The Besties - Thank You for Flying Besties Airlines, Enjoy Your Tomato

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

Join the gang in the virtual cockpit as they fly through the new Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020! Together, they examine the pros and cons of the ultra realistic gameplay and discuss exploring the Earth with the live streaming map technology. Plus, Griffin, Justin and Chris show off their newly learned piloting skills while Russ demonstrates his grasp of altitude. 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!

um so big changes over here on my end i'm afraid that i have left my family uh abandoned my my wife abandoned my son because i'm afraid to i'm scared to tell everybody this to stand in my truth but i have found a new bride and it is the open skies okay i'm married married to the skies the big blue skies the clouds uh when it's night, it gets dark and there's stars and the moon. Married to that one too. If it's up, I'm married to it. And that's my new bride. And the plane is my... Marital aid?

My marital bed. It's your condom. The plane's your condom that protects you from getting killed by the skies. Right, yeah, no, the skies would destroy me if I was, it's very cold from what I understand. But I do love it very much, and it is my why? My why?

My why? My why? Justin's got a lot of use out of that Borat button, unfortunately. Yeah, I only play it in certain circumstances, though. Anyway, I noticed that you guys were looking at the sky yesterday. What the fuck, man?

That's my wife. Uranus. Uranus is the god of the sky. You're married to Uranus. No. You're so much better. Hey, Chris, can we step outside the episode? You're so much better than that.

You've been my friend for a while now. I know what you're capable of. You're so much better than that. It's just mythology. Yeah, Justin, you're raising your hand. Sir, excuse me, Justin, yes? I was trying to... That was a secret symbol to you guys

to stop talking there because we got it. Because we nailed it. And I don't want to waste more time after Russ just wasted a half hour of our lives. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best flight simulator of the year. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best flight simulator of the year. My name is Christopher Plant, and I'm free, free falling.

My name is Russ Farsick, and I know the best plane of the week. I wish I hadn't stumbled over it. You did not skip the landing. That was three bumps on the week. I wish I hadn't stumbled over it. You did not skip the landing. Three bumps on the runway. Also, Chris, if you're free-falling, you're not doing a good job in your airplane. That's bad playing. I know that because I just spent

a whole week playing Microsoft Flight Simulator. You know, things are rough out there in video games. There are not a lot of releases to go around. We were so excited to find this major. Here's some of the ones that are, I'm looking at the list of new releases,

according to Jai Bomb. Quarantine Arena came out this week. Death and Request 2. Big Farm Story. Operation Zeta. Wait, Life is Beautiful. Wait, they made a game with that? Life is Beautiful? Wait, Life is Beautiful. operation zeta wait life is beautiful wait life is beautiful wait life is beautiful uh so it's tight times but this this is a big one for dads it's microsoft flight simulator and i there's not a subtitle on this right it? It's just Microsoft Flight Simulator. Well, it's Microsoft Flight Simulator colon Z2 Dreams of Genesis

with hashtag re colon remind. Microsoft Flight Simulator is the new game from Microsoft. It's the latest in the Flight Simulator series. It allows you to fly around the entire world. And that is all you need to know for now, because we're going to take a very quick break. And then after this, we'll come back, and everybody will be like,

Chris, you were so right. This is the best game of the decade. So I can't wait for you all to hear that praise. We'll see you in a bit. You can't see him right now, but Chris is fully rigid. We're back, and we're ready to take to the sky. We're clear of the runway and this bird is lifting off. We've got our trim right and we've got our flaps

all the way up. That's right, this is just some airplane lingo I picked up from Microsoft Flight Simulator. Chris, you were the champion of this game. Occasionally, there will be a week where- Actually, if you look at the leaderboards, I'm the champion of Microsoft Flight Simulator. I got the high score, just dumping those chills. You were the one who brought this game to us and said we had to do it.

And I had not followed this particular iteration of microsoft flight simulator i have never played a flight simulator game i'm wondering why you were this is nothing to do with the quality of the game but like what was it about this this game and the buzz around it that made you so hyped for it sure i mean i think this game is uh one it's a great game we can debate that in a minute but i think the the one thing that is not debatable is it's a watershed technological achievement. It is something I think Microsoft has been striving for, I don't know, at least the past decade, to have something where they're taking their advancements across different parts of their business, right? where they're taking their advancements across different parts of their business right so like games and hardware and whatever ai um and bring them together to achieve something like magical

so connect try to do that um hololens try to do that e um and then flight simulator is i think the like oh you found the porridge it's just right here the way they created this game is it's effectively a traditional flight simulator but then they also took um all of the information they have from bing maps probably the first only great use of bing maps they have a map of the entire world and then they used um 3d modeling uh topographical scans from all sorts of data pools. And then they use things like Microsoft Azure cloud computing to actually stream those into the world when you are flying around it. So you can do something like fly from Kansas City to New York City. And as you are flying close to the ground, you will see believable 3D recreations of a lot of known cities. It also uses

