The Besties - The Besties 66 - Rise of the Sun

Episode Date: August 5, 2013

What's that sound? Well I'll be! It's the dulcet tones of Mr. David Tach. Yes, this week Dave "Sweet Sweet Butter Voice" Tach fills in for Justin "Hoops" McElroy. We discuss the rising of a triad, the setting of a sun, the returning of a shadow and the escaping of a zero. Won't you join us on this audio expedition? 4:05 - The best new old game (Rise of the Triad) 13:20 - The best old new game (Shadowrun Returns) 21:20 - Halftime! 32:10 - The best PC game that could be a mobile game (Race the Sun) 36:50 - The best game that was on PS+ but isn't anymore (Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward) 43:00 - The winner is... Theme song by Ian Dorsch Get the show: Download MP3" Subscribe to the podcast (RSS) Subscribe on iTunes 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!

So, Griffin, you are about to experience everything id Software has to offer at the annual QuakeCon. I mean, I don't anticipate that I'll be experiencing much things directly through id Software. What does that mean? By which I mean that there's not going to be any fucking Doom talk at all at this thing, as there never is. How long has that game been in development at this point it's been a billion years i mean i'll do i'll give it the old college but i feel like asking people from id software at koi con about doom it has almost turned into like a fraternity like pledge dare it's the the futility of it is like do you think it's a texas thing that maybe you aren't allowed to release games until they've been in development for like 10 years well the state is so big yeah

and they know it's too like the heat just they're like lizards on a rock you finish the build which is like hard to do anyway because like trying to motivate a team of 100 developers when it's 100 and butt-sweat hot outside. Yeah, and I guess most people don't know that if you are a developer in Texas, those 100 people have to have at least 10 miles apart from one another. Right. They're scattered across. There's very little collaboration, just because of the geography. Yeah, and it's all delivered by rickshaw. Rickshaw traveling over hot wastelands.

Yeah, football fields. They had a build of Duke Nukem forever ready like in 2004, and then you know what happened? Vultures. Whoops. 2004 and then you know what happened vultures whoops Hi everybody, I'm Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week thing. Hey, I'm Chris Plant. I know the best game of the week. I'm Dave Tack, and I also know the best game of the week.

A jaunty good day to you, sirs. I am Ross Froschick, and I happen to know the best game of the week. We're the besties, and together we get together on a weekly basis on fridays and we get together on fridays and we talk about games we talk about sports we talk about interior decoration we talk about um new experimental kinds of twizzlers um there's there's really a new one every week have you tried that one with the like the juice in it it's like a gusher but it's a twizzler no but you've just described a very real very powerful dream of mine yeah um justin my brother and my boss is out um he's on vacation in savannah georgia um so so so substituting for him is professional professional griffin McElroy substitute Dave Tack. Hi.

This must be so weird for you, Plant and Freshstick, because it's like you're caught in between the cracks of some sort of multiverse. We've never done this array before, and it really is blowing my mind apart. You can just do what I do and pretend that Griffin is Justin. That is... Don't ever say that again um we we are going to talk about some games this week um we've all been playing some games there have also been newses but i don't think we want to talk about those right we're pretty much going to stick with games yeah i don't know who knows we want to talk about those, right?

We're pretty much going to stick with games. Yeah, I don't know. Who knows? We'll see where the spirit moves us again. Why don't you start us off, Dave Tatch? Oh, boy, how exciting. My thing of the week is the best new old game, I think I'm calling it, and that is Rise of the Triad, which I have been playing for and failing at miserably for days and days and days.

Do you guys know Rise of the Triad? I actually, apart from the name, have no prior experience with the series or the game at all. So imagine a world in which someone doesn't know anything about this game and you're living in it. On the flip side. Oh, no, you oh no you go ahead i had an embarrassing well they announced it last year at quake con that was my first quake con that i covered and i got like a hands-on demo an interview with the like new creators and like there's so much nostalgia built into the game in that um its weapon set is fairly zany and and its violence is pretty over the top. And they were giving me this demo, like,

here comes the Excalibat. You remember that, right? As you know. I don't actually. I super don't remember that. I'm sorry. It was my first first-person shooter, and it was my entry point to casual misogyny.

