The Besties - The Best Games You're Not Playing

Episode Date: March 13, 2020

Before the big game release storm rolls in, The Besties wanted to cover some of the latest smaller titles you might have missed. Including action platformer Bloodroots, mobile game Crossy Road Castle, the third installment in the Ben There, Dan That! series Lair of the Clockwork God and the manga artist Junji Ito influenced WORLD OF HORROR. Plus, they examine the upcoming PS5 versus Xbox Series X and the promise of HDMI 2.1, https://www.polygon.com/2020/3/4/21151509/xbox-series-x-ps5-specs-4k-8k-tv-hdmi 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!

guys yeah so you guys are going to be gone uh you're leaving us um you're going to be out on the water on the high seas what is what is your cruise like for people that go on cruises what's your cruise pro tip gaming gaming i do a lot of gaming on the ocean and a lot of people are ocean gaming ocean gaming a lot of people say what do you have like a switch what switch games are you loading up with um mario uh zelba like whatever and my answer to that is always why would i do that when there's dolphins swimming alongside the ship and they're they want you to throw a ball to them so that they can bounce it back up they want you to try and throw a ring onto their big nose. The whales want you to jump out so they can blast you back up onto the ship with their powerful blowholes. Like, why am I going to play video games when I can play real sort of aquatic folk games with the dolphins and whales?

Is my question. That's so true, Griffin. We'll be visiting exotic lands with different peoples, different cultures. exotic lands uh with different peoples different cultures like um there's a foreign land we're visiting called half moon key that's a wholly owned subsidiary of the holland america line a private island that they own and uh is peopled only by their staff members and what can i learn from them that i would miss if i had my face in the screen right mario mario mario you know i wouldn't be able to learn anything. I would miss all their traditional dances

and cuisine. They had something last year. A push pop. Have you had these? No, I haven't. They're small. They're like the lollipops of children here,

stateside. But it's a lollipop without a stick. So as you twist, the sweet fruit, or perhaps it's a lollipop without a stick. So as you twist, the sweet fruit, or perhaps it's a candy, emerges from a tube, and you consume it there, and they cost 75 cents. And it's like, what is their Zalba? Because that's what I want to know.

I want to broaden it a little bit. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and my i know the best game of the week my name is griffin mackaroy and i know the best game of the week my name is christopher thomas plant and my game is the best game this week my name is russ furshig and i'm playing those deep cuts you haven't even heard of yet oh damn welcome to the besties where we celebrate the latest and greatest in video gaming a game of the year podcast that goes all week long it's like a book club for video games and you know these video games they've come a long way since pac-man it used to be a bunch of bleeps and bloops and uh flickers and different dots now we got fucking bioshock man now there's bioshock and i hear this

one did you hear this they're putting um messages into them now. Some of them have things you can learn about being a human, not just points. Sometimes for some of these games these days, the points are the friends you make along the way. I was playing Bioshock, and I was surprised to see that it had a message, unlike Donkey Kong, who had no message.

And as far as I could tell, the message in Bioshock was, if someone wants to do something, you should just let them do it. If someone wants to experiment with something or make some sort of new thing, regardless of what sort of problems you might have, you should just fucking let them do it, man.

Because they're going to do it under the water. If you don't let them do it on the land, they will go underwater and do whatever bank shit they want to do there. It'll be way more fucked up under the water. And that's on you. That's your fault. So we don't have a massive game to talk about this week.

We are at the very end of the slow times before there's a pretty good pickup coming of a lot of big games. But right here at the tail end, before that big game storm rolls in, we wanted to get just like the last few smaller titles that we are enjoying and give them a little bit of due

before they get sort of eclipsed by some of the heavier hitters, you might say. I would love to start because I've been playing my game a bit and we've talked about it on this show a little bit. Chris Plant turned me on to it. It is a, wow, I'm trying to think of what kind of genre to apply to it and I am struggling,

but it is World of Horror, which is, it's almost sort of like a digital board game. Like, you could think of it sort of that way, sort of a roguelike adventure game is another way to think about it, that its sort of defining feature is its aesthetic. defining feature is its aesthetic it is a game that is sort of visually inspired by the mac venture games so your uh your shadow gate manhole your your og shadow gate what's that manhole was manhole i feel like i remember like yeah mac adventure game called manhole maybe it's for there was little baby deja deja vu was one of babies. Deja Vu was one of them. Uninvited was one of them. And Uninvited might be the best sort of example

because Uninvited in some ways was inspired by an artistic source that this game is like dripping with inspiration from. And that is the work of Japanese horror manga artist, Junji Ito, who is hyper prolific. And you have probably seen, if you're like plugged into this community, like at all,

you've probably seen either some of his work or like something that references his work. If you've seen like an image of, it's like a person with dead eyes staring into the distance. And then they have a hole in the middle of their skull and that hole just seems to recede into the infinite. That would be a very good idea.

