The Besties - Taking All the Best Pics with Viewfinder

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

This week, we're diving into the Portal-esque Viewfinder, a game all about taking photos and then using those photos to, well ... it's hard to explain in the description of a podcast. We also talk about some of our favorite photography moments in games.  For the full list of games we talked about on this episode, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, which can be found at besties.fan. (We sometimes drop free game codes in there, as well!) 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 got one of those ear cameras. What the fuck are you talking about? I got one of those otoscope things you certainly all of it. Russ, if you have not gotten advertisements for these little ear cleaning cameras on Facebook, This is Icarus shit. This is modern Icarus. You are, no, hey, I've done it too. And you just see a little bit deeper in your ear with this little pen.

And then you're like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to scrape out my brain. You know, it's very fitting you mentioned Icarus because it is very waxy. Yeah, sure. I can build wings out of it. Beautiful. Hey, Griff, I know that you probably got a bit all planned, but I'm here to tell you as your brother, I've known you quite a while.

You should not be mucking around in there. There's some real, that's where the real stuff is. Is it skeletons to worry about in there? That's honestly a hole you should not have access to. You can make one wrong move and just be done-ski. Okay? You should not be in there. You.

I mean you. Not like all of you. I mean you should not be in there. Now hold on just a fucking second if you're suggesting that i possess less hand-eye coordination than the average bear you're out of your fucking mind i think that if if push came to shove and i did need to do emergency surgery yeah the studio then i could probably figure my way i'm perfectly capable of getting this bit has gone off the rails i was going to complain about how I bought it, thinking it was going to change my life,

but then I shoved it back in there. There's really not much going on. Oh, it's empty, huh? I thought for sure. I thought this is going to be a whole new me, a whole new day. And I put it in there, and it's pretty clean, actually. I mean, that's worth the price of admission right there, is the feeling that you've been staying very hygienic.

Yeah, but then now all of a sudden, my three friends, one of which is my brother, have come to me like, you're gonna mummify yourself, idiot. And I don't really think I appreciate that. I don't really think I like that. Wait, wait. Why did you get it in the first place?

You're telling me that you put on these wax wings out of no need other than curiosity? Deep curiosity. Do you feel like you could have been hearing better? He's like, I know I hear okay, but I feel like I could hear better. I had a stuffy like you could have been hearing better he's like i know i hear okay but i feel like i could hear better i have a stuffy right ear but i think it's on inside and i will agree with you yeah don't go inside don't go inside there's a there's a barrier there that you think i bet i could get through that but that's bad there's like a geo city is like under construction sign that you really can't pass. Otherwise, shit goes real.

It's funny that they keep selling Q-tips, isn't it? If you look at the Q-tip box, nowhere on there does it say, like, clean your ear out. Yeah, in fact, I think it says the opposite. We all know. They're like, this is perfect for polishing your CD spindles. Like, fuck off. You know what I'm doing with these? You know how many you sold me.

Look how big this box is. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Rostein, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment it is a video game club and just by listening my friend you have joined our illustrious ranks this week we're talking about a new electronic bomb a new bonbon for your electronic delights it's viewfinder but first before all that did you know we have an exclusive newsletter at besties.fan?

Here's the thing, everybody. You should subscribe to this newsletter ASAP. It is besties.fan. And once you go there, you're going to get so much great stuff from all of us. What are you going to get? The thing that you have all been asking for, links to the games, movies, TV, books, everything we discuss on the show. You just got to open that email and boom, we're going to be using the power of the web 2.0 to take you where you want to go. If we talk about videos and images and you're like, man, I bet that was funny.

Too bad I can't see this. This is an audio medium. Hey, guess what? You're going to find it in the newsletter. You're going to get first looks at merch. You're going to get info about upcoming episodes. We just dropped free game codes in the most recent newsletter. Hoops had mentioned Shoulders of Giants last week.

And the devs reached out and they were like, hey, we want to get this game in front of your listeners. How do we do that? Answer, newsletter. It is wonderful. hey we want to get this game in front of your listeners how do we do that uh answer newsletter it is wonderful and somebody just added a fucking transformative snack mix recipe seriously fuck well that's it yeah i got some good ones for y'all get in there oh man so you're gonna get some snacks oh man are we gonna put the popcorn recipe in the newsletter? No, that's not for them. Okay, I don't want to overpromise. It's not for them.

