody who worked on community and one of the co-creators of uh it's always sunny and the show is like fine it's about how people make video games it's it's fine yeah it's not it's not terrible it's you know what it'd be a good show to watch now if you like need to burn through something that's very watchable um but there's an episode in the middle of it it's a bottle episode it's like episode four or five and this if if you have access to a free month this subscription you should definitely check it out and it is uh basically a 20 year span of a couple making the resident evil games like it begins in

the 90s with what is like clearly a game inspired by resident evil and as it grows and grows all the pressure that they feel to add guns and kill states and like make this a big blockbuster at one point like it turns into a movie and thing and i think i i love that this the show exists because i think it's very hard to explain to people why resident evil happens like this isn't i i seriously doubt this is a creative decision of one individual who's just gradually wanted to make this into some weird abstract military action film i think there are all these little pressures in the video game industry to to not make the character who can't be killed effectively and just walks around wearing a fedora into something that is like sinewy and gory and looks good as a standee in gamestop and also has a

rocket launcher because rocket launchers are the favorite weapons in video games right there's also a weird there's a there's also a weird thing with nemesis where if you drop a grenade at him he'll drop some nice stuff for you which is very bizarre but the first time you throw a grenade at him it explodes he's like ah shit i dropped my damn pistol scope it's like oh thank you that's such a generous system yeah that's a nice thing for sale stars i'm gonna lay down here like there's no reason for it makes no sense it's just if you blow them up you get some good stuff from time to time uh unexpectedly delightful uh i thought jill valentine is maybe the most i've ever liked a protagonist in a resident evil game she is very good she drops

fucking the hottest lines like ever uh including the last line that she drops in the game is so fucking fresh and good uh yeah it's a great part where nemesis runs out on fire and fall like she's a good distance away on a bridge and nemesis smashes through a wall runs out on fire and falls into the river and jill just keeps walking and goes bitch can't even swim it's so funny it's so good um i i also want to talk about the i feel like there is a loss of vibe in the environment the mansion in one very specific to beginning in the police station and then branching out from that point um to and then the it it immediately drops you into like a city which a downtown area which should have a vibe but just feels it feel that it's so incongruous to earth that i think it like it very much loses a the sort of like uh claustrophobic

vibe that you get from one and two and the city is just bizarre like there is a very tight there's a supermarket that is two aisles that's not a supermarket i don't know what you're doing i mean there's a bodega but whatever it's labeled supermarket there's a train museum that also is where you control trains what the fuck what is this building like it's got a neon sign up front advertising like train museum what is this city there there is a there's a toy store with a two-story tall toy head hovering precariously over you uh it is bizarre i think the issue here is uh if you think about 8-bit video games right where it's like why is mario a plumber i can't remember this is actually true or not but it's like oh if we give him suspenders you know there's like with a very limited uh visual palette

that we can use to design a character we can convey that this person has some job or like we put a hat uh on people on animal crossing in the original one they put horns on the characters to convey whether they were male or female by the shape of their horns they come up with these like very specific things to communicate visual information when you only have a few sprites or a few polygons so i think like when resident evil 3 came out they're like we can't do great detail we need to show this as a toy store so we're gonna go big like right you'll be able to tell it's a toy store when making the remake, you have all of the tools to make this look as believable as you need.

You don't have to use these simple, you don't have to use simple iconography to convey it. You can just make a toy store and people will know it's a toy store. But instead, they took it very literal. There's also two sides of the downtown area that are like all the streets that people use are like closed off from trash

and so if you want to get from one part of downtown to the other it's like oh that's easy you just walk into the donut shop and then walk through the donut shop to the other half of town that's how everybody does it we all just go through the donuts or you know what now that i think about it you could climb into the fucking drugstore owner's window and walk through his private home and then climb out another one and go down a fire escape then you'll be on the other side of town as well those are the two ways you can get from one side of town to the other you know it's great you don't need a car it's just like a walking city it's great it's a walking city and a climbing city because you're climbing into the drugstore owner's window i don't know i

don't i you know we're dumping on this a lot like it's fine right it's like it's fine it's like especially when there's nothing coming out it's like very passable i think that it's kind of cool i don't think you're losing much from resident evil 3 it doesn't seem to me like it just it it it's it's flat compared to resident evil 2 and i do think also it's suffering from the fact that it's so close to to resident evil 2 i i it it's it's flat compared to resident evil 2 and i do think also it's suffering from the fact that it's so close to to resident evil 2 i i think it's i think it does not stand up to comparison to resident evil 2 very well at all but i don't think that's the remake's fault as much as it is the source materials fault i've been sitting here trying to because we've been

