The Besties - The Best Games of Early 2022

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

As we approach the end of the first quarter of 2022, we take a look back at some of the classics that the first three months have brought us. Maybe spread the love throughout the year next time?Games discussed: Nobody Saves the World, Pokemon Legends Arceus, Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection, Olli Olli World, Super Auto Pets, Cyberpunk 2077 revival, Horizon Forbidden West, Dying Light 2, Destiny 2, Elden Ring and Dragon Quest XI. From the Ukraine Games itch.io bundle: TENNNES, A Short Hike, Baba Is You, Celeste, Quadrilateral Cowboy, Golf Peaks, Cloud Gardens, Mortician’s Tale, CrossCode, Kingdom Two Crowns, Wandersong, Super Hot, Ynglet, Towerfall. 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 wickered my toe this morning. Now, like you trapped it in a sort of like effigy, like straw effigy and burned it? No, that's not wickering. Are you crazy? I don't think I know what wickering is. That would be wicker manning it, but it wouldn't be wickering. Okay, so you put like a helmet with bees inside of it on your toe?

Is that what it is? Here's what happened. I woke up and I was getting dressed and I had some fluff on my toes. Slow down. Slow down on the parts about the toes, though. Getting dressed. I don't want to give it out for free, but I was getting dressed and I had some fluff on my toe, whatever, lint, something.

And so I did the old toe flick, the foot flick, as it were, you know, like get it off. And I misjudged the placement of my laundry basket. And I like full on kicked the laundry basket, like with the side of my big toe. I hate that. And wicker plus toe, not a good combination. I guess even like cheap wicker. Anyway, my toe got pretty fucked up. Oh man, I'm sorry to hear that.

Terrible way to start the morning. And of all the sort of like injuries and ailments that you have discussed on the show, I would say this one is the most esoteric. Like the most like, did you really need to tell us about like you drop a you eat an egg sandwich that's so hot that the steam gets in your eyes and then you you know get hit by a taxi or fall in an open mail hole cover and i'm like yeah that's sure that's the spirit of the city baby but this is just you kicked your laundry basket yeah but how many

people need to the people need to know i bled over this how many people have bled from a laundry basket incident realistically speaking for sure you're a special you're a special sort i don't know what you want me to say i know this already about you you'll find a way to hurt yourself on anything i love that about you yeah i can't believe that somebody's gonna photoshop a wicker man uh image and we're gonna have to live with it on our twitter timeline i don't even think that the injury story was merits a photoshop well i think it's gonna be like it's gonna be the wicker man poster but where nick cage's face is it's gonna be a big bloody toe it's gonna be arrested well don't do the bloody toe yeah no you'll get kicked it's just

it was a one bad day in situation i don't want to escalate it too much. I didn't need like... Yeah, he's definitely never going to kick his basket again, dude. Yeah. He's going to kick his basket tomorrow. This fucking guy. How do you still have all your toes? Unknown. Hello everybody, welcome to the besties. I just decided to do the intro.

This is the greatest and best video game podcast in the planet. Sometimes we talk about books and magazines and zoos. This is the greatest and best video game podcast in the planet. Sometimes we talk about books and magazines and zoos. But today we're talking about video games. We gotta at least do the name introductions, because that's the one thing that has remained unchanged. So go ahead and say your name, Chris. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best game of the week oh chris plant very short yeah

russ why don't you go let's just fuck up the order like yeah totally my name is russ frustic and i know the best game of the week my name is griffin mcelroy and i know that actually i always say it like in contrast to justin i don't know if you've noticed that where it's like my name is griffin mcelroy like oh and but well you can't do that because justin's not here but this is the besties and it's a video game club that goes all year long and just by listening you are a member and this week we're talking about all the games we've talked about so far this year uh which is elden ring and some other ones. And maybe we shouldn't tease it any more than that because I'm looking at this list

and there's some huge names here where I'm like, wow, great stuff. Did those really come out this year? Because I don't remember that, but I'm stoked to circle back on it. It is hard to lift yourself out of the fog of Elden Ring, but we're going to try. We're going to try, Tarnished.

