The Besties - The Best Games of the First Half of 2023!

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

We're halfway done with this great experiment we call 2023, and hot dang, there's been some certified club bangers in the mix, huh? We're spending this episode going over the best of the best, the biggest blanks in our backlog, and the most anticipated titles still to come!Games discussed: Fire Emblem Engage, Dead Space, HiFi Rush, Metroid Prime Remastered, Like a Dragon Isshin, Wo Long, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Have a Nice Death, Dredge, Pizza Tower, Tchia, Paranormasight, Rusted Moss, Mr. Sun's Hatbox, Meet Your Maker, Dead Island 2, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Boltgun, Laya's Horizon, Diablo 4, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI, Super Mega Baseball 4, Mars First Loigistics, Battlebit Remastered, Honkai Star Rail, Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, Shoulders of Giants, Sun Haven, The Caped Crusade, Starfield Controller, Past Lives, King Kong, Siren: Survive the Island 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!

Here's the thing, guys. I have been looking for the moment to talk to you about this, but, well, I finished two books this week, and I think that maybe I'm kind of like a books guy now. You have been publicly anti-books for so long, just such a long time. That is a wild no. What I have said is that some games that are extremely boring

are books-level boring. Right. That's what I've said is that some games that are extremely boring are books level boring right that's what i it's funny that sounds to me but that's a character you know oh sure we love to see does that character have a name change is that a named character what does that character have a name no no uh but but i just feel like maybe i like books you know like they're easy to carry around they got so much in them there's so many different kinds they have some about video games i don't know if you guys got into worlds of power by fx9 but those are just a series about video games but it's books about video games it's like both you know i played some of those but the problem is that they kept

spoiling the video games oh so that's true and that pissed me off so much the other problem i have with books is that i keep losing my save games. Oh, interesting. Speak on that. Well, normally saves just like stick around when you save your game, but with books, you have to like keep the bookmark. And if you lose the bookmark,

you just lose your save. That's your problem. You got to be like me and never stop reading. I'm a voracious reader. I don't know if you heard, but I finished two books this week. No, no, no.

So I'm on Justin's Goodreads right now, and there is some messiness here. He did finish two books. One of them is a receipt for Soul Calibur on the Sega Dreamcast, and the other is the instruction manual for Soul Calibur on the Sega Dreamcast. I think that counts. I think that counts.

I think that counts. That's books, yeah. Okay. Don't try to embarrass me. No, no. I'm not trying to. I'm just trying to adjudicate. Do stay out of my Goodreads, though.

That's not for your consumption, okay? That's a private list that is somehow public. I need you to stay out of my Goodreads. It's amazing how many receipts you have on here. It looks more like it's like a tax audit. Yeah, I list everything. I listed the, you know, the printed out HBO guy that they mail the hotels back

in the 90s. I kept all those and I reread those. Yeah, it says you have 1984 through 2003. I guess when the Sopranos ended, you kind of got it. It says here, guy in store with shirt with words. So that's a...

And the review says, five out of five stars, howlingly funny. Wow. That's great. my name is justin mackler and i know the best game of the week my name is griffin mackler i know the best game of the year. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best games of the first half of the calendar year 2023. My name is Ross Froschek, and I know the best games of the week. Welcome to the besties, where

we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It is a video game club, and just by listening, my friend, you have joined our illustrious ranks. Welcome. We are, as we are wont to do, wanting to take a break here to just survey the landscape this is living history we're looking at the first two quarters of this year we call 2023 and seeing like how is it going how's it going i gotta say that before we get into it

seems to be going good yeah it's going incredibly fast i don't like how long has it been since a year with this many releases that were big and great can't remember it's been that long i mean last year was pretty good wasn't it it's yeah this this year is i think cream of the crop quite honestly it's a good one and uh we're going to talk about that and so much more right after this break. So January was bad. We can start there. January was a little... January was... Okay, not January.

But, because that was just... They didn't release any games in January. And we should mention that we're not going to spend too much time on Q1 because I think we already did a Q1 episode, so I think we're going to breeze through it. But Justin is right. January was a little light, as it tends to be. I think it was really just Fire Emblem Engage.

But Plant, do you want to scream through the Q1 games that we thought were extra duper special and will probably show up maybe in Games of the Year? Yeah, for sure. And let me know if you all want to talk about any of these from january yes fire emblem engage from february dead space dead space is actually the end of january so that is inaccurate well if the end of january is basically like february it's like a sneak preview of february if you haven't played it's new to you and fe And February is so short that they're kind of, you know, like, it's due in January.

It's solid. Dead Space, Hi-Fi Rush, Metroid Prime Remastered, Like a Dragon, Isshin, now we're in March, Wolong, Resident Evil 4. Can we just pause on Wolong for one second? That was a great game that I feel like the world has just completely forgot. I did not play it. You didn't play it? It seems like a Griffin game.

Griffin. I really, really like it. It's really good. It's definitely got some Sekiro vibes to it. Yeah, it's a delight. Yeah, it's a really good game. It's hard. Yeah.

It's hard. It's very hard. But it's quite hard. Yeah. Okay. It's hard. It's a hard, it's very hard. But it's quite good. How did you not play it? I don't know, man. I was absent that week. Put that on your list of shame. You like that one a lot.

You're nasty. Also this month. It's not even on Summer Sale. It's not even on Steam. It's Game Pass. It's Game Pass, baby. I'll loan you the money, Griffin, if you need it, if you're hard up.

Steam says it's mostly negative. So are you guys sure that means it probably has a woman that is presented as anything other than a sex object if a Steam score is in that range it's probably and frame drops thank you girl

it says no babes no frames no babes no frames two star also in March Resident Evil 4 remake incredible have a nice death really good if you like that kind of thing if you like silk song no it's not so it's like hollow knight and plan to enjoy silk song at some point one day with your grandkids on your lap yeah i think it's more 2d hades than it is silk song i don't want to give people the wrong idea. It's not a Metroidvania, but it is very good. Yeah. Dredge. Love this

game. Excellent game. I feel like Dredge is going to be the dark horse at the end of the year. It's definitely going to show up right now. It's easily in my top 10, if not top 5 of the year. Fantastic. So fucking good. Pizza Tower. I haven't played a ton of this one.

