The Besties - The Best Resident Evil Game DECIDED! (Almost)

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

With the fervor over Resident Evil Village, the gang gathers to figure out whether they can narrow down the very best Resident Evil game of all time. Sure, there's a lot of crud to sift through, but there's gold in these hills! And they're gonna buy shotgun upgrades with this gold! 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!

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Oh, that's gonna help with leaking. Oh, boy. Can you give me your best Tim Allen grunt, Russ, just to sort of send this thing home? Oh, the spell is broken. That was not good. It was bad? No, it wasn't.

It's over. The moment's passed. I'm really more of a Wilson. I'm inverted now. I'm inverted now. The spell is broken. That was not good. It was bad? It's over. The moment's passed. I'm really more of a Wilson. I'm inverted now. I'm inverted now. The spell is passed. If you had a fence in front of me, I'd be crushing it. Everybody's got to know if they're a Tim or a Wilson.

It's just... I'm a Lowell from Wings. What? My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best Resident Evil game that there is. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best Resident evil game that there is my name is griffin mackaroy and i know the best resident evil game that's it my name is ross fresher and i love this game the week chris planned is too afraid to talk about zombie he's not here 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 you're a member and today i'm checking the minutes of today's meeting there's no old business well i guess there's only exclusively old business there is no new business we are talking about the resident evil uh franchise we are going to be winnowing out the greatest Resident Evil game. And it's a discussion I'm excited to have. This is a storied franchise. There are stories in it. So that is true.

Sometimes. Sometimes there's not. Sometimes there's not. Even when they're supposed to be sometimes, there's not really stories. Sometimes it's just like military guys show up in a city and they just wreck shit. Sometimes it's a big man and he wears a black jacket and he turns into a helicopter or something and that's okay too

that's a kind of that's a kind of story that's a part of the hero's journey i think resident evil is really interesting because if we can talk about the franchise holistically real quick i think it's interesting because i was kind of researching to see like what other people where where other people stand on this um i think resident evil is really interesting because there is not a general consensus on like there's there's there's games that have a lot of love there are games that have negative love bordering on distaste um but people seem to want different things out of this franchise there's different things about like the there are purists that

miss the the old you know tank controls and and believe that that's the way you know that that the badness made it scarier there's people who are way into the new new direction of the series i think that that makes for an interesting discussion um yeah we i think we've got a lot to tackle with the figuring out the best resident evil game so let's get into it yeah now russ tell me how we set up this uh this bracketing here sure so the bracket real quick uh the the spirit of the bracket is normally we try to do randomized brackets here but because we're dealing with 10 games here instead of uh you know an evenly broken out eight i didn't i was not able to randomize it so these are the games that we've included.

Resident Evil 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, Village, 7. We've included Zero, and we've included Code Veronica. So that makes for an even 10. So the bracket's a little weird, but we're going to have to do like a... if you've been watching the NBA playoffs, you'd know there's something called a play in where people basically have like a mini tournament to figure out whether they make it in. And those are all the shittiest teams. In this case, we've chosen the shittiest Resident Evil games to try to play in to the tournament.

To be immediately demolished as soon as the next round starts. But that does seem likely, but you never know. There could be, the Dark Horse story could happen. Right. Can we also in like 30 seconds talk about sort of our history with the thing? Because I was not a Resident Evil fan, I will admit, until Resident Evil 4. Really, Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition came out came out because i was we joked about plant earlier but i was too scared the original uh resident evil gave me terrible nightmares

uh for a very long time that i had oh wow i was not interested in returning to the franchise uh because i think i was like 10 when it came out which is just about the right age for you to be very scared of zombies photorealistic three-dimensional zombies of course reasonable um my first resident evil experience i think was the remake of resident evil 1 that came out on the gamecube right um i never owned a playstation uh i did have a dreamcast but i didn't play code veronica on it um so i think that was the first Resident Evil game I played. And I liked it. I wasn't like over the moon about it until, as Griffin said, Resident Evil 4 was like the breaking point for me.