all these mathematical equations for what is it? Procedural generation to kind of fill in the gaps. So a thing like flying over my neighborhood, you don't see a totally

pinpoint accurate version of my neighborhood, but you see an accurate version of houses where they would be yards that are roughly the same size um because it's procedurally generating what it can read off of a 2d map to make it look 3d and it's just it's incredible it's truly incredible to be able to say i'm gonna fly anywhere in the world and and see it um sorry just one one quick example that i think like hits home in a weird, kind of tragic way. There have been nonprofit journalism groups that have used it for research already and being able to visit areas of the world that you couldn't visit,

like mining zones or no-fly territories like North Korea. And that opportunity to go see parts of the world that truly you will never see like that's that's just a gift like that to me is very cool but then there's a game tied to that and that's where i think we're going to like we're going to find the friction here's the thing i will say i i don't know that you can debate the fact that it is an extremely good flight simulator it is in terms of i didn't have what i would call traditional fun when it came to flying the plane when it came to take off and finding the correct attitudes and landing it's not pilot wings is what you're saying it's not pilot wings it's you're saying. It's not pilot wings. It's not.

Well, the thing that I kept coming back to was like GTA 5. GTA 5, huge map. You have lots of different sort of aerial ways of getting around it. And there is a certain amount of this sensation of like, I'm flying over the fake Grand Canyon or whatever right now, that you that you get to you know a much sort of richer more realistic degree with microsoft flight simulator but also you can bank on a dime in gta5 you can like do insane boosters like it is they have they

have taken a sort of simulation approach but also injected some fun stuff into it and microsoft flight simulator doesn't have the fun stuff into it. It's just a very, very straightforward simulator. Straightforward in the sense that they have sort of perfectly recreated, I think, what you have to do to fly an airplane. And I think that that's kind of miraculous. And as somebody who used to fly a lot,

I didn't realize how into that, like how relatable it was. By fly, you mean you ride ride an airplane right no yeah I have exposure to airplanes sorry I probably phrased that in a wild way like I didn't think I was going to find anything entertaining about this aside from the map right but I have been in airplanes a lot and never really given a shit about how this huge vehicle that i ride around in you know several dozen times a year actually functions yeah if there was one person before all this that i was going to predict would enjoy it it was you griffin because you are the person who i think really enjoys just

figuring out how things work uh especially in virtual things um and and wow does this game offer that opportunity the problem is oftentimes it throws you into a brand new boeing plane and it's like well here's how to adjust these two knobs those other 30 buttons i don't know go download like a pdf from boeing um let me know when you've read it all um good luck so let me just boil down a few things one One, you know, I've had, as with Griffin, a passing interest in the idea of flying. And I think I was not expecting to find as much satisfaction as I did just from the tutorials of the game, which I think are very,

very well done because you get dropped in and you have all these dials in front of you. And all they really tell you are the like dials you need to care about at the current moment, which I think is very smart. And it actually started making me realize that like the act of flight, which has always seemed like this, like totally beyond me. No way I could ever figure it out was like weirdly attainable, even though obviously the money and danger are elements that are removed from this but the but the actual like things that you are doing while you are flying or taking off or landing are like vaguely attainable things which i found like pretty miraculous and incredible and made me really like pretty jazzed about it. But I would say on the flip side, like A, you need a pretty beefy setup to run the game

and B, unlike Chris Plant, I do not have a ultra widescreen amazing super monitor. I have a fucking laptop monitor. So I'm basically like crouched in front of this thing with an Xbox controller, which I wouldn't recommend either, but it's fine. Staring at this little screen and like all the dials and stuff are so jammed in that you constantly have to like maneuver and like literally use the camera to look down at the things to see like what your

altimeter is. And it's, it's a lot like you kind of to really get the right experience. You need like a pretty baller set. One second. I'm going to open this can. Oh, that's fresh. That's a fresh can of undiluted hoops that is about to come in here and just take a big old swig of Microsoft Lite. It's neat. I mean, the maps were cool. I flew over disney world that was fun got to go see the dudes been a little bit is is epcot there oh yeah and like the thing the modeled and everything

yeah it's cool um as he um i i uh here's what i would say um my complaints okay i have actual complaints and then fake complaints. I'll do the actual complaints first. I actually am kind of with Griffin that, like, I was finding the learning about the stuff pretty interesting, and then there's a point of proficiency where it's just like, we're not going to teach you more than you know right now. And it's not particularly dynamic in terms of you've gotten