That's Junji Ito. He's fucked up, man. This dude's got just, his brain is so twisted and fucked up. Yeah, that's Uzumaki, which is a long-running series about a town that becomes cursed by spirals and it's fucking amazing i i adore junji ito's work uh uh enigma of amigara

fault is like maybe his most sort of referenced piece of work and that is uh about a town where a cliffside suddenly has a bunch of holes that appear in it that are in the shape of people and each hole is like perfectly molded for a person to go into and they go into the mountain and never come out why always towns though uh i think that it sort of i don't know man towns where people live it's where people live man real americans uh so it's tapping into these two very sort of crystallized aesthetic inspiration points uh that are i feel like kind of specific things and i don't know that there's been a game that has blended the the two of them when i say i mean talking about sort of like a game being aesthetically inspired by something there are different degrees of that this one is like if you're familiar with jinji it is where can you see any screenshot of the game like it is a lot of uh you know body horror one of the first

investigations you do is uh about a woman who uh uses scissors to oh okay fine but there's scissors and body stitching okay we can fill in the place and that's like gingito works like in the grotesque and this game like really really dabbles in it as well in a way that is genuinely very upsetting and very very scary and on top of that you have this uh if you've never played like the mac venture games like one or two bit sort of aesthetic uh Also like what was that game that we played? Return of the Obra Dinn. Return of the Obra Dinn had it. This is not 3D though. Yeah. It's not 3D, right. So it's 2D

sort of mostly still grotesque images done in this one or two bit art style. You can change the different color palettes of it between different basically Game Boy color. What was the Super Game Boy where you could switch the different color palettes so sort of on in that vein the game itself plays uh like an adventure game where you there's a few different modes and so like there's an

onboarding mode where you have this investigation that was part of the demo i think because it came out on itch.io uh but it's out on steam now in early access uh where you go into a school and you're hunting the scissor lady, whatever. And like an adventure game, like you go through different rooms and the rooms are basically like cards that have a scenario on them. You have a character with stats, you have like a health pool and a mental health pool. And so different encounters may hurt you physically, or they may like just fuck up your psyche. But you also have like a strength stat and a dexterity stat. So like there's a sort of board gamey, if you've ever played,

what is it? The House on Haunted Hill. Juice, what's the game? What am I thinking of? The one we play. Betrayal at. Betrayal at House on the Hill, right? Like you have a character with stats

and you have cards and they resolve in different ways based on what your stats are. Like that's kind of the basic breakdown of the game. You can find companions to go along with you. There's a ton of different items that influence how like different scenarios play out. But every time you play, it's different, right?

You like get different scenario cards. There's a different old god that you go up against. There's a lot of like eldritch, astral, horror, Lovecraftian shit going on as well. And there are different game modes where you can also like randomize what character you're playing as. You could have a character who's like a smoker.

And so you have to keep your cigarette pile high or else you start getting like negative benefits. What's the fun factor? 4.5, thanks for asking, Justin. I was gonna get to the fun factor next. The fun factor I think of the game is the tone that it sets and the- Doesn't sound fun. it sounds really terrifying and

miserable well i mean okay but that's just a taste let's leverage that claim at like every horror i know no i just i get spooked too easily so that's not a knock on the game itself chris have you played it yet you are the one who sort of i i played the demo years ago but i have not played the current version of it um it it's it's become a lot more sophisticated i think since that first yeah it sounds considerably better i mean it was it was great when i when i played it but i yeah i this is one of those games that i honestly i have to recommend it to you i then couldn't decide if i wanted to dig into it yet or wait for it to get out of early access. Because it is

so systems heavy, sometimes I feel better holding off. And there's so much to play right now. But I don't know. After listening to you talk about it now, I feel like I should just give it a try. It is, it does still I completed one run. It's fucking hard as hell and fairly

unfair at some points but I did complete like a run of the basic mode where you solve these five different investigations that are different every time that you play they like pull from a a pool of multiple investigations uh and I like completed all that and there's like kind of an end point that you get to and it just like just kind of ends just kind of peters out and i was like oh boy i hope they can i hope they flesh that out a little bit like it definitely there are some places where it left me sort of wanting a little bit more and i've actually been enjoying it since i've been playing the random randomized like roguelike mode there's an endless

mode where you just solve investigation after investigation and until you die or until the world ends which is another thing yeah it's definitely not for everybody but if you enjoy sort of uh if you enjoy horror games if you enjoy sort of like uh stat-based board games uh if you enjoy junji ito like fucking of course go pick it up i think it's like 15 bucks on steam and i don't know i think it's really cool as is i don't think it's got a long tail necessarily until it gets a little bit beefier, but it's unlike any sort of horror game I've played before and is a very specific thing for a very specific person.