talking about i think the discussion of like horror versus action especially when framed in the context of the resident evil franchise is really interesting but i've been sitting here trying to think because we got into it a little bit last week with uh half-life alex which yeah i made the argument like transition into a horror game because they couldn't make it a very good action game i'm sitting here trying to think of like the last time a game actually scared me or like suspended me in a state of fear or anxiety and i don't i don't know i honestly can't like are you just a broken boy that doesn't he's just a very brave boy that's what he's bragging i guess i'm extremely brave well no it's like what is scary in a video like what is still scary in a video game because i think resident evil 3 also suffers from like what we are able to be scared by in video games has changed since it changed from resident evil 2 to resident

evil 3 when it first came out in the late 90s like sure maybe back in 1999 like a big monster with a rocket launcher is scary but that is like not scary anymore today so i will say seven is scary resident evil 7 is scary as fuck because it's like trying different stuff. It has a different kind of fear than the Resident Evil series ever had. I will say I stopped, I know you guys have stopped playing Half-Life Alyx, but I've continued playing.

I had legit nightmares and had to sit and stare at a wall for an hour after a sequence that i played the other night like because you're so nauseous no i was not in this one case my tummy was very strong but my mind was weak i was totally stricken by fear in that game to the point where i was like i needed to talk to people to see if there was going to be any moment that was on the level that i just experienced it was so disturbing so it happened that was on the level that I just experienced. It was so disturbing. So it happens still.

Yeah. He's brave. I actually think some of that part has been taken by the souls games. Yeah. I was just thinking that it's very much like it's, it's the same. What, what is it?

Okay. Why does the increment exist? Why are resources so limited? Why is all that stuff? It's just to like give you the tension of loss right like i can't fucking die here please that's very much removed in these remakes you can save whenever you want to like there's there's plenty of resources like i i never i don't know about y'all i never ran out of ammo i mean uh it was not it's funny because

you were ragging on alex a little bit for giving too little ammo right issue. I mean, it's funny because you were ragging on Alex a little bit for giving too little ammo. Right, and ragging on Resident Evil 3. It's almost like there's a balance between good and bad. Well, no, because in Resident Evil 3, that idea, I think they are also going for it. You start with eight inventory spaces, and they fill up pretty much instantly.

The ammo's not super, like, it does not flow like milk and honey at the beginning of the game and so this idea of you having to be methodical in killing zombies now you have this like uh balancing act of like well do i want to be methodical and wipe them out so i don't get bitten or do i want to just try and run right through because then i can save some ammo like that idea that exists in the souls games exists here too this idea of like scarcity as fuel for fear like a mechanical source of fear it exists but like uh for some reason i mean not for some reason like they didn't it's it's there are a lot of reasons why it just doesn't work as

as well this time i feel like yeah that's that's resident evil 3 right we got it anybody else have any other big points i want to get to does anybody want what's the next like a resident evil 1 remake feels like an obvious even though they've remade that what twice already at this point yes like what's the next thing that's the one thing i i do want to talk about really quick i think is like gets to that which is we now know the resident evil cycle talking about you know getting bigger and bigger and bigger and we saw that go from resident evil one to resident evil six which i mean is a nightmare resident evil five was the one i think where you fight at a volcano it ends with a volcano boss fight with a teleporting scientist

there were some fun parts in bad guy yeah six is like the one with helicopters in a city um and then seven yeah seven is i think a masterpiece the weird thing about seven is i feel like it's the entire series in one game seven starts with you're like you have nothing it's just a horror movie um kind of playing with like found footage the same way that resident evil 1 played with romero and then by the end of it you are on a oil tanker or some sort of large boat with an assault rifle just like spraying and praying like the end of resident evil which felt like it felt like the perfect culmination of the resident evil series what's weird now and i saw somebody i think somebody wrote about this a little bit on fanbite but these games are just blending together that like resident evil 2 is a remake of resident evil 2

but it's also kind of playing with stuff from the other parts of the series resident evil 3 feels even more like that where it's simply i get it's like it's technically remake remaking nemesis but again it's it feels even more action-heavy and big. It opens with a first-person sequence that is like Resident Evil 7. I guess the next step of what do you make, just in terms of if you want to make a lot of money, is you remake Resident Evil 4.