I know you've played it. Griffin griffin you said you just got it yeah pizza tower has sort of made a big splash on like kids youtube for some reason uh and so henry was like hey let's check this one out and of course i wanted to i wanted to like sort of scope it out before doing that just to make sure there was no uh you know he's six and there's a lot of games out there that's not appropriate for a six-year-old but it's great it's great it's uh it's way too mechanically complex i think for him but i have been enjoying uh i've been enjoying playing it i'm not even like a big wario uh world sort of fan um but fan. But when you start stringing together wall runs and dives and all that shit,

it is a good time. Looks so good, too. I can't believe how good... I can't believe this game looks the way it looks and runs the way it runs. It's really, really... It's like a playable zine. It's like a playable zine. It's like a playable zine.

Yeah, I would say it's like a playable version of Boogerman. Like they finally brought back Boogerman and they said, let's make it really great. And they nailed it. I know, I love the format here and I have not gotten into a lot of the old Wario games, but going through a level very slowly, getting to the end,

and then having to sprint back with alternate paths, it just feels good. It feels almost like a heist. Yeah, I don't think that was in the WarioWare games. I think that's a new thing. You think that's new to Pizza Tower? I feel like there was something like that.

I don't know. It's been forever since. I mean, it's been forever since a Wario World game has come out. Yeah. Steam on this one, over 30,000 positive reviews, overwhelmingly positive. That is a tough thing to pull off. The community for this game is bizarrely fervent.

I know there's a very popular subreddit, and I keep seeing random memes pop up, but for being a pretty small 2D indie game, has developed quite the following, which is great. I mean, good for them. That's awesome. Also, Chia, which I played more of this weekend, and wow, that game is just really special. It's such a pleasure to play.

It's a delight yeah can one of you kind of explain a little bit of what this game is because i know we've talked about a little bit but not a lot it's um gosh the setup was that it was uh made by people in new caledonia which is a very small pacific island nation and it's all set on new caledonia and but uh justin i know you've dug the gameplay a lot yeah it's cool it's well first off it feels like you're getting a bit of a cultural education kind of like playing this game you're learning about a culture you probably don't and that sounds boring but it's really not no it's really cool and and the gameplay is is really interesting you play a girl who's got the ability to like basically inhabit objects and

animals in the world. Um, and you're, it's a, it's a sort of like a big quest where you're navigating between these different islands with, with the, with your boat.

Um, but you have this ability to like psychically leap into fish, uh, for example, or like a bird, if you want to be able to fly to your next destination or a fish or even stuff as simple as like a rock you can inhabit a rock like a can or something a can whatever to chuck it to try to solve like uh different puzzles throughout

the world it's really really cool uh beautiful to look at so chill to play i was gonna say that mechanic is so robust that it really feels like in the way that like nintendo's like tears of the kingdom like building system is like so like there are so many approaches and so many options like it wouldn't feel out of place if like nintendo did something similar in a way to like expand tears of the kingdom where you could just inhabit like any bokoblin or any creature and like fuck around that way it's like really impressive that they were able to pull that off yeah it's great yeah I I also think it is one of the few open world games that solves the kind of overarching colonialism problem of how do you make an open world game where it's not about capturing land and killing every life form in it yeah um and still uh make it enjoyable uh yeah it's something special uh i will say i think it's based off a fictionalized version of new caledonia yeah and

it's like a lot of because there's like flying machines and like well yeah yeah i think it's like even culturally they they kind of branch off um uh and then last one before we dig into q2 paranormal site which remains in my top five for the year and i desperately want all of y'all to play it it's the first time i've ever heard you say that word that's not true that's not true so good i'm gonna start having to talk about it like i talk about not having to get in your brain before i don't know what I'm seeing now, but... I want us to all maybe play it... Google, remember. I want us to play it for Halloween.

This was a reading game, right? Wasn't it? It is a reading game, so this might be your time to shine. Oh, listen, bud. If I'm going to put myself through the arduous task of reading, I am definitely going to do it in something that gets me literary credibility with all my book talk friends. So that is the first quarter. Now we're getting into Q2. And this is stuff that we haven't really kind of, we haven't done a Q2 episode.

That's true. We did a Q1 episode for people who want to dig into all those games. We did a U2 episode where we talked about all of our favorite hits from Bono and the gang. We did a QT episode, but that was just about me and some of my adorable looks. Looks. Yeah. We don't talk much about the QTE episodes. It's press day.

April, are you ready? Are you ready, y'all? Yeah. Here's some games that we have here. Rusted moss rusted moss let's start there because i know sweet fresh loves this game continue to love it i know there was some doubt about people saying that maybe it wouldn't make my game of the year list but it's still on there that game rules if you love metroidvanias and this one has a fucking bungee cord in it. I never could make... I really did try with that one.