Justin, you want to go? Sure. I am playing Layer of the Clockwork God. Great title. It's a very good title. A lot of games these days have bad titles um but this is a this one's got a good one so it's got that going for it already um okay so this is a sequel to a point and click adventure series called dan and ben oh shit yeah really yeah so there are two games before this been there damn that

and time gentlemen please which are two extremely extremely funny uh point and click adventure games size five uh has has been going on continue it was mainly dan marshall he's half of the team with ben ward uh that made the first two but dan marshall's continued on he made games like um privates and uh gibbage and a few others but um they are back now with the third sort of like main Dan and Ben game called Lair of the Clockwork God. Oh, he also made The Swindle. That was a big one. It was like a stealth roguelike game. But anyway, they're back now with Lair of the Clockwork God.

I can't tell you why this game is funny because like me describing something as being funny, I can tell you jokes out of context won't do any good. It's very funny. And it's having a lot of um you know what let me talk about mechanics first and we'll get to that so it is still an adventure game in that ben half of the team the two guys ben and dan ben is still very much into adventuring dan has decided that the world has moved on and he is going to be a platformer and that is his calling that's what he's got that that is what he is going to do um he will no

longer be picking up items or interacting with them he will only be running and jumping and moving things with his hands and collecting items that has caused ben to sort of double down on being an adventurer so he refuses to even step over small gaps and it's all in a 2d world right it's on a platformer world but dan refuses oh sorry ben refuses to uh step over small gaps or fall down things or push things he will only do point and click adventure type stuff so the game becomes this hybrid of platforming and point and click adventure where dan is frequently picking ben up to carry him to the next point and click adventure type scenario and there's constantly like uh there's things like um you know at one point to get him over a small gap dan has to run around and jump and find a like a cloud that reverses gravity so he can

momentarily lift ben into the air and then set him back down by re-reversing gravity to get him over a very small gap that he refuses to step over. And you switch between them at will, right? So there will be a little bit of fun platforming stuff, and then you switch to Ben, and there's a more in-depth, very LucasArts-y sort of adventure sequence. Quick question. Yeah, hit me.

Have you also played the visual novel that launched i have not that you get for free yeah i guess if you buy this game i have not i've played uh i have not played the visual novel i i would love to offer more other than just the fact that you get a free visual novel with this game with a totally different art style and it looks wonderful what is very funny is that dan in deciding that he's going to be a platformer is also taking the high ground what he contends is that the real art the real soulful independent art is being made in the platforming genre and he frequently points out how his jumping and running around is actually metaphorical and very moving because he's taking the high ground i like that it's very funny right the entire first

level is them trying to find trying to find a flower that will cure their friend of cancer and it's they they're constantly talking about how kind of inspiring it is and how every jump is representative of a step in their journey towards it's very good and you just carry this flower around with you the main arc of the story is that all the armageddons are happening at once because the computer that controls all of reality it's ram chips burned out and you have to go through uh like 13 different sort of stages and experience the entire range of human emotion to remind the computer of how to have artificial intelligence so dan has to run around and collect ram chips and he collects ram chips he inserts in the machine and they're taken to another stage where um they get

to experience a different emotion and show the robot how to experience this emotion um it's very irreverent it's very funny again like you just kind of have to play it for yourself on that and to get the tone of it but um it's very british uh which like i've been inadvertently copying like the some of the slang from the ben and dan games stuff like brillo and defo like i've been inadvertently copying like the some of the slang from the Ben and Dan games stuff like Brillo and Defo like I've been covered like wizard accidentally picking up for a decade like they are very formative for me and the fact that there is another one and that it is very enjoyable and smart and um fun just to give you there's a there's a bit very early on where ben gets battery acid and he uses the battery acid to dump on some vines to clear a path through right that's