And I was like, oh, hell yeah. It also made me go back and play the other Resident Evil games. I have played them all at this point, but I was not on the ground floor. I'm of an age where I experienced these all as they came out. We got back into PlayStation right around the time that Resident Evil came out. So I'm pretty sure I rented these bad boys. I have played all of the main entry games, but I'm not a purist about it. I tend to just sort of take each one as it comes um so i'm i'm i'm

interested i don't have a lot of religion here is what i'm saying so i'm interested to talk about these so should we do our first also we should say that we have left out a absolutely dizzying number of games that are in this franchise it's a 25 year old franchise there are i mean like 30 games depending on how sort of expansive you want to get there's like watch games there's game.com games there's uh rail shooters there's you know you know yeah those don't count no basically we're gonna keep it easy otherwise we'd be here all day yeah uh let's start with the the play-in playoffs okay so round one of the play-in playoffs there are two rounds to this uh section uh round one is resident evil 3 versus resident evil 5 okay this one's a slam dunk because one of them's super racist so like

that that is true should make this a cakewalk before we get into this uh the only way we're able to pull this off was to fuse the remake. We've done this in previous brackets. Fuse the remakes together. So Resident Evil 3, for example, just recently had a remake as of last year, I want to say. And so that should be grouped in with the original Resident Evil 3 that came out on PlayStation 1. Okay. Yeah, so let's talk about Resident Evil 5.

As Justin alluded to, resident evil 5 was pretty racist it yeah it a lot of it took place in africa in in uh there was a big portion of the game that takes place in like a small african village and you are uh you're chris red I believe, in this one. Yep. And you are just going around sort of blowing away black people with sort of, that one was, their version of zombies was like, I think at that point, like weird worms that pop out of your head or something like that. I forget. Yeah, it was an evolution of what it was in 4, which is mostly just worms. But it was like, it leaned on some like um dark continent tropes

from like uh early 20th century hyper problematic sort of literature and it yeah it was wild that this game came out in the the late aughts i mean it has aged even worse yeah of course looks that i mean there was an outcry in uh ought seven when it was first sort of debuted when they first started showing around people were like this feels bad and then it was released and it did feel bad and if you watch a video now in the year of our lord 2021 you are basically just watching like a cop kill black people with a machete it sucks like it is extremely unpalatable yeah uh chris redfield has no there's really no scenario where this is great i mean it is worth noting there was another playable character a black woman named chiva um who as far as i'm aware was not

in any of the other games no you could almost say that maybe she was introduced to make the uh optics slightly more palatable but not yeah i'm talking a bit out of my lane here because obviously i'm not a video game developer and i am not among the oppressed people that would be affected by uh a game with these sorts of depictions but like in my history as a game journalist i think i there was a real period where you saw japanese developers become aware that racial optics were a thing and something they need to be aware of but not necessarily having the ability and and western developers too i yeah this is by far not there yeah a japanese of large but like i think that you because of the cultural divide there i think that it was maybe more of a a

challenge to like deal with racial issues in games without it like completely running a foul and not knowing how to really like uh uh handle it in a way that would would appeal to a lot of people and would feel tasteful to a lot of people yeah it's a that is a hyper uh complex issue that like yeah not to skirt it but like we are you know not equipped to to handle sort of uh i'm not even smart i'm not smart enough to talk about it really right i didn't want to say it's like it was a period that i observed where like there was a lot of these where it's like oh this doesn't feel great um yeah but i do want to mention uh before we just talk about resident evil 3 real quick like if you remove the very which i agree with everything that's been said if you remove

the like very untasteful and bad uh racial aspects to resident evil 5 as a game it's actually a pretty good game I do not I do not it's okay it's not it's a it took all the wrong lessons from four yeah tried to push into like more action sure while that not necessarily with that not necessarily being like the strong suit of this franchise um yeah it basically picked up from the end of four which was like a very actiony game and just like continued that there was very little like high tension attention like survival horror there is no there is nothing there is no tension horror stuff in resident evil 5 to speak of whatsoever it is yeah it is it's all just like

machine guns yeah and it feels weird because it it sets it down the the sort of uh bad path towards resident evil 6 which was sort of the nadir of this of this franchise because it was a full-blown action game but uh it feels almost like it was there to justify like the tone of the game was there to justify mercenaries which was the multiplayer mode included in in five which was you know a fairly story free just romp where you just shoot lots of dudes and that's sort of also lean on co-op a lot that wasn't bad i remember the co-op being okay but but yeah, five is a mess. And I know what you're wondering, Justin, in your 2009 review of Resident Evil 5 for Joystick, how much criticism did you bring to the racial issues that you are so strongly opinionated about now, some 12 years later? And the answer, reader, is obviously none. Not even a passing mention in that review.