Couldn't get it to feel good to me, just the playing of it. I spent a lot of time never quite... It is a learning curve. I will say this is one that I felt sort of the same way, where I wanted to enjoy it more than I was actually enjoying it, but then when I made liberal use of the, I guess, accessibility sort of options uh yeah sort of celeste celeste like in nature it

it did uh it did sort of get there for me yeah i i thought this game was great visually really cool and and uh really unique mechanic that isn't really in any other metroidvania so yeah if you dig it go i'm gonna give my underground hit for maybe the whole year so far to meet your maker um that game absolutely slaps um justin and i went back and played it for a stream uh a few weeks ago and i had not played it uh since april and it's it still goes man it still works i hope it finds enough people so that they can continue to invest in it because it's not like it's not everything it could be yet but it's really very very cool yeah um just that that model of uh mario maker doom is just so it's so good it's so

fun to mess around with it's fun to build it's fun to play it's so fun to mess around with. It's fun to build. It's fun to play. It's fun to die and lose and then try again and again and again. It's funny. It is a – the conversation that happens between level creator and level player is genuinely hysterical and exciting, and I can't say enough good stuff about it. I love it. I see two games on this list that I'm a little surprised to see here. Advanced Wars 1 and 2, Remastered,

and Dead Island 2. Who claims these? I just put Advanced Wars on there because I thought you boring guys liked it. You were trying to do us a solid. I was trying to give you all a platform to talk about this one.

It's not bad. It's just not. It wouldn't make my cut, certainly. I was trying to give you all a platform to talk about this. It's not bad. It's just not. It wouldn't make my cut, certainly. I kind of dug Dead Island, too. Yeah? It is absolutely, like, thuddingly sort of dull in terms of, like, it's not a brainy game. And the mechanics are sort of, like, run around, get the piece of trash, tape it to some some other trash and kill a bunch of zombies with it but the environments are really really good and i know that's a weird thing to highlight but like

when you enter a home like it is so richly detailed it feels like that's where a lot of the many many years of development that went into this game and you can feel like the time spent on these environments and it doesn't necessarily carry over to like a perfect gameplay experience uh but i i had phone that i did not complete it don't plan to return to it but if you're if you know if you see it on sale you want like an open world kind of thing and dying lights too hardcore it did i did find it funny when you enter a home because although i agree with you like aesthetically they look pretty amazing and unique like you basically can't interact with anything in that

house it's like a png basically environment that you can enjoy there's like and what do you mean you can pick up all the trash in there and yeah that's true there is a lot of trash uh for april the best elevator pitch that i think I will hear all year, Spelunky meets Metal Gear Solid 5. Did I invent that? I think I came up with that elevator pitch. I'm pretty positive that it was in the email from the creator of the game.

Oh, that's possible. That sent us code, and then I used it to get you to play it. But I like that your brain... I think it's mine. I'm going to call James on it. No, you definitely should. You definitely should take credit.

Mr. Sun's Hatbox is fantastic. I completely love it. I do not have much of a desire to play it again, which is not bad. I felt like I just went really hard on this game for a week or two and saw everything that i needed to see which is rare for a game as fresh it clicks to give me shit about to just feel like i saw everything there is and then to be done with it yeah um it's a delight it's uh 2d colorful and very cute and weird and i think everybody should give it a try i didn't play it in multiplayer but it seems like multiplayer would also be very silly and fun yeah we should steam fresh we should go back and yeah it's on steam that'd be fun but i

think it's only local multiplayer is the thing yeah but we can do that over steam that's true there's no problem um uh let's go into may uh star wars jedi survivor hoops you had a kind of a question about this one i was just curious if you all stuck with i was really enjoy i really was enjoying this one and i feel like i fell in the exact same trap that i did with the first one where i was like yeah that's that's cool i'm not really being pulled along you know there's other stuff coming out i just kind of fell off it after there's this truly stunning sequence about i don't know how what percentage of the way through that game it's about halfway about halfway there's like great and i did that i was like that really was great

and then i stopped playing it and i don't and i i feel the same guilt about stopping playing it that i felt with the other one did you guys like go any further with that or did you i finished i finished it um and i would say i think from a like a splashy panache standpoint that moment which uh i'll give minimal spoilers but it takes place at the end of like a wind temple sequence is definitely the peak of the game from like a splashy standpoint it's like the biggest wow factor moment of the entire game um i think the game gets a lot more interesting after that because you have this air dash effectively that like really opens up the exploration and you can do all sorts of crazy shit i think narratively jedi survivor does not hit the hot at the heights that the first game did

i think it kind of falls apart a little bit and has some difficulty with boss fights towards the end but overall i thought it was really good. I think the big question I have is whether they've dealt with a lot of the technical issues because I was playing on PS5 and it, like, performance mode or even non-performance mode at 30 FPS, neither of them were running very well when I played it, and this was about two months ago.

So hopefully they've smoothed that stuff out. But if they have, it really would be one of my favorite games of the year even though the narrative didn't quite land for me uh I fell off okay I yeah I fell off a lot of games this year I feel like I'm looking at this list and I'm like oh yeah one of the things with doing this show is like I feel like I and it's not a complaint it's a cushy problem to have, but I do tend to fall off of stuff that I'm just simply enjoying and not completely obsessed with

when we have a game. Especially the longer stuff. Like, we do a lot of, like, Jedi Survivors, like, a 30 to 40 hour game. It's tough, right? Because I kind of feel like I got it, you know what I mean? I wanted to be a Jedi for a while, and I was a Jedi for a while, and I was a Jedi for a while, and that's all fine.

I know I will instantly forget the story the moment it ends. So I feel like it's not the biggest thing in the world to not finish it. It's not a judgment on the quality. It's just sort of like, I got what I needed. I think that is a healthy way to go about loving video games. Also, look at how many video games are out this year that are so good. There's just so many. That's the catch-22. If there are

going to be this many good games, you can't finish them all. A little game called Tears of the Kingdom. I think it's called Tears. Tears of the... We're not going to say a whole lot about Zelda today because next week we're going to do a full spoiler episode of it. Oh, hell yeah week we're going to do a full spoiler episode

of it. Oh, hell yeah. So, we're going to give you a little bit of warning. Has everyone finished it? Plant, did you finish it? Plant's not going to finish it. No, there's no way I'm going to finish that game. No, I'm very slowly making my way through it. I'm consistent. I have no desire to speedrun it.