So, you know, if you want to hear more from all four of us without having to, you know, wade the treacherous waters of social media, let me tell you, this is the best way to do it. And then you'll hear more about the game we're talking about this week. Remind people where they can find the... Oh, yeah, yeah. One more time. Besties.fan.

Literally, that's all you have to type in. That's it. Just besties.fan. I just did it, and I got there. It's very easy. Yeah, it's easy. I should sign up. And that was a commercial, and here's another one.

But after that, I swear to God. Wait, we want to talk about what viewfinder is before we jump oh yeah okay it's a puzzle game with like images and cameras and forced perspective and all sorts of cool stuff new portal about it a lot more it's like nude new portal nude portal nude portal yeah you can finally see everything with these holes use the holes to see the holes these robots want to fuck i i don't know that i would go so far as to call this new portal i think did you did any of y'all play uh super liminal yeah yeah yeah yeah i i feel like this is too too preliminal yeah it is uh in the in the well no i don't i don't think that it is a a clone as much as it is like this is a an emerging sort of sub sub genre of first

person puzzle games that are based around like a handful of very very neat mechanics that are based around it i guess i guess you could call portal that but portal feels so much larger and so much more like the scope of it is is different yeah but when the first game came out it really was just three hour whatever whatever, three hours. Yeah, I guess it was a tiny one. Yeah, Portal 2, I kind of blew the course off of it. Yeah, that's a different story. I fucking love it, man.

Give me as many of these budget-priced puzzle adventures as you can possibly get me, because I just love them. I am really excited to hear somebody try to explain in audio form the mechanic at play here um let's do that i can take a swing at it uh in in viewfinder you are exploring the sort of uh fucking mind palace of a group of scientists and creative types who are trying to solve global warming. You do this by wandering through these kind of impossible, floating, puzzly landscapes that you have to navigate. And the main mechanic of the game is you can take photos, either that you find in the environment or that you snap with your own camera, which you

unlock about halfway through the game or so, and then you can place those photos in the world. And when you do, they switch from being flat two-dimensional photographs to actually realized three-dimensional objects from the perspective of where you place the photo. So imagine a platform with a battery on it. You need that battery to solve the puzzle. You have a photo of that. You can hold it up in the sky and place it there. And all of a sudden it becomes a 3D object that is beholden to the laws of physics and gravity. The battery falls down, you catch it, you can keep moving on. Or you can take a photo of a column and then you can look down at the ground and place it and now all of a sudden because of where you you know had the perspective when you

first took the photo compared to where it is now it's not a column anymore it's a bridge uh yeah that's pretty good it is it is that uh only it's so fucking wild that the the the links to which they explore that idea and the links to which like there's there's sometimes you'll find a cartoon sometimes you'll find like a screenshot of a desktop background that you place in the world and now all of a sudden it's an interactive object um and those things that you find like uh you know if it's like an impressionist painting that you find you place in the world when you into it, the art within that like now realized area is still that impressionist look to it. So it matches whatever you've placed down, which is insanely cool.

What I think is so smart about the design here is they're doing like the very classic Nintendo thing of introduce a thing, add a spin on it, do a little bit more. So as complex as these puzzles sound really the answers are quite simple like you could use a picture to create a bridge and close a gap and there are going to be different ways that you're going to do that whether that is like literally going straight ahead or like are you going to have to create a ceiling so you don't fall off of an area um it's like using photos as space then there's like using photos to create additional objects and that could be something as simple as like the battery but it could be basically using a photo to recreate an entire end of the level because

the level is too far away from you um then there's like using photos to close distance but there's kind of like a few categories of ways to, of types of puzzles. And I think it's very, very, very smart in that you never feel overwhelmed because it's kind of teaching you these categories. While they might seem very abstract, they're actually not too abstract. Yeah.