We're going to talk about hundreds of basically free games that you can get, and we'll talk about that in the second half. Okay, the first quarter of 2022 is not even over yet. We're not even through March, but we felt like, hey we we should do it now because they put too many games into the first two and a half months they actually they actually put too many oops all games and and i would say this game game devs and i know you guys aren't

on the same team but you should be for our enjoyment um we the gamers uh maybe space them out a little bit fucking better next time huh how do you feel maybe do that a little bit better next time so that we don't get like elden ring and witch queen and horizon forbidden west like all within like a a five-day period of i get that like indie small indies don't necessarily aren't necessarily in the same meetings as electronic arts big wigs right but you know who knows the platform holders steam knows xbox we the gamers certainly know and uh someone should yeah clue them in to uh not putting all the games out at the same time because that's a drag um i mean it's fun but it's fun it's weird

man i feel like for i don't know going on a decade now uh the the first quarter of the year has been pretty fucking lit like release wise it's not just um this is ancient history but it's not just like every november you get fucking 50 games that all drop all at the same time this this year i think is a little weird because sometimes we'll get like one or two very good games in january and february and this year there were like a large number of them uh and more i don't think there's ever in the history of me doing this has ever been a stronger march year a month like release wise uh well let's let's let's talk about it let's go through this list and sort of uh uh because a lot of time on this show we are all guilty of playing a game for the episode and then not really spending any more of our very very precious and few free free time hours personal hours uh

like actually playing them anymore so i'd love to hear like if you all stuck with these things or not what's the first one on the list and the first one on the list is nobody saves the world which was the great uh indie from drink box studios the like wild where there was all sorts of classes we could play as a rat or a horse or a wizard and we all really like that if i recall we did it it is this is this is becoming a reductive thing to say and i understand that but uh if it's on switch i feel like i would play this one a lot more because it's so inherently grindy uh and i don't really have the kind of life anymore where I... Well, I can't say that and play Destiny 2 at the same time.

But this is the kind of game that I feel like I would groove on nonstop in a more sort of portable format. Yeah, I think certainly Steam Deck will also. I was going to say, I haven't had to worry about that. Just run so silky smooth. So silky smooth on my Steam Deck. Griffin, where is your pre-order? What group are you in?

I'm in the weird Amorphous Q2 2022. Yeah, that's me too. Which is like expected availability date. And it's like, what does that even fucking mean, Gabe? Tell me what that means, Gabe. Gabe, shave that beard and put those switch steam decks out did you see the video the steam released of gabe going door to door and delivering steam decks to people that's not real it's real for sure and it's real and most of the time their

reaction is like oh wow whoa cool i would be whoa thanks terrified. I feel like if Gabe showed up to my door, I would be like, oh, Gabe is here to sell me a knife. Like he's going to unroll some magic cloth. He's working for Cutco? And he will show me his whole knife collection, and then we'll spend the next four hours talking about it. And you know what? The first three hours, I would be like, I have other things to do.

But I think by the last hour, I'm actually pretty charmed. Yeah, like, I think he could win me over. He seems to care so much. He does. He does. Y'all, Pokemon Legends Arceus. What a game.

This is the game that I have not gone back and played as much as I want because Elden Ring has consumed my life. But this is the game that I have not gone back and played as much as I want because Elden Ring has consumed my life. But this is the game that I have the most fondness for of everything that we've played this quarter where I get warm and cozy feelings about this game. And now that I know that that new Pokemon is coming out, and it kind of is borrowing from this one. Kind of, not all the way.

Well, kind of. Well, it is open world in the way that Pokemon Legends Arceus is. It sounds like they are going back to a more traditional style of catching Pokemon, which is sort of the biggest defining feature, I would say, of Arceus. But yeah, it looks good.

They got a duck with the fucking emo haircut and you know i like that um i i i keep this is one in my head that i keep saying i'm going to go back to when there's when there's more time but also i'm a father of two so it's like when is that well it will help when the release calendar gets a little less yeah that's that is a fair point we'll probably be doing like three episodes on it next two months when there's nothing to talk about i just this is the game i'm most jealous of people who got like really into it because i see people posting clips of like you know snorlax coming and just you know fucking up their whole shop i'm like man that looks fun i want to be chased by a big Snorlax.

But I didn't play that long. Fresh, did you end up getting into it at all? I played... No. I mean, I played like five, six hours, and I liked it, and it's not out of interest because I actually did enjoy it.

But I just couldn't, I don't know. I kept getting pulled to other games. I mentioned the warm and coziness of this game. The kind of like, I don't know, it's hard to define this of it all, is I really just like the world, which is weird because the visuals, as we talked about in the episode, are not great. But there's something, I don't know, almost like nostalgic about the simplicity of it. Sure. Kind of like a Nintendo 64-ish game that's just a little prettier that, I don't know, it takes me back in a way that it's Nintendo.