off what out of whack here let us help you sort of like figure it out or like here's some tool tips that will help you to get it back so there was a lot of times where i would be like trying to do a tutorial i just did one of the next last tutorials where i was supposed to like follow all this navigation and then it's giving you like you have to do a huge turn to go into the airport and it was showing me like indicators for like where to turn right and so i passed one and i started turning right where it told me to and the indicator didn't change and it didn't pick up with me and i was like uh okay so i'm just gonna i guess just keep going on my own and kind of figure it out and then I just kind of figured it out

and then they're like that was actually not very good that's not what we wanted to do we're gonna start the lesson over 20 minute long tutorial level we're gonna start it over because our indicators didn't like see what you were doing

so like that stuff and there's stuff like it tells you to adjust the trim to sort of make it so that you don't have to fool with your controls that much. Love the trim. The plane will kind of like, love the trim. There's an, you can do vertical trim, right? And there's a little indicator if you back out to the third person view.

There's a little indicator that shows your vertical trim. And then there's supposedly horizontal trim. And I was tweaking it it but there's no indication of what was happening ditto with your flaps you're supposed to raise the lower flaps there's no indication that i could see of like what they were unless my control was like broken i was like constantly veering to one side like my plane would just always be pulling one way or the other and i just couldn't figure out how to make that not the case um and there's a lot of other stuff with like and there was just like some jank like i have a good computer it's

like pretty beefy and i had multiple crashes and let me tell you well did you did you come down land did you put the landing gear down okay i had multiple software crashes um and i had multiple incidences where like i'd just be in the middle of a flight and uh it would just crash and i was like well okay i'll just do that again i guess the other thing the the but the bigger the the fake things and that that is things i could i would actually level at it is like it holds your hand but like not as much as i wanted as like a complete neophyte and especially like with bigger planes as far as i could tell there's not like a there's not tutorials on like here's how to fly 787 like which uh i took off from the airport in huntington which was hysterical i was like

like leveling the buildings as with my wing just like went right through the tutors biscuit world crw um just kidding that tutors was actually run out of business but um so the do i wish that also there was a little bit of i would like to just do dumb like i wish there was some sort of way to just do dumb shit to like check out the map the map's cool enough that i wish there was just like a jet pack or a helicopter or something where like i didn't have to fuck with like flight and i could just go like explore you know what i mean because for me there isn't a game in microsoft flight simulator in the way that we traditionally would use the term game for me the game of microsoft simulator was i'm on track to where I'm going.

I see kind of the navigational stuff. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I kind of see what I need to do. And I just need to keep flying straight for another 15 minutes. The game for me is do you have the patience to not attempt a barrel roll? Because for me, I would be going for a few minutes and then my brain would be like, maybe just a quick one. And I'm like, no, brain, I can't do a barrel roll because for me i would be going for a few minutes and then my brain be like maybe just a quick one and i'm like no brain i can't do a barrel roll right now i have to fly the boring plane and it got worse and worse where my brain was like america's been through a lot justin maybe it needs this barrel roll right now i figure how inspired everyone would be for just

one quick barrel roll and then you try to do anything fun it's like you broke your plane your plane broke in half because you try to fly too cool um but that i like i say it's dumb i just wish it was a little more flexible i was gonna say i do want to mention one of the planes that i flew which was like one of the smaller planes did have a sticker above the uh flight yoke that said no intentional barrels which i think leaves a lot of room for a potential other battle. You fly into a tornado and then it's in God's hands. That's the kind of fun shit, dumb shit like that.

That's a little more bite size, like something like fly through this tornado, like dumb stuff like that. I would like it more activity based. I think it would be cool. Like it really feels like this game was made to ship for hardcore flights and fans um it to the point where like things that would be seemingly obvious like being able to just start at a specific point on the map are way more difficult than they should be um like the the main menu is not especially clear at times to drive that home if you want to start from a specific

point or set a waypoint like an arrival waypoint at a certain place the only way i could find to do it is to punch in specific like geographical coordinates like you can't i couldn't right click somewhere on the map and set that any that location that i clicked you know anywhere that wasn't a waypoint already to be like if i wanted to fly to my house i would have to punch in the exact coordinates of my house and then search for those and then it would allow me to set that as like my destination i couldn't just go to where i knew my address was and then like right click it there i have to have that it's wild i was gonna say it feels like you know the people that like get really into like euro road trip trucker four yeah this is them

like this is their game the ultimate version of this yeah yeah the thing that i also wonder is like is it like um how the rules used to be for uh driving sims or it was like you can have zero crashes uh if you want to have bmw or um honda inside of your game because they don't want to have BMW or Honda inside of your game, because they don't want to have any representation of car wrecks. And like, is that a reason we don't see things that are a little lighter or sillier? Well, I would say one thing. If you do happen to have the game,

the one thing that I would recommend that counted as like quasi light was they have these landing challenges where you have to land on like very small runways. So I landed on one in the french alps that was like less than a thousand feet on the side of a cliff and i like tried it like six or seven times until i got it it was pretty satisfying so like that's the closest like mini objective thing that i've seen and then i tried to land a 747 at jfk airport and it went

very wrong very quickly. So the other thing I'd say is, to Justin's point of, like, I can't just, like, go around and see things easily, there's actually a camera mode that reminds me so much of... I can't remember what the damn game was. But on the Nintendo 64, there was a golfing game. It was terrible, at least for me.