your puzzle you solve but he keeps the battery acid and you keep for the next few minutes you keep running into puzzles that are solved by just dumping battery acid on them. They shouldn't have given me this battery acid this early. I'm just using this forever. And you constantly are just using battery acid because it melts stuff and then you move on. You eventually have to mix the battery acid with a cooked dinosaur egg to make an energy drink that gives Dan the ability to double jump battery acid with a cooked dinosaur egg, uh,

to make an energy drink that gives Dan the ability to double jump or to, to know, to sprint with Raptor speed. Uh, it is very dumb, but it's very good and well worth, um, uh,

picking up. I think it's so cool that they're making, uh, they made another Dan and Ben game. Is it like, uh, is it, is the platforming like,

is the platforming like anything to actually like write home about? Because I love the, the point and click stuff in the, the first two Dan and Ben games, but. Yeah, I mean, it's not, like, life-changing, but it feels good, and I mean, Dan has been making, uh, Dan Marshall has been making, like, platformers and more action-oriented stuff, like, since. Yeah. The last Dan and Ben game, so it's not like he's completely out of his lane, in doing this it's a it like it feels good i will say this it's a little cumbersome on a keyboard i feel like i'm kind of missing something by not just like using a controller but i'm playing on my laptop and just haven't gotten a controller i would recommend grab a controller for it it's on switch sorry not on switch it's on steam and i can tell you how much it costs if that is something that you are

interested in just going to click on the button 20 bucks very good very fun the other thing i'll say is that there is a in the main menu of the game there is a store called the size 5 game store where it says you can buy premium solutions to puzzles and every time you click on the store they say it's not up and running just yet but soon you'll be able to buy premium solutions to the puzzles if you're struggling which sounds hilarious i hope i hope it's a real thing i know it may just be a one-off gag anyway that's the game well worth playing uh let's take a quick break and then we'll talk about two more games i'm going to tell you about blood roots have any of you even heard of blood roots i have yeah i was looking at it on the uh switch shop

because i was hearing a lot of people say hey if you like hotline miami you should play this and i was like yeah i like hotline man yeah that's a good way of kicking it off it is kind of like hotline miami um but not as i guess cynical and uh grotesquely violent it we should have a name for this genre at this point right like this ape out hotline miami there's a lot in this it. It's a murder con. Katana Zero. The way this one works and what differentiates it is if Hotline Miami is about extreme violent gunplay, kind of John Wick

ish, this is the Jackie Chan version of that. Jackie Chan was very clearly an inspiration for this game. It is not super gory violent. The weapons are whatever is around the environment. So a weapon could be a boat paddle or a ladder

or a cart full of hay. It can be really anything. And the weapons are as much about annihilating enemies as they are getting around the world. So there's like a sort of platforming puzzle element to all of this. For example, the long, I think they're boat paddles, you use them to almost like pole vault over long areas. It's still a top-down sort of twin sticky. There's a lot of platforming and if you fall in a pit, you are dead.

That makes me a little worried. I don't think platforming feels especially good from that perspective. So I had a really sour intro to this game because I played it portable on the Switch, and the top-down view, everything is very small on the Switch screen, and it does require, at least it did for me, more precise controls. So I found myself, even in early stages, falling in pits after having a pretty solid run and knowing exactly how I wanted to go through this environment, taking out each enemy in

this very cinematic way, and then at the last minute making a bad jump and having to do it all over again. And that sucked. I think I messaged Frush, where I was like, I don't know if I can bring this game at this point. But once I put it up on a TV screen and actually used a regular controller,

actually, I didn't even do that. I switched to playing it on the Epic Games store on PC. And it was so much better. I'm having finesse controls, being able to see all the action very clearly. It is definitely one of those games where you spend a great deal of time memorizing your lines, figuring out like, okay, if I, even though I can use anything in the environment, I don't find myself playing it as an improvisation very often. I find it more like, okay, I'll try this. Oh, that didn't work.

Okay, I'll use the boat oar this time, and that'll allow me to take out five enemies, and then I have two more swings of it left, so I'll jump over to the south of the area, knock out a crowd, jump one more time, finish off one crowd, and then I grab this axe because i know it'll help me take out this like armored type of character and it becomes all about almost memorizing your path and then executing on it is that to its benefit or to its debt do you like that because yeah hotline did that too and i my wonder yeah i i like it i think what i liked more about hotline was it felt a little more freeform.