in a way that it's nintendo maybe it was intentional or maybe it just by accident and by dint of looking so bad uh ends up looking like the type of games i played you know when i was a early teenager um but yeah what a game i like games where you just can see pokemon just doing their thing i don't know that's what i that. That's what I love about Pokemon Snap is not so much the photo taking as much as it is like you feel like I am a fly on the wall in the habitat of these like imaginary creatures

and this, you know, they have gone to the lengths of establishing what their little ecosystem is like and it's so, like, I like that. It's funny to think that a giant a magnetized tank is a fly on the wall as it rolls through their house yeah a lot of pokemon are not bothered until you get like right up on them yeah uh yeah i i can't believe the next game is on this list who why uncharted legacy of thieves collection i put it there

okay so uncharted um legacy of thieves collection came out on ps5 it was basically a bundle of uncharted 4 and uncharted lost legacy and i feel like a lot of people played uncharted 4 but uncharted lost legacy is like an extremely strong arguably one of the best if not the best uncharted game that they've ever put together um really uh great uh characterizations uh the environment's really cool and i feel like a lot of people missed it because it came at the tail end of the uh playstation 4's life cycle and this seems like a really good opportunity to people kind of loop back on it i know it's coming to PC as well, so that's exciting.

But if you dig Uncharted and you never played The Lost Legacy, this is a very good excuse to do so. I might actually, sir. I've been, I've, I'm, I am curious, I've always been curious about Lost Legacy. I've heard nothing but amazing things about it. I feel like the messaging for that game was kind of weird

because I can't remember how many stories I read about like, is it DLC? Is it standalone? Do you have to have played 4 in order to... It is definitely a standalone thing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's really good. Maybe I should go back and try it. I keep waiting for the Naughty Dog

game that is like, oh, this is my sweet spot. Because I enjoy the stories in Uncharted, but the gameplay just feels a bit repetitive to me. And then I enjoy the stories in uncharted but i i the gameplay just feels a bit repetitive to me and then i enjoy the gameplay in last of us but then the story isn't like a hellscape that i don't enjoy at all i just surely you don't get it you don't get it man that's true that is true i'm just a bad gamer that's the thing i i think maybe we're the walking dead do you know what i mean like that's sort of what it's about um i mean maybe maybe you'd like keith the thief um which was

one of their first games uh naughty dog did that's a great fall game called keith the thief uh i love keith the thief and when's that revival coming? Please, Naughty Dog. Nobody talks about it. Nobody talks about Keef the Thief enough. Griffin, did you play Olly Olly World? Or was that only Friday? Fuck yeah, I played Olly Olly World. That game beats ass. I didn't actually play it.

I wanted to, but I didn't get around to it. Just put that shit on your Switch and then like every time I see, anytime I'm like between games on the Switch and have some time to kill away from my chunky boy PC, I will see the Olly Olly World thumbnail on the Switch UI and just be like, oh, I don't mind if I do. Don't mind if I do pop in there for a few downhill jams.

Thank you very much. Yeah, that game is perfect for just like dipping into for a half hour and doing some sick ass stunts while you keep like practicing the same line like over and over and over again. It's like the only Switch game I play with headphones on because the soundtrack is like part of the vibe in such a major way. It's exceptional, man. I think Olly Olly World is a pretty easy recommendation for virtually anybody. Henry loves it because I made the character look like me.

Yeah. And he'll play the left stick and I'll play the right stick and he'll just make me eat shit over and over again. And he thinks it is so funny to watch me just ragdoll like 20 feet into like a you know a wood chipper or whatever that's the dream that is the dream take that daddy take that dad uh griffin did you play super auto pets no oh my gosh y'all was that a resting state or did we talk no no we've we've

not really talked about it on the show i I've watched a little bit of clips on YouTube and Plant recommended this to me recently, but I haven't had the chance to really go into it deeply. It makes no sense that I am the person bringing this show because it is the most not me game and very much something everybody else here will love. It is kind of very, very loosely auto chess like in that you you have a collection of pets and you spend money before a round to pick which pets you want to add to your

lineup and then which bonuses you want to give them to upgrade them and then you click go and then you watch your your pets fight another team's pets online and then that's an auto chess yeah i mean it's basically auto chess i i would just say it's auto chess if you made it uh so simple that everyone could enjoy it and not be super intimidated by it um it is great. It's really, really great. What do you play on? And the art is cute. I don't think it's fully finished yet. I don't think it has hit 1.0,

but here's the most important thing. It's available on iOS. So that is definitely the place to play it and then eventually delete it because it will consume your entire life. I don't want that to happen. Yeah, well, I want to try it out and understand it because I haven't gotten that far.

I did see the cute little characters, and I like them. They were cute. I will say I was so skeptical of it because, again, not my type of thing. I played two or three rounds. I was like, eh like this isn't really for me and then a day later i was like well it's on my phone i should try it again and then i

won a couple fights i was like yeah maybe you know maybe maybe in a couple days i'll come back and then that third day came back and oh i was all in it and i I feel like that is the formula for these types of games. Yeah, the three-day rope-a-dope that they give you. What are you playing it on? What platform? Yeah, iOS. I'm playing it on iOS, yeah. Oh, okay. Well, I can do that.