That's the break the bank, right? They've remade one a million times four seems like the thing re4 in vr would be fucking cool like the the wii version of re4 for me is the optimal version i love that that version of the game like the the actual motion controls being pretty fucking great but like how do you one up that i don't necessarily think you can unless it's in vr that would be pretty um i think you can unless it's in VR. That would be pretty astounding. I think you could get away with Code Veronica first. Really?

Yeah, I think you could get away with Code Veronica or maybe not Zero. They just did a Zero remaster. Hell, that was released on the Switch last year. I mean, that would be going back to the well uh too soon but dino crisis yeah dino i think that would be preferred i would much rather they do uh dino crisis or uh this is not even the same publisher but where's parasite eve at you know if we're gonna do these old playstation games give me my parasite eve remake that's number one on the list do it thank you thank you to be made

thank you i think we'll just keep talking about uh dino crisis until someone just makes we're gonna keep that torch alive right we will what was the one oh you guys are good what was the one that was um oh god this is gonna irritate me it was like it was sort of the similar tank controls but it was two women and it was like that effect or something effect i want to say double helix fear effect double helix was the second game in the series i believe it was like yes fear effect double double healing and they released a new one very recently did they really yes that's bizarre it's like a top-down isometric game we're just getting into this yeah this is real yeah y'all i think this means it is time for us to take a break please

it's past time it's past time so i don't know if you guys are aware, but I've been trying to get a little bit of extra side money lately. And I actually picked up a job as an HR representative for Umbrella Corporation. I don't know if you're familiar with what they do. They're a biopharmaceutical company. They make a lot of useful products for people helping our world. And we actually have some internships open and available. And I thought maybe you guys were interested and would like to come in and maybe sit down.

That's good. It's just that maybe I might be an undercover journalist working with someone to try and bust y'all's ass wide open. Yeah, but are you? No. You're not. But you have to tell me if you are. But I could be. And the fact that you didn't

ask me ahead of time maybe means i should have your job i'd like to interview for your job uh that's unacceptable there's only one hr rep here uh it's taken a really long time to get hiring up and running so can i ask a question i'm sort of uh you know i work online. My maintaining my image is really important to me. What is Resident Evil? Like, sorry, what does the Umbrella Corporation sort of bring in terms of that? Is this going to milkshake duck me? No, no, no. I wouldn't worry about it.

Now, let me start by saying this is an internship, but there's definitely room for growth. So I don't know if you're aware, but our marketing budget is through the roof. So you can actually see employees all over the world through our billboards and ad campaigns, standing usually in lab coats and with like beakers. And they actually, all of them started as interns. So like that could be you. You could be the face of Umbrella. I saw David Beckham do a sponsored Instagram ad

of him just chugging a beaker of some sort of fluid. And he says, boy, boy, I love Umbrella. So that is obviously you all are rolling in it, rolling it. I don't want to cut me off a piece of that Sponduli. Now, let me ask you a serious question for the group. What would you say are your weaknesses? I'll be really honest with you. I've long wanted to get a career in science,

but I've found, I don't know about y'all, but my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Playwriting has not been especially great at helping me get a career as um science doctor it's not really helping now either to be honest it's not see i i i was hoping that you know my expertise in not knowing anything about the scientific method um not having any idea of standards or ethic protocol um but being able to tell a good yarn might be the type of thing that could you know get me in well at the umbrella corporation so uh griffin and justin now that we've ruled out chris plant as a useful employee yeah i have a weakness my weakness and you'll find

this out if you do any sort of digging so i'll just get out in front of it um my weakness is that is that good green herb um i do have a tendency yeah uh i'm hooked on the stuff um i have a tendency to leave potted plants of that good green herb everywhere in my office uh i put them in lockers sometimes just to keep them fresh in there i'll leave them growing i'll scatter them on the ground i'm really careless about that good green herb and i'll leave them growing i'll scatter them on the ground i'm really careless about that good green herb and i don't know and i've been i've okay i've been dabbling with the red the good red herb too no justin i know it's embarrassing sometimes i even mix them together but i do leave them sort of scattered about my workplace sure and allow myself to be killed by any zombies in the room rather than consume this delicious herb you guys ever think about that man there's no fucking

way i'm leaving that herb there and then getting killed by zombies in the same room no chance anyway i don't know if you're aware but we are working on a new formula which actually combines green, red, and yellow. No, that's too many herbs. You're making fucking pesto at that point, Umbrella. Yeah, I would say my greatest weakness is that I have too many ideas about how to make medicine taste really good. What would be one of them? You mix in flavorings. You just take the medicine,

like you have medicine that makes you get younger, but it tastes really yucky. And then you can just go to a snow cone shop and just juice some of the juices that they put on the snow cone right into the medicine, shake it up. So that's like one. And then you also get more of the medicine.