Because on the box it has the woman with blood all over her and she's wearing a very revealing v-neck that they've since neutered in the remake art. She had like cleavage and now they've replaced it with

a very weird tattoo. Interesting. As a follow up question, is there anything like formal misogyny is that a thing no i think it's like it was like oh yeah it's just like a box art no no big deal it's not like you know like a trashy like rag is that what they call playboy magazines they call them trash trashy rags yeah trashy rags um i don't think anybody calls them that. But yeah, it was my first FPS. And what's funny is I've been playing this, and I'll let Dave talk about it, but it's nothing like what I remembered it being in my head.

The box art makes about as much sense as the game, which actually works out pretty nicely. which actually works out pretty nicely. It really is a remake of a Doom-era first-person shooter in Unreal Engine 3. Chris, you've played it, right? Yeah, and I actually just got off the phone with Scott Miller, who was the guy who funded the original, and I guess will probably make

some money off this one. In my head, Rise of the Triad was just Wolfenstein, which is slow and flat, and that's not it at all. The original Rise of the Triad was one of the first Y-axis, or

what is it, X, Y, Z? Yeah, Y. Oh, so you can look up. You can look up and down, and there's bouncing pads. So you actually, there's platforming, which is about as much of a nightmare as you probably imagined it would be back in the day. And the new one is pretty much the exact same thing, but with shinier graphics. Like they really did just make a super fast, really bizarre, kill everything as fast as you can shooter. And that's what it is.

So you think it's in the spirit of like a Serious Sam? Serious Sam was inspired a lot by Rise of the Triad. Sure. And yeah, so I mean, now it's like kind of fulfilling that circle. Yeah, and it reminds me of things that I've essentially forgotten for 15 years. Well, it's because nobody makes shooters like this anymore. Like nobody makes these. You guys remember that sort of shitty toned video about how if they remade Quake in modern days this is what it would be like and it was just like one long

corridor with a giant reticle on the screen and there were tips that popped up every four seconds that was pretty exaggerated but not so far off and this kind of represents just a style of maze shooters that I just think fell out of fashion a decade or so ago.

Well, yeah, I think everyone appreciates that. I don't think, as gameplay, they're not super fun. They were fun at the time because we didn't really know any better, but they do not age well at all. No, I remember picking up, I think, Doom 2 for Xbox Live Arcade with the rewind feature. I think it was actually Duke Nukem that just like, man. Yeah.

God. It captures that feeling perfectly, both good and bad. And I think as shooters have gotten more intelligent, this takes a deliberate step back. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But it really is, like Chris said, an excuse to run. I mean, your walk in this is like a Usain Bolt sprint. What's the sprint like then? That is your sprint and your walk and your everything.

You just sprint. That's it. Period. And they throw enemies at you that appear at first to be about as smart as a sack of rocks. But if you stay still for any amount of time, they will absolutely destroy you. Still, for any amount of time, they will absolutely destroy you. And that was my... It was like a great unlearning for me for the first few days of playing this game when I did miserably. Miserably? I was terrible at it.

And I'm only slightly less than terrible at it at this point. Were you just like hiding behind chest high walls and waiting for your health to refill? I'm like, wait, fuck, that won't work. Right, right. I was looking for the zombies that didn't come and i was trying to play it stealthy and that doesn't work no it's i mean it really is you have to remember that the point of the game is to go insane and shoot like the gun that has a wave of fire that just obliterates everybody and look for all the secrets which are hidden everywhere

so that you can get these crazy power-up weapons that don't make any sense. But they don't have to make any sense because they're there just to be completely insane. And they have built cheat codes right into it. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. Like, turning on God Mode is, under normal circumstances, in a normal game i i wouldn't do that um and i am playing this so that i don't have to do that but man i'm gonna have a lot of fun turning on god mode at some point just to to motor through it's the opposite and again this is not a knock it's

the opposite of a thinking man shooter it's just there to be crazy uh and it accomplishes that and you sound you sound pretty excited about it it sounds yeah like you're into it yeah it's fun it was it was an absolute drag for the first like i got stuck on world like straight up got stuck on world one three for hours i mean i just kept couldn't find a key. There was a switch. Oh, there are switches. There are colored keys. There are everything. And I just, yes, it is everything on its face designed to be everything like that kind of game that I haven't touched since about the time that Rise of the Triad first came out. Like back when I was playing Star Wars Dark Forces or whatever that was called. And I didn't think I missed it and I didn't think I wanted it.