I know. I can do that. I don't want to brag, but I do have an iPhone device. I don't know if anyone has in this group has actually played cyberpunk since it hit whatever version update why would i do that everyone seems to really like it i wanted to put it in i haven't played it but everyone seems to really be pretty amazed that they were able to like make it a lot better okay this is this is the these are the wages of not being on twitter

anymore i feel like it's stuff like this where it's like wait you're telling cyberpunk's good now you are shitting me the only way i would know that is if i was plugged into some sort of application where people like hey did you all hear cyberpunk's pretty good now when you shoot a gun the game doesn't crash that's awesome uh yeah i don't know point you haven't tried it have you yeah no i i've watched a few different videos on it especially digital foundry of like how they cleaned it all up i think people in video games like a comeback story a lot um and i also think that like maybe people were just a little bit like uh piling on when the game came out the first time around yeah so it's like mix of i mean it was pretty bad it was a bad game so like we were we were i will admit yeah we

were piling on but that's because there was so much to pile on too yeah i think also people were ignoring maybe some of the good parts because of the name you parts there were. Because there were so much bad parts, right? Yeah. And now it's like I don't think the game changed that much. I heard they like reevaluated the whole like skill system and the skill tree is like completely different and obviously the performance

stuff. I don't know. It's kind of amazing Anthem just got straight up cancelled. Because it feels like if you're willing to just be humiliated and spend a lot of money for two years you can make anything into a hit i mean like that is revisionist history a little bit they did put some they did their bet they i wouldn't say their best but they put but there was some sweat equity involved in Anthem's attempted salvation, I feel like.

It was mostly bad ideas, like getting rid of the fun loot exploits that people actually enjoyed doing in that game. Wow, Griffin, the one Anthem apologist left. Oh, don't get me wrong. Bad game, bad game, bad job. Poorly done. But, you know, they took a swing at facing it, but they

swung in the opposite direction. I also feel bad for that team because the senior leadership just keep bleeding out through most of that game's development. Yeah, they just really didn't want to work on Anthem was the thing they kept saying. It's possible. The Bob Dylan of video games. Okay, somebody wrote Horizon Forbidden West, and was the thing they kept saying. It's possible. The Bob Dylan of video games. Uh-huh.

Okay, somebody wrote Horizon Forbidden West, and I'm amending that with Dying Light 2, because I think... Oh, I didn't know we could do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. Which one of these did you like? I liked Horizon much better than Dying Light 2. But it is... Man, both those games just got their fucking

lunch eaten by the by the ring that is elden and i hate to i hate to keep coming back to this because i know there's people who are not vibing with elden ring and man this must be a really a lonely time for them but it's these games came out and they have the you know a a sort of shared scale and like foundational like design philosophy and one of them does it about a hundred billion times better than the other two so i mean they are pretty different i i view that i mean granted there are a lot of similarities but they're pretty different i think like from a minute to minute and like narrative standpoint like visual design standpoint like they're all yeah different but i do agree with you like you know horizon the first horizon came out at like the exact same time as breath of the wild and and that's a drag uh because there's

definitely like the one that ended i mean the first horizon i really like i know you didn't like it griffin but i really liked it um and and you're right like there is this moment of like another open world game coming out right around the same time and as much as I loved Horizon Forbidden West, you know, it's hard to not be totally, totally absorbed by Elden Ring right now. But again, those people that don't like Elden Ring, like, I have also seen lots of people who are like, I do not like Elden Ring, but boy, howdy, Horizon's doing it for me. Yeah. So, like, you know, different strips for different folks. Horizon is definitely the more approachable option of the two by like a mile. And I would say also like not to short shrift Dying Light, which again, narratively pretty terrible.

But from a like minute to minute like parkour standpoint, the best parkour game I've ever played feels amazing. I wish it was in not a zombie town because enough already but like that stuff is really really good so i think all these games kind of bring some of the table um there's just kind of one that is very close to my heart yeah our buddy kirk uh at triple click podcast on the most recent episode gave kind of like a taxonomy of of these open world games of like who who is the type of player for each of these and why and it was very helpful and very much clarified why something like horizon forbidden west is not necessarily for me right now there have been times i really really liked the original horizon but right now when i when i started that game that isn't the

world that i want that much story in when i'm in like that beautiful world i just want to go have fun in that world and when it keeps just pummeling me with story and it's not even whether the story is good or bad it's just it's just not what i want at that time um and it's silly because at the same time i've been playing dragon quest 11 on the steam deck which is all story and i love it but yeah man but that's what i expect when i play it like when i go into that that's what i want from that world and it delivers i think there's this weird thing that we've seen with all not all of these games Elden Ring is the exception but both Horizon and Dying Light they're so intent on making you eat these vegetables before you get to do the thing that is the entire selling point to the game and I just wish that they I don't know either had more confidence or more respect for the players not quite right