So that's just one idea that I have. That's good enough that I'm gonna bow out actually. Yeah, sorry. I do have one more weakness that I feel like, you know, it's embarrassing. But at night, I turn into an eight-foot-tall gray man in a fedora hat. Large detective. We call him the large detective. Actually a benefit, but that's okay.

Interesting. Can anyone compete with that? I turn into a nine foot tall gray man oh and i have i haven't seen griffin he does have a rocket launcher for an arm it's true and it's full of ice pop flavorings they're delicious and incredible give me this job russ i fucking need it okay we'll be in touch end of skit what's our next skit Justin uh the next skit is we're I'm we the three of us are going to tell you about the new PlayStation 5 control yeah so we discussed this briefly before we started recording I didn't I'm I've

been a little out of the loop because I'll be honest guys gaming is not my top priority right now and I'm amazed that it's your guys's uh so i did i you know i missed a few stories here and there but i'm i think i'm focusing on the important stuff i saw a cool cloud today what if i told you imagine a black playstation wait wait he hasn't seen it yet i know i was gonna i was gonna describe it to him and see if he believed if he thinks this is real or not okay it's a imagine a black playstation controller okay you have that in your head yes smooth it out take the take the photoshop option to just smooth all those edges right okay now cover it in stormtrooper armor white stormtrooper armor only covering

half of its body that that vibrates like locust wings at any given sounds fucking cool to me so far are you imagining it are you imagining i'm gonna drop it in the chat you can get your first look at the dual sense five soul sense the dual sense not five just the dual sense griffin reacted like someone threw acid in his face well no it's just, it's just like, it's a little more, it's a little more Ooyah-y than I think I was expecting. So what are the big changes? God, there's something about the two-tone nature of it that like makes it look so weird.

Like it makes it look so, like I don't think that actually the form factor is gonna be that different from a PlayStation controller, right? It's just that, like, the sort of circular indentations on the DualShock 4 is just, like, not going to be circular. It's just kind of one smooth arc. The triggers look really weird, though, huh? Yeah, so the triggers are tension triggers. So if you're, like, the example they gave is if you're pulling back a bow,'ll actually be harder to push in the trigger which is pretty cool yes i don't hate is that a

touch pad in the middle still yeah it's just not a rectangle anymore it's like a weird arc shape yeah i don't know i'm sure it's i'm sure it's i'm sure it's neat i think i also had the same feeling about dualshock 4 until i touched it and then that was like my favorite video game controller for a long time there's also uh other changes are it's got um built-in microphone array which i think is actually a bigger deal than it seems because it it standardizes like sound input in a way that like everybody has it so that's really i think that's really interesting yeah you don't actually need to plug in a headset and presumably they figured out a way to deal with the echo so that like i mean you don't have to worry about like the screen bleeding through the or the click clack of buttons and shit like that like that would be my larger concern i think yeah i mean hopefully

yeah i bet they probably they got some smart people over there and also haptic um feedback do you do you know how that'll be integrated i don't know how it's different from like a rumble to be honest there there's you can feel like haptics uh if you've done any vr stuff i know they do good use of like making it feel like there's tension if you're like pushing up against a wall or whatever i don't know what that is like in a i mean in a uh in a controller like an insane controller is it got pad paddles on the back i feel like because they introduced that with the new uh dualshock 4 accessory that you plug into it i don't think it has pads but i have to show you the back of the controller anywhere i don't think they i don't

know i really like i i did when i got the uh the Xbox Elite Controller 2 to play like PC games with, I did not think that that was a feature I was gonna be excited about. And now like, especially when I play a shooter like Destiny, like I almost only use the paddles on the back for jumping so that I don't have to like move my thumbs half as much

to take it off the right analog stick to press the ABXY inputs. So like, it would be weird to me for especially for them to introduce an accessory that kind of like attaches that to the dualshock 4 to not have that i wonder if there will be some sort of option some sort of paddle paddle gambit that you can go for yeah i think they didn't want to alienate like if you're a more casual player and then suddenly oh my god there's buttons on the back too. That seems like a lot to deal with. Yeah, it's fair.