And it was a lot harder to get back into. But actually the thing that taught me really how to play was getting in the multiplayer, which is a big component of the game. Where they just throw you several insane weapons and a couple of other guys in a room, play some music in the background, and just everybody goes nuts. And it may be a one-trick pony, but it's a pretty good trick. Yeah.

And that's what was great about the original Rise, too. And I think is what's good about this type of shooter, and what still disappoints me with Halo and Call of Duty, even though I love both, especially the latter, is they just aren't fast and crazy. No. They've gotten so competitive that they've lost a certain part of the wacky,

okay, let's have some beers and just blow each other out for a few hours. And I feel like this game nails it. Halo's like a, it's big encounters are like a gameplay puzzle, right? You go in, you got to figure out who to take out, how to take out, when to take them out. Yeah, but there's not literally a goddamn red key to open the red door. Yeah, and what's the difference between the single player and the multiplayer?

Yeah. Right. Yeah, this's the difference between the single player and the multiplayer? Yeah. Right. Yeah, this is just shoot people. And it turns out, though I haven't really played anything like that in a long time, just shooting dudes is fun. Yeah.

The Serious Sam games, I said earlier there weren't many games like that, people making games like that, but I think the Serious Sam games are kind of in the same vein. Yeah, but those have also sort of worn their welcome and gotten progressively worse over the years to the point where i can't even stand them let's talk about another game i've got actually a good set i've got a good segue if you guys don't mind and i'm gonna pull an audio audible because i was originally

going to bring one thing but then i realized we had not discussed one of the biggest game releases of the last few weeks and i was gonna do to do it right here. Is this a goof? No, this is not a goof. This is legit. My game is the actually best old new game that I played this week. And that game is Shadowrun Returns. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sell me on this fucking game, because I never played the original, and it seems like something I could probably sink my teeth into. I can sell you on this fucking game because i never played the original and it seems like something i could probably sink my i can i can sell you on it very quickly imagine blending xcom with fallout 1 and that's shadowrun returns that sounds all right it's groovy so so here's the deal i never played the original either i know a lot of people are fond about it like dig the snes

version i think there was a a Genesis version as well. I never played them, but, you know, I dug those games from that era, which were like the Fallout 1s of the world and like those RPGs that were half about reading and like talking to people as much as they were the combat. Shadowrun Returns is definitely in that spirit of game. combat um shadow and returns is definitely in that spirit of game um it uh the store it sort of comes with its own uh obviously campaign as like a starter campaign which is actually quite long but the story is essentially like film noir you know your buddy dies and uh he leaves like a dead man's switch and his head flips off and he sends you a message that's like,

if you find my killer, I'll pay you $100,000. So that kicks off this, like, very... That's not a lot of dollars. No. Well, in the world of Shadowrun, that could be a lot. I'm just saying, you win more dollars on... Maybe they're creds. On The Biggest Loser.

Cred sticks. In Biggest Loser, if you win The Biggest Loser, you win 250,000 cred sticks. Oh, shit. Well, I mean, that's tough, though, because you've got to lose all that weight. You've got to lose a shit ton of weight. It's probably easier to just find someone's killer. Oh, whodunit.

In whodunit, you can win, I think it's also a quarter of a mil. Yeah, but then you get mauled by a tiger. It is a mountain lion. God, that show's fucking bananas. Go on. So there's a couple things god that shows fucking bananas go on um so so there's a couple things i want to talk about for shatter on returns but the big one the one that i think i find most appealing is the combat which is like legit very um x-com ask um but the difference between the combat and this and versus x-com is that you it feels like you have a lot more control over how you develop

your character whereas in XCOM there was like four classes and each of the classes had a very like strict narrow field for how you can upgrade them whereas here there's like tons of skill trees and powers to unlock and like tons of weapons and stuff like that