But you could go into a golf cart mode, which was really just free roam no clipping camera and you could tour drive through the open world of a golf course which at the time felt like wild like oh my gosh i'm just moving around this giant open space free for all um you can do a version of that in flight simulator where you pause everything around you keeps moving but your plane just freezes in midair and then you can tour around the world in a in a free camera so you can zoom all the way down to the to earth and like just stroll through neighborhoods um trying to find landmarks and stuff and that is super cool um and obviously not a selling point but yeah you

could also do what i do which is crash your plane upside down in the trees behind your house and then just kind of look at it through the window longingly did you did so who here actually went to their house oh yeah i did of course yeah i tried to and they did not try with honey i could barely i saw the stadium and i was like i guess it's kind I guess I'm kind of in the basic area but none of the buildings were recognizable to me they got the texture of the like stucco on the outside of uh on the outside of my garage correctly and I was like I don't I started to get kind of Ron Swanson about it like I don't actually, I don't actually love that y'all clocked my stucco. New York is amazing for what it's worth.

Like for the big cities, they really do a direct texture map of what the actual buildings look like. So my building looks identical to how it looks in real life, which is pretty nuts. When am I going to get that tech for a Spider-Man game? Please just, it's there it exists now just do it i mean i will say the second you freeze the camera like because there's a like a active pause we can like rotate the camera around it's very clear that the graphics

do not hold up on like a closed inspection standpoint molecular level yeah it's just janky because it's from space i feel feel like our like qualitative review of this game has been a bit murky. So I wanted to say that it kind of surprised me in how it slots into this this this pseudo genre that I didn't know how into it I was until this this year. And maybe it's just because of how, you know, cloistered we all are. And I enjoy a good learn from time to time but there is there's some there's something educational obviously about like here are what the here's what plane terminology is and here's the basics of what pilots have to do in order to fly a plane

i also felt like if it gave me an understanding of the physics of plane flight in a way that like no book or you know whatever like really ever has by making me sort of have to interact with it like learning how how lift like actually affects a plane and what what drag is used for and how you accomplish those things with with plane controls like in the same way that that uh clubhouse games like taught me a lot about gaming literacy in a sort of roundabout way i feel like this game teaches you a lot about physics in a roundabout way that uh i found very very very satisfying even if i didn't have like a lot of you know traditional super fun with it um there's so much to learn i feel like it needs to almost be kind of branching where like i can click on anything this was weird that I couldn't click on something in my display and it just tells me what it is or like what how I control it or how I alter it um

I found that like really very strange uh and I and I feel like I can't really recommend it in terms of like if you don't think you'll be into just like flight sim in general I don't think it's necessarily worth it for the um you know the educational aspects of it it's it's very cool and i learned something but i don't i don't know if it'd be worth the price of admission here's my very very easy super easy everybody should try it recommendation it's on xbox game pass on pc whoa really oh shit go for it go play it like that that i i man i'm i'm so excited to see like what this show becomes as game pass and things like it become the norm because i think it just allows us to one more people who listen to our show can just try things in the same way that we

often do um and this is just such that sort of game do i think every person in the world should buy this game no like uh that would be a lot to ask but do i think everybody should at least get two hours like surfing the skies yeah absolutely four hours two hours for installation and then two hours too it's worth the time investment is worth it, if not the financial one. Also, I do think this is probably going to be Xbox's first big swing at game as a service. And I'm super curious to see what this game looks like two or three years from now.

Let me get that Superman mod. That's all I need. Russ, you've cooked up something for us to test our newfound acumen. Is that correct? No, I you've cooked up something for us to test our newfound acumen. Is that correct? No, I haven't cooked up something for you. Fate happens. Oh, God.