You know, we all had a lot of going on to do i don't know i said it was fine here's my review it's it's fine i wrote it's all just fine um and resident evil 3 is cool and i like it i like resident evil 3 it's a different vibe where rather than like exploring you are basically like just trying to stay alive for extended periods of time it is very much like the sense of being hunted for an entire game which I think is a cool departure from 1 and 2 yeah I think we talked a little bit about well actually a lot about Resident Evil 3 when we talked about the remake uh last year but at its core like i don't think it is as special as like resident evil 2 was yeah um it i think leans again too

heavily on the actiony stuff and the main bad guy it doesn't do anything for me but um it doesn't feel 100 disgusting so that's a plus. Yeah, I mean, it was... Did 2... I know 2 Remake had Mr. X. I don't remember. Was that in... Nemesis was 3.

Right, Nemesis was 3, but Mr. X, the big sort of bald gentleman who just walks around very slowly and follows you around was also in 2 Remake. Was that in the original 2? It's been a while since i've played the original resident evil 2 i genuinely thought that there was a tyrant but i don't know that the

mechanics were exactly the same um i i think three is a fine game i i think of the i think of the you know resident evil 1 2 3 is sort of a a trilogy because they were you know playstation 1 titles and there is like a through line of the evolution of them and they came out fairly close together. But for my money, 3 was a bit of a step back from 2 because 2 was just a really good action-adventure game with a really fascinating exploration of this whole city and a really nice sort of power curve,

which is an important thing for these games like making you weak when you start out and then feel empowered by the you know by the later portions of the game uh and three does that fine i don't know i'm glad that they did the remake of three because it it it was better it was a better package of of what they did but um i think three definitely beats five because yeah i think think I would give it to three for sure. So I'll get there. All right. Justin, do you concur?

Yes, I agreed. Okay. The next round, we're going to be deciding Resident Evil Code Veronica versus Resident Evil 6. And I do think that this is going to be a bit of a trouncing. Yeah. Yeah, six is not a good game. I don't. Six is not only not a good game i i would argue

it is the worst game of the entire series yeah it's it's well yeah of the ones we're discussing of the ones we're discussing right of the main ones the the if for those that don't recall the spirit of six was basically like we are bringing all the series together we had like chris redfield and claire and and there's leon over here but now we're going to bring them all into the same game and it's going to be this climactic build and build and exciting and the way they presented that was that they'd have like discrete levels where it'd be like okay this is a leon level it's going to feel like survival horror and creepy and then this is a chris level and it's gonna feel like super actiony and there's like zombies

with like karate moves in this and like flipping down from the sky from rockets and like it just doesn't it feels terrible like it's not a fun game to play and um i think like it was just like absolutely savage when it came out like Like, no one liked this game. Whereas I think for most of the other ones, there's always, like, a camp that's like, okay, yeah, this is pretty good. But this was just devastated to the point where, like, they literally had to reboot the series after this. Like, that's pretty telling. Which is good. I mean, 7 is a huge reversal from 6 in every conceivable way.

So, like, as a launch pad for a better thing to come out of it like there's something redeemable about six but it's uh it's not great and at the same time i don't harbor a lot of affection for code veronica which is to say like yeah i know i played it on dreamcast because there wasn't a ton of stuff to play on Dreamcast. And I don't remember hardly anything about it. Well, the interesting thing about Code Veronica is that it was the first 3D Resident Evil game. And let me caveat that by saying, like, previous Resident Evil games basically had pre-rendered environments that you would, like, move through. By which you mean literal, pretty much still images

essentially. Yeah, so previously they were still images, but it was like an optical illusion where it was like a matte painting where it looked like you were actually exploring these environments, but it was all pre-rendered. Code Veronica was the first game, if I am correct, where it had physical

environments that you like 3d polygonal environments that you're walking through and because of that this game has aged really badly yeah like way worse than any of the like one through three look dramatically better in a lot of ways than code veronica does that's not, but I see what you're saying. Sorry? That's not. I mean, one... You don't think so? No, they look terrible. I mean, one... Man, I don't... The textures... The textures in Code Veronica

look so rough, my dude. And that is... It's really bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I... You know, gameplay-wise, Code Veronica basically, more or less, plays a lot like the one through three. So you really just have this like environment and the environment for what it's worth is like a fucking prison island, which never really did anything for me. Like it's not a thrilling environment to explore.