Well, three of us have finished it at this point, and I finished it with a bullet, so I'm definitely very eager to talk about it. Yeah, other stuff I have here, Bolt Gun, which we did an entire episode of the rest he's on, but just to say I'm loving these demakes that have a modern twist or hook to them, and the Bolt Gun itself in this game is one of my

favorite guns in a video game. Hey, guns in real life. Gun in a video game? Good. And the kind of teleport combo that you have with that where you kind of dash towards enemies. It's so good. And then the biggie. Have y'all played Leia's Horizon?

I literally haven't heard of it. Just download it. Really? This is wild to me. Have y'all played Leia's Horizon? I literally haven't heard of it. Just download it. Really? Actually, yeah. It's not on a list. This is wild to me. It is the new game from the people who made Alto's Adventure, Alto's Odyssey. And it is a 3D open world game about gliding. And the way the game works, this game is incredible.

Oh, here's why you haven't heard of it by the way it's a netflix mobile game uh so it came out on may 2nd so it's effectively buried um but open world game and you start out at the top of there's a mountain island and in the middle is like the peak and you start from that peak and then you can turn in any direction and just glide down the mountain kind of like a wingsuit and there's like various goals like fly near trees or you know go under bridges or things like that right which gives you upgrades you do more of those which gives you new capes which allows you to do more things this looks fucking dope yeah it's cool as hell and this is one of the coolest design choices I've seen. So the way that they made the world,

there's a whole bunch of biomes in the world and reasons to go to different places while still being an open world. But since they know that you, most of the time, are going to start at the center, imagine like a pie chart, right? With a whole bunch of different sections and you're starting at the middle or a

pizza um and if you look out from the center of a pie chart it's all a bunch of like little tiny little corners of space but as you get further and further away from the center they're able to widen and widen widen into like their own big worlds so from your point of view, you see like seven or eight biomes, but they look very tiny. But as you dig into them, they feel humongous. What are the controls like? Is it motion control? The controls are you put your thumbs on the touch screen and you move them up or down. Kind of like if you're imagining, like put your arms all the the way out make a T pose with your arms. I'm not

strong enough to do that. Okay, so imagine making a T pose with your arms and then you lift your arm, your hands left up or down. Like your left hand up. Imagine you're a plane and then lift your sides up and down. Well, there he goes!

Russ, come back! How does Russ have any happy thoughts? That's weird. But it feels, it takes a second to get used to. And then it kind of feels like wrestling with your phone. And wrestling with a video game controller in the past, bad. But this is like, no, more quite literally, it feels like you're like actually grappling your phone.

It's very strange. Do you think maybe it would just be better when it eventually hits a platform that has controls? No, no. I actually think this feels really good. It just, it feels like you're very hands-on with the game. Okay.

Yes, it is great for people who are weirdos like me, who like Riders Republic or Steep. It scratches at itch.ch but really if you just like the alto's adventure alto's odyssey games this is the closest i've seen both visually and feel wise a 3d version of that experience yeah that's like it rules and that in it and just yeah abysmal that it's been effectively buried it will again i think it'll find its time eventually i'm

sure it's a year long exclusivity or something eventually it'll hit other stuff is anyone still playing diablo 4 uh i finished it and got my barbarian to like level 60 or so i did some like in-game progression shit i never made it to um world tier 4 which is like the end game because it just wasn't rewarding my time that I was spending with it. Even for a Diablo game, right? Like that's a value judgment that I'm willing to adjust for Diablo. But I mean I was spending – I don't have huge chunks of time that i can hop on and just you know sink into a video game like that anymore so i would play it for like an hour do a bunch of these like nightmare

dungeons do like a big open world hell tide event and then like not get any upgrades for any of my armor or get like the same three pieces of legendary gear over and over and over again and i was like well okay that's i'm done with that i'm not yeah i i enjoyed the core loop of this game but not nearly enough to just you know piss my time away into it like that um but they've made some adjustments to that stuff i might dip back in for season one uh just to you know try a different class and see if you know the the the feel of it has has improved because i did like my time with the game yeah it's a it's a strong game i i

i agree with you i haven't finished the campaign i'm very close um yeah i've just sort of gotten into this kind of repetitive loop that isn't super rewarding to me but yeah again maybe season one starting fresh will help. Yeah. Good game though. Street Fighter 6. I think that one like all hit us like a lot better than we thought it would. Yeah. It's great.

Punching random hot dog cart guys. So much fun. They did such a good job on that game. Oh, you know what? You know what I think it's time for? I think it's time for Griffin's Final Fantasy 16 double feature two hour show. Mini show. Oh, you know what I think it's time for? I think it's time for Griffin's Final Fantasy XVI double feature two-hour show. Oh, yeah, because Griffin wasn't here last week. I was not here last week. I desperately wanted to talk about Final Fantasy XVI, but I had no voice.

And so that was a tragedy for me. for me um i i feel like i just kind of bounced off it uh like a day or two ago after playing for god i don't know 15 hours wow i put a lot of time into it i i think i got about halfway through i made it to sort of the third time period the third age of that game um and realized that it was just kind of uh it was it was leaving me a little bit nonplussed um i have played every final fantasy game i i every mainline final fantasy game certainly to uh to their their conclusions and i think this may be the first one that i don't do that for um i i want to say this i i think that the i think it's fun to play. I think the combat stuff is quite fun. I think the way that it gives you sort of the freedom to put together your own combo-making machine is pretty cool. And whenever I'd run into a big group of enemies and just start slashing and comboing my way through them, I really did like that.

way through them uh i really did like that i am not like a character action games are not sort of my favorite genre and that is i would say very much what this game is um and so like playing a mainline final fantasy game that is not really rpg uh and it's just sort of a character action game, a good character action game, it's kind of like going to, like, a really nice, uh, you know, Italian restaurant and, uh, getting some jambalaya, and you're like, oh, this is good jambalaya, not really what I was expecting from here, um, I think that my main issue, and the reason I am bouncing off it is I do not find, with some very, very few exceptions, the characters to be very interesting or the world to be very interesting compared to Final Fantasy's past. I think that this sort of just like straight over the plate medieval thing that they've got going on is not, is not, uh,

