The Besties - Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a Trip and a Half

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a wild ride, y'all. Mario can turn into an elephant, sure, but that's like, the tenth weirdest thing that happens as you progress through the game. What other tricks does everyone's favorite toilet repairman have up his sleeve? Find out inside!Also discussed: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Insomniac’s Wolverine, Death Stranding 2, Ghost of Tsushima 2, Last of Us Factions multiplayer, Last of Us 2 Remaster, Marathon, the works of Jason Rohrer, the Stanley Parable, Pokemon Unbound, World of Horror, Sea of Stars, Dungeons of Eternity, Wizard with a GunSubscribe to our newsletter at besties.fan! 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 need a Halloween costume, and I want it to be a video game costume, and I want it to be sexy. That's all I know. So I need help from each of you to give me one Halloween costume that is a character that is a new surprise. It can't be sexy before that I can look good in, and I need your help. Okay, can we pause? You've come to the right place, Chris Plante. Well, and this is not the first time he's mentioned Halloween costumes because he did bring it up on Rusty's,

and last time we spoke about it, he was going to do a garbage bag Sonic the Hedgehog. Yeah, but that's not sexy. I talked to my wife, and she's like, that's not sexy. And I said, are you sure? And then I turned around and showed her what I looked like in a garbage bag, and she said, close, but try again. Close, but no cigar.

Let me hit you with this, plant. Let me know how this hits you. Manjo Kazooie. Ooh. I just had a hot flash. So it's a big, beefy man with a bird in a backpack. Is that, and he's a bear, right? Is that where we're at yeah just a big

strong hairy man with a bird in a backpack and his name's manjo kazooie and the suit sure he hates witches that's the thing that's gonna be a problem for you if you're out there trick-or-treating you see witches you're gonna have to fight them which is not good which is not good and he likes he likes he he likes witch doctors he hates traditional he right yeah it's a bit of a double standard yeah for real um okay okay that i'm that it's at the top of my list because the list is one um how about this okay let me give you this womb raider and you're just you're just a big, beefy guy. Next suggestion. No, no, no, no, no, no. Not so shy guy.

Oh. So you've got the mask. So you're a little shy. But down below, not a mucho. Okay. What's that mean? I'm sorry, what? What does that mean?

I mean, you're a shy guy, but naked from the neck down. Okay, so that's not going to feel good. It's not going to feel good, but sexy. Maybe a tasteful mask. So I was just going to dress up as Pikachu, but in a Borat thong. Now we're cooking with gas. Does that seem like... My eyes!

Because I'm looking at them. Yeah. Chica-choo? No. That's nothing. Please start the week. It's, I mean, Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best Mario of the week.

My name is Ross Frusci and I know the best game of the week. Hello and welcome to the Best game of the week. Hello and welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. Friends it's a video game club and just by listening you have become one of our illustrious members. Welcome. This week we're going to be talking about Super Mario Wonder and I wonder what that is Plant. Super Mario Wonder is the latest in the mario franchise that you've heard of it that lovable italian plumber is back but this time it's a little something new we haven't seen fresh new mario ideas like this since let me check my calendar 1990 what wow that's huge

uh we're going to talk about that and so much more right after this brief commercial message let me start by saying i'm not the only one who says mario there's like whole regions of the world like canada and england that say it that way as well as the northeast so if you hear it and you cringe just know will you try saying it the other way just to see... Sure. Mario. No, you did it the same way. Try saying it with a sort of a long A or a short A. I'm just confused.

Say the word off. Say off. Off. Okay, now take that off sound and put it in Mario. He's never gonna change. Damn it, at this point I wouldn't want to. Oh, you almost did it. Okay, my nose is bleeding right now. What do I do change his name. Damn it, at this point I wouldn't want to. Well, he almost did it. Okay, my nose is bleeding right now.

What do I do? Okay, cool. Listen, in the movie they say Mario, so you're wrong. Yeah, the movie is It's settled law, okay? People said his name

and it's Mario and you're wrong. We know he's wrong, but it's like a regional thing. You know? Yeah. You can't be regionally wrong. If I went to Arkansas

and they're like, hey, Justo like i'd be like no incorrect it's justin thank you i'm sorry about your regional i don't know i just want to call you justo from now on that's really good this game's pretty fucking fun y'all yeah it's it's uh you know what it's interesting this super mario wonder because on the surface when you start playing it and i think this is actually pretty brave of Nintendo, you don't immediately see a big new gimmick or gag. You know what I mean?

You start playing, it's like, oh, kind of like a Mario. It's just like Mario. It's just like a Mario game. I get it. Cool. I like these. And the interesting thing about Wonder, and I think it's aptly named,

interesting thing about wonder and i think it's it's aptly aptly named is that it very quickly starts uh using your understanding of mario games as a vocabulary that it then like wants you to use to understand this whole game in a different way or or it takes your ideas of what mario and how mario plays and it knows you knows them you know them and then subverts those expectations in some really really really interesting ways yeah um i i was sort of disappointed at first because it didn't my favorite mario game is odyssey i have i don't think that a 2d mario game in my mind really holds a candle to some of the if i were to list my top five mario games that most of them would be 3d right uh no way like yeah oh yeah i guess with the galaxies that's true yeah galaxies and and i mean sunshine needs to be shot into the sun but otherwise it's not my favorite but it's it's

got its charms right but there's so many i love the sort of exploration and the mechanical complexity of the 3d games that the 2d ones don't really have outside of like uh you know super mario maker one and two are probably my my faves in that category because they have you know so much going for it with the the user generatedgenerated content. So there's no advanced tech that's going on in the movement in Wonder. And I was disappointed in that at first, but pretty much as soon as I picked up my first Wonder Flower,