I think it gets a lot of love partially because dreamcast and like the love for dreamcast exclusives hooray uh and i think people um you know i think it's kind of a dark horse in the resident evil series i don't think it's a terrible awful game but in the same way that like going back and playing one through three is bad um because the controls same thing here but you also have the added downside of like oh this is like a 1.0 3d world yeah and it's it's rough it is but it let's not waste any more time because it's it is not resident evil 6 so okay it has won by default i would say congrats to resident evil 3 and code veronica for surviving the play-in playoffs. You know, Code Veronica was originally supposed to be the third one.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, it was originally supposed to be the follow-up to 2, and then Sony wanted one more on the PlayStation Plus. And they asked really nicely. So nicely. No money involved. They actually said please, and Capcom was like okay, fine, you stinker.

So, yeah, I'm you stinker. So, yeah, I'm so glad that Resident Evil 3 and Code Verona could make it through to this next part where they will be instantly thrown right in the dumpster and pushed into a big pit because they are going up against some real slam dunkerinos. Yeah, they are.

So, round two, part one is Resident Evil 3 versus Resident Evil 4, the Leon one. It is Resident Evil 4. And I realize I sound like a real hipster every time I say this, but the Wii version of Resident Evil 4 is maybe my favorite Resident Evil experience I've ever had. is maybe my favorite Resident Evil experience I've ever had. That game whips ass,

and the action-y elements of 4 only worked for me when I was controlling it with the raw power of Nintendo's Wiimote. It was... There was something... Resident Evil 4 is still pretty tanky, right? You are not very fleet-footed, and it is a little bit clumsy like it is not the slickest action game ever so taking sort of the um the aiming away from the

the the sticks and just making it something that you control with the Wiimote, which worked like way better than it had any right to, was fantastic. And it added a feel to the game that like, you know, getting that auto shotgun, the striker, I think is what it was called, and like using your Wiimote to aim that at a zombie's head and blowing them away,

like it felt fantastic. It's one of my favorite Wii games. So this is the one to be in maybe in my book and for and for those that don't recall or haven't played it uh resident evil 4 was the first um behind the shoulder over the shoulder resident evil game so all the remakes now use this perspective of like third person traditional over the shoulder aiming and this was the first time they had really done it in a resident evil game was for uh it was set in a european village uh very similar to

resident evil village and uh it you know as griffin alluded to like has more of an action event but still has like the survival horror dna the thing that like stands out to me about four you start and you just like walk into this village and it feels like a resident evil game which is to say it's slow and it's creepy and but there's like a grounded nature to it that like brings you into it and obviously very quickly that dissolves into zombies but that introduction is something that i think is still missing from some resident evil games. I think 7 pulled it off. I mean, 8 literally recreates it beat for beat. So I don't know that it was missing from 8.

Well, I wouldn't agree with that, actually. So I think 8, there's really no moment in 8 where you, like, meet, like, normal, like, people that turn into zombies. Like, 8, within the first five minutes you are like fighting yeah that's fair straight up zombies whereas like resident evil 4 has that intro moment where you like walk in and and people are i believe they're speaking spanish i think it's supposed to be like a like in spain or uh it's definitely in europe but uh they speak spanish i don't know that they ever like specifically classified and um goes without saying still not great from an optic standpoint, because you are like an American agent running into a city, killing people, but it does a better job portraying this as like a fantasy universe. It gets way over the top, way quickly to the end point where you're like riding a jet ski out of an exploding cave after you just like blew up a uh a big monster with a rocket

launcher uh it's like it gets that it gets so wild so fast yeah i you know you're also trying to rescue the president's daughter like it's that game is is is poppycock in a way that is uh a genuine delight and like i don't know if you've if you're new to the series and you really enjoyed village play four because the connective tissue between those two games is like undeniable it's interesting though it's more of like a thematic connect it's almost like um pastiche i mean would that be like an accurate way of describing it like it's not like one-on-one references it's just sort of like um it's in in conversation with resident evil 4 how's that like it assumes a uh a knowledge of resident evil 4 um i think resident evil 4 also i will say and i know