And it is, it is, you know what it reminds me of? It kind of like the way witness handled like every single puzzle is a different mechanic and this is just all the different ways we can think of to use this mechanic but it's not reusing like every puzzle in this game is requiring a new tiny step of lateral thinking yeah like, and that lateral thinking is another, like it is already in your head for the next level. So you may have to combine that prior knowledge, but there's always a little twist on it with everyone,

which makes everyone seem like satisfying and never redundant. And the one thing I will say is like, it's interesting. When you're in a groove with it it feels really easy like sometimes the balance for me was a little off just because like when i was dialed in to a mechanic it almost was like showing that it makes you feel smart yeah it makes you felt like wow i am really i'm really getting this well there's also a virtual cat that's like oh you're smart which yeah he is laying it on like oh you're smart which yeah there is a puzzle in this game that is the one that i messaged the slack room that we are all in about asking if anybody else had done it because i was so stuck uh and that when i finally did

figure it out uh on on my own because we were playing this before it was out usually i probably would have just gone online and be like what the fuck do i do with this watermelon uh when i figured it out i felt like the smartest human being who had ever lived on earth ever before and that feeling is like the best shit that puzzle games like this can can do to you uh and this game does it in in in big measures you're also playing in the narrative is is uh is pretty ephemeral early on. It starts to dial in the further you go. But the important part of this is that you are in a built world. It is a simulation, a built world.

And they really do a great job with – you can feel – I talk about the hand of the creator a lot where you can feel the person who created it. This is definitely that because all these worlds were like made specifically for this purpose. So you can feel, there's almost like jokes, you know, like jokes in the level construction. Like when you'll see, they mess with like optical illusions, things like that as the game goes on. And they are like definitely trolling you with the way that they roll them out but it's fun because you can like feel the intent like it was built for this exact purpose yeah i guess uh even though i i also found like all the i think aesthetic and puzzle stuff to be really engaging i think the only area that i like struggled to

latch on to was just like the narrative of it you know the way that's conveyed is through either audio messages or someone kind of talking your ear or as i mentioned the virtual cat a lot of post-it notes a lot of post-it notes i'm not going to compare everything to portal but there's a reason why portal became the phenomenon that it did and it's because it sort of sustains itself both on pretty incredible puzzle design and also pretty incredible writing and here i just like i i'm not being pulled ahead by the writing it's entirely on the puzzle design which is again very good but it's just something worth keeping in mind if you're looking for like a really engaging narrative i i wasn't really finding it here i really i feel like and i was like this is almost a sub-genre narratively speaking of like scientists after disaster or or calamity or the end of a project or something like i feel like so many

games rely on this exact sort of structure of like scientists working together and leaving the notes for each other and like um i mean prey is a really good example like prey is very similar there's a lot of games that that are doing the same kind of gag and i just didn't find any of it particularly engaging i think in part because what you are ostensibly there to do doesn't seem to have a lot to do with the puzzles right yeah the actual levels it seems very disconnected and the the the it's all very like you know what it is most of the story is diegetic it's in like uh post-it notes or it's in uh phonographs have been audio logs. I mean audio logs that have been left around.

And none of it can be particularly like concrete or sequential because it's experiential, right? They don't know which ones you're going to see and which ones you won't see. by nature kind of like a gauzy because it's, you, you're not really following a story from the beginning. Cause they have no idea what parts of it you're going to ingest to which parts you won't. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, I, yeah, I feel like there is a, a, um, ethos in, in game development,

um, particularly indie game development that like every game has to have a deep and emotional story and like i one of my favorite puzzle like games in this genre is antechamber yeah i was thinking of antechamber uh alexander bruce it's it's it's a really fucked up sort of non-euclidean game that is really genuinely extremely difficult, like extremely difficult navigating through all these like environments filled with impossible objects with literally not a line of dialogue or story to it whatsoever. And it works because now all of a sudden you are just this sort of drone operating in this

weird and fucked up space trying to solve these million impossible puzzles. And like that's the experience, which is like, you know, I would never try to dictate like you better not do a story. Your game just focus on what works. But there is a I don't know. I feel like this game has an incredible, it is incredibly fun to play. And every time that I was in the hub world, I was just sort of ignoring the dialogue, rushing towards the next sort of level that I could find so that I could just get back into doing puzzles. Because that's really fucking great. Yeah.

I mean, you mentioned Antechamber. I feel like there's like a bunch of those games in that period because there was also Perspective, there was Fez, Echo Chrome, which I think kind of is playing with some of the same things, even Monument Valley. Felt like there was like this kind of weird moment and now maybe we're drifting back to it. Quantum Conundrum, you remember that game?