I, I don't find it very interesting to explore. Where are you at? Where are you at? Story. Like, I'm trying to figure out where, cause I, I felt similarly as it,

until it sort of like grew past. Again, I don't want to spoil it. I just had a, I just had a, a, uh, there was a,

uh, a death that happened that was pretty major, and then five years jumped. So that's a pretty considerable, yeah, you made it. I played a fucking lot of it. I feel good about the amount of the game that I've played. I'm really, I'll be honest, I'm sort of like, I'm sort of in this, I think I've gone so far

that I kind of need to see how it shakes out. I think what you're bumping up against... You could watch it on YouTube. What? You could just watch it on YouTube. No, but I like it. This is the problem. This is what I want to say. Like, this is what I'm stuck with, right?

I'm still playing it because I like the action part so much. I think part of what Griff is bumping up against, or at least this has been my sort of take, it is a really good character action game that is paced like a final fantasy rpg where you can't have a really fun combat system and then make a really fun character action game that then very very very frequently gets derailed um by by um these cut scenes that are honestly like ponderous and yeah not extremely great to what like they're just not super well shot or directed like i mean it's weird to comment on

but like it's they're just no you compare it to like a metal gear solid cut scene which even though it is total nonsense at least it's visually interesting right or compare it to any other final fantasy game right like even even 13 which is not good like that world looked fucking crazy right uh uh 14 is an unfair comparison because it's so like massive but like uh i don't know i kind of feel the same way about 15 a little bit where it was just like big open fields and a bunch of bunch of nature that wasn't very interesting to look at this is a this this franchise is like so meaningless now just because the wide range of like genres and uh you know types of storytelling that they have done is that it is not uh cohesive i feel like and so like it for me it is not a preciousness of like this isn't my final fantasy it's just like if if i have to watch these characters that uh i think are honestly pretty

boring in a world where i don't really care much about the you know the stakes of it and it's not that interesting to look at it's just i i just, I reached a point where I think I was, I had the gumption in me to see it through just because of my history with this franchise. But I realized, like, if this game was called Final Fantasy Origins of Light, I would have fucking quit a long time ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's, I think, kind of how I feel about it. Interesting. So, yeah, pretty disappointed. I'll be honest. I feel like there is a lot of, I feel like every side quest is pretty terrible. I feel like the equipment stuff is kind of meaningless. It's like, oh, I the the gear for defeating this icon and then

i'll go home i'll turn that into a sword until i beat the next icon and then i'll get the thing that i need to make the next sword that has a higher attack thing and oh i found a necklace that makes this power eight percent stronger it's it's it just like there's just not much there that i am that's okay enjoying aside from the combat which makes me wish that it was a 10 hour all the side quests are completely pointless and kind of boring except there's one that lets that gives you your show it gives you a chocobo to ride and if you miss that one you just don't have it but like every but so that it becomes a sort of can you can you risk ignoring a side quest when it might be the one that gives you a chocobo to ride?

Yeah. It's probably my favorite one for quite some time. I will probably finish it. Justin will venture forward while we all sort of... I'm going to keep playing. I'm enjoying it so far. How much 7 Remake did you guys play? Sorry, because I definitely like 7 Remake better.

I beat 7 Remake. I was gonna say, because that's one where they really, really, really split the uprights of like, this is an action game with RPG shit in it. All of it works fucking great. This feels like a half measure. I like it. Again, I'm not trying to downplay, but this feels like they didn't want to they they were trying to hold on to the people that expected this to be a quote unquote final fantasy game when they should have just been like i don't know it's a it's you know

it's just different like i just think that you could make all future final fantasy games seven remake style yeah and that that's like a mainline final fantasy game to me this this if they want to do the character action thing they should just just discard the discard the trappings of like the gear thing is wild you just get better swords and you're getting all these crafting materials and never an opportunity to use them it's really wild just cut or you do to just like turn the sword into a plus one sword until you beat the next icon and then you get the next purple sword that has the numbers higher. It's so fucking

inane. I think we should move on. Let's move on. This is mostly about games we really, really like. It's a great game. So you want to talk about Super Mega Baseball? Everybody else playing that one? No? Touchdown. Okay, yeah. It's great that's that's

that's all if people really should play these i played the first one of these and really liked it and i didn't know they made three fucking more of them they're so good um mars first logistics who oh yeah this game just came out on early access i played the demo of it like six months ago as part of like a steam next fest if you are into zelda and maybe you just beat zelda and you're like still have the itch to like build wacky shit um this game rules you're basically on mars and you're trying to do like simple tasks like move a bucket from this point to this point and you've got like a lego car and as you complete missions you get currency to like buy more components to your lego car and you're constantly reformulating it to complete different missions and i'm not like a

kerbal space program guy i get really overwhelmed by that but this building system is like pretty simple and i find it like incredibly rewarding um it's great on like a steam deck if you want to play it there i think it's yeah just on steam early access right now but um if you're into sort of building vehicle games uh this one totally rules this is fun last but not least battle bit remastered yeah battle bit remastered is a game that we're going to be talking about on resties um next week and it's pretty much battlefield but they stripped out all the realistic graphics and replaced them with like roblox graphics and yet it kind of fucking rules like it runs great there's like 128 by versus 128 maps oh it's mag baby there's no like like whatever loot boxing and like gross currency stuff in it it's just like a bunch of indies were like we could do

what ea's been doing a lot better sure we don't have the budget to like make a realistic sunset but we could crush the gameplay and they kind of have game rules i'm looking forward to talking more about it i'm downloading it now i saw it on steam uh yesterday i thought it was some weird anti-cheat problems i don't know well stop fucking cheating man i can't believe i mentioned mag massive action game and nobody wanted to talk about zipper interactive's great hey listen i actually just thought about mag massive action game yeah two weeks ago and it is a great where why don't they just make it like that no more yeah because it was a bold move for us to try to lose all of our listeners before we go into the break let's take a break

fine thank you baby real quick are there any other games that came out in the first half of 2023 that we missed that we want to play i mean i gotta play honkai star rail let's just say that like i've not played it yet plant i haven't and it feels like if you haven't played it i bet the play count is sitting at zero everybody's waiting for you they're just waiting for you i'll let it you're gonna download the game and turn it on and you're gonna see an anime boy on a train like, oh, fuck, he's here. Guys, he's here.