which is hidden in every level and fundamentally changes the laws of reality of the world, I was like, oh, okay, I get what this game is putting down now. And it is so fun and hysterically funny and really perfect for me and my six-year-old to play together. I have a real issue playing like platformers multiplayer platformers with my son because i want to get all the collectibles and shit and you can care less yeah this game has the boldest advancement in collectible technology which is

that there's a wonder flower hidden on every stage that makes the whole world very very fun and occasionally hysterically funny to explore and so we went to great pains to find every single one of us just to give you all an example of one that was fun that i found right before um there was a wonder flower that i or yes a wonder flower that i collected that the background that i was jumping in front of was suddenly it was suddenly a top down game yes where mario is like running around in a top down perspective on the wall and like navigating it uh think of it like um like when you're climbing on a fence in in world yeah like that kind of idea but you're you're uh it just swaps out out of nowhere it's but the rest of the world

doesn't change. Right. And so you're like avoiding the same enemies that you just snuck past in 2D space now in this like top-down. It's like when Contra does that shit and it goes from being like a side-scroller to like a weird top-down tank control style thing.

For me, it was the first level has a wonder flower and yeah, it gets colorful and zany and I was like, okay, I get it. I'm not sure I'm in love. Yeah. But the second level, you get a wonder flower and it turns the stage into a musical with all the piranha plants singing and marching. And if you decide, you know what, I'm going to still kill these piranha plants you just take the voices out of the number it responds to to that like that was the moment for me where i was like if they can maintain this and they do repeat some ideas throughout it but it's impressive how often the

wonder flower is an original idea unique to that level that they don't come back to like one like one off weird things there's one where i was in a cave level and you pick up the wonder flower it shifts the lighting so that the foreground is in silhouette and it stretches your body out so that you're like 10 feet tall and very very skinny and very very upsetting to to see and then when you uh press the crouch button you shrink it back down to regular size and so now you have to go through this very tight cave as a 10 foot tall string bean person and then that mechanic never comes back that's it there is another i have played another string

oh okay well there's usually one or two times you'll see the same idea throughout the entire game it's definitely not frequent it's so it's just really sometimes it's the the game. It's definitely not frequent. It's so, it's just really, sometimes the hoppos, there's a new enemy in the game called a hoppo that's just a little hippo that's a ball and you can bounce off of it and then he'll get stuck in pits. And so you can like avoid dangers that way.

And the wonder flower for the first hoppo level is it just throws dozens of them of various sizes that bounce your ass all around the level as you desperately try and scramble to this uh to the wonder seed which is like the collectible that you have to get to progress through the game uh before time runs out literally i don't know that i've ever seen henry laugh so hard at a video game before it is just like pure slapstick chaos it does does seem like, you know, you were talking about the 3D games, 2D games difference.

And it does seem like by it being 2D and like more bite-sized and focused, it allows them to be way more experimental. Whereas I think the 3D games have amazing levels and amazing moments, but they can't take as sharp of a turn because of the nature of like moving through a 3d space whereas this right like fucking you have no idea what's gonna happen when you grab that flower exactly yeah it reminds me of and i probably return to

this comparison too often but it kind of reminds me of the Witness in that it takes this very simple idea, right, of Mario running left to right and jumping on stuff, and then it, like, turns it and twists it and rethinks it in as many different permutations as you can come up with. Yeah. There's also, I mean, I would say the biggest sort of mechanical innovation of this game, aside from the Wonder Flowers, is you can equip badges.

And you will unlock these as you go along the game. And you can only have one equipped at a time. And sometimes levels will lock you into a certain badge if they are built around it. But the badges do a lot of wild stuff. a certain badge if they are built around it but the badges like do a lot of wild stuff like the first one that you get allows you to uh deploy a like hat hang glider that all of a sudden now you can like you know add a lot more horizontal momentum to your jumps because you can just sort of slow your slow your fall down yeah i was kind of amazed that like i played as princess peach you can play as like a ton of different characters. And I played as Princess Peach and she didn't have her float, her classic, oh my God, peach floats.

That's just what she does. But they moved all of those features, those character specific features over to badges. So you can get Luigi's like floating jump that he had in whatever game. I think it's Super Mario Brothers 2 and the like duck down to charge up like a super jump yeah that is also a badge but then there's like things that transform the level like so there's a badge that adds a bunch more exclamation point blocks that you can use for pickups and to like uh make certain gaps a bit easier to cross or there's one that we use a lot that uh if you fall in a, it lets you bounce out of it once, which is invaluable for some of the levels. But I was really, really impressed.

These games are so fine-tuned. I was really impressed that they were able to sort of incorporate this thing where based on which thing you have equipped, like your character's ability to traverse the level is going to change dramatically. like your character's ability to traverse the level is going to change dramatically and didn't make it like so wildly unbalanced that there was like one clear front runner every time or like you know you could you could go through a level with the wrong badge equipped and still complete it yeah which is uh sort of a design marvel i think did anyone play multiplayer well i know you played same system multiplayer so what was the experience like that was it like frustrating or was it pretty smooth i mean same system multiplayer yeah like you know on this on the same screen because there's online multiplayer as well which i think is really interesting but i did not touch the online i played i've only played it multiplayer

i've only played it with henry and uh a little bit last night I actually played with Henry and Rachel which is really good because there's not a lot of multiplayer gaming experiences that the three of us can do together and Henry also gets very very impressed with Rachel when she is shows off her she's very good at Sonic you know she's a little bit out of her depth in in uh the the fields of mario battle but uh it's pretty incredible watching our son sort of realize he has two incredible gamer parents um it's fucking fun man it's so it's so good it has a great balancing mechanism where you can play as you know the usual cast uh or you can be one of a different array of yoshis or nabbit the little thief character guy and if you play as a yoshi or nabbit you're invincible you can't die unless you fall in a pit um you can get hit by as many enemies as you want and you'll still be okay

and that is really good i would say uh the one complaint I have about it is that the Yoshi and the Nabbit, they can't be hurt, but they also suck. Well, they don't have powers, right? Well, no, but they're just stupid and who cares? And my kids don't want to play them. Wow.