this is not a popular opinion but whatever as i've tried to return to it over the years i think that resident evil 4 has benefited by its contrast to the first three and how good it was initially. I think that people still sort of hold it up, maybe give it a little more credit because of how different it was and because of what a big jump it was from three

and elevate it above some of the later games in the franchise that I think succeed a lot better. I think Resident Evil 4 of the later games in the franchise that i think uh succeed uh yeah a lot better i think resident evil 4 of the first of those first i guess five games if you include uh code veronica is the only one that i can go back to and play the original version and enjoy myself right just the only one i don't know and that is actually quite an accomplishment for a 3d game that came out in what was it 2003 somewhere on there for that long ago to still have that staying

power is extremely rare yeah and it shows that they really locked into something special it's it's a bummer plants uh internet crapped out like 10 seconds before we started recording it's a bummer he's not here because he was actually playing it for the first time he had never played it before just this week and i really wanted to hear more of like his perspective of experiencing it now and whether it like works for him without that nostalgia tied in well we'll circle back back this week and ask him yeah he'll be back next week i mean who knows though resident evil 3 might beat Resident Evil 4 right now no Resident Evil 3 is a good game though the next one is gonna be pretty easy too because it's Resident Evil Code Veronica versus

Resident Evil 7 which is probably next to 4 my favorite of the Resident Evil games I've been wrestling with a lot with if I liked 8 or 7 better because 8 does a lot of things really really well but seven just like seven just floored me in a way that was so surprising and I feel like I kind my expectations were much higher for a and while it met those expectations it wasn't this like constant surprise of like oh my god like this is a completely different thing from the last terrible game that came out in this series um seven is i don't think there has been a i don't know well i'll say this and then immediately think of something else but like

it's hard to summon up a like long-running franchise that has turned it around to this extent like credit to them six was widely panned and then they did several other games but then for the next major entry in the franchise they really did did tear the entire thing down and make a new game that had not a ton of connective tissue to the last one. Virtually not. Went to the franchise that they had been working on for 20 years and created something that became the best-selling one ever.

So it's a massive, incredible success that i think more developers could like take something from in terms of like killing your little darlings and and really reinventing in a way that is like not trying to guess what the players will want but rather like the or the the existing fan base will want how's that but rather like what what is the thing that makes the most sense right here in this moment also obviously hugely inspired by pt but the two games that like spring to mind as being like the equivalent of that are breath of the wild and uh metroid prime but see neither of those neither of those games were preceded by a terrible game like sure but they but they were like we're gonna take this franchise that's pretty beloved and like

go in a completely different direction with it yeah um and that's extremely risky but i would argue cash cow capcom's done that before with resident evil 7 in resident evil 4 like a one two three code veronica like you can there those games are very similar even though code veronica is not you know pre-rendered and all that jazz like it is a very very similar game to the first three and then resident evil 4 is nothing like those games and i don't think features like a lot of characters from from the series and it's so interesting that seven does the same thing because six was like justin said four Well, 4 has Leon and Ada and Wesker. Yeah, I guess that's a good... Guys,

this is madness. Are we literally just at the halfway point here? You're right. Come on. This is end of show. Congratulations to 7. 7 wins. Now we are going to move on. To a commercial break. We're going to go through these quicker because we're getting bogged down and this is taking forever.

We're actually doing well. Cause there's really only two matchups left for this, for this episode. So okay. Resident evil versus resident evil too. Uh, this is interesting. This is where I think,

this is probably my favorite. It's where we start having to make some decisions about what we are valuing in this ranking versus like, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. I, I still, I, and I've in this ranking versus like yeah i don't know yeah i i still and i've said this previously like i think nostalgia and like setting new ground is only worth so much in these cases whereas i look more to you know at the core what is the quote better game um i think resident evil the resident evil 2 remake um just highlighted the absolute best parts of the original resident evil 2 on playstation while also making it like not a

shitty game to control yeah um which helped quite a bit but even original resident evil 2 had the controls that still didn't feel very good and it was it was uh it was a masterpiece that's that game that game is good as hell like you talk about like a good horror story a good like it it tells a really good zombie story which is not really a metric that we've leveraged against this this series so far but like it can hang with with uh you uh, you know, some of the best zombie media. I feel like having that truck crash at the very beginning and having the two protagonists separated and you're surrounded by flaming cars and like an army of zombies is like an unforgettable way for,

for a game to start. And it, it only gets, it only gets wilder from there. Um, yeah, I think resident evil is a historic game, obviously, because it's a hugely long-running series. And it's definitely super memorable.