Clean up. It's like the Toy Story characters. I just realized that Spike Chunsoft has a new game out as of six days ago called called master detective archives uh rain code which i remember seeing announced on a uh on a nintendo direct and i was like hell yeah and then i didn't realize it came out uh june june 30th well you can't really blame yourself for not being able to keep that sequence of words in your head long enough to write write it down now someone has written down hastily i will say in the google doc master detective archie wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait can you can you tell me what

the the screenshot for the new spike chun chop game i just i yeah i just dropped it in our slack just read me the screenshot okay let me see you dropped it in our slack i don't see it oh i see you've messaged it privately so it's uh shinagami is a character i guess in it who says i'm so horny for mysteries right now that's great that's fucking really good i feel like um that's something i have said out loud before in my life and my journey uh is a new dang on rompa is basically uh except it's like 3d and so that's that's that's great man i'll play as many of those as they want to make uh so keep them keep them coming spike shunts off uh i saw one yesterday that i had not heard of before and so i dropped a little

gameplay trailer in the slack for y'all so you can have some reference it's called shoulders of giants uh and it is an action game where you are a frog with a gun who's on the back of a giant mech robot. And the mech has like a big energy sword and you switch kind of like back and forth between the two. So it kind of like segs between a shooting kind of action game and a sword-based hack and slash kind of thing.

It's got co-op, so multiple people with their frogs and their armors can uh can work together it's very colorful and cool looking just i love those sorts of like blending of of uh different gameplay styles and and genres and stuff so it looked neat it looked kind of a little bit like risk of rain maybe um it does look like risk of rain too yeah but uh neat i thought i might check that out at some point so for this back half we were going to talk about our most anticipated games for the rest of the year how about each of us kind of pick one or two because there's a lot of games coming out wait a minute i meant to mention one other one in that exact segment

ebenezer in the invisible world i don't know how to spell Ebenezer Write it in Sounds real Okay, Ebenezer E-B No, don't do this, tell us about the show Or the game Hold on

Hold on, just look It's an Ebenezer Scrooge Game Oh, it's a Metroidvania Yeah Just look. It's an Ebenezer Scrooge game. Oh, it's a Metroidvania? Yeah. It's an Ebenezer Scrooge Metroidvania game where the ghosts give you powers and you have to defeat automatons.

And Ebenezer Scrooge is dressed basically like Scrooge. This is like the fucking I think you should leave sketch. I know. He's got this kick-ass mustache It looks so good, but it's not out yet. It's like a 2D action. I know I just really want to play it

That's all The first screenshot that I loaded is Ebenezer Scrooge fighting what looks like a cop in front of a workers rights protest Alright, so I mean they know what they're doing. Yeah, it's probably like post-transformation Ebeneezer. So he's harnessing all of his abilities. Tiny Tim is in it. Good news. Good news.

He's still got the crutches, unfortunately. Okay. I'm glad this isn't out yet. That makes me feel like I didn't. I feel like if I could have missed a Christmas Carol action game, then I would have really failed. I'm glad that it's not out yet. The next screenshot is a picture of Tiny Tim, and he says,

Hurrah, Ebenezer. It's Christmas time again. Thank you for your kindness this year. You have truly changed. And here's your double jump. I also want to check out Sunhaven. it's one that a bunch of people on our staff has been have been playing it's sort of a starting valley with sort of fantasy elements which uh sounds sounds good the the aesthetic of it is like uh kind of wild it looks like those like uh

emoji avatar thing like pixel emoji avatar things that you would see on like uh somebody's uh like geocities fan page oh my god early 2010s uh which is i i i think kind of interesting um so that's another one for me uh okay so what are we looking forward to i mean i know that ho Hoops, you gotta tell us more about Lies of P, right? That's gotta be your big one. Hey, guys, this is shaping up to the best game, like, the best year of video games ever.

I'm looking at the rest of this list. I mean, I don't want to skip down to Lies of P. I know people love Pikmin. The 4 is coming. Well, we don't need to do the whole list. I know, but, like, I'm mentioning the list because it kicks ass. Baldur's Gate 3 is just a few couple weeks away. Armored Core 6.

That's one that I'll definitely plan to get deeply into and then probably fall off of when it's too hard. Starfield, September 6th, but you've only got 13 days to finish Starfield, which is really unfair. You have to be done by September 19th so you can uncover the Lies of P, the world's best Pinocchio action game.

How do I get, how am I such a lucky little boy? How am I such a lucky little boy? I get Armachor Six, Starfield, Lies of P. Come on. And then I get Alloy 2 and Spider-Man 2? You shouldn't have. Okay, here's a question for RE Lies of P. Come on. And then I get Aloe 2 and Spider-Man 2? You shouldn't have. Okay, here's a question for R.E. Lies of P. Do you think...