So Chris Plant, your favorite folks, Chris Plant, Justin McElroy, and Griffin McElroy have found themselves on a 747 airliner and disaster has struck. The pilot is sick. The co-pilot is sick they all ate from the same plate of fish just like in that movie airplane and they are out of commission and it's up to them that is quite the diarrhea they've got there if it's keeping them from doing their their duty of landing the airplane yeah so you know how when you drink and when you're flying, it's like more powerful? Okay, say no more, please. So it is up to these three heroes

to land this plane safely using the knowledge that they've gained from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Now, I noticed in the rundown for the episode, you've left the WikiikiHow article on how to land a Boeing 747. Do not use the link that's in there. Pay no attention to the link

behind the curtain. I am no longer using that. I am using another source that is also wikiHow. So we're in this plane. A few questions before we get to all take our turns. How far away from the airport are we? Well, no one is doing anything, so the plane is actively plummeting to the ground right now so just letting you know how how far away from the airport are we and how how um high in the air are

we well i'll tell you you're getting much much closer to the ground at every passing second but you are are we vertically yeah no not no you're you're uh like a 45 degree angle going also are we in the clouds 45 degree is damn i grab the yoke and pull up okay justin grabs the yoke and pulls how far do you pull up justin how far do you pull up like how hard until my attitude is level terrible fail what is justin's dexterity i wonder what's your mom what's your modifier My personal dexterity? Yeah. Well, let's see.

I'm a 39-year-old man with carpal tunnel syndrome who hasn't worked with his hands for 20 years, so it's pretty bad. So in an attempt to yank the yoke directly upwards, you've actually pulled it directly into your chest, and the plane is now tilted upwards. Well done, but it's now stalling. Oh, God.

Griffin. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to increase the the throttle a little bit maybe level us out a touch okay that should be easier than yeah no so you good work griffin you've leveled us out things are things are but i don't want us to be level we need to be at a descent attitude which means we're gonna have to we level first and then we'll we'll begin our descent okay that's fine that's fine. Things are running level. You are about 17 miles away from the airport. Oh good then.

Do you need to begin? And how high are we again? 13 miles. We're 13 fucking miles off the ground? So we're burning. We're on fire. No you're let's say 2 000 feet up okay so we're 2 000 you didn't play microsoft flight simulator right because even i know that that's not do you know the difference is that lower how how how high do you think a mile is in feet? 5,280 feet. Okay.

So you're half a mile up. Oh my gosh. So we're half a mile up, but before you were telling us that we were over 60,000 feet in the sky. Is that what you're... So you've gone from 60,000 to two. Is that correct?

Yeah. That's accurate. Okay, it's a rapid descent. Okay, so we're very close to the ground. Very close to the ground. And level. Well done, Griffin. You're level.

Yeah, I mean, fat lot of good is going to do us. One particularly ambitious building, and that's a rip. I want to call to see if I have the phone number for Sully Sullenberger. Oh, like what's in front of us between us and the runway um it's mostly farmland farmland okay good good good i'm feeling good i mean at this point i feel like even if we don't have the runway we're probably going to be okay so interesting okay so what kind of plane is this it's a big one yeah it's a boeing 747 superliner oh okay so um we're already if we're that low, we need to pretty rapidly reduce our speed. Because if we're going over, what is it, 25 knots?

Is that it? You're going 250 knots. Yeah, so we need to. Are you fucking kidding me? Well, it's a 747. They go fast. Okay, so we're going to gradually decrease our speed. Okay.

And ever so slightly. Well, actually, right now, we're not even going to gradually decrease our speed. Okay. And ever so slightly. Well, actually, right now, we're not even going to lower our nose. We're actually going because if we do that, we'll just crash into the ground. Okay. So you're gradually just decreasing speed. Decreasing speed. Yeah. Okay.

You are now going 100 knots. Hey, wow. That worked out pretty well from 250. Okay, so now it's Justin's turn. Land it. So you go to land it and there is a farmland. So you're going to try to land

in the farmland. Is there any water? Do I have visibility on any water? I should have mentioned you're in Iowa. Yeah, you should have told me. I don't know anybody in Iowa. I'm going to bring her down Iowa. You didn't tell us that. Yeah, you should have told me. I don't know anybody in Iowa. I'm going to bring her down. Yeah. So you're going to attempt to land in this farm.

Do you have a preference for which produce farm you're going for? Corn. Corn. Corn. Water. Not corn. Watercress. There's no water.

It's Iowa. Watercress. You're going to go for the watercress? Yeah. Get something squishy that's going to break. Corn will go into the engines like a bunch of missiles. Watercress landing.

Okay, okay, okay. Okay, so it should be noted that watercress- Three souls on board. Watercress is not in season right now. Does that change your decision in any way? Okay, I'm gonna go with tomatoes. Tomatoes. Good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good.

Iowa tomatoes. Okay, so you're basically lining up to go to land for the tomatoes. The tomatoes are a mile away, and you're kind of angling yourself down, aiming for those big red circles. I hate to ruin Iowa tomatoes. They're famous statewide for their plumpness and juiciness. Griffin, you're now 10 feet above the ground, about to land.