They want to be Nabbit. Nabbit seems offensive, doesn't he? Like Nabbit? I don't think we talk about Nabbit anymore. He's got a little bag. I like Nabbit a lot. Yeah, so he sucks and the Yoshis all, I mean, don't get me started, and my children, what they want is two Peach

that can't be hurt. That's what they crave. Two invincible Peaches. Two invincible Peach, and you cannot have invincible Peach, you must be Nabbit or the terrible Yoshis. There is Daisy as well. How do they feel about Daisy?

Yeah, that's, I mean, if Daisy was invincible, they could probably figure it out, but probably not. Actually, they both want to be Peach. Yeah, maybe there should have just been a badge that, like, makes this character invincible so they can play as any character they want. Yeah, that would make a lot more sense. One thing I did enjoy is uh henry

felt the same way he played as yoshi a lot but you know yoshi can't turn into a fucking elephant which is that is really good uh and but he you know was having trouble with some of the like platforming some of the harder platforming stuff so what you can do is i would play as yoshi he would play as one of the characters that could transform and then if he was like struggling with a certain section he'd just jump right on my back and I could carry him right along. Like I do for every other thing in his life. That is also very, very good. The game also has the way that it decides who like the camera tracks is pretty brutal.

Your character can have a little crown over them, which you can get by landing highest on the flagpole at the end of a level. Or if the previous crown holder dies, the crown might go to you and will follow you along. That is an extremely chaotic element of this game because if Papa is the cameraman, we're going to find our way to glory but if it's following my uh six-year-old who does not follow i would say a a steady path through these trials uh it can get it can get a little rambunctious um yeah it's it is uh it's great with kids it works how's the online did you put did you play the online i did not i tried the online how did that go um it's really interesting it's maybe the best online implementation of a mario game i've ever seen which is a pretty low bar because online

mario games tends to be pretty bad um i mean what else has there been other than super mario maker which is there's been a number of even the 3d i think some of the 3ds ones had like online race modes oh really okay okay so the way it works is as you're exploring the world, there's going to be like these little towers that'll be like, you can go online now and you just turn online on. You don't need to join anyone. It's just like you flip the switch. And once you do that, it kind of turns into Dark Souls

because you've got these ghosts that you'll see, which are other players that have made their way through levels that you are on, and you'll see them running and jumping, but they are not directly impacting your world. So if they jump on a mushroom or whatever, it's not going to like vanish from your game. They're just sort of following their path if you die in that mode while online is on you turn into a ghost that can then fly to any of the other ghosts in the game you turn into like a spirit i should say that can fly to any other ghost in the game and get revived that way yeah so i've done some of the really hard levels there's some like brutal levels in the special world and if you do that

online it's actually much easier because you have all these second chances where you're like scrambling to get a revive but there is a timer on the revive and stuff like that so that also you can drop all standees too yeah and the standees if if you see a standee and fly to that that'll also count as a revive point so there's all sorts of ways you can help other players either asynchronously or if you're in a game with friends, you can actually do it like exactly in time with one another. But because they do this ghost thing and that applies even with friend matches,

you don't have to worry about the biggest issue in Mario online games, which was the lag. Because any small, minute delay totally fucks with the feel of a Mario game. So here, you don't worry about that at all. You just see their position in the world, but generally speaking, it's not a problem. There are a few maps, you guys have probably done them, where it's like, there's no enemies. It's just like a big open area, and what you're looking for are these like um medallions to collect so you can find the wonder flower and a lot of those are really tricky because there's like hidden blocks to hit and like you really have to kind of scour

the level if you do that online it's filled with fucking ghosts running around trying to find shit and you can use their positioning like maybe this ghost is like floating in midair just like standing on nothing so you know there's a there's an invisible block there so there's some really interesting shit online and i really hope they do more of this there are also some every level has a difficulty rating which is cool and the ones that are like four stars that i encountered they're fucking hard they're real tough i mean they're hard. It's not a joke. And actually, the fact that they are so hard is actually kind of nice for me because the way I normally would go through these is trying to really clean out a level

before I move forward so I don't have to backtrack. But there's a lot of levels where it's like, unless you're making an afternoon of this, I would just keep moving forward. There was one that was great it was called jump jump jump and speaking of like playing your mario knowledge against you i ran out as soon as it was the level started because that's what you're supposed to do

when it starts and then there was like a um a bunch of different colored blocks and it was an outline the first platform was an outline and i just ran and jumped at it because i figured like yeah it's gonna something will happen mario's got it and i died and mario's like shit why did you do that you just you knew that wasn't gonna work it turns out you gotta wait and the music is creating the blocks so you are like running and jumping along with the blocks in time with the music, which is creating the next block in front of you.

So you're having to match like the pace of the music as you're doing the jumps and like, stay ahead of it. It's really, really hard. And the music in this game is so fucking good that like, that's really great. Oh my God.

They do neat stuff where it's like, if you get the elephant power up, which transforms Mario and friends into elephants, the, the core instrument and the melody changes to like a deep tuba. There's like all sorts of like little touches like that, that make it really one of the most standout, like musical Mario games.