I gotta get back out of books, guys. I'm not gonna have time for books and all these. Do you think P, A, turns into a donkey, and B, it is a benefit from a gameplay standpoint to turn into a donkey? Yes. Yes. Because that would go counter to the the plot of the actual

i would assume it's sort of like uh um a curse and a blessing like okay it uses your health but you can like tramp down some of the different care bad guys in lies of p the pinocchio video game it's trying to think y'all didn't play the demo because mad donkey is the second boss fight in the demo well you people already know easy kill tricks for mad donkey guys check slack mad donkey boss fight i told you yeah no damage confirmed guys this is just a man in the donkey mask i fucking this is and it's happening this is the fucking cleric beast fight from the from bloodborne one thing that i would disagree with you about griffin is that it is pinocchio that's true the wooden boy bloodborne was not

about arm like a steampunk robot arm and he's fighting a man in a donkey mask this is gonna be the best fucking video game ever. I can't believe it's real. Does all of September just need to be Lies of P month for us? Yeah. Yeah, we're definitely doing a Lies of P series. The Mortal Kombat reboot, I'm not going to be good at a fighting game

probably ever again in my lifetime. But I am going to enjoy watching people play Mortal Kombat 1, the pseudo reboot of the Mortal Kombat franchise. Did you all see the Roomba in Johnny Cage's house? No. There's a Roomba that just goes around the map collecting all the blood that gets poured onto the map and sucking it all up and cleaning it up. But the Roomba is interactive. up and cleaning it up but the Roomba is interactive so if you like

kick it while you're fighting you just like send it across the room and it explodes or it'll like fall in the pool and like zap and die and there's a great video I'll find it for y'all of the Roomba after a fatality running up against a body and it breaking

the Roomba physics and then the Roomba just taking off just straight up into the sky the Roomba's gonna be a the Roomba just taking off just straight up into the sky. The Roomba is going to be a star. I'm happy for its moment to shine. Are you excited about Forza? How do you feel about Forza?

It's not the one you like. It's not the one I like. I don't like serious racing games. It looks gorgeous. I saw it at the Xbox presentation when it was in LA a couple weeks ago. It looks really, really cool. I completely get it for people who love those games. The whole appeal of Forza Horizon for me is that I am not on a track. Let me just be a clown and drive through a valley and not think about roads.

What else? How are y'all feeling about Assassin's Creed Mirage? I feel nothing for this franchise anymore. I'm ready. Let me play one. I haven't played one in like five years. I know. It's been forever. They really did a good job of making me want it because I really do want an Assassin's Creed game.

I'm a little worried that going back and playing an Assassin's Creed game that feels and playing an Assassin's Creed game that feels like the original Assassin's Creed games is going to not. Is it not like an actual one? No, it's like it is a throwback to, looks like a throwback to the old way of doing things. I'm down with that.

You only have five days and then you can lose yourself in Alan Wake 2. That is true. That is true. Okay, I think we need to go a little bit faster. Okay, okay okay okay i'm gonna just real quick talk about alan wake 2 i'm extremely excited for it i loved alan wake 1 i am hesitantly excited because i don't know for sure if they're gonna do the things that i loved about alan wake 1 which was like a pretty even balance of like weird small town quasi normalcy mixed with like the horror stuff this feels like way more on the horror side but they have been making dope games for a while

and uh so i'm optimistic the remedy will pull this one out and do cool stuff i'm also expecting that it will also end on a very upsetting cliffhanger, as all of their stuff does, but that's okay. Twin Peaks does too, so it's fine. Spider-Man 2, anyone pumped? Hell yeah. Yeah, sure. Not since I got my vasectomy during Spider-Man 1 release window. Not during, right?

No, no, no. I got my vasectomy the same day it came out, so I just put a bag of peas on my balls and really had a great time with Spider-Man, and it was a delight. I can't get another vasectomy, so I don't know how I'm going to carve out the time to play this one. But I will figure out a way. I don't know if maybe I can have some sort of butt thing.

I don't know. Okay. I don't know what that would be. Hemorrhoids, I think, is what you're looking for? Hemorrhoid procedure? Some sort of hemorrhoid procedure. Then I have to lie on my tummy and play Spider-Man 2. No thanks.

Oh, I actually missed the title on here. Obviously, we talked about it before, so we don't need to go in depth, but Super Mario Wonder. Oh, yeah. Is that out this year? That is out this year. Everything in that showcase is supposedly out this year.

Great. Yeah, a few more real quick persona 5 tactica looks great super mario rpg remake looks fucking great that looks real good real stoked for that one there's an indie metroidvania that i'm excited for called gestalt steam and cinder which doesn't currently have a release date but i played the demo and it was fucking ruled so i'm really looking forward to that and of course silk song is definitely 100 for sure absolutely coming out this year for sure i kind of hope not if they're smart you know what you want to hear my prediction i'm going to come out with it right now i think silk song is going to

be like early q1 2024 it doesn't matter when they put it out realistically it'll do great i mean yeah but like look at some of these months man they're packed i think it's gonna come out a quiet period where i can really enjoy it i don't have to worry about that's what i would like lies a p 100%ing platinum lies a p yeah all right well that was a lot of games do we have any honorable mentions to talk about i have something what yeah tell us yeah go for it i've been using the starfield controller my i think i have to say that microsoft sent me the starfield controller but i've been using the starfield controller and this is what i want to say about it it's basically a typical xbox controller it's not like an elite controller

or anything like that but if you are a company that is making a branded piece of hardware based on your video game look to the starfield controller for the perfect way to do this there is no anywhere on the controller does it say starfield there's no like giant logo of starfield on this controller it's all like inspired by like the controls of the game uh so like whatever there's like space buttons on it but design-wise it's just aesthetically appropriate for the starfield universe and all branded controllers should follow this exact same model i would probably get way more of them from games that i love if they didn't have like giant fucking fallout stamp on the side yeah it rules that's cool i don't want one of these cool control neat um i had a uh honorable Cool control. Neat. I had an honorable mention. This is a – my dad and I drove down to our shows that we did in Richmond and Raleigh, North Carolina, weekend before last.