10? What are you talking about? Okay, how fast are we going? 100 knots. We're dead. We're dead, baby. We're going to die. I tell Justin and

I ask Justin and Chris to real quick check on the pilots back in the fuselage and then I shut and locked the door of the cabin so that they can do no more fucking harm to this process. And I'm going to pull up, because we're going 100 knots, 10 feet off the ground. If there is a tall person, we'll be decapitated by the landing gear.

Oh, that's funny. You should mention the landing gear, which hasn't been discussed yet. I want to do a contested strength check with Griffin to see if I can wrest control from him. You do need to break through. No, he didn't have to roll for that. I want to contest his Okay.

Yeah, that's a critical strength check from Justin, so success. Now I'm in control. What happens if it's a critical uh strength check from justin so success okay so now i'm in control what happens if it's a crit how exactly do you take control from your brother what i give him a forearm shiver right to the bridge of his nose he's unconscious he's out i've bloodied griffin okay um what's our landing gear is it deployed or not it is not deployed deploy it okay you push the button for landing gear? Is it deployed or not? It is not deployed. Deploy it.

Okay. You push the button for landing gear. It lowers to the ground. And you're at, what, 15 feet off the ground because of Griffin's slight efforts to raise the... Flare. I'm flaring it, baby. That's the flare. I'm going to flare it, baby. I'm pulling that yoke to flare.

Okay. You're flaring the plane. My flaps are down, too. Flaps are down. The plane is slowing to 50 knots getting closer things are great but people of iowa like uh podcaster marinara that's what they're about to have all over the all over this field uh i mean quick so i mean it seems like we are rapidly rapidly decreasing speed so i mean i'm gonna I'm going to, you know, pray.

I'm going to put those wheels to the ground. And then, so that's two turns. Are you going to pray or are you going to put the wheels to the ground? No, I'm going to put the wheels to the ground. But here's how I'm going to do it. Because things have to happen. I want to rush to have to roll for the existence of a medieval D&D. Yeah.

This has to take place in, like, what? Like two, a few seconds so i'm gonna do a whole bunch of things all at once i'm going to press down into the ground and then i'm going to very gently pull the nose up to help decrease the speed yes this is yes yes um yes press down and then up and uh decrease the speed and the second that I am down and I am decreased and both all the wheels are on the ground, I'm going to flip that brake. You're going to flip the brake the second that you're down.

No, no, no. Nope, nope. Sorry. Did it. Did it. No, that's not. I very clearly said this takes place over multiple seconds. You said it, Chris. Let's see. Okay, fine. Roll it. Okay. So the plane is lowering. You're at 10 feet, 5 feet. The plane hits the ground.

Chris yanks on the parking brake and the front of the plane flips over on its back. Oh my gosh. I'm unconscious, right? I'm unconscious so I don't feel it. Yeah, Griffin is completely out. Justin, you're upside down.

The plane is otherwise intact. It's're upside down. The plane is otherwise intact. It's just upside down. Oh, so it's a good landing. And then wait, it's like smash cut to title card lost too in Iowa. Well, congrats. You found your way onto the ground. Well done. Thank you so much.

Wow, that was fun. Can I just say the diarrhea pilots really set us up to fail oh man can you imagine where all the diarrhea went after we flipped the plane i don't want to think about it uh any communique from our beloved listeners the sweet plant uh yeah here let me let me get some stuff uh well first i thank you to everybody because quite literally everybody let us know uh about the minions uh tweet uh and the fall guys yes a minions costume for team yellow is our idea and we are uh trying to negotiate royals oh did that come straight did that come straight from the top from dreamworks uh it came from some but but not DreamWorks, some other group.

Here's some specific messages. From Shay on Twitter, living on the other side of my country to most of my family while in full lockdown, I had a very profound and emotional experience, virtually visiting my parents' new farm in a nearly photorealistic condition. Did any of you get any intense feels like while playing microsoft flight simulator um i visited uh iceland where i had my honeymoon and that was very i did the same thing i mean i didn't go to iceland i went to hakone

uh which i visited on my honeymoon uh and it was it was it was super neat it was very cool i don't know that i got like a huge emotional rush out of it but seeing like the places that i went to and had some very happy times was uh a real real put some some wind in my sails to use a flying term uh i want to uh share a note from millie because last week justin asked people to tell us uh their feelings on flight simulator before they installed it and then after they played it. For Millie, before message, I have never played a Flight Simulator, but I just got a new PC and I do love planes. Not enough to do much more than

go, wow, look at those planes at an airport. So I'm going in and trying Flight Simulator 2020 for the first time later today. I will report back. And then a few hours later. So I've played the training levels for about an hour when it works it feels amazing when it doesn't i'm just just left flying with no direction as the game