I felt like I could go chaos, except for in later stages. This is really rewarding when you can execute it. Again, I think it just means that the game has to really work control-wise, because if the entire pleasure of the game is

learning and then executing on these lines, you don't want it to feel unfair like you didn't nail something because of how it controls not because of like whether or not you're any good at it but overall I like it the other thing that I really enjoy about it is just the vibe it is going for cartoonish reservoir dogs you are are, you know, going after all these, I guess, like, leaders who have different funny names. They're named after, I believe, all animals or something.

And there's, like, a bit of a story there that is, like, charming enough. And again, isn't the... What I feel like a lot of these games have, which is the, you are a murder god. And like, why do you choose to keep pushing forward in this murder simulation? Think about it. This doesn't have so much of that, which is to its benefit. So yeah, I don't have like a ton to say about it. It is, it's really enjoyable. And if. And if you like these sorts of games, of which there are

more and more and more, I do think this shift to, hey, use everything in your environment rather than just using the same guns is a nice enough variant that it's definitely worth a try. It does, as Plan said, I don't know if it was a controls

issue or just a performance issue, but it did seem like the Switch port had some growing to do of what I played. It ran a little hitchy. So I don't know if that's a patch thing. I only, as Plant did, I only played in handheld mode. Maybe it runs a little bit better on TV. You know, it kind of changes from game to game, but a little bit of a buyer beware situation on the Switch version.

But it sounds like the PC version runs very well. Yeah, I definitely recommend it on PC if you're going to try it. Cool. So my game is Crossy Road Castle. Excellent. From the deep cut Crossy Road universe comes Crossy Road Castle.

Now, you can't call it, I can play that on a fucking big screen at the Austin airport, so I don't think we can call Crossy Road a deep castle. Really? I feel like it's kind of underground at this point. Sure. So, Crossy Road, the original, if you recall,

was just Frogger with a chicken. Like, there's really no other way to put it. It was Frogger with a chicken. Cool aesthetic, like a low poly aesthetic, it was frogger with the chicken cool aesthetic like a low poly aesthetic but otherwise frogger with the chicken they've made a couple games since then uh including the arcade game that griffin was referring to but disney crossy road baby and disney crossy road that's the good stuff right there that'll keep you coming back for more um so they made a basically the same game a bunch of times with like different skins

crossy road castle is not that although it has a similar aesthetic to the low the other games in crossy road franchise it is a straight up to the guts platformer um you know you've got three buttons move left move right and jump and that's it. The structure of the game is interesting insofar as it's platforming, but like micro-platforming. So each of the levels in the game are like at most 10, maybe 15 seconds long. You like blow through them

and they're randomly ordered. So you don't know which levels you're gonna get. They do seem like it scales in difficulty as you get into later levels. They'll like throw you harder variants of the levels but generally you you know don't know the exact order and there's a few things that like jumped out at me first of all apple arcade we've talked about a little bit in the past has been like kind of desolate for since launch like yeah it's just been kind of rough like They had some amazing launch games

and then there just haven't been a ton of them. This is definitely the first game that I've played on Apple Arcade since launch that I was like, oh, damn, this is a game I want to play. I've played a bunch of it and it gets me jazzed about the service in ways that the last bunch of releases have sort of not.

So that's really encouraging. The other thing that jumped out is uh platformers on mobiles uh mobile platforms like touchscreens are generally terrible it's like not fun to play a platformer on a touchscreen um and they i don't know exactly what it was with the magic sauce but they clearly spent a ton of time tweaking the just like how high the jump is how fast the jump is how much control you have acceleration all that stuff to the point where like i feel like i have way more control over my movements and jumps and everything like that than i do in most platformers on mobile i have a theory about that i think it is because it has an extremely like rudimentary physics engine yeah

so like there is no um there is no like momentum i i played it for like a half hour or so so maybe i'm talking a little bit out of my ass but like my takeaway is that there was there's like no momentum right so like if you are running left and then you tap right you are just it's a binary like you are instantly going right when you jump like you jump the jumping amount and like that's that's it and so i feel like that that is always going to feel so much better uh we were just i was playing um symphony of the night just came out on switch and that's you know touchscreen or not on switch maybe on switch by the time this comes out hopefully fingers crossed uh but on on the phone and while like the touchscreen controls on that are still good it doesn't it's not this like mechanical feeling of control that that cross your yeah i would say though that like the jump

is not a it's not like you always jump the same height like you can actually control the height of your jump based on how long you push the button. So there is some nuance there. There's also like, if you jump after landing on a guy, you'll jump a little higher. So there's like some Mario vibe to that. So I don't know, it feels really good. I like the fact that it's super short because you can like blow through levels

and like while you're waiting for a train or something like that. And also it has a really dumb and yet addictive gachapon system. It's on Apple Arcade, so there's no monetization or anything. But as you play, you collect tokens and coins to unlock new characters and hats

and they all control the same. It's all just visual, but there's something very satisfying about unlocking stuff. I would also say it is one of the best multiplayer games I've ever played on mobile just because the integration is really good. Like it's super easy to hop into a game

with up to four people and just start playing. Like there's no, oh, I need to log in and connect to this and da, da, da. It takes like two seconds to join someone's game. It's all local though, right? It's all local Wi-Fi? It is over Wi-Fi. I don't know if it's only local.