I can remember. There's one thing in Mario games. I, I wish that they not got rid of but had a better fix for and that is running which oh yeah you kind of take it for granted having played these for decades and it's like yes just hold down run forever and then use my other fingers to like play the game um but i've noticed watching you know like mo play it that is a it's a weird kind of like relic of the past like i i wish that there was an option in the game

where running was just automatically pressed the whole time yeah there is a toggle for running in this game but all it does is change which button you have to hold down the whole game right yeah yeah recent platformers like a spelunky have come up with the solve which is the default becomes run all the time and when you hold the button down it becomes a walk right yeah that makes that would make more sense yeah but like honestly be honest with yourself guys at this point in your life would if mario is like hey i've changed up all the shit like he would probably uh struggle to it i think i mean i adapted to spelunky and it's like like that's well you don't like yourself very much that's true it's why it should be a toggle right because i

just mean like little kids should not be having to learn this weird thing where you have to hold down a button to play a video game yeah i've been thinking about like what it's a good point because it is different from sprint right like that is supposed to in that that idea of like you need an extra boost to get through this part uh is is is different from mario's idea of like this is how it's supposed to feel and to get it to feel right you have to hold the button yeah i've been thinking about what game to start my child on, like what legit game. And that is actually one of the main reasons

why I haven't done like whatever, Super Mario World or something like that is because of that, because it really does require some coordination. I will probably go with something like Mario 64, which starts with like the zero stakes outside of Peach's Castle and you can jump and you can run

but you don't have to worry about like hitting two buttons at the same time and you're you're looking over it kirby my friend kirby oh yeah kirby's a really good one to start with kids really you mean the 3d one or i mean that was henry's for i mean henry was a bit older than than your kiddo yeah it was when when kirby came out but it is it has a lot of uh very forgiving mechanics yeah yeah i do that is the oh a sadness with this i wish anything anytime you're like making uh a game that like includes kids i in my experience at, the idea of levels is like a lot less appealing to kids than it is to me. The idea of like, well, let's move on to the next level

or we're finishing this level or whatever, like they really just want to play. And this is not the game, like this is a more disciplined, I think, than you would see in any of the 3D games where like running around and exploring is a much bigger facet of it. Another big issue that I have,

I think the way the game is laid out is kind of disappointing. Like just running from world to world to like get to a level you haven't played before is kind of breaks up the flow. Bigger issue for me is when you're playing with multiple people. When we were playing with three players last night,

we were burning through one players last night, uh, we were burning through one ups, like nobody's fucking business. And then if you lose all your one ups, uh, it takes away some of your like special purple coins that you could spend to buy new badges and stuff like that. Uh,

and it boots you to like the beginning of the world, which is like not the worst thing. You just have to run back to the level that you were at but after doing that a few times uh it it was it was you know we were spending more time navigating the like world level select screen than we were actually playing the game because if all of you die that's three one-ups gone and you can just that also feels kind of vestigial right yeah they should just not have them really yeah no one usually have a sure fit of of like the the purple coin so it's not normally

a big deal but like why do any of it just like play the level like who cares yeah i think these are relatively minor very minor so i think the game overall is fucking astoundingly good it's beautiful to look at it's just fun like it feels good and like mario running as fast as he can just jumping through the air and landing in just the right place it always feels good and what's amazing is if as somebody who has just finished super mario world with his brothers uh uh splitting the controller between the the three of us it feels good in the same way that it did in World. I think they returned the physics to that.

It doesn't feel like the new Super Mario physics. It feels like the World physics. It doesn't, yeah. Yeah, it does feel okay. Yeah, yeah, which is much better. I will say that playing that game with you, Juice, in that way really fucked me up. Yeah, man.

Being in control of a full Mario is an incredible amount of responsibility you haven't watched normally on tuesdays me griffin trav will play right now we're doing donkey kong country but we split it up so bad idea i'm doing left and right griffin is jumps and travis's barrels and and throwing and stuff and it is so fucking hard and stupid and it's a stupid way of playing it and it's ruined. Seems like Travis has the easy job in that scenario. He does until you get to one of those sequences where you have to launch between like 15 barrels in a row.

He's also in charge of speed, like turning on, which in Donkey Kong is the whole production because he does this dumb roll whenever you want to run. It's a good game. I don't think it, a lot of people have been talking about like the symmetry of the switch and it's launch year having a breath of the wild and super Mario odyssey and just

like coming out of the gate stronger than any like console launch maybe ever. And now we're, you know, maybe reaching the end of the switches lifetime and we get, you know, tears of the kingdom and we get this. I don't think this is a masterpiece on the level of super mario odyssey uh but i it is i mean some of the most fun like multiplayer

platforming that i've i've i think it's fair to say it is certainly my favorite 2d mario games since super mario uh world for yoshi's island which is like it's been fucking 25 years 30 yeah i i love the 2d mario games and i would definitely put this on the level of odyssey but i also i i think i like the 2d games quite a bit more than than yu ni griffin um i i think that there's yeah nothing really like it and. I would really have trouble picking a favorite now between this Super Mario World and 3. Good game. Good video game. Good game, but it's not the only good game, folks.

There's other good games. You don't have to be weird about it. There's plenty. In fact, we're going to talk about some more stuff, including those good games, right after this brief commercial break. So we're going to take a little bit stuff, including those good games, right after this brief commercial break. So we're going to take a little bit of a turn for the second half of this episode so that we don't alienate the people that aren't necessarily diehard Switch fans. And we're going to talk a little bit about PlayStation exclusives.

Last week, we obviously talked about Spider-Man 2, huge PlayStation exclusive, certainly one of the best that has been released in recent memory. And it's kind of an interesting period because apart from Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, which we'll talk about in a second, a lot of these games are like kind of a ways out. So I think we are about to enter kind of a quiet period for big PlayStation exclusives. And I just kind of wanted to go through the list. I don't know if I forgot anything, but I think this is mostly pretty consistent.

And we'll just go through and talk it through. I mentioned Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is coming out. What is it, February? Yeah, it's Q1. Which I know, Griffin, you're super hyped about. I mean, yeah, man. I fucking love Final Fantasy VII so much, and the first remake was incredible.