Oh, yeah. That was, I mean. That's Portal. That's very deeply Portal. Yeah, that feels like a big to-do. For listeners, that game was made in part by some of the Portal team. True.

Yeah, no, I agree with all of this. I like this game quite a bit and i was i was a bit worried because um i don't know if this is really a spoiler or not but kind of fair warning fresh had given me a heads up of like hey you don't get the camera in this game for like quite a while um maybe like 45 minutes an hour and, and it's a short game. And I was worried that I was like, oh, it's gonna be a lot of kind of talky stuff that I'm not super interested in and kind of filler to get me to the puzzles I want to do. And that wasn't the case at all. Like, even without the camera, the puzzles in this game are extremely clever. And I'm glad that they did withhold the camera as long as possible. Because I I felt like I don't think I would have been very good with it if I hadn't kind of learned the ropes through all the earlier puzzles.

It would also be overwhelming. I think you really need to understand all the other parts before you get the camera, which almost starts to make it feel like a cheat code. Yeah, and credit to them that that doesn't feel like a tutorial those also just feel like great puzzles yeah i think the only thing that turned me off on the early game before you get the camera is that it was much more reliant on oh you better find the thing that we're asking you to find yeah whereas when you get the camera you feel like you have a bit more agency in terms of what you can do. Realistically, you kind of don't because there are still pretty set solves, at least from what I could figure out for a lot of the puzzles. But at least it feels a little more like you're directing it rather than like, oh, you need to find this photo and then this photo in this order.

Otherwise, you're just not going to solve it. this photo in this order otherwise you're just not going to solve it did did any of you break any puzzles like where you felt like oh i i did i solved this and i'm pretty positive in the wrong quote wrong way oh i don't think so no i hadn't felt i mean i i there are definitely some puzzles where it's like all right using your camera and the environment you need to duplicate this battery and make four batteries and i was like how about fucking 128 batteries uh but yeah nothing that felt like i had cheated the thing there's a very early one where you have to create a bridge and then you get across the bridge and there's like a mesh gate i don't know if any of you remember this, but I basically just broke the side of the gate and then hopped around the geometry

to get past that part of the game. Yeah, I've definitely done that a few times. I kind of think that's part of it. Yeah, and then there was one where there was an entire level out in front of me, but I just took a picture of a certain thing and bent it in a way and was able to just skip the entire level out in front of me but i just took a picture of a certain thing and bent it in a way and was able to just skip the entire level um that was once i got the camera which i thought

was great i like i loved that that's like fun breaking it uh interesting uh note for you all i showed this game to charlie my eight-year-old um just because it's such a wild like first impression there's a demo, by the way. You should go check it out. But I showed it to her and she actually got it pretty quickly and she started playing it independently from the beginning.

It was making her way fine through the levels. I think it's a great comment. I think it's really a credit to the developers because I think that it everything in this game is endemic to the game itself it's like not asking you to bring a bunch of like preconceived notions about what you can do in video games like it's very it's a it's very accessible in that way which i think portal actually was a strength of portal as well i i

feel like that was a really good game for people that don't play a lot of games yeah they could get the the first person movement under control uh the rest of it's like it's very uh specific to itself and doesn't require a lot of like uh insight and intentionally sparse like these games are very smart in terms of them them showing you very little so you know what pieces you have to work with. Whereas I think people that don't play a lot of games frequently like don't have that language to know, oh, this is an important thing and this is not an important thing. So they get stuck a lot. But Portal and this game are very directed. Yeah, man.

I think that covers it. Yeah. Question. Let's let's how about we take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about more video games. Well, me and Plant and Russ will talk about more video games. I wasn't going to make a big deal out of it. Justin's going to get stuck in the break.