but it's all turn based and like really thoughtful and you're dealing with like percentage to hit chance and stuff like that. But it's all turn-based and, like, really thoughtful, and you're dealing with, like, percentage-to-hit chance and stuff like that, very retro, old-school stuff. And backing all that up is, like, a really well-written story and an art style that looks obviously inspired by that, like, isometric era of RPG, but modernized to the point where it looks amazing

even on like my crappy MacBook Air. It runs great on a MacBook Air, I should mention. Oh, really? Runs great. That's the only endorsement I really need. Yeah. And it's just a really cool art style

that's very true to the series while updating it for like an HD system. So that's all the good stuff. There is a lot of good stuff to talk about this game. I really dig it. It's a cool like tool that I'm sure people will use to build mods and their own stories, et cetera, et cetera. That's all great.

There is obviously one very large issue with this game that you may or may not have heard about and that is the saving. You cannot save anywhere in shadowrun returns at all you're only the only way to save the game is through auto saves that happen when the game decides the game should auto save um this is becoming the norm like let's like bioshock infinite did not have discrete saving it was allpoints. But the difference is the checkpoints in Bioshock Infinite were not 20 to 30 minutes apart, whereas they definitely are in Shadowrun Returns.

It's a pretty big bummer, not because I'm, like, I don't mind, like, having, like, I think it's kind of good to have tension and, like, if you die, you're punished enough that you have to go back. But I'd rather have the option and i also like i don't like i need i don't want to be in the mindset where it's like oh i can only play this game if i have 30 free minutes to dedicate well not only that but like having to make that decision every 30 minutes because you know every time you hit a checkpoint it's like well do i want to commit another 30 minutes to this thing right and i and i definitely find that i'm going through the game much slower because it's like oh i i need to stop now because i don't know whether i'm going to be able to make it to the next checkpoint

it's i mean i've looked online the developers have said there were technical reasons for it and that they don't like checkpoints better than actual saving but and in the long run it was just like a triage decision it seems like a pretty major miss on their port on their part that i don't think you can really excuse like it's a it's has anyone ever leveraged the complaint against a game the saves were too frequent like seriously that's never you you can't use something as basic as determining where you want to like leave off and continue playing a game as something to determine tension yeah like that's that's fucking poppycock that's crazy town especially like it like if that's what you want to do if you want to determine tension by not allowing the player to save wherever they want do like do like dark souls did or that's the only game that's coming to mind but i'm sure there are

hundreds of games that do that where like it's constantly constantly constantly auto saving yeah yeah but to an extent where like if you die it doesn't take you back to that save yeah well i should i should mention it's not it wasn't a design decision it wasn't like oh we're doing this because we want to increase tension it was literally we can't get this running in time to ship the game so we're just going to do a checkpoint then you then just wait a bit i know i'm completely with you it's it really stinks that being said it's it's telling that despite something as large as not being able to save wherever you want uh i still really really enjoy the game and definitely endorse it uh it's got

the rust fresh stick seal of approval which i know uh you could trade in it like best buy for a free copy of the game have they said anything about a patch like if i wait a month i've looked they haven't said anything specifically i mean if they do release release a patch, it's a big deal to, like, not have saves and then implement them later. That's not a small patch. So I think it'll be, if it happens, months away. Wow. I'll still check it out. A little bittersweet, but, yeah, I would definitely recommend checking it out, especially if you like RPGs from that era.

That is so high on my list of complaints. Yeah. like RPGs from that era. That is so high on my list of complaints. Is like, I will stop playing a game I'm really, really, really enjoying if it dictates the pacing of my play

that thoroughly. Like, it's a computer. You just like, pause all the files. That doesn't seem that hard. But I don't make games, so I don't know. PlayStation 4 can do it. You pause all the files. It's a file pause option. Yeah, just pause all the files.

File menu to pause. Copy it to a flash drive. Right, make a macro. And you're done. Take Shadowrun.save and just freeze it right there. Just your entire computer at that point in time. Take all the zeros and ones, fucking copy and paste them into a Word doc.

It sounds so easy when you say it. It is easy. It's baby school. I just did it. Let's talk about halftime. Halftime. Yeah. We could talk about...