I can't confirm. I think it is. It might only be don't know if it's only local i can't i think it is it might only be local but if even so like i've played a lot of games that are even just local and it can be a pain in the ass to like get in the same game and here it's just like very clear how it all works and actually it's i would say even more fun with two people because if one person survives the level you don't lose any uh lives you don't lose any hearts so there is play with up to you can play with up to four yeah up to four um and but like yeah i don't know i found it to be like very engaging in ways that like a lot of the apple arcade stuff hasn't and um it's actually distracted me from pokemon go and fire emblem for a little bit, which is quite the accomplishment.

So yeah, CrossFit Road Castle, only on Apple Arcade. Check it out. Okay. I will. I will, because I have Apple Arcade, and so it's free. And that's a good, for me, that's a good proposition. Yeah. That I don't pay money to get it, and I like that. I like that I can just have it.

So that's good. We have a little bit of extra extra time here because we couldn't ask for your emails because uh for obvious reasons uh but we do want to talk about a little bit about the next gen you know we're about probably what would you say there's really no telling how long it's gonna be eight months seven to eight months out from the from the next generation yeah oh for sure absolutely seven eight months um where are you playing i want to talk to you because i know you're plugged into this stuff where what do you what do you think about next gen right now where where are you at where am i at uh so i mean where are you at i feel like we don't know much of anything about the new uh playstation really specifically mark cerny came out and did like a big interview about like the specs right much of anything about the new PlayStation. Really, specifically.

Mark Cerny came out and did a big interview about the specs. Fast-loaded. That shit gonna launch Spider-Man at you from a fucking trebuchet. I think I know a little bit more about the Xbox and what people are gonna get hyped about.

And the big question I have is, are people going to notice why these things matter? Because a lot of the cool stuff that you're going to be able to do on this new hardware might not even work on your TV. In fact, probably won't work on your TV if you haven't put a TV very recently. What are you talking about? So some of those things are obviously 4K is a huge thing. Not everybody has 4K, but that's okay. We know that the Xbox and I believe also the PS5 will output up to 8K.

I don't think anybody listening to this show or on this podcast has an 8K TV or plans to anytime soon. They also have features that require HDMI 2.1. Now, you might think HDMI 2.0, I have that. HDMI 2.1 can't be that different. You are wrong.

It is a humongous difference. Is the plug different? It looks the same, so that helps. You plug it in. Say you have best case scenario HDMI 2.1 on your new console with all these features. And you plug it into the TV and you're like, yes, because I'm using HDMI 2.1, I can send all this extra information. I can have 4K resolution, and I can have frame rates not at 60, like you would see on most TVs. I can have them up to 120.

That's more. So like what people are used to on PC gaming. And I can also get G-Sync compatibility. G-Sync! Yep. We're getting into PC gaming talk where the screen does not tear if the game's refresh rate, which is like how many frames per second,

is variable. It's shifting. I know, I know. The point is... No, Plant is making a very good point now where it's like imagine someone fucking on stage doing this. And imagine somebody at Best Buy trying to explain what TV you should buy. So my point is, here's what HDMI 2.1 does. It makes the picture, it can make the picture look way, way, way, way, way smoother.

Way smoother. But, again, HDMI 2.1, you have that on your console, right? So you're like, okay, I bought a new TV. It has HDMI 2.1. We're set, right, I bought a new TV. It has HDMI 2.1. We're set, right? Right. Wrong!