Justin has to go back to his home planet. Justin's diving into the break. Hey, listen, guys. To live will be a very big adventure okay so we're back and for the break given that this game viewfinder is so photography centric uh we thought it'd be a good idea to talk about photography in games which actually just recently came up in Tears of the Kingdom and how Chris Plant hated taking pictures

in Tears of the Kingdom because it made him feel like he had to do all of them yeah well it also just didn't feel artistic it felt like it was work oh man talk about oh love to be told that there's a wrong and a right way to play

a video game i'm just saying you could be no no i'm not talking about you i i i just oh oh take better photos is what i'm saying here and your compendium will look fantastic in tears of the kingdom anyway uh photography and games i generally love it I think it's great I think games that like work with a camera Pokemon Snap and we mentioned here's the Kingdom Breath of the Wild games that have that mechanic built into the game I

usually dig but I also love the fact that like photo modes have become kind of the norm yeah I don't usually if a game offers photo mode as like an ancillary bonus thing to like take fun screenshots to share on social media i usually do not engage with that yeah but what if you can make it like joel is pooping make it like joel is pooping yeah like a photo of like joel like taking a big deuce in a toilet. Joel from Last of Us taking a big dump.

I was gonna say, man, you can't just say Joel is pooping. There's lots of Joels. Our agent's named Joel. Chances are somebody listening to this podcast is named Joel and is also pooping. That's wild. That's actually probably statistically correct. I like it when it is

a mechanic. I like when photography is actually a meaningful game mechanic that is implemented well. That is when I get pretty, pretty into it. Do you have a favorite? Man, I have some very fond memories of a game that I think probably hasn't aged very well, which is Dead Rising. Oh, I love that game. Dead Rising had like a photo mode,

not a photo mode, but like a photography. You are a photojournalist. Yeah. And by taking pictures of different like zombies or survivors or events, you get points that you then spend on upgrades like that you kind of have to do. You kind of have to do so that you can spend on upgrades, like that you kind of have to do. You kind of have to do so that you can get strong enough

to not die from all the zombies that there are. And I remember being very, very, very deeply into that. Obviously like Pokemon Snap is, I think the most obvious kind of thing. Did you guys play Umurangi Generation? Yeah. yeah i did not i didn't play it plant did you play it yeah i i mean i would say if man griffin you should really play this game actually and i to the point that like i'd say you please play this game and then let's talk about this game as like either a b segment or or a backup also isn't there a sequel

but i think it is on game pass it's been downloaded on my xbox the last like year and i haven't gotten a chance to play it even though i'm really i like love those sorts of games i i occasionally i'll do the like very posed like photo mode thing but you're right Griffin it I find it a little less uh engaging than like a mechanic or even just like capping like gameplay footage normally mostly because I like showing people like oh this is actually in the game and not like a cut scene photo but I'm also always like really impressed by like a the number of features in photo modes uh filters and various other things that i won't use and also be like the fact that like creative people can do pretty dope shit with those settings like i've been pretty impressed and it's smart that developers put it in there because

it's free marketing like people share screenshots of your game that might not otherwise share did any of you play africa on playstation 3 no i do remember it was just like you just take photos animals right yeah it was like quote safari simulation and you just like yeah took beautiful photos of at the time very realistic animals yeah how have they aged um you know i mean it looks fine it's i i think it's telling that sony doesn't ever mention that the game exists um the other one that i i was thinking about was um snapshot the it was like an indie platformer game but honestly has a lot in common with the game that we were talking about today and that it's using um photos to like kind of create things in your environment oh yeah but that's like a platformer right yeah yeah yeah yeah like a 2d like a 2d platform yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i gotta say these are

pretty good lions for ps3 i'm looking at some lines you're looking at africa okay yeah they're pretty good pretty good right i mean the ground textures need a little work, but the lines are primo. Yeah. Conceptually, I think one of the more interesting uses is Fatal Frame, the whole Fatal Frame series, because in Fatal Frame, you use your camera as basically like a weapon to defeat ghosts. Yeah. And what is so interesting about that is like, it is an inversion on the impulse to run away from a ghost.