It is. Does it seem weird to you guys to see this before the system? It is kind of weird. Maybe it's because the system doesn't look as interesting as this does. Well, you would hope the design language is like, you know. Consistent. Yeah.

That would be a weird looking box if it is consistent. A black and white thing. I don't know what to believe at this point. and box if it is consistent a black and white thing i don't know what to believe at this point i had heard rumors that there is something very strange and like interesting about the playstation 5 and i don't like i'm seriously i don't know anything more about it no just like the console that there is something about it that is unique um and it's invisible it's in tangent it's not real the console is in your house yeah it's in the cloud the literal console is in the cloud it's not it but like my my my dream is that it's just the vita right like oh boy that refresh bring it back but why would it have a controller no it's

maybe there's i know it's not i just have dreams if. That's the haptic. If you stretch it out, a screen emerges. Hey, we asked y'all for your thoughts on the Resident Evil franchise. Our email address is mail at besties.fan. You can tweet at us at thebestiespod. Here's an email we got from

Pete. I played Resident Evil 4 on Switch. Never played RE before because it's so spooky you told me it was the best one ever griffin i trusted you now where am i what was that what was that tiny little big-headed european bad boy did they know there are other colors than brown brown bad guys brown walls brown water nah my boys nah just joking love you all and i listened to most of your besties back kylog just just because I love you. I don't play that many video games. Switch changed the game,

though. Love me an indie Switch tile. Please talk more about the underground games that are grabbing you all. There's so many it gets difficult to navigate. Never would have played Minion if not for Griffin. I got sexy Brutale because of Justin. Messenger thanks to Plant. And Dead Cells thanks to Frustate, I think.

Purporting is Pete in protest, but really, Pete, your pal. Oh, that's very nice. I like Pete. Pete, I want you to check in every week, Pete. Just keep coming. I'll check in on you every week. RE7 is the best Resident Evil, I think, at this point. But RE4, I don't know if RE4 holds up to scrutiny.

Again, with motion controls, it was fucking fun as hell. RE4 rocks. It's awesome. This is a tweet from Michael. I tried to offset Resident Evil 4's creepiness by listening to a Jerry Seinfeld comedy album at the same time. These are fucking good reader submissions.

Top 10. Top 10. Mine is just to keep the walkthrough in another tab so i just always know what's coming and we're all the everything is i love that it's the only way to play resident evil my opinion next week we get to talk about a game that i have been playing for a while and i am so so incredibly excited to talk to you all about. Final Fantasy VII Remake. It is, Justin, his lip, corner of his mouth,

it went up, it gave it away. I don't think it's as exciting. No, just because I wanted to say, I just wanted to say this good thing, that I'm very excited to talk about it, and much less excited to play it. It is so good. Did you play the demo?

Justin? Justin? Justin or me? It's fucking fine, man. I'm 39 years old. So you can't play demos? I don't play demos anymore. Okay, fine. I'm not going to fucking Nick's News and buying an OPM so I can get the disc out and check

out Legacy of Kain's Soul Reaper. I'm 39. I play real ass games for men. I play real ass games for men. So we're going to be talking about Final Fantasy VII Remake Part 1, which they should morally be calling it. Half a game. Half a game that we did.

Sorry, it's half a game. But if you have your own hot take on Final Fantasy VII Remake, you can send it to mail at besties.fan or tweet it at us. Or if you have specific questions about it that you'd like us to sort of address, we'd be more than happy to do so. It's not half a game. It's like even less. Stop it.

No, it's great, y'all. It's like the game itself is so long, but it is. It's like the first five hours of Final Fantasy VII. All right. Spread out like butter, delicious butter. If you finish it and you still are found wanting, just pick up Crisis Core and just fill in the fucking gaps.

Y'all, thank you for listening. Get the bouncer. That'll take care of it uh thanks for listening remember you can uh follow and listen for free on spotify uh if you want to share the show with people here's a great link to do it besties dot fan mail again mail at besties dot fan the besties pod is our Twitter plan, am I forgetting anything? And if you want to subscribe to the newsletter, you can do that it's the top pinned tweet on our Twitter feed, also

now's a good time to follow our Twitter feed as we talk about some plans that we'll have for the rest of the year and the upcoming weeks Great point, Plant, well made that is going to do it for us for this week, so be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best

games The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!