Guys, we have to talk about it. Oh, no. I don't know if Dave Tack can participate. What have we got to talk about it. Oh, no. I don't know if Dave Tack can participate in the greatest 15 minutes of reality television ever filmed. No, go ahead. I'll sit back. No, we can't talk about the evisceration of Des' heart. Gosh, he left on the floor bleeding. It was really bad.

Why don't we play a game? Can we save? You can't. You can't save. I was just going to go through my Google News alerts and read some of the headlines that people wrote about Nintendo

only selling 160,000 Wiis over the course of three months. Lovely. It's not good. Because some people got pretty ribbled with their headline choices. I mean, I don't know. I can't imagine. This is what I can't imagine.

Like, I get that the Wii U is doing very poorly. What I can't imagine is that they think that over from now until March, it's going to sell, no joke, 10 million units. Because they are sticking to their estimation that they will. It's at a little over three and a half right now. Right. And I think their estimation was that they'd sell 14's at a little over 3.5 right now. Right, and I think their estimation was that they'd sell 14 million units by March of 2014.

Are you sure about that? Because that's... That's bonkers. I gotta... Let me double check. Estimate. The good news is that the 3DS is doing super well for them. Which is like... The fact that I'm saying that sentence out loud is kind of crazy

because I feel like definitely not to the extent that we're saying this about the Wii U, but there was definitely some doom and gloom about the 3DS following its launch because they did something fairly similar to what PlayStation is only now starting to recover from on the vita which is where they had you know a fairly big launch lineup and then just fucking forgot about the thing yeah let me let me adjust my statistics because i got it wrong a little bit so their forecast is that they will sell nine million wii u consoles by march of 2014 so they've sold 3.5. So you're only off by 5 million. Whatever. But I will say, so essentially

they're, you know, for the lifetime of the console, they've sold 3.6. And then they're going to have to sell another 5.5 to hit this number. And there's no games coming out. 3.6 were like all... Okay, hold up, hold up, hold up. You can, and there's no games coming out. And how many of those 3.6 were, like, all during the first few months?

Don't say there's... Okay, hold up, hold up, hold up. You can't say there's no games coming out. Okay, for this year, I can think of two big holiday games coming out. Pikmin's obviously out, but Bayonetta and... What's the other big holiday game? Super Mario? I don't think that's this year. It's a console pusherher like bayonetta 2 yeah

super mario's in december okay so super mario so you have those are two brothers smash brothers isn't this year next year smash brothers next year and it's not going to happen for march probably um there just isn't the software to move there's not there's got to be uh like a significant price cut there needs to be a like a sensible marketing push There's not. There's got to be a significant price cut. There needs to be a sensible marketing push that's not just like, listen to us guys. We're serious.

Business time. Business podcast for stocks. I don't know what it's going to take for them to turn this boat around. But we should note we're already seeing it on the 3DS. Like, I don't know what it's going to take for them to turn this boat around. But we should note, like, we're already seeing it on the 3DS. Like, the 3DS boat is being turned around.

It's being turned around by, like, a super aggressive first-party release schedule. Right. I don't think there's much third-party support for the 3DS. No, absolutely not. Am I wrong about that? But, like, that's sort sort of when i think of what it's going to take to get the wii u going it's it's fucking games yeah but it's only going to be first party games you're not gonna i mean this is again it's a return to form for nintendo from the era of like gamecube which is yeah they're just sustaining themselves with first

party and it's like they're you know 3ds is picking up with first party releases and there's a lot of for really good first party games coming out and i'm sure this will happen that strategy is working out better than the strategy of playstation vita which is somewhat similar in that there's a lot of mostly first party releases but like especially the indie stuff like they're they are getting more third-party support, I would say. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. The Vita is kept alive, honestly, by indies and third-party support. Whereas it's the opposite for 3DS.

It has thrived, despite the fact that nobody's... Nobody's playing games. I don't know. Like, it's going to have to take the best fucking Mario game, the best fucking Zelda. Oh, Wind Waker HD. That's coming out this year. Right.