Like, you have to look right the fuck at these things and take pictures of them in order to uh banish them and from from you know a horror perspective that's that's that's very fascinating to me uh i actually bounced off fatal frame when i was much younger i think it was like fatal frame two maybe i played that game and was just having to look at ghosts that much was a little too spooky for me i said no thank you uh but it's still a cool way to make people scared yeah i've not played that one but it does i know people really dig it also beyond beyond good and evil is so fucking good with this oh yeah uh you're a photo journalist in that one too uh trying to sort of un un un uh mask this alien conspiracy um and you use your photos to like collect bounties and take down the government i like how they

expanded that in beyond good and evil too i thought it was yeah i thought that the photo mode and beyond good and evil too is really great really really good of course we're talking about the build that only journalists got um that we've been playing for i mean shit man five six years so yeah by the way we on for friday we're raiding uh the big government spaceship uh to get some new film and a stun stick and just so you guys know like i know y'all thought those were all pre-rendered cut scenes that they were showing when they premiered it like six years ago. Oh no, no,

no, no, no, no, no. That was actually gameplay footage from us. yeah, we kept that and we sent it to Eve and he posted it.

Yeah. We sent it to Eve and he was like, good, good work. He's like not enough farting and Rayman. Yeah. Y'all, do you know that there is a, like, Game Boy,

oh, TurboGrafx-16 paparazzi side-scrolling game called Polaroid Pete or Gekibo Gekisha Boy? It looks real good. I'm going to drop an image in Slack for us just so you can see this. Oh, this looks amazing. Can you describe what this guy looks like? Okay, so, I mean, he's got a big round nose and a red shirt,

and he's really jazzed about taking photos. But why is he walking like a pervert? Because he's sneaky. He looks extremely deeply perverted. He's being a little sneak. Hugely, hugely perverted. He's got to hide behind things to invade people's privacy. But I love the art design the like actual screen tells the game are like very like wario ware this is this is actually from the video game adaptation of nightcrawler uh that's jake

gyllenhaal obviously yeah he seems so jazzed just as jake gyllenhaal was jazzed to take photos. Oh, he's so sneaky. Wait, so for the actual photography modding games, neither of you use it? I've used it, but not with any. I'll take one or two and then be like, eh. Mostly I use it not to take photos, but just to be able to pause the game and rotate the camera to see something cool. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's rare you get that ability to like freeze the simulation in a game and just like check out a character model or something like that or a monster that's like

right behind you i i mean the i love it for our jobs just because being able to take like interesting photos that are not the exact same framing every single time helps a lot, especially for like editorial. I remember ironically when I was writing about Last of Us Part 2, a game I did not really like that much, I had a lot of fun effectively doing like photojournalism in the game of trying to get photos that I thought matched what I was trying to tell with the story. Yeah. of trying to get photos that I thought matched what I was trying to tell with the story. And yeah, I love when there are people on YouTube who like use these photo modes to honestly not just create photos,

but kind of create videos of these open spaces. Yeah, I wish it was a kind of like guaranteed thing in any video game, but I also understand that it is a big technical ask depending on how the worlds are rendered um so yeah i mean i can appreciate at the very least that like basically the guaranteed thing now is you can take a screen cap or a short video on any platform and that's exceedingly cool like, the fact that you needed a capture card like one generation ago is pretty amazing that it's now the norm.

Can we talk about what we've been playing? Yeah. Audible mention time. Let's do Justin wrote, I am looking for 3,024 people. I haven't played it, but will you all ask other people to play it and write us to say if it's good?

Thank you. Okay. So I'm reading the Steam, none of us have played it as far as I'm aware. Okay, the description on Steam says, can you run, swim, and use a shotgun without your eyes? I'm looking for 3,024 people. I'm looking for 3,024 people is an alternate reality game where you have to solve complex puzzles in-game, but also in real life.

Participate in an AI voice-generated blind experiment. Interact with websites and locations with other players. That seems like not a good idea. There's live cameras, which is terrifying. And this looks sketchy as shit. I'm sure sure they're very nice the people that made this game but i'm like i don't want to show up and have like another gamer show up and then i don't want to talk about the weather i have three gamers i like and they do i do a podcast with uh it is mostly positive on steam with 47 reviews and 76 approval rating so it seems like it's pretty good fucking anything but you know what 47 is not 3024 people so maybe the more

people that jump in there will enjoy it more um i have been playing something pretty wild. I will admit that my game choice is pretty out of left field. Y'all ever get a hankering for a game that you played a million years ago and you can't move on until you satisfy that urge? I had that for Phantasy Star Online for the sega dreamcast and then also the nintendo gamecube that game was a early sort of mmo action console game uh that is set in the of course the beloved fantasy star universe that we all know so much about yes yes classic sega rpg uh and it was the vibe and tone of it was so like unique uh it was like spaceship fantasy with uh you know trance music like everywhere that you go uh and you just go around shooting you know aliens and stuff and picking up monomates and uh feeding items to your little