doesn't recognize that i fulfilled an instruction there you go justin getting bugs in the most basic training kind of sucks for getting into this i actually don't know if that's a bug for for whatever it's worth i just think that it meant and i don't know millie's experience obviously but um i actually think it might just be it's very literal I just think that it may, and I don't know Millie's experience, obviously, but I actually think it might just be, it's very literal about what it wants you to do. And it's not good at sort of compensating for, maybe he's just a rebel who flies by his own rules. Millie also added,

also I now really know why we don't fly planes with keyboards. No sensitivity is how I can pull the yoke makes life pretty difficult. I hear controller is better, but I haven't tried it yet. And yes, that's true. Honestly, controller is still not as sensitive as as a flight stick um this is a question from uh haruza on twitter is it possible in this game to fly the plane upside down like in the blockbuster film flight starring denzel washington hmm um not for very long yes i i think the thing to remember with flight starring denzel washington

is it's not so much that he flies the plane upside down as he does a very controlled barrel roll yeah and i i think that is doable in this game you could do a controlled barrel roll but you can't just like fly upside down forever that's not how i mean are there stunt i didn't fly all the planes i don't know if there's yeah there's some planes that let you do some pretty stunty stuff. Traditional planes are intended to manage lift, which upside down becomes sink, I guess. I don't know what the opposite of lift is. Yes.

And one last question, not related to Flight Simulator, from Evan. Can't remember the prompt for this week, but here's a question. What's the best game you've never played that you're okay never playing for me it's bloodborne oh interesting i don't know man near automata you jerk wow that's wild hey any one of these this is a loaded question any one of these is going to piss somebody off you You should definitely play Nier Automata and Bloodborne. Everyone should play both of those titles.

You know what mine is? Civilization. Fuck, I love Nier Automata. It's a great game. So let's talk about it. Civilization is mine. I think I understand why people love it. I'm sure it's great.

I know I do not have enough time in my life to play it. Or also World of Warcraft would be right up there in that same that same world yeah it would have to be some genre that I'm not like like any fighting game like I there are so many I listen to I listen to podcasts of people talking about Evo and like all the like dope shit that people are doing and I'll watch a clip of a fighting game from time to time and be like oh that's that looks pretty rad but I just have no no interest in actually playing it y'all what else are you playing this week because i am excited to talk about this section because i've been playing

some good good stuff you know what i dip back into i'll just say very quickly because it's very old game but my daughter is six and uh she i weirdly saw her watching a playthrough of um she's of that age where she started watching like playthroughs on youtube and she was watching on broken age and i was like oh shit you know what you could play broken age you could absolutely do that so we dip back into it i love that game it is beautiful it's so funny and well written and the puzzles are neat and it sounds great it's just i mean i hadn't thought about broken age for years so it was cool to to see it again and share that with her and it's very like very approachable for for

her even at even at six you know she reads some but it's it's much more about like a puzzle experimentation something like that it's very neat um broken age i downloaded never winter nights on ios which just dropped and i never played that one even though it's sort of um broken age i downloaded never winter nights on ios which just dropped and i never played that one even though it's sort of a seminal dnd video game classic uh and it was not pleasant to play it on ios just it works fine but just like the interface was not my preferred way to do it but it did give me a sort of hankering for a nice crpg uh so i picked up uh pillars of eternity on switch uh because i never played that one either. That was the Kickstarter-backed Obsidian CRPG.

And there've been some patches to sort of fix it up because when it dropped, it was really buggy, like super, super, super buggy. Like the text would just like glitch out and like ranged attacks didn't work, which is not great. And apparently there's one more huge patch like coming soon that's going to uh bring everything up to sort of console parody but

uh yeah i mean i am enjoying it uh also i've i've i've played so much more heroes of hammer watch get up on that shit yeah i'm playing a lot of that bad i'm really deep in that one griffin wasteland 3 comes out yeah now i am i am psyched out of my mind for uh balder's gate 3 did you guys watch the first of all that live stream was super fun and if you've never if you didn't watch it or don't really care about balder's gate 3 it was really it was the most fun sort of uh live pandemic quarantine event that I think anybody's done. Yeah, that game looks wicked. I really like Forbidden Sword of Wasteland 2 when it first came out.

Very good game. And I think both games are essentially, you know, both Baldur's Gate and Wasteland are kind of modern recreations of classic CRPGs. Why don't we do that one for next week? Is that? We could. I've never really. It's so funny. I love D&D. I love RPGs. I love big games. of classic CRPGs. Why don't we do that one for next week? Is that... Could be. We could.

I've never really... It's so funny. I love D&D. I love RPGs. I love big games. But I have never really... A CRPG has never really gotten its hook to me. Except for...