but like realization of what the player actually wants from the game which is weird because again they marketed it selling it as like hey go have a huge adventure in a beautiful open world not as hey talk to characters for the next 15 hours yeah uh that said all right all three of these are great games i think i think they're all legitimately good yes uh what what's what do we have what what happened next and then what i mean i guess destiny 2 which i you seem to like a whole heck of a lot a lot of people honestly like a whole heck of a lot people are calling it like the best expansion they've they have done on destiny and the best campaign I've heard that they've ever done. The campaign is great.

Cabal are nice now, is what I gleaned from the trailer. I was like, oh, they're nice now. Nice is, you know, it's just a question of, like, which horrific astral horror sort of entity is forcing these these these big bad rhino people these big bad rhino warmongers to like do war with you instead have we seen them without masks because i feel like they look like grimace i think that's just their faces oh it's tough to say it's okay to say um yeah no it's great i have not i finished the campaign and did like, you know, tried out all the new, um, you know, game modes and they're pretty great, but I have not, I, I have not even like touched the grind of, uh, of Witch Queen yet.

Cause, uh, you know, other big, big boy games came out that I've been, uh, ensorcelled by, but yeah, it's, it's fantastic, man. I think everybody should, I think folks should play Destiny. I think it's it's fantastic man i think everybody should i think folks should play destiny i think it's a good game now i think i'm gonna play the campaign at some point during the summer when it's a little bit quieter honestly with the big expansions like witch queen like don't put any pressure on yourself to do anything else just like play the campaign because yeah i'm not gonna do like the raid push and all that stuff no god no the raid does look fucking cool but it yeah i'll just watch on youtube

yeah uh yeah just just play the campaign and don't don't worry about doing anything else because it's uh destiny is still an extremely fun game to play uh and i think they've done some stuff in witch queen to make it even funner more fun is that it i think i think that's it for early i'm sure there are some we missed feel free to to shout them out on Besties Twitter. But those are the biggies for early 2022. Pretty busy stuff. Yeah. Some stuff has been talked about coming out this year that I don't actually know will actually come out this year.

But if it does, great year for gaming, folks. We're back. Half-Life 3. Games are back in a big way. Duke Nukem, baby. for gaming folks we're back half-life three games are back in a big way baby okay we're gonna take a break and after this we're gonna talk about the ukraine uh bundle which is just full of great games for a great cause okay we're back so you can right now go to itch.io and you can buy the bundle for Ukraine, which is hundreds and hundreds of video games, rule sets for tabletop games, there's digital books, soundtracks, comics, just tons and tons and tons of stuff. And you can donate what you'd like to get all of this stuff, which would be worth just an incredible amount of money if you were to just buy it straight off Steam. So I thought we could talk about some of our favorite games on this

to get people excited about it, and then go and contribute to the bundle. Yes. So I think there are some familiar ones that people will recognize, maybe from other bundles, but these are obviously fantastic games if you've never picked them up before. Celeste being one of them, Baba is You is another one, great puzzle game, and A Short Hike. Those are like the three that jumped out at me. It was like, oh, these are like easy game of the year contenders that if you've never played them you're

in for a serious treat and already off of three games you're getting a huge amount of value out of this bundle what do you what about you guys i mean there's so there's so much man uh uh freaking uh crosscode is on here yeah like a great like twin sticks action rpg style game um uh wonder song is on here just a neat little sort of adventure game super hot if you've never played super hot you should probably just go ahead and play super hot um there's a game on here i'd never heard of before called minute fundraiser and it's like a racing game version of minute the uh the game where you had like 30 seconds to explore which is also on the bundle yeah where you have like 30 seconds to explore before you die and you have to

like figure out how to like accomplish the different objectives of the game in that very limited time span uh towerfall is on here with all of its expansions like yeah it's basically every game that we've baldy's basics is on here if you want to learn like why teenagers keep talking about that game on youtube um yeah i feel like there's a lot of people that might uh hear a lot of games maybe don't play a lot of games but uh want to get just dip a toe in and yeah i mean for ten dollars which is the minimum uh donation you're dipping a very good toe and yeah for people up with you and toes i don't know i'm just in a toe mood or like russ's russ's new thing hey everybody

it's me russ and i'm i'm happy to announce i'm into toes now yeah they don't really do it for me but i don't know i guess i'm gonna i guess there's some people that do and you're thinking about you're thinking about the listeners i can appreciate that i am for people who listen to the show and don't play games which is a surprising amount of people there are two games on this that i recommend that you play one is called cloud gardens, which is basically little post-apocalyptic landscapes, and you plant seeds on them to reclaim the earth. And it's like a puzzle game, but very, very simple puzzles. It's much more about kind of like a bonsai tree of, you know, the feeling of growing stuff rather than the challenge of playing the video game. And similar to that, there's a game