hover robot so that it evolves and makes you stronger. Anyway, I really wanted to play that game. Uh, and I found that it has been sort of revived by the intense fantasy star online community. Uh, at first as fantasy star online blue burst, which is free to play, download it, you can play it online. But then different sort of shards have branched off and formed different sort of servers that actually have a lot of people playing on them. So I downloaded one called Ephinia, E-P-H-I-N-E-A. Oh my gosh.

And it's a pretty active server that you just download. It's free and you can play fantasy star online uh with other people which like i played this game a lot mostly on gamecube with like dad and justin and travis i never played it online because who the fuck like connected their their gamecube to the internet and figured out how to play games me uh sorry yeah chris plant um so playing this game that i played a lot of with like this pretty big community not big it's like a hundred people but like that's all you really need uh is really cool and like i beat it for the it was after just a sort of a handful of runs and i've moved on to like the harder difficulties it has uh this shit from episode one

and episode two and then like a fan made episode four because pso episode three was like a weird card battler game anyway uh it is i downloaded it for the nostalgia factor of it i just really wanted to kind of like be in that world and get a get a feel for that game again uh but it is kind of fun just sort of being in this old ass game with a bunch of people who like care a lot about it and have gone to i would say great lengths to keep it uh up up and moving did you play fantasy star online too yeah oh no no i'm sorry i'm sorry i played fantasy star online episode two yeah but so you have yet to play so we did a monster factory on it uh and it seems cool they did just re sort of relaunch that as uh fantasy star online to new genesis which uh from what i have heard

feels a little bit uh bare bones um so like i i you, if I really wanted to scratch that itch, I probably could have just done that much easier. But I do not regret my choice. I also got it up and running on Steam Deck pretty easily. And it's like kind of a fun little game to have on Steam Deck, just running around playing this. What is your, is it mags? Is that what they're called?

Yeah, the robots are mags, right? Robots called mags that sort of boost your stats and have like different special charge up attacks and you evolve them by feeding them items and no relation to massive action action game no relation to magic no that will be the entire focus of the next five episodes but yeah we've heard your feedback yeah people are crazy about mag we need that crossover i yeah i just i love game. And I think that it is, this is one of those rare cases where I have an urge to go revisit some obscure game.

And then I find that it is actually, there are lots of other people who have sort of made achieving that like very, very easy and fun. And that is very exciting to me, whatever that happens that's awesome i love i loved that came out i really want to go back and try it yes i mean it's free there's like no barrier for entry i also got a new uh retro handheld uh called the miu mini plus

uh and russ had has the miu mini i've never really dabbled in like tiny handhelds there's like a whole sort of subcategory of uh retro handhelds uh that are just like outrageously small um and the miu mini is i think like what like 2.7 inches it can fit it can literally fit in a pocket and like not look stupid yeah uh whereas i think most very small handhelds are still too big to actually fit in a pocket yeah so the miu mini plus is like a little bit larger i want to say it's 2.7 inches for the miu mini and the the miu mini plus is 3.5 which is still like real fucking small it fits my pocket great screen looks incredible the buttons feel so so so good yeah they've done it um it's it's

great it's pretty cheap on it on you can get it on amazon you can get it from a lot of different places every yeah so just a note so the miu mini the original that they put out became kind of a phenomenon yeah and became like sold out very quickly and then they put out this plus which is again the larger size uh you still can't really get the smaller size very easily but yeah they i think they did a much larger run for the plus and also like i don't know if you're new to this space or not but if you are you should know that it's moved so quickly that if you wait six months all these companies will release like a new version with better hardware and better screen and blah blah blah so don't feel like you missed out there's always going to be another iteration on