Because only really nice TVs that have HDMI 2.1 also have the specific, basically, firmware to match these features. So you could have both ports. Now, that could be updated, right? On some TVs, yes. On some, not. Because manufacturers say it's like Vizio, right? have both ports now that could be updated right on some tvs yes on some not because manufacturers say it's like vizio right maybe they want their top of the line series to have these features that way you buy that top of the line series right the point you're making sounds like it's harder to sell this stuff than it was the previous generation like this stuff is way harder and this is where i will

plug we have a story on this on polygon that explains it in far greater detail because submit actually knows what half of the jargon i'm saying means um i encourage people to check it out but that that's like problem one right the other thing that i think is really good, and this is going to work for everybody, and it will be very cool, is they're shifting to a thing called NVMe SSD. And those are your hard drives. They're solid state. And what is different

between them, and maybe you already know about solid state drives, you probably have one in your computer right now, they're very fast. These are way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way more faster. On my PC, it's directly connected into the motherboard. These are the little wafers.

Those little snack wafer sized. Yeah, they look like extra thin Hershey bars. Delicious. And what that means is, Mark Cerny did, I think, actually talk about this, so I don't know if he used the jargon. That means you can have an open-world game where you can move just astonishingly fast through it

because it can load that world in real time. We don't think about this or notice it very often, but in most open-world games, if you are, think about GTA V, right? Like, if you're on the highway and a lot of stuff's going by, that is usually a pretty desolate area because they don't want to have to load as much. And then when you get into the city, there's lots of corners that keep you moving slowly

so that the whole world doesn't have to load. In theory, NVMe makes that stuff easier. It also just makes your normal games load way faster. So a lot of backwards compatible stuff will be way better. Let me ask. Welcome to the next gen. To me, it sounds like the biggest problem they have is just like a marketing problem.

How the hell do you explain this? Because in the good old days, we had VGA. VGA was pretty good. We were all pretty happy with VGA. Then we wanted something a little better we had super vga and that's clearly better but when you talk about nvma ssd that sounds like a new hipster party job it sounds like i i mean i think it's i think it's going to be less about i mean any any what chris is saying is going to be boiled down to that fucking microsoft like

the most powerful i was there for the birth of the most powerful console again like that's what you're gonna get the faster load times out of phil spencer's neck yeah the the faster load times like speak for themselves like that presents really well i think that it's gonna boil down to like even aesthetics is like not even a fucking thing anymore look at the series x and it looks like a you know a a small frigid air chest refrigerator like whatever uh i think it boiled i think like the bigger thing is going to be the systems level stuff of just like uh xbox game pass level stuff or whatever the playstation equivalent of that is or whatever their um like onboard streaming thing is for you know uh you know the the ps5 remote play equivalent the xbox to pc like uh cross play cross share like all that shit like for me that's the stuff and

obviously like whatever the first party lineup looks like which i feel like we still don't know jack shit about i think this is xbox pc gaming like that which I feel like we still don't know jack shit about. I think this is Xbox PC gaming. That's all it is. I don't even think about it as a full new console cycle for Xbox. I don't think they do. For at least the time being, I don't think there's anything first party that will be exclusive to Series X. I think the way that they're going to come out is PC gaming has blown up. People are spending that money, but there

are still a ton of people who want all those benefits, all that fancy stuff. They want the best of the best, and they also want it to work. Like Windows Defender jumping in and being like, yo, dog, restart your shit. That's what Series X is for, and then they'll also

have xCloud for some people, and they'll still have the xbox one x and i think for the time being it will continue to be a series of variants not unlike how it works with new iphones right like if you really want the best of the best of the best and you want this special space alloy um sure like spend that money we know that people will buy it what what is like the big question mark now is what is the playstation 5 like i don't think that's sony's plan i mean it's one more it's one more yeah yeah so right now we have the four right oh oh oh well that changes it yeah i just like for me the the uh i come back to play playstation for

now i i built a new pc in january uh and i'm trying to convince justin to do the same uh but he's afraid he'll break his hand a piece of motherboard shrapnel will go in his brain and kill him and like that's not unreasonable uh but i go back to the ps4 now to one play the play dreams or the ff7 remake demo and obviously that's where i'll play ff7 remake when it comes out but for a long time like it was also like i played destiny with my friends there so like there is something to having a codified gaming uh ecosystem that i know i can play with my friends on, because, like, for, I don't have that on PC, and that's not to say it doesn't exist, like, I think Discord communities, like, fill that need for people, but, like, I just don't play like that, and so the idea of having a gaming console

like PS5 that is as powerful as my PC that, like, I know all my friends have, and I can play shit with them on there like that's that is what I'm excited about but like I think the Xbox PC hybrid argument is way better for me this time around and so like if if uh I'm gonna get a PS5 probably but like if it's gonna be my road dog like it was this generation like I think that's again as is always the case like it's going to boil down to like what the games yeah i think it's going to transform into uh how i view the switch which is i look at the switch as like a exclusive player predominantly and then some indies and i think that's what the playstation 5 for me is going to turn into is like oh shit god of war

just came out on playstation 5 it's only there I definitely need to play it because I loved God of War, the last one. Whereas previously, the PlayStation 4 was my go-to third party, first party, everything. That was the main man. If the Xbox is effectively recreating that PC gaming experience where everything works and everything

is cross-play with PC, hell yeah. It's a question of what are you going to play the live service games on? What are you going to play Destiny 2 on? What are you going to play, you know, Monster Hunter? Like, what is the platform that you play those games that you play 500 hours on? What do you play Fortnite on?