called Mortician's Tale, which I adore. And it is about effectively the business of working at funeral homes. And it has a message that I won't spoil, but about like end of life. And what we do with our remains that I think is really nice and special and i was kind of surprised to see in a video game when i played it for the first time uh the great thing about this again for all of these games is you can just try them so something like celeste i know sometimes people are intimidated by or baba is you which is one of my favorite puzzle games of all time uh maybe seem intimidating hey you're getting in as part of this collection what better time than now to give to give it a shot yeah uh

quadrilateral cowboy is also on here which is my favorite games of the last 10 years maybe it's a it's by blendo so it's got the it's got the good jazz punk vibes, but also you've got a hacking deck that is just a crummy laptop that you go around and have to solve puzzles with. And it is so clever. It is such a clever game that's all about just sort of setting up pathways for yourself with timed hacks of like, okay, open the door for five seconds, then shut down the security for three seconds, and you just make paths for yourself that you sort of program out, and then you have to run them in first person. It is really, really fun.

I love that game. Sorry, one more thing. Well, also, Yingling is on this, which I think Fresh recommended to me, and I never played, and now I need to finally go play. Oh, yeah, very cool platformer where you're like a little paramecium type thing but most importantly for our listeners tower fall is on this

but you said already you both you both acted like i didn't just say it oh i didn't hear it i'm sorry well i was just gonna say i i want to emphasize it because a lot of people listen to our uh best of the decade episode and like towerfall really hey go play the game yeah go play it with some friends i understand that it's not uh the best time for local co-op to sort of make its uh re-emergence but uh yeah i mean you can't do better than towerfall in that department so you can't okay uh let's do some uh quick reader mail we we asked for some ask me anything and we got just that you know i'm just going to get a technical question out of the way uh this one's from rendezvous fancy takes flight a hay plant i just finished the besties

resties pod uh about bang for your buck games and i had never heard of drop seven until you mentioned it and i'm very curious about it but but when I check Google Play, it seems the game doesn't exist. No way to access it? Sad news. The game is not available anywhere. You're kidding me. I am not. It was created for area code.

Area code was acquired by Zynga. Zynga made an alternate version of the app, and apparently the app has just been, I guess, appearing and disappearing for the last few years. I reached out to Frank Lance, one of the creators of the game and the co-founder of AreaCode, who now runs the NYU Game Center, and he was like, yeah, I don't know. I'm not involved with it anymore. It might come back or it might not. So a really tough reminder of game preservation in the age of mobile games. You know what I really want to do is somehow buy the rights to this game

from Zynga because I'm sure that they have no interest in it and then I can just release it to the world and you do a video game podcast so you just say we could just say on the video game podcast like you gotta check out this new game right and we don't even have to talk about the rights part and then I could charge like

a hundred dollars for it right definitely worth a hundred bucks and you don't even like really need to say that you own it. No. That you make money out of it. Like that's a great, why has nobody thought of that? Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know what we could also say is we could mention it every week.

And then we could be like, yeah, you have to like pay in-app purchases for like the next like 50 weeks before you get to the good part. Yeah. Yeah. That is true. I've heard that. That's good. That's good stuff. This is good. This is good.

This is good. So related note, I went looking for Puzzle Quest 1 or 2 on iOS because Puzzle Quest 3 was such a letdown. And those games are also not available anywhere. And it's like, those are genre-defining games that are just like tears in the rain just lost to time

yikes uh from cameron do you think this will be the long-awaited year where both kirby and sonic somehow get a good game no because the sonic game is going to be bad and there that's that's all there is to it the kirby game based on the demo that I played, which is freely available if anyone wants to try it, is going to be spectacular. I am fully sold on it after the demo. The Sonic game, as Plant and I bet on, is going to be hot, fiery garbage. Is the Sonic game open world?

Yes, sort of. Open zone is what they're calling it. Open zone? It's open zone. That's great. I disagree because most sonic and kirby games are actually pretty good so already people people say that they're not but like let's review the tape they're actually quite good uh sonic games have come out in the past uh however many years pretty decent sonic mania we all liked that one right sure yes the sonic the hedgehog 4 games we all like we should only count the

3d games okay okay so i i agree that sonic forces and sonic lost world were not great but before that sonic generations great sonic colors also great sonic and the black knight okay not good sonic unleashed not as bad as people think sonic shadow what about shadow shadow oh you skipped you've skipped there are a lot more sonic games than that my friend you just skipped right past if you wanted to get a bad one, Sonic the Hedgehog, the 2006 remake, where he kisses the lady. That's a low blow. That's the bad one.