And it was remade for GameCube and certainly got a glow up there. But it is tough to get over a lot of the pacing issues with resident evil which is to say every time you open the door there is like a door opening cinematic and the puzzles are uh like as obtuse as this series gets uh which like resident evil 2 definitely has some obtuse puzzles but resident evil just like around every corner was a tough one. It also reminds me that all of the original game, really through Code Veronica, had this like ridiculous inventory system

where you had to, you could only carry like three items at a time. You had like, oh, a green herb and a box of bullets and a gun and that's it. It had some major issues. I do agree though, issues. I do. I do agree, though, Griffin. I think Resident Evil 2 at its core, the like star of it is the environment, like the police station and the surrounding city and Resident Evil.

Obviously, you've got the castle, whatever the mansion. But I don't think it lands quite with the like, I don't know the film familiarity that resident evil 2 has mixed with the outrageousness of like hey there's zombies in this familiar environment uh really i think sticks with people and continues to like really land to this day yeah um so i i i agree with you griffin i i think resident evil 2 is the winner here. But I want to hear what Justin has to say. It's tough. You know, Resident Evil, I definitely like, it's kind of like Assassin's Creed where it's like you have to give it credit for just like working. Like it just sticks together enough to land.

I mean, there's obviously progenitors here, alone in the dark, I think being the most notable. Clock Tower. There were a few. Yeah. mean there's obviously progenitors here alone the dark i think being the most notable um clock tower but there were there were a few yeah but i mean this is like it's seminal it's landmark it like it basically invents a genre fundamentally uh and it's just not i mean two is just an elevation in every way that you would want it to be an elevation um and like if we're not going to declare as we've said before if we're not going to declare as we've said before if we're not going to declare resident evil the winner you know then i think you have to give it to right yeah it's either resident evil wins this whole thing because it like you can't get more important

than resident evil uh or it's is a very this is not the most important d's podcast this is the besties podcast okay yeah best games good yes then that's i mean that's resident evil 2 amen okay last match up for this episode resident evil village versus resident evil 0 quick refresher obviously we talked a lot about village there's about to just get real quick if you could just tell me what that is that would be so cool resident evil zero was a prequel to resident evil one it came out exclusively on gamecube it was actually the first like gamecube exclusive uh when capcom came over um to start making exclusive games resident evil games for gamecube it's like a big deal and uh it is set before the events of the first game. As I mentioned,

you play as two different characters, which is pretty typical. The difference being here, you can actually swap between the characters at will, like whenever you want to. And that obviously manifests in puzzles. If you're like near one another, you can trade items between the two characters,

which is actually pretty interesting it also like really showed off the um visual enhancements that were like introduced with the remakes of the original resident evil and stuff like that i think it visually you could still play this game be like oh this looks pretty good actually um once again it is stymied by the fact that like you know inventory is still issue, even though you've got two characters. The tank controls are still an issue because they're the tank controls. It's still that core early Resident Evil that has definitely not aged well. I think you could probably do a remake of this game and make it much more interesting.

But where it's at right now, where it hasn't been remade apart from like an hd re-release um it's still feeling pretty creaky i would say yeah it's just it it's it is kind of it's kind of forgettable like i remember i i didn't i definitely yeah i didn't finish it but i do remember it came out i think around the same time as eternal darkness which i i think you could compare these two games because eternal darkness is also you know kind of a survival horror game that is obviously much grander in scope but resident evil zero just did not feel like an evolution of resident evil one which is wild because they had already done that. They had already evolved Resident Evil 1 and Resident Evil 2.