I've been listening to the soundtrack of that game basically since it came out because I adore the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack and it's the way they sort of reorchestrated it came out because i adore the final fantasy 7 soundtrack and it's the way they sort of reorchestrated it for the remake rules but yeah i mean we're this is the this is the the game that is going to get to my favorite shit in final fantasy 7 like mostly gold saucer uh the like huge mini game casino place uh and you know get get up to vincent and all that good shit it's also going to be the one that yeah can't breaks the game right like that's that's kind of the promise

of rebirth is that where the first final fantasy 7 remake stuck pretty close to the original script this one will probably start to diverge from that in significant ways start to diverge from that in significant ways i kind of wonder i think certainly plot wise but i think i think they've already said that like the big major beats and like locations will still be there but you're right obviously there's a question of like which characters live and die kind of thing yeah because they sort of shift expectations for that at the end of one at the end of remake right it's a really good game by the way if you haven't played it i know we talked about it but like i'm tempted to go back i didn't play the whatever it is the ufdlc the ufdlc yeah um i might pick that back up on pc and give it another run through but uh yeah i think it goes up what i read is that rebirth goes up through the uh the

city of the ancients which is i think like end of disc two or something like that from the original game where a big thing happens so um yeah i can't can't wait i love this game so much outside of this game as far as i'm aware none of the the other PlayStation 5 exclusives have dates attached to them. And some of these are even unannounced, but essentially are more or less happening. Rebirth is what, February something? Yeah, I believe it's February. February 29th. 29th.

Wow, Leap Day. Taking advantage. All right. The next one I want to talk about is announced. It is coming from Insomniac and it is another marvel game and it is a wolverine game didn't know that this was a really it was announced like a year and a half ago and i think it was more or less just like a title card and like maybe a shot of him it was like very light we haven't seen gameplay or anything like that

but i am pretty excited mostly because my understanding is it is also kind of an open world vibe but i'm pretty done with new york city at this point yeah and and honestly just like mechanically i want to see what how um insomniac kind of differs the experience than playing as a spider-man game but that's gotta be forever right? No, this game has been rumored in development for a very, very long time. And I also would say, like, I think Insomniac has shown their ability to, like, pump out games at a shocking frequency.

Just this generation, we have Miles Morales, they released the definitive edition of spider-man uh ration clank spider-man 2 like they are pretty productive and hit their deadlines broadly speaking so it wouldn't shock me if this was a holiday release for yeah that's that's my guess and there have been like how big is that studio i mean well it's also i think all remote well not all remote but i think you you can work remotely there so i think they've been able to spread out quite well um and they have a lot of support obviously externally from you know asset creations yeah yeah yeah yeah um i'm very curious about that game i'm very curious about where they decide to set it

um if it's like multiple locations, if we get some Wolverine in Canada, or is it Madripoor? Is that how it's called? Oh, that'd be cool. Some forest. Yeah, I'm picturing like a jungle type of vibe. The trailer hints...

Maybe like a Just Cause-y kind of thing. The little teaser hints at, I think it's called Madripoor. I'm terrible at pronunciation for these comic book places, but that's like the big city setting. So I don't know. What if they made just a whole... That's the sort of...

Underbelly city, is that right? In Indonesia, like analog, I think. But it's supposed to be where villains hang out, right? I don't know. Oh, like Crime Town. Yeah, I'm not good enough at comics. Hey, you know what I am good at? What?

I'm good at Death Stranding 2, which better come out next year because I need to be playing it right now. Will Death Stranding 2 be harder to play or easier to play? Death Stranding 1 is one of my favorite video games. I will second this. I will acknowledge that Chris Plant tends to make some statements of

extremity when it comes to games that he loves. This is one of my favorite Kojima games. And it's only stuck in my brain more since it came out. This game, the first one, fucking ruled, and I'm super excited about the second one since it came out. This game, the first one fucking ruled and I'm super excited about the second one.

Wow. That's so weird, guys. It's really weird. I'll tell you, I spent a lot of time with Death Stranding 2. I did get to a point where- Death Stranding also. No, the second one, Russ.

I've been playing it so much because Kojima-san and I are really good friends. Yes, the first one. Yeah, I understand. And I did like it. I kind of fell off at a certain point, and it is impossible to return to that game. That's true.

I would agree with that. But it was so much of it. I'm open to it. I need to hear Kojima's finally standing off the edges, and this is the perfect pack mule experience. Griffin, you hated it? Yeah, because it fucking sucked. It's a bad game.

It's not a good game. Once you build roads, it feels awesome. Can I say it's divisive? I'll say it's divisive. It's a divisive one on how bad it is and lots of people like it despite that and I think that that's special. There's something for everyone, I guess. Did you all finish Ghost of Tsushima? I did not finish it. No. Yeah I think that that's special. There's something for everyone, I guess. Did you all finish Ghost of Tsushima? I did not finish it.

No. Yeah. Well, they made more. I liked what I played. I thought it was fine. It didn't like wow me in the way I think a lot of people were like totally bowled over by this game. It felt like a very capable open world game.

I remember being a little bit like uh left cold by the narrative and the my inability to skip the dialogue but yeah it was gorgeous and i liked the combat the combat was fun um so i think i think people are excited about this one i just i would rather have more infamous or slight or slight cooper as long as we're talking about Sucker Punch dream projects. I mean, Spider-Man 2 is pretty close to more of this. I guess that's a good point. It scratches the itch.

We have two Last of Us projects in the works. One of them is the multiplayer. We got either. Last of Us Factions is a multiplayer mode that has been delayed. I would be really surprised if this ever saw the light of day. Yeah, it seems a little cursed.