But, I mean, you know, Sonic doesn't make Sonic, the creator of the Sonic games. Sonic doesn't make games, period. No, he just runs fast. He just runs very fast, and he says funny shit, and he loves sloppy hot dogs.

Yeah, and same thing with Kirby. Kirby games are for the most part quite good they're just not always made for like you know pro elite gamers yeah i don't want to bundle kirby and sonic games together because i think kirby's hit to miss ratio is much better than sonic they're not they're tied and you can't take apart from each other Kirby is the balloon that's gonna take Sonic out of crap town uh one more question from Bonnie if you had to summarize

yourself in three games which games would you pick I think we should given that there are three of us yeah we should each pick a game that represents ourselves wow that's not what the question asked for at all but a game that represents ourselves wow that's not what the question asked for at all but that's that's because otherwise that's nine games that's gonna take a lot of games that is a lot of games um i'm gonna say

probably animal crossing is in there. Man, probably some MMO bullshit. I mean, it's tough to divide this from, like, the games I play a lot of. Is that how we are defining ourselves? It says a lot about you what games you spend time with, I think. That's fair. Yeah, and also, like, I wouldn't, I don't know if I would call you, like, a destiny person. No, I wouldn't call you. I don't think that defines you.

I would never volunteer that. And then I would say Leisure Suit Larry, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not doing it. My game is Parcheesi. That represents me, personally. I mean, probably some Pokemon. I'm going to say Pokemon Leaf Green.

Oh, no. Heart Gold. Okay. That was a close one. Earthbound, BoJackson Baseball for the NES. Yeah. And that's it. I did it in two.

You don't really need any more than that. No. BoJack's Baseball for the NES. What a game. He knew video games. Among the other things that he knew, he knew video games. That's true. He did know bonus games. A real reference

for four people who are listening to the show right now. We did it. We made it through this episode sports fans it's like the aged sports fans uh hey have you guys been playing anything else that's not that doesn't rhyme with melvin bing griffin did you play um triangle strategy yeah i've played a couple hours of it and done two battles i think that uh we pulled an audible and decided not to do that game for this episode because we knew that it was a slow burn uh as casey musgraves would say and it it is that i I love strategy RPGs. It's like my Jimmy Jammer, but the amount of just plotting dialogue

that you have to get through to get to that stuff is even by my tastes, which I think trend in the direction of liking that stuff, is a bit unpalatable do you like the the combat systems though uh i mean there i haven't i don't think i've gotten to the point where the combat systems like uh like establish themselves as being different at all from yeah sure uh other other strategy rpgs um it's also and i don't know if this is a, I played Octopath Traveler and to a lesser extent, I think that the Bravely Default, Bravely Second games kind of have that sort of visual aesthetic. But this is definitely in the Octopath Traveler, like gorgeous 3D or I guess 2.5D sort of pixel art vibe.

3d or i guess 2.5d sort of pixel art yeah vibe uh it looks really blurry and not as good as i remember octopath traveler looking and i'm wondering if it's because i am playing it on the oled switch and there's some sort of like scaling issue that was not true for octopath traveler because the the resolution would be the same right yeah i that's probably not it and i'm a it's possible that yeah maybe it's just like more say like down res that it looks pretty it looks pretty blurry and not as good as i remember octopath looking but that's neither here maybe maybe your vision is getting worse that's i mean that is absolutely true uh yeah i'm to spend some more time with it. It's just this week has been kind of a mess with like sicknesses and other shit going wrong down here. Austin ways.

So I've not had like a ton of time to sit down with my Switch and spend time with it. But we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. Wait and see. Don't buy it until I tell you to buy it. That's it. You should always wait. you should always wait you

should always wait for the griffin's stamp of approval before you make any decisions uh i've been testing uh odin pro which is one of those new uh oh yeah emulation handhelds um and setting up emulation remains just not fun yeah it's the, but the most important thing is I got Bust a Move 99 running on it. Good. And I'm back in Bust a Move. Yeah. Bust a Move, I mean, the inspiration for thousands of iOS Android puzzle games, the ones where you shoot a little ball at some other balls that are colorful

and then they pop yeah but oh the art style here it is delightful it's just so crisp and colorful and it takes me back is that the dreamcast one uh 99 i believe is the saturn one oh um yeah know, for real gamers. And also, Turning Red comes out by the time that this episode airs. Very exciting. And people should watch it. It rules. I cannot wait for more people to see it. It's on Disney+.