Also, the AI for your partner, I remember, was pretty rough at times. Not the most helpful cyber friend there. But it looked great. I remember

the tone of the game was was pretty great and i don't know if you're gonna go with like tank controls in tight corridors which is what the early resident evil games kind of was their bread and butter you can't do much better than setting the whole thing on a train for the most part so i yeah i don't know it's okay love trains love trains not the whole thing is not on a train a lot of it there's on a train. There is a large chunk of it on a train. And that, I mean, I think that settles it. Train is best of all the different modes of transportation. But Village is...

But not of all the video games. Yeah, Village is the better game. I don't think we need to go too deep into Village. We literally just talked about it. It's a good, it's a very good game. When it wins this whole thing, it's going to get its... Oh, interesting. It's insane, for sure.

Well, and now here, I just want to set this up because in the next episode, we are going to be putting the true best Resident Evil games. I think it was bound to happen, but here are the matchups. I haven't figured out who's going to go against who, but essentially we have Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil 2, and Resident Evil Village going up against one another in the next episode. So look forward to that. But before we get into that, we do have some quick questions from readers.

So thank you for sending in some questions. Oh, this is a good one. I'm going to ask Justin this question. This is from Angry Aria on Twitter. If you had the money, which obtuse puzzle or puzzles would you put into your own home, and what would it be hiding? I guess I this is extremely personal.

This feels very personal, doesn't it? This makes me feel very vulnerable. I don't remember any of the puzzles from Resident Evil games. They're all pretty stupid. I would probably do one with chess pieces. Wild about chess. And I think it would be locking up my woodworking equipment just because that's a safety thing.

That's going to keep the little ones out and make for a safer work environment. Especially if my kids are having to run and look under the, push the bookshelf aside to try to find the rook to go put in the door to daddy's shop like they're never gonna put in the effort to do that they won't even watch an entire episode of bluey without trying to kill each other so uh that would be my that would be my choice what about you guys yeah i uh well i was just speculating i think it'd be terrifying to know what the next step is once they got the woodworking equipment where they would go with that they have to combine it they have to disassemble

it and then combine it then it turns into uh uh what's the one with the photographer guy oh god dead dead rising dead right dead rising yes oh yeah they have to start gluing together daddy's tools to battle um the zombies i mean, at one point in Resident Evil 8, you are carrying around, I believe, four different statues, like four different busts that you, am I remembering that correctly? No, that's right.

The faces. The masks, the faces. Is that what it is? Yeah, I don't know. I just love, in pretty much every Resident Evil game, there is a puzzle where there is a room with four statues in it, and you have to do stuff to the statues.

And I think it'd be great to just have four statues. You walk into my house and you're greeted by four statues. Maybe they're knights. Maybe they are just scary faces. But you've got to put a gemstone in one of them. And one of them has a crank. And some of them you have to play a piano

to make a key come out. And yeah, i just want four statues that's it and that's how you activate your dishwasher yeah the dishwasher is there's a you have to switch switch the circuit breaker because it does flip it quite often and then you have to do put the four masks in on the statues in the foyer got it um do you want to do another question yeah let's do another question. Uh, this is from Pelican Patronus. Would you rather see, see them do a new remake treatment to Resident Evil 1 or Resident Evil 4?

They already did one. They already remade one. It's technically speaking. Yeah, but not really. They, they just like gave it a glow up. They didn't change the actual game of it. I think he's, uh, uh, uh, they're probably talking about a like re reimagining of the actual gameplay. Here's what I'll just say.

I think Resident Evil 4, as I've mentioned before, you can go back and play right now and still have a really good time. Resident Evil 1, not so much. So I kind of want a 1 because it would give me a little more range. I will say if Resident Evil 4 could get the VR treatment in the way that Resident Evil 7 did, that would be amazing. Well, they are actually doing

a Resident Evil 4 fully in VR. Oh my God, yeah, you're right. Oh yeah, you're right. You wished it into existence, Griff. Hey, that's the secret, is to say things that you forgot about existed

and then pretend that you made them happen with your own intentions. Thank you for those questions. Any honorable mentions? anything anyone is playing uh i dipped into uh resident sorry not resident resident evil near replicant um i don't know it just seemed like something to play seemed like it would be fun uh you don't like it so much the first time well that the first time i was laying back i wanted to get past it it felt like important to have the closure to like get past the part that

i rage quit last time that ended that tarnished forever your video games journalism career yeah ended it basically um the uh no and i really i've been digging it it's it's very like especially with as much as i loved the aesthetics of automata like being able to have a little bit of that flavor and and explore in a new world and sort of getting it a little bit more like understanding sort of where this might be heading or uh you know some like some of the quirks of the thing it is as plant i to, like, it's still way too wasteful of the player's time. Like, there's a lot of backtracking. A lot of the side quests are so stupid and pointless.