What do you play Dauntless on? Like, that's the question. I don't know the answer to. Justin, where's your head at with this? You know what? I'm just irritated. I know't know the answer to. Justin, where's your head at with this? You know what? I'm just irritated. I know this is going to sound stupid, but I feel like Microsoft didn't do themselves any favors

with this Series X business. I feel like, and it's not just like, I don't like that name. It's like from a lot of what we're talking about could be fixed if it was just Xbox 2 because then you look at the back of the game, it like enhanced on two like enhanced on xbox 2 or like it just seems like they've really made it so much more like what a wild way of making it even more complicated you already have the xbox one x now you have the xbox one the xbox series x

there's going to be another one that's different just xbox separate from the xbox series x it's so next gen powerful as the series x it is so wild to me it feels intentionally like bad i don't understand why you would make it this

harder especially when playstation's got like fifth one wait fuck you maybe that's what it is they're trying to make it more like pc gaming oh yeah why you would make this harder. Especially when PlayStation's got like fifth one. Wait. Fuck you. Maybe that's what it is. They're trying to make it more like PC gaming. Oh yeah. We need to make it. I think I already have this,

but I better buy another one to be sure. I hope the new Xbox just has like a weird elf lady on the box like the way PC games have like the motherboard art. Yeah. Extreme Xbox One. Y''all next week yes games are here but griffin's griffin's away by the time the games show up uh our intention is to talk about doom next week the the episode is going to go up on march 20th and doom will be out that day. And our hope is that we will talk about Doom the day it comes out because we maybe we'll get early code. We do not currently have early code,

but maybe it'll work out. It's a real cold shot. We do not know if we will have code for early code for Doom. We can say confidently that we will not all have early code of Animal Crossing, which also comes out on March 20th. That's next week. You know, we can't do Animal Crossing without like, we can't do Animal Crossing, which also comes out on March 20th. That's next week. You know I'm gonna be in the mix for that shit.

Also, we can't not do Animal Crossing without, like, we can't do Animal Crossing without Griffith. We can't do Animal Crossing if it's an option. Justin, you can take vacation forever while we're doing Animal Crossing. Okay, perfect. So Animal Crossing's next, or the week after.

Doom is next week. I will be gone, but y'all are gonna have a lot of fun talking about chopping up all the demons and shooting all the robots robots send your thoughts oh i guess you wouldn't have played doom but doom is a long-standing franchise so i'm sure you have memories of doom across the history of across the time wheel or this is also the first episode i feel like where we've done a game that uh like is out today and people haven't played it yet. So what about if you have questions about Doom? I feel like we ought to talk about that too.

Yeah, we will answer questions about Doom. Right, okay, cool. Well, that's going to be it for us. I want to remind you to thank you if you have already followed and listened to our show for free on Spotify. But if you maybe have some friends that are into video games,

you can tell them to do the same. There's this link, besties.fan. You can send them and they'll shoot them right over to our show and they can smash that follow button. You know some Spotify shows have pictures where you can look at a picture while you're listening to it. We should try to figure out how to get

pictures in it. If you look at your phone right now, every little thing does it, right? You're listening on Spotify. We should try to figure out how to get pictures in it. Yeah, they have like, if you look at your phone right now, like every little thing does it, right? It's like, you're listening on Spotify. Look at your phone right now. There's pictures. I mean, our logo's there. That's true, Russ.

Our logo is there and it's very good. It's designed by Sarah McKay. It's very good. So if you would be so kind as to do that, that'd be great. You can mail us, mail at besties.fan. You can also follow us on twitter.com at thebestiespod. And if you want to be the first to learn about new shows and topics of future shows or anything else,

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Besties. Nesties. You shouldn't have said that. Okay. Shouldn't have done that. Thank you so much for listening and 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? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter.

And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Nesties! Testies! Nope, nope, stop it.