It is a Pixar movie. I think it is in the vein of the more character-driven, less franchise-y Pixar movies like Soul and Luca. But I hear it's very good. Yeah. Hey, I got an iOS game I've been playing. Can you believe it? It's a free-to-play roguelike called Guidus, G-U-I-D-U-S.

And it is like a very sort of, at first glance, simple, like proper rogue style game where you're going through dungeons sort of one step at a time and you bump into enemies to attack them uh it is not turn based like those sort of classic rogue games are like everything is moving in real time so you have to so it's it's something between a classic rogue game and like a Crypt of the Necrodancer, albeit without the rhythmic element to it. And there's like a ton of different characters to unlock. And each one has their own sort of way of attacking or doing like special charging attacks. There's lots of free to play stuff, a lot of like opportunities to watch ads to unlock a new character or buff the ones that you've got now um but i would say that there is plenty to do without necessarily having to do

that stuff uh and it's it is fun i've i have really uh liked my time with it and it's free so it's like you you know there's no reason not to check it out uh there's there's a lot to do there russ i think you would i think you would get a lot out of it yeah that sounds good fresh anything for you no i've just been playing world and ring in my spare time how are you just can we have like two minutes of how's everybody feeling about it liking it feelings i'm i'm having a very tough time convincing myself that's not my favorite game of all time yeah i'm having the same i think i'm nearing i may be four fifths of the way through the game like i think i'm getting close and i am already excited to like try it again because there's so many side quests that i have just missed and a lot of like weapons and shit that i have gotten

that i have not been able to use because of my build that i'm like oh but next time though look out yeah it's spectacular chris point won't finish it but i applaud him for trying when i finish it i'm gonna feel that i mean i don't know if i'll feel validated i'll feel nagged you know what's good about that? Win-win. Because if you don't finish it, I was right. Wow. He's playing 4D chess. We can't fuck with that, Chris. Okay, let's recap the games, because there are a lot of them today. Here we go. Nobody Saves the World.

Pokemon Legends Arceus. Uncharted Legacy. Of Thieves. Legacy of Thieves Collection. Olly Olly World. Super Auto Pets, which is free on iOS right now. Cyberpunk 2077, the Remix, Remaster Edition. Horizon Forbidden West and Dying Light 2.

Destiny 2. Elden Ring. I dropped a little bit of Dragon Quest XI in there. For the Ukraine bundle. Dragon Quest XI, holy shit. I'm so excited you're playing that game. That's one of my favorite games ever. It's fantastic. Yeah, we should talk about that on another episode when we're in the slow period.

Bundle for Ukraine, we talked about Tennis, Short Hike, Baba is You, Celeste, Quadrilateral, Cowboy, Golf Peaks, Cloud Gardens, Mortician's Tale, Crosscode, Kingdom, Two Crowns. I don't actually know if we ended up mentioning it, but I'm including it here because I know Hoops loves it. Wandersong, Superhot, Quadrilateral Cowboy again. I can't believe I wrote it down twice. Yinglet and Towerfall. And then stuff we're still playing right now,

Elden Ring, obviously, Bust a Move 99, Triangle Strategy, Gaius, I think is how you pronounced it, and then the film Turning Red is on Disney Plus right now. Man, it's a good, it's a, for media,

it's a good time. For most other stuff, not as good. But man, media, keep it going, guys. Doing great, media. And then next week, who knows? Next week's gonna be a surprise. It's a mystery episode. Well, here, we will disclose this fact.

It's just gonna be me and maybe a guest, but we do not know this may be besties first ever one-hander uh russ is going to do his one-man show called it's called 501 sundays and it's all about his love of baseball i was i was raised in brooklyn to me you could to me you could probably recite all of Billy Crystal is it 700 Sundays 700 Sundays

so this is man I don't think ice cream used to be so much better back then I would listen to that oh man I would put that on repeat I would fall asleep to that every night uh yeah chris why don't you wrap it up you've been you've really taken charge of this episode and i'm proud of you for it you've done a great job thank you so much that's it for the besties

uh i am christopher thomas plant on behalf of griffin mccarroy and russ prushtick and the missing uh justin mccarroy thank you so muchhtick and the missing Justin McElroy. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you want to follow us on Twitter, we're at thebestiespod. If you want to leave a review, it helps especially if you leave it on Apple Podcasts. But hey, you can really leave it wherever. I think Spotify

does reviews now too if you're on that platform. And hey, if you want to support us in other ways, we have a coin with a giraffe on it and you can find that on the mac it's not legal tinder we have to say that correct and it's not yeah someone tried to buy a pack of cigarettes with one of these coins and we got a mean letter from the from from the irs you could barter it for another animal coin. That's the only way you could do it.

Yeah, another podcast animal coin. Yeah. That's it, though. And that's it for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best video games? Besties!