Yeah. It's going to need to take, like, bundles. It's going to need to take a price cut. Like, they are going to have to use every arrow in their quiver. I just don't see this console coming back. In three months. In three months, they sold 10,000 across all of europe the entire that's fucking bananas but they also had no new games or one new game uh in as mike mcwarder pointed out i think

two of three territories had a single new game come out and to be honest there are a lot of clueless grandparents in europe so fair enough. Oh, he'll like this game. It's got the screen on it. Now, what nationality was that specifically? That was old lady Europa. In Vienna. But I think

the price is already a problem for the deluxe, which is, I think, the unit most people yeah are interested in and i think that's going to be an even bigger problem in a couple of months when you can buy a playstation 4 for 50 more yeah yeah they're gonna get poop smacked i just think what other company has the good fortunes of the legacy that Nintendo has? Which, when I say that, and this isn't to discount the games that they are releasing,

because for the most part, first party is good. They're great. They are good games. But they have this lineup of first party games that people just devour. Like, Microsoft and Sony will, it seems, never have characters that so many people love so unconditionally and that they will buy a system for. And then on top of it, because Game Boy dominated for so long, if their console market isn't going so hot, they have mobile to fall back on. And if mobile's not going so well, they seem to have consoles. So it just seems like they have a lot of fail-safes in place

for when things like this happen. And that is how they've somehow managed to survive when I don't know, when Sega couldn't have made it. They made it through the dark days. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the reason... They can probably do it again, it seems like. Yeah, and they're excellent game developers. I mean, most of the stuff they put out is somewhere between good and great.

They haven't run into the Team Sonic problem. Well, Steel Diver, but yeah. Son of a bitch. Why is that their free-to-play game? That's what makes you so angry. Do free-to-play Pokemon, you dumb idiots. Do free-to-play Pokemon, you dumb idiots. Do free-to-play Pokemon. Like, I will keep your company personally afloat through that single edifice.

How much would you pay for a Master Ball, be honest? I would put down... I mean, I can catch shit without the Master Ball. No, but there's, you know, let's be honest. There's going to be a legendary that, like, you're going to want to use that Master Ball. Did you guys not know, in the OG days, it was, at least at my school, the most baller thing you could do was not only catch them all,

but catch them all and still have your Master Ball. Like, I don't need that shit. I'll go fucking toe-to-toe 200 rounds with Mewtwo. Griffin, how many people did you talk to at your school? Just three. Okay. But they were all pretty big Pokemaniacs. Yeah. And they were the coolest kids, right? We were the coolest kids.

Nintendo, please get it together. I've been playing my Wii U a lot lately. I've started to reach the phase where we have people over and I sort of introduce it to them and nobody has played one because only 130,000 or however many were sold last quarter. Like, I genuinely do enjoy playing it. I just...

I like the console a lot. I think it's got a lot of potential. What it doesn't have is a lot of games. It's a fun little thing to play, yeah. Do you think it's going to have maybe a big indie push? That would be pretty sweet, I think. No, it would like indie indie developers like develop an indie game for nintendo after they took this stage at gdc and literally were like fuck off and die you are hurting us go away to their credit that was two or three years ago so yeah they've changed now that they need help

i think that i think that there's some opportunity there like to get a i think the unity license for wii u is free i think that like if you have clever ideas that i think the indie community has shown itself as having a bigger um preponderance for cleverness than the triple a community has like I think there's a lot of shit you can do with the Wii U. I think there's a lot of uses that the gamepad has in it that nobody's gotten out of it yet. I think people just have learned, like, after releasing

indie games on Wii and having them die to the point where, like, they didn't get any money because they didn't hit that threshold that they needed to hit. I feel like a lot of indies are just soured on Nintendo in general. Sure, but load up the Wii shop three years ago and count the number of indie games on there.

Don't worry about it, Time Traveler. It's zero. And then load up the Wii U shop and look at the front page. They're all over. The placement is better. They could do a lot better in terms of promotion, but I don't know. I don't know. I want it to turn around so bad.

Let's talk about a game. Chris, do you want to go or should I? Yeah, I'll talk about a game. So my game is pretty simple this week. It'll go very quickly because it's a fast game. It turns out the sun is setting and you have to race it. Enter

Race the Sun, a new game for PC, Mac, and maybe Linux. I'm not sure. I can't be accounted for the truth right now. Is this game set in Hawaii is my first question. No, it's set in basically do you know what white boxing is? That's a phrase, right? When you white box a game?