There have been reports of, well, there have been delays, certainly, and I have hesitance to believe this is going to necessarily happen it wouldn't surprise me if they released it alongside the other game that is uh unannounced but certainly heavily rumored which is a remaster of last of us 2 because if you know naughty dog they love their remasters um you know i guess there's stuff you can do to make that game prettier. That free game was very pretty, but it was also very much a gut punch and not a game that I would necessarily want to play again. Yeah, but I do like the idea. I know that it rubs some people the wrong way,

but I think remasters are great. If you miss something the first time around, you have a new console, you're looking for someone to play on it, it's great from a preservation aspect. Oh, sure, that's true. I love that we're keeping these things that don't need to be reinvented they just need to be do we need like a remaster of this though i mean it just came out and it runs on the ps5 and it uses the ps5's like graphics power i don't i don't know what that

would do really um lighting and that like i'm not trying to argue for the validity. I'm saying as a broad concept. Oh, sure, sure, sure, yeah. I think they're good. It is, it does seem fast. It does seem strangely fast. Two more games to talk about. One of them is Bungie's next game.

If you'll recall, Bungie is now owned by PlayStation, has been for quite a while. So weird. And their next game is going to be a throwback it is marathon which was their original first person shooter that came out in the fucking i don't know late 80s early 90s somewhere on there um and i don't think a lot is known beyond that right we know it's marathon we've seen some visuals these visuals yeah it looks colorful sci-fi yeah it's pvp focused is it only pvp focused do we know that i'm pretty sure that's what they've said

um it feels a little early to be able to marathon itself like if you watched videos of marathon uh i know it has its fans i think those are mainly fans who had a Mac and couldn't play Doom would be my guess and are over the age of 55 and then are 100 years old but it is cool I don't know I guess it's cool they're making something that isn't

I'm starting to get I think it's been just long enough I think the time span is like 8 months for me from when I stopped playing Destiny to when I really want to play more Destiny. Eight months is usually like the half-life for that. But at this point, I kind of just want Destiny 3 or something like that, which is just a nice, clean break.

They're getting to the point of the last shape and arguably whatever comes after that might be a little bit. That's true. I'll circle back to last shape. That last DLC was so fucking bad. Yeah, I heard bad things. It's hard to get stoked for that. Okay, there's one more game I want to talk about.

It doesn't have a title. We don't necessarily know exactly what it is, but it's maybe the game I am most excited about on this list. And it is the game that Bluepoint is making. excited about on this list and it is the game that blue point is making blue point if you recall is a studio most known for remastering classic playstation games in fact some would say they are only known for that um that's probably true it's pretty much all that they have done uh they made the remaster of demon souls they made the remaster of uh the last guardian i'm sorry shadow of the colossus yes shadow of the colossus i don't think they made a remaster of the last guardian i'm sorry shadow the colossus yes shadow the colossus i don't think they made a remaster of the last guardian and um they are working probably something and my

understanding is it is not a remaster my understanding is it is its own thing like their first like kind of breakout game that's cool which i'm very excited about because honestly they've shown their chops to make extremely good games yeah um with like gorgeous gorgeous graphics and art design now again they were working off of templates that were designed previously but but this is a heart like i didn't mean to sound dismissive when i said this is all they've worked on they do they're the best in the biz at this yes uh. So it would be cool to see them do it. They made one original game, their first, called Blast

Factor, and it was the only thing notable about that is the first game on PlayStation 3 to run at 1080 with 60 FPS. Wow. Yeah. Cool. Interesting. Okay. I think that's it. I might have missed a PlayStation exclusive

that they've announced and I just forgot about it. Please yell at me in the newsletter comments, besties.fan to sign up for that. Nothing for the rest of the year on the PlayStation front, really. In terms of exclusives, I don't think so. In terms of big games, you got

Avatar. Oh, man. I hope you all are excited to talk about avatar when that releases because see my co we are going to go way out into the woods of pandora and not come back until we are living in perfect harmony with all nature fucking our tails together um we are also going to read a little reader mail right now okay great uh this question comes from joseph this is from the newsletter again feel free to drop questions in the newsletter comments besties.fan hello besties there's an approach to gaming that is

unique uh compared to other art forms where games are expected to be fun first and everything else second it is also true that great art can be challenging to experience. Can you think of an example of a game that used anti-fun design to great impact? Oh, I got a great one. It's Death Stranding, all of it. It just had a great impact.

I mean, you are right, except that you're lying. I would also, I think this is a great question. I you are right except that you're lying yeah i would also i i think this is a great question i would poke a hole in it in that i think most art is meant to be enjoyed first and then everything else second like when you go to see a movie at a movie theater you're not seeing like war hall which is like shown at a museum you're seeing even like a challenging movie like killers of the flower moon is like still meant to be like a enjoyable watch and i don't know enjoyable is the right word certainly something that can emit emotions from yeah but i mean i just because like a hard tofsky movie is not enjoyable. Yeah, but yes and no.

It has a Robbie Robertson rock and roll soundtrack at the beginning and a whole bunch of beautiful people in it. They're not trying to make it difficult for you to get in and sit through. It is not like you versus the movie in that case. No, sure. And I think weirdly games have more of an antagonistic relationship because they like purposely have to put up barriers to the player when you think of like learning how to like get good at them. So I mean even like paintings, you know, we're not trained to look at them this way anymore. But like people used to like go look at paintings because it was an exciting thing to do. People used to like read novels because they were like wild and you were like not supposed to do it.

It was too vulgar of an art form. So I think it's not that games are like meant to be fun. I think that they're just young. So they haven't earned their reputation as like things worthy of being taken seriously. That said, like anti-fun design. I mean, anything Jason Rohr has made, I would say is that. He's an indie designer. QWOP is certainly that.

Sorry, which? What did you say? QWOP. Oh, yeah, QWOP. Where, like, that is the point. The point that it doesn't play well is the point. I'll also push back and say that Jason Rohr's Sleep is Death is one of the more fun games I've ever played in my entire life. And Roar's Sleep is Death is one of the more fun games I've ever played in my entire life.