And, like, it feels like a commentary in a way that's like, that's fine, but you're kind of playing with my time to make the point. Like, okay, fine. This TED Talk could have been five minutes long, y'all. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Right? But the combat feels good. There's a lot of flexibility with, like, the. This TED Talk could have been five minutes long, y'all. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Right? But the combat feels good. There's a lot of flexibility with the different powers that you use.

The writing is okay. And I'm excited to see sort of where it goes. I am struggling with my completionist nature to, like, I want to do all the dumb little bad side quests. The swords, I understand. You need to get all the swords. I hear about the swords. You need to get all the swords. I hear about the swords. You got to get all the swords. I asked Plant to tell me what I should be concerned about,

and he said, we'll talk about it during the show. And then he's not on the show. He did. Chris would want me to say, he published a mea culpa on Twitter that you can buy the swords at the end of the game. He was mistaken. You can.

Folks, you can buy the swords oh thank god so please hey you guys gonna play i don't know if you guys i figured out there you guys play biomutant not yet no um that's the furry game right well it's a reductionist it has furry creatures in it um i mean that's what i mean so does banjo kazooie. Yeah, so does Final Fantasy XIV, which is the only game that I've, I don't have a lot of gaming time, but when I do, I spend it playing Final Fantasy XIV. Did you guys know that that game is free to play all the way up through the end of the first expansion?

That's a bonkers amount of video game that they get away from. I'm not, I'm sorry, Griffin. Russ, I think you should get in. That game is like the GameStop stock of video games. It's like, I never know the right time to get in, but it always seems like a month ago. And there's always a bunch of nerds.

No, it's really popping off now, but you actually have to play through 60 hours of stuff to get to the good stuff. And there's always a bunch of nerds trying to bump that unnaturally by trying to get other people to play it. But folks, it's good stuff. I'm playing, I almost don't want to say this because

i'm worried nintendo is going to remember that it's an a thing that exists but it's called another metroid 2 remake oh yeah it is a fan-made remake of metroid 2 uh that came out originally in 2016 and was updated in 2020 it's for pc uh i think there might be an android version as well and uh it's incredible it's like someone took all the tenants from super metroid and put it into the uh chasing down metroid's mechanics of metroid 2 so if you never liked metroid 2 uh and are looking for like what it could have been well they already did a remake of an official remake of Metroid 2 that a lot of people like

which I actually also really liked didn't care for it but I'm curious about this one yeah this one is really phenomenally done and really interesting and yeah you just google AM2R to find it but totally fan made and free so so nintendo be nice to them

please but they won't so next week chris will be back hopefully and we are going to actually pick the best resident evil game and we've got quite the range uh as we mentioned uh we've got the heavy hitters coming at you i'd also bet that that I'm going to talk more about Final Fantasy 14. Chris is probably going to talk about Nier a whole bunch. I'm going to dip into Biomutant. I downloaded it. I'm desperate for new stuff to play, and I don't necessarily want to hang with... I don't know. Nier Automata feels like...

I don't know. I worry that I could be wasting my time sometimes. And we do have coming up in the very near future, we've got a new Ratchet game, which is an actual PS5 exclusive, which hasn't happened since Demon's Souls, have coming up in the very near future we've got a new ratchet game which is an actual like ps5 exclusive which hasn't happened since demon souls which is exciting so that's but that's uh in two weeks so we've got a lot to look forward to thank you so much for listening to our podcast we hope you'll join us again next time until then you can follow us on twitter at the besties pod you can

leave us a rating or review on the the podcast platform of your choice we love the reviews they're great if you haven't done it yet please please do it you never know when we'll be singing them again could happen yeah that's true uh you can also i think we got some merchandise over at mackler merch.com we have a bestie shirt and there may be more coming so stay tuned for that and uh that's gonna do it for us for week. So 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? Besties!