Yeah, it's when you and your buds get in a car with the windows. Yeah! And then you just sniff some white out. I don't know why you'd need to be in a car to do that. It's pretty much an anywhere thing. Also, hey, don't huff.

Don't do it hey no guys don't don't um don't give me no guff i don't huff this this message is brought to you by the right stuff by mothers against drunk driving go ahead plan um so you are you're like basically like a futuristic aircraft paper airplane and you are being pushed propelled forward and you have to dodge uh giant pieces of geometry uh and that's it it's pretty much an ios game like an endless runner but in 3d moving forward um and as you accomplish little tasks you unlock additional abilities like the ability to jump or other things that you can collect on the Hold on, wait a minute. You need to slow

down a little bit because you said a lot of things that confuse my brain. First you said you're a futuristic space plane that's also a paper airplane. Well, you look like a paper airplane, but it's obviously supposed to be futuristic. Okay, that sort of makes sense. Second question, how do you jump

when you're in a plane? That is, that's a good question. You press A. Well, I don't think so. It's a little like a double jump. No, there's no double jump. Still doesn't make any sense. Don't get out of control. But how do you double jump?

Aeronautic flight is basically a double jump. It's just a is basically a double jump it's just a long sustained double jump do you have any other questions is it like starfox well visually in that you are behind the plane

and it's moving forward and you can't slow down or speed up you just go that speed unless you hit like a speed boost in which case you do speed up. You're doing such a bad job. Guys, it's, like, the most simple game in the world. It's an endless runner, and you have to move forward, and you have to

not run into shit. Is there someone shouting encouragement at you? What? Is there someone shouting encouragement at you, or maybe offering tips on, like, a maneuver that you should pull off? Like music. music like if you want to maybe spin like the plane in a circle you can't barrel roll oh my god why are we even talking about can you shoot are there bombs are there upgrades is your dad there are upgrades and you thought you're here's here's the hook are you ready yeah they change the level

every day so there's a new leaderboard every day. Okay, that's kind of fun. That's nice, right? This is not a mobile game you're talking about, right? It's not. That's the problem. I dig this game. I think it's pretty fun.

It's a good game to play between other games. Or if you are... A lofty achievement. If I worked on a PC, like if I normally worked on my PC, I could, you know, be writing and then be like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take a break, play this game for about five minutes

and then go back to doing something else. Now, I do understand why games like this have found more success on the iPhone, because it's much easier to just, you know, pull out your iPhone and press an app and then play while I'm on a toilet or something. You know?

But it definitely looks better. It controls really well with, you know, a joystick. That's nice. So, yeah, I like it. I just Googled Race the Sun, and an IMDb page popped up that made me understand Russ's reference earlier. And by the way, Russ, you can go straight to hell. Jim Belushi is in Race the Sun.

You bet he is. Along with Halle Berry and casey affleck um he is credited as james belushi there's this more serious phase yeah back when it was life according to james it was after k9 um i want to talk about my game and it's not a relatively new game but it was recently featured in playstation plus so i imagine its player base was um was expanded tenfold during that period it was very recently pushed out of the rotation so i apologize for not coming with it earlier because it's it's one of the neater games i've probably ever played um and it is zero escape virtues last reward is anybody down with that series, the nine doors, nine peoples, nine hours?

I mean, I've seen it, but it always scared me. It's kind of a scary game. It's kind of scary. The two titles, and by the way, if you're going to play Virtue's Last Reward, which you absolutely should, it's on PlayStation Vita. You should make a concerted effort to pick up 999. I think they re-released it through Amazon. They did like an additional print of it last year.

So it may not be too hard to do. Basically, it is... Did you guys see Saw 2? I saw Saw 1. Basic gist of both games is some shadowy figure or organization has brought nine people together to play a game. Okay. Already sounds like bad news bears, but go on.