We're also using and misusing, well, not misusing, but like the way that we use the word fun in video games specifically is kind of weird. Because a lot of the time what we mean when we say fun in regards to video games, and this is Ralph Koster, not my idea, but is learning, right? my idea but is learning right it's analogous in a game the the satisfaction of like learning a new thing and and using it is like the fun uh that we get from video games and there is a certain barrier to entry with that right because you have to be somewhat versed in what came before unless it's like bending over backwards to be accessible. There are though, like, I think there's great analogs to that with like, uh, orchestral music, right? I don't think it's fun to listen to orchestral music.

I don't have the frame of reference for it. I don't have the, the, the knowledge. I don't have the taste, whatever it is. I don't have the familiarity with it to have fun listening to it. And I know there are people that do, right?

So I think that that idea that like there are things that are that probably seem like it's just attempting to be fun to you that are maybe to another player or someone else who's trying to experience it like it wouldn't hit them the same way. I would say the most literal sort of interpretation of this, I think Stanley Parable does this a lot, very, very well. That is a game sort of about game design largely, and so it sort of criticizes itself, very tongue-in-cheek style for its sequences that are anti-fun. That's what came to mind for me. Cool.

We got a question from Alex L. Hi, question for y'all. Mostly Griffin. I'm wondering if any of you have tried out any of the Pokemon ROM hacks, specifically the GBA FireRed-based hacks. Pokemon Unbound is maybe my favorite Pokemon game ever.

It has a new region, difficulty settings, with Eevee, Ivy, attention required for higher settings, a mission system, level scaling, new game plus, all Pokemon up to Gen 8 and Gen 8 mechanics, fun, weird gym gimmicks. I think this game and other hacks are quite special, and I kind of uh hoped what the mainline games would eventually be uh be like and as far as i understand the hacks are perfectly

legal with a legal copy of fire red which doesn't everyone have certainly i mean i do yeah i definitely do uh i have not played any rom hacks i have actually heard of this one uh and it is it is on my radar i'm tempted to play it i uh have this kind of mental block with pokemon where i uh really like how the modern like pokemon games are all interconnected right so i can catch a pokemon out on the street with pokemon go and then transfer it to the Pokemon Home bank that I have a bunch of Pokemon from different generations stored in. And then I can bring that over to Scarlet and Violet

if I wanna move something over there. I like this idea of cross game progression. And so I don't usually like the idea of going back and playing an older Pokemon game where that is not something that I would be able to to really do that said this game does sound very fucking cool and definitely is something that I would probably toss on one of my infinity little emulator devices that I've got got my hands on fire red is one of my favorites is like fire red leaf green those are that's

probably right behind soul silver heart gold for me so anyone got any honorable mentions to talk about uh i briefly wanted to touch on wizard with a gun because it's out now please do you It is a isometric blend of, call it like, Don't Starve and Hades with some like, maybe more Bastion would actually be a better comparison point. But you are a wizard. Your guns are wands. They call them wands, but they're guns. And your spells are bullets. They're just bullets. And you have guns that shoot the bullets.

And your spells are bullets. They're just bullets. And you have guns that shoot the bullets. The basic flow is you are sent into the world five minutes before the destruction of the earth. And you have that five minutes to collect resources and defeat enemies that you then, at the end of the world, take back to your sort of home base, which is sort of outside of time. And there at the base, you can upgrade your weapons. You can craft new stuff. You can make more bullets, which you have to do to shoot them. And you can build out new facilities, et cetera, et cetera. And then you restart time. You get your five minutes to go back in and collect more stuff. That's the basic, the basic loop. It's really, it feels good. It's hooky. The, I would say my big problem though, the progression feels weird.

Like after maybe like six hours, seven hours of playing it, I still have like the basic guns. Like I know I have like base weapons and it hasn't given me any opportunity to upgrade them. And honestly, the other bigger thing is that I think it feels bad to spend ammunition like where you're out and about in the world and you're shooting bullets to and then you have to like cut down more trees or whatever to like refill the bullets. I think it's just an unpleasurable sensation in a game that's all about like shooting a bunch of bullets with every shot you're like that's another thing i gotta go yeah i gotta go keep up with russ you you touched it a little bit right yeah i i i played way less than you did i probably put in like an hour or two and i was certainly overwhelmed because there's a ton of systems they throw at you very early um I didn't find the action combat parts of the game to be super engaging. There are way more capable isometric action games.

You mentioned Bastions are a really good example. So it's difficult when the game doesn't seem to be mastering any one particular thing. I did really like the art style and kind of the world design and the vibe of it. But yeah, the loop wasn't really grabbing me early on. But I'd imagine if people spent a lot of time with it, it might come in later. I also feel like it's one of those that needs,

it needs some attention. And if they keep updating it and making it like, the base concept i think is okay they just gotta they gotta fine-tune some of the stuff yeah um i have gone back to sea of stars at justin's uh sort of constant um evangelism for that game not constant nagging some might say nagging um and i've put maybe 15 hours into it or so. I've made some good headway. I think I'm past sort of the halfway point. I don't think the story still has not clicked for me.

And I am beginning to think that it just might not. But I really, really am enjoying playing it. I think the characters are all very good. And there is certainly a lot of endearing stuff there. But for me, I just love, it is rare for me to play a JRPG where I get into combat and don't have that immediate sort of gut feeling of like, ah, fuck. Okay, well, I got to beat these guys up. Like it is genuinely fun every time you get into a fight. And I love the exploration. I love the different sort of like relics

and power-ups and stuff. There's like a really nice curve to, you know, getting stronger in the game. And I gotta give a special commendation to the sort of headline mini game for for sea of stars which is a game called wheels uh which i don't know if we talked about on the show but it's basically it's like a it's like a tactical slot machine battle against another player uh where you have to sort of like build walls to defend your your hero and charge up like attacks from these two different units

that you get to select at the beginning of battle. It's just really, really fun and challenging and satisfying. And so I'm glad I've gone back to that one. I'll probably finish it because I'm having a good time with it now. The game I really want to talk about is a VR game. I got the Oculus Rift, or I guess, what is it now? Meta Quest 3, which is the new headset. I don't know if you've seen it.