this popular handheld that's coming up yeah it's it's you know the cost the investment is not so outrageous that i've ever felt burned by that correct yeah that's the other great thing um you're you're looking at like 60 to 80 bucks for a lot of these which is really like and it's going to last you at least a couple years yeah um so yeah i've been playing uh aria of sorrow on it henry picked it up yesterday because it looks neat and got him playing um kirby superstar for snes which he's really into yeah it's just neat i have a lot of these but i think this is this is going to be my sort of the size factor of it alone sort of guarantees it a spot in my all all day carry as it were yeah i think it's also nice to have something that like is plastic and you kind of don't care if it gets scuffed up yeah whereas a

lot of these like higher end metal yeah the analog pocket i don't take anywhere because i'm afraid i'll break it yeah um i've been playing nobody saves the world which came out a while ago we certainly have talked a decent amount about it uh it's from drinkbox um makers of guacamole and a number of other very very good games um i liked it when it first came out but i never got around to beating it and what got me to go back to it was basically diablo 4 because i had been playing a lot of diablo 4 and i was getting kind of fed up because it was so like there's a right and a wrong way to play diablo once you get past level 50 or like builds can just fully suck even if you get like a ton of gear that seemingly synergizes but doesn't and i was getting really frustrated and bummed out. And Nobody Saves the World is just like Diablo,

but you're constantly like encouraged to craft a new class based on the situation you're in. And because it's so quick and easy to like make new builds, it just encourages like a ton of creativity and fun. And tonally, it's like very light-hearted and silly and colorful and it's just been like really great i'm like really glad i went back to it it's great on steam deck i think it came out on basically everything i think it's on switch and everything else but i've been playing on steam deck and it's great there i know it has

online play which i haven't tried but um if you're kind of looking for a palate cleanser from diablo maybe you got a little burnt out by it um nobody saves the world is extremely fucking good man i i tell you i was thinking about dipping in on season one or yeah the first i am gonna do it i'm gonna try they released this big update that like people are very upset people are very upset apparently nerfs like every class and uh like nerfs drop rates for everything other than like the highest end activity stuff which is like what the fuck are you guys doing this isn't that hard people play these games so they feel nice and big and strong so just stop making them feel weaker it seems like they basically were like oh people are complaining that they ran out of content too quick. So we're just going to make it really last.

Yeah. Yeah. That has really quelled my excitement, I would say. Yeah. Get back in. Yeah. I have been playing a ton of Ridiculous Fishing EX. And we'll talk about it more on Rescue.

So you'll be able to hear that on Tuesday, because I have so much to say about it. But damn, like, I knew that this game would consume my life because the original did. And I said, hey, I know that I'm I've come a long way, baby. I'm gonna just play this for 5, 10, maybe 15 15 minutes and then like an hour or two goes by and it just keeps happening over and over and over every time i think i'm out i'm back in i i'm in the new game plus i'm in it i'm just cannot stop playing this game and uh yeah i'll talk more about it later but in the meantime people should give it a download if you have an Apple Arcade. It is more than the original Ridiculous Fishing.

I will say that. It's an EX. It is EX. Cool. I think that is it. By the way, they could release literally all their games again. Like, give me a Super Crate Boy EX. Oh, Super Crate Box.

Give me a Lufthraser's EX. Like, I'm fucking in for whatever you want, Vlambeer. Give me. Yeah, 100%. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Mr. Dunn, WJ Tall, and hamiltrash number one thank you for writing reviews for the best design apple podcast thank you to everyone for who has signed up for the newsletter at besties.fan and if you haven't yet uh you should do that because of the many reasons we mentioned at the top of

the show um we really appreciate it it is definitely going to be the best place to hear from us on dope shit so please take your time to sign up for that it takes two seconds and is free plant we want to recap the games we talked about we talked about a ton we talked about viewfinder portal antechamber the echo chrome series so many other games all which i'll put into the newsletter um and then in terms of our honorable mentions uh i am looking for 3024 people nobody saves the world ridiculous fishing ex fantasy star online blue burst miu mini plus which is a little hardware gizmo and yeah that's it griffin loves hardware gizmos um next week we are going to be talking about Pikmin four, which I'm very excited about.

Uh, not everyone on the podcast is as excited as I am about Pikmin four, but we're also going to be talking about might and magic clash of heroes. Definitive edition. Hell yeah. That one's going to be me. Cause I don't like it. Yeah.

Um, that's going to do it for us this week on the besties. Thank you so much for listening and join us next week on the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends make the world's best games? Besties!