And we listened to Glenn Weldon's The Caped Crusade, which is really fascinating. It's a history of Batman, but it's really a history of – Glenn Weldon is a pop culture critic. He's on Pop Culture Happy Hour with NPR and stuff. So he's a very smart like observer of the way pop culture shifts. And it is really a story about the cultural history of Batman with his fans, the way that they have attempted to like shift him and possess him and gatekeep and accept new versions of him

and how like the character himself is a reaction in many ways to those fans. It works just as like a straight up and down history of the character, because I think stuff like that is really fascinating, but it's also like, it almost always features snippets of text from like fanzines at the time newsletters from like the 1960s to hear how people were talking about Batman comics at that time.

And it like finds forum posts from when, you know, new movies came out and like how the fans were reacting to it at that point. Um, so it's really fascinating and it's a really fascinating way to view the character as, as sort of like, uh,

a shared biography with his, his fan base. It's called the Caped Crusade. It's by Glenn Weldon. Cool. Sounds awesome. Yeah, it's really good. I'm not sure if you all talked about this last week. Siren survived the island.

Did anybody else give the hard sell on this? Okay. It's on Netflix. You're right. Whatever you're about to say, you're right. It is a Korean reality competition show, and it is basically a capture-the-flag battle royale. Set on an island, there's six teams of four women, and each team is based on a different profession. So there's police, firefighters, soldiers, athletes, stunt people, and bodyguards.

soldiers, athletes, stunt people, and bodyguards. And they compete in sort of like challenges to get sort of advantages that they then use in sort of the main hook of the show, which are base battles. Everybody has a base on this island. It's a pretty small island. Everybody kind of knows where everything else is. The bases are really

varied they have certain weaknesses and strengths like that somebody is in a tent but it's extremely remote um so yeah it's kind of a trade-off um and uh every day at a random time an air raid siren goes off which signals the start of a base battle and then it is just everybody puts on these suits that have flags on them and then you have to try to get to an enemy team's base and pull their flag out uh and once that happens once the base battle is over and that team is eliminated uh and then the the team who knocked them out gets their base and all the stuff in it uh there's some other like shit that goes on like there's a a general store that you spend the calories that you burnt the previous day to get things like shovels or food or ropes or nails. But it is so incredibly well made, so incredibly well made so incredibly well shot moments of uh of of tension and action

unlike anything i think i've ever seen in a reality i've never been i have never been as on the edge of my seat they make things like i mean at the end of the day these people are not like the the shit is real in the sense that there aren't a lot of rules like yeah you can't strike anyone you can't someone gets in trouble at some point because they throw a fire extinguisher at somebody else uh and they are they are penalized for that so there's you can't it's not like an all-out fucking it's not brutal to watch there is some wrestling that happens because a lot of them are wrestlers but i mean stuff like you're watching someone you wonder like who gave this person an axe when they try to chop down a door that someone is like pressing a bed up against to try to keep the intruders out and people get like really it's so physical and aggressive and the way it's shot though

you're watching someone like sneak underneath a set of stairs at night, even not during a base battle. And so most thrilling thing you've ever seen. Cause what if they get caught and they can, anybody could come by at any time. And it's really, really, really,

really well done. It's so exciting. Yeah. It's it's. And the, the, the people on it's so well cast. The teams have like a lot of character.

It's it is it is probably my favorite show that I've watched this year. Full stop. And it is it's all on Netflix. I cannot recommend it enough. It's got some survivor vibes. There's like alliances that like have to happen because, you know, otherwise a team will just get devoured by the other ones if they don't have some level of protection and cooperation that happens. There's castle intrigue that happens around that. It's fucking great. I cannot recommend it enough to everyone.

It makes almost all other American reality shows look like limp and kind of airless, I think, by comparison, or bloodless maybe more accurately yeah um so check that one totally out i've also been watching the bear season two it was really good oh nice i really want to go watch that show um i saw past lives which is as amazing as everybody says and i don't learn any more about it before you see it because there's just not a whole lot of story there. So you wouldn't want to spoil it. And then I watched the original King Kong from 1933.

Okay. That movie's violent. That movie's really violent. King Kong, he's mean. There's a thing that happens in a lot of modern movies, even like PG-13 R-rated action movies, where like a plane blows up, but then you see like the parachutes, right? Like they make sure that you know everybody's okay. King Kong, he loves to chew on people until they're like mangled little dolls and then just spit them out. So that you see every part of his process.

He's a mean guy it i mean you get it uh he's he you understand because he's kind of put in a bad situation so because he has a bad taste in his mouth oh wow no because he gets they take because he's got taken from his island he was so happy yeah but that's not till like that's like the final 20 minutes. Yeah, but people are messing with him on his island. Oh, no, no. To be clear, these people, it seems like they... Kong is the good guy. Kong is ultimately the good guy.

You feel bad for Kong when, you know, when things don't go his way. It was the beauty that killed the beast. Oh, my gosh, that line. But, yeah, what a fun... It's still fun, turns out. Old movie, still fun. Fresh, movie still fun uh fresh you have some people you want to thank yes thank you for to the following people for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcast we have carly coco malzi and raul r guarda branco is how i'm going to

pronounce that thank you for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to everyone else for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Chris Plant, how do you want to recap all this shit? There's so much. We talked about so many games this week. I think in this case, you're going to have to go back and just look at the episode.

I'm sorry. It's a big list. We'll try to include as much of this as we can in the episode description. You say we, I'm the one who writes that. That's true. It's a big list. We'll try to include as much of this as we can in the episode description. You say we, I'm the one who writes that. That's true. Griffin's going to include all these games in the episode description. The good thing is all you'll have to do

is copy paste. It's going to be okay. It's going to be Liza P. 20 times. Next week we're going to talk about Zelda and this beautiful boy adventures. Full spoilers. Don't listen unless you next week we're going to talk about zelda this beautiful boy's adventures and uh full spoilers so again don't listen unless you have finished or don't care right like me that'll be next week until then be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's

best friends pick the world's best games Best Games. Besties!