Oh, God. What was that Sierra one? Arcanum of Steamworks and Magic Obscura. Oh, yeah. Would you guys count... Would you count... Disco Elysium? No. Oh, yeah. That's guys count, would you count Disco Elysium? No.

Oh, yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, that's a CRPG. No, I think it's a different, I think that's a different beast. When I think of CRPG, I think like tactical, multi. It's its own weird thing. Yeah.

Fresh, are you anything that you're playing? Just, I played a lot more Hammerwatch. That was basic. And some more Desperados. I'm very very near finishing desperados 3 which is continues to be really one of my favorite games of the year for what it's worth fresh is being coy fresh is playing something that you can and something else that i can't talk about yeah it's very um and uh so i've been playing uh a few different things

just try and try and little stuff while i stuff on my exercise bike. Spiritfarer. Oh, yeah. What a lovely little management sim about death that's very cute, and I did not expect to be so touching. It's a game where you are helping souls come to terms with moving

on post-death. It's sad and sweet. Kill It With Fire, which is a uh spider killing simulator where you uh walk around a house and you try to kill spiders you like it's kind of like gone home but underneath uh half the objects are little spiders and you you just smash them with a clipboard but as the game progresses uh your weapons become increasingly silly so you'll get uh flames and uh molotov cocktails and uh big guns uh silenced pistols it's it's really silly and i don't know i think danielle at fanbite wrote a piece uh about it

being comparing it to like what would happen if you made a light hearted immersive sim and I think that's pretty spot on and then lastly people on twitter have been telling us to play Hades forever well we've been playing it we just haven't talked about it

well I haven't been playing it we did talk about it we've talked about Hades for sure we've talked about Hades I played if you'll forgive me the hell out of that game uh i will probably go back it's on switch now i don't think it's out i don't know if it's out yet oh is it not it's approaching its one point it's like official release but yeah i went back and played more of it and damn that game is good that game is really really really good um and maybe maybe we'll talk about that more when we get to the 1.0 release then if y'all have been playing enough of it so yeah that's it for me um there are a lot of good games out in the world right now we made it guys we made it through the the

fallow times sure uh i played grifflance finally justin griffin yes yes which fucking kicks ass it's so good i didn't expect it to be as story-rich as it is, and it is story-rich. I've beat it twice now with both of the two characters. The next one should be out soon, but it's fucking great. I do wish it was mobile in some way, because I feel like that would sort of match my gaming habits.

It'd be neat on Switch. For sure, I'll come on Switch. Next week. Next week. We're going to Switch. Next week, next week, next week. We are playing Madden, and that's the only game we're playing. We're all playing

Madden, baby. Get excited. No, we're playing Wasteland 3. That's the one game we're going to talk about. Only Wasteland 3. Unless we play Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Let's do a grab bag. Chris said everybody wants to hear us talk about Madden. I said nobody wants to hear us talk about Madden.

So we were going to do a little like nerds box split Madden Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered, which I've been very excited about since it was announced. And now I think Justin's coming in as a fucking splinter agent. As a hero cool dude, neither jock nor nerd. Perhaps as a dweeboy, perhaps. A jock jim. A popular kid. I'm escaping from having to play either Final Fantasy or Madden

by volunteering to play Wasteland 3. It sounds like we're just doing an old episode of Besties, then. Sounds like we're just doing old Besties. Too many games? Could we put up a fucking Twitter poll just to see which of these games people are most interested to hear us talk about? Okay, I'll do that. That's a good idea.

Do you want to add a fourth one? Fresh, do you have one? Okay, no, no, I have a great idea. Wait, okay, Fresh, do you have one you want to do or no? I don't fucking care. Just let us decide. All right, Fresh has to play all of them here's what we'll do we'll put up well a lot 30 minutes right we'll put up a twitter poll oh for which of those three games people want to hear the percentage of the votes that you get is the percentage of time of

that 30 minutes that you get okay to talk your game. That's hysterical and good. And that's, that's what we're doing. So play any of those, play all of them. It's up to you. When you want. Yeah.

If you want to hear a lot about Kansas city barbecue, um, where to get some of the tastiest, uh, meats and Russ looks right now, like all three of us, just like open mouth burped in his face. I've got to use the bathroom so bad.

So this is the end of the episode. You can follow and listen for free on Spotify. Please help share the show. Besties.fan. We really appreciate it. If you want another season of the Besties, we got to get those numbers up. So share the show.

Besties.fan. Email us, mail at besties.fan. We're on Twitter at at thebestiespod. And yeah, plan. No, time for you to go potty, or else you're going to turn into one of those pilots. Fingers in the air. Well, anyway, I love you guys.

Wow, that just came out of nowhere. Thanks for listening to the besties. Be sure to join us again next week for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends make the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter

and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!