The rules are, like, very, very complex. Like, I'm not going to waste five minutes of listeners' time trying to get into it, but you have to solve these complex puzzle rooms um and you do them in teams of people and in virtue slash reward after you solve the room you get your team has to split up a set number of points and the way you do that is through the um ally betrayal game which is sort of a i think they do it in like big brother right where like you have to vote whether to ally with the other person or betray them and based on how people betray or both people betray then you get no points if one person betrays the other allies then one person loses one person the end of bachelor pad yes it's the end of bachelor pad

yes thank you um and you do this for points, but if you go into the negatives, you die. And there are actually a lot, a lot, a lot of circumstances that lead you to die. But it's a single-player game, so you're fighting AI. It is a single-player game, so you are playing against these characters,

and the characters are all very well-written, and their individual storylines have a lot of depth. So basically, the game is an interactive novel with these puzzle segments peppered into it. And the entire time as you're playing, you are making these literal life or death decisions in terms of who you want to pair up with, which puzzle rooms you want to go go into whether you want to ally with them or betray them um and based on the results of those decisions you will go down different storylines you will spend more time with certain characters and learn more about them um or like you'll fucking die or other characters will die because they're you know there are very very dangerous things afoot in this game.

The awesome thing about the game, and I really don't want to go too much into it because it's so fucking cool that as it slowly dawned on me that it was happening, I gained a new appreciation for the game. The flow for the game is depicted in this enormous flow chart that branches off showing exactly where each decision was. So it's basically like a tree, if you can imagine that. At the top of it, that's the start of the game. You haven't made a decision yet. And with each decision, it branches off and it keeps going down and cascading like that. At any point, you can jump to a part of the tree you have been to before to make a different decision.

So if you make it to the end of one storyline, which would probably take you a couple hours, and then you die, you can jump back to one of your earlier decisions and go a different way to see how it plays out and fill out another line of the tree. So you're basically filling up this flow chart of the story.

What is fucking awesome is that at a certain point the plot of the game begins to acknowledge the fact that you are playing through different timelines oh boy at a certain point characters will say something like that's not how it happened or like somebody will give you a piece of information that you'll have to utilize in a different timeline i'm pretty sure biff's had a casino that's like yeah it's it's no kidding like so fucking cool that's and like it's it's different from 999 because 999 had a like had a few different endings but you had to play through the entire game to get to them it didn't have this like flow chart system in this game you can literally go back and like just see how it's it's you know what is? It's the movie Sliding Doors.

Oh, boy. But with, it's Saw II meets Sliding Doors. I don't know what better recommendation I can give it than that. It really is, like, it's a fucking cool game. And even if it's not free anymore on PlayStation Plus, I would pick it up. I would try and do 999 first, though, because there's a lot of super heady concepts at work. But it's just so neat i love when like time travel and quantum leap-esque shit like that is is well represented in games yeah and it totally is here sassy ai robots they're not they're not robots yeah but

how was that's how was of is a famous robot. So I guess you do have a... Wasn't that the name of his helper on Quantum Leap? How? How. How. Close enough. God, I'm so angry right now. Yeah, me too.

How. And Ziggy. So those are four games. Cool. Totally. We did it, you guys. We did it. We did a whole episode.

Guys, do you want to talk about a bonus game? Yes. B-b-b-bonus game Earthbound is great. No, no, we're not doing that. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yes, we can talk about it. We'll save it for next week because it's going to be a really good conversation.

It would be really weird to include it in the normal podcast. Let's save it for next week. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Who won this week? I think I did. Maybe. You didn't win. I forgot what the game was. James Belushi won. Your game

had Jim Belushi in it. I don't know. I think Dave won. I think Dave Tack did think DaveTac did win yeah DaveTac won good work Dave thanks guys so this has been the besties you can read more of our work

or not our work but the work of more talented people at Polygon.com it's a website about video games anything else I should talk about guys oh thanks to the person who edited the nathan's hot dog eating contest wikipedia page oh yeah to reflect the canonical victory held by new york giraffe uh that was clutch is that still on there i don't know i haven't checked in a little while it's was on there for a while. It made me a little worried about Wikipedia's

vetting process, by which I mean you just click publish and there it is. Yeah, well, thanks for... Oh, it's off. Sorry. God damn it. God damn Joey Chestnut. Thanks for listening. This has been The Besties because shouldn't the world's

best friends pick the world's best things?