I had no idea. I didn't either until I- That is so, do you know what a failure it is that I, an owner of the Quest and Quest 2, did not hear, did not get the information communicated to me that there is a Quest 3. It's crazy. Real quick, the Quest 3 is really cool. Games just sort of perform better on it.

The screen is better. It is more sort of like immersive in general. The big thing that it does is it has these front-facing cameras uh on on the headset that are very prominent that makes the pass-through uh just a completely different thing so on quest two if you stepped outside of the boundary that you made you get this terrible sort of grainy grayscale uh projection of your environment around you that is mostly good for making sure that you don't um you know take a header through your office window or whatever uh in the quest 3 it is like full color like really really i can if i get a text i can grab my phone look down and pass through and like use my phone

and pass through yeah i could sprint through my house using it yeah basically it also allows for ar stuff so like one of the first things that comes on the on the headset is called first encounters and you scan your whole room walls and ceiling uh furniture everything and it sort of you know maps out where everything is and then all of a sudden alien like these little alien colorful balls like tribbles start uh smashing through the walls into your room and you have to capture them uh inside of this little you know like ghostbusters containment unit uh and it is very very cool to like blast a hole through my my office wall and see just a bunch of aliens come pouring out of it um so the the headset's very

very cool i'm i I'm enjoying it. It's got me fired up about VR stuff for the first time in a long time, specifically Dungeons of Eternity, which is a multiplayer sort of gauntlet style dungeon crawler where you go into these different missions. There's different types of dungeons that you go into. There's three player multiplayer

and it's got really seamless, like quick quick join so when I boot up the game I just press a button and boom like I'm in a lobby with with two other people and you get to customize your loadout you find different weapons and blueprints as you explore the dungeons that you get to keep with you as you you move through the game there's like a great progression system and perks that you can unlock. And it is not the sort of like deepest RPG stuff around, but the different interactions for just going through dungeons and fighting through waves of enemies is really terrific.

And I have fucked up my rotator cuff, going to the gym, going to the Iron Church and getting the gains that I need to keep up with my children. And so I am genuinely bummed out that this game would hurt me to play now because I am chomping at the bit to get back into it. So if you have a headset, it's also good on Quest 2.

I played it on Quest 2 before I got my quest 3 and and um it's it's great on there too so i i would thoroughly recommend it it is the deepest i've gotten into a vr game in forever um my thing uh so the movie theater in my local area uh santa anna uh hosts the horror festival campida, which I think I mentioned on either this or the resties. But I just want to say a thank you to our listener June and friends who came out to see all these movies, which were awesome. And I'm going to include a list of the movies that I checked out. You actually have some choice during this festival of what you're going to watch over the course of 12 hours but i'll include a list of uh those movies in besties.fan that way if you want to recreate uh a little film festival at home before halloween you can do that because you think you'll have a few days after this episode comes out to still fit in a few more horror movies

before it officially becomes christmas season on november 1st speaking of horror we're going to be talking about a game called world of horror on the resties on tuesday uh it is a very cool throwback to uh computer games of the like 80s but with like a very neat japanese horror vibe to it i've been jonesing to get back into this i just read a bunch of junji ito stuff uh which this game is obviously super heavily inspired by yeah the 1.0 just dropped with a bunch of new features that they added i wanted to mention it here though because we actually have a bunch of codes that we're going to be giving out on the newsletter come tuesday so if you like free games and you want a shot at one of them we're going to be giving out on the newsletter come tuesday so if you like free games and you want a shot at one of them we're going to be uh giving away free codes to world of horror on halloween on halloween

on halloween it's very very good news peg there i'm very proud of us is this one out on switch yet it is out on switch as well as part of the 1.0 release it came to switch and other consoles i'm gonna get that i'm gonna get uh dave the diver also comes out on switch this week which i will definitely get to get back into yeah there's a lot of good stuff going on right now it's very exciting um hey do you want me to talk about everything that we talked about very quickly oh god we talked about so much here we go we talked about super mario brothers wonder final fantasy 7 rebirth insomniac's Wolverine, Death Stranding 2,

Ghost of Tsushima 2, Last of Us Factions Multiplayer, Last of Us 2 Remaster, Marathon, The Works of Jason Roar, The Stanley Parable, Pokemon Unbound, World of Horror,

Sea of Stars, Dungeons of Eternity, and Wizard with a Gun. Cool. Well done, Plant. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcast we have harvey lime we have horse hoarseness and emily hamster thank you

for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcast and thank you to everyone else who has written reviews or has subscribed to the newsletter or even still has subscribed to the newsletter and participated in the comments and dropped questions in the comments. It's like a nice little community building there and it's really exciting to see everyone playing this. That link is besties.fan. Besties.fan to sign up for the newsletter. It's free. Justin's in the turlet,

so I'll close this out this week and say thank you so much for listening. Next week, Alan Wake 2, American Nightmare. No, wait, Alan Wake 2 2 just the second alan wake game we're not playing an old xbox live arcade game although that would be i think pretty on brand for us um i know nothing about this game so that'll be fun he's a writer he's in portland or something and shit went down shit gets really weird you shine a flashlight on shadow guys on the on slenderman yeah slenderman's in this one probably um so join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best

friends pick the world's best games Besties! So what happened?