The Besties - The Dawn of CyberWar is Upon Us (Also Outriders)

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

This week we're diving into Outriders, a game that sounds about as generic as is possible within the confines of the English language. And yet, we all think it's pretty damn fun! We also attempt to one-up its generic efforts with a new title of our own. 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 I was thinking about the creator of surge protectors recently, like the guy who invented or the gal who invented surge protectors. Okay. And it made me wonder, do you think that they're sad that no one gives a shit that their device protects from surges and is in fact just for a fuckload of outlets? Like this was their life goal. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're saying, are they sad that they didn't make like a video game console instead of just some dumb plastic? No, no, no.

He's saying, are they sad that they made this thing where it's like searches are not a problem anymore and everyone else is like, no one gives a shit. There's eight outlets on that thing. I'm going to start plugging in everything. This was their life dream. Their goal in life was to finally protect the world and its devices from surges. And no one gives a shit.

They just love all the outlets. But surges can still happen, right? No one cares. Doesn't matter. I don't know. don't know maybe wait wait wait wait so what you're saying is they did such a good job that they have erased the memory of surges effectively from all of our shared conscious so now people are like they just take it so for granted they're like what's that thing they're like it's the eight outlet thing no i don't think so. I think immediately when Serf Protectors came out, people were just fucking

thrilled to have so many outlets. I don't think there was ever a moment where we're like, thank God, Sergers are gone. No, they just were like, look at how many outlets are on that thing. Yeah, that's a good point, Russ. It's not a good point, but it is a point. Thank you. Thank you. point but it is a point thank you thank you my name is justin mackaroy and i know the best game of the week my name is christopher thomas Plant and I don't usually go second.

Or say all three of your names. Yeah. I always do. Really? I don't. Not every. I normally zone out. I normally have longer.

Come on. My name is Russ Rutsch and I know the best game of the week. I'm trying to be a DJ this week. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment and we've got a great one for you this week games are back sort of basically in a sense games are back or at least this week there's a there's a new game to talk about last week we we had a new game as well. We had Monster Hunter last week. Two new games in, that hardly felt like an episode though,

because the plan wasn't there. That's true. I think Griffin, I guess, wasn't there either. No, we're going to talk about Outriders. And what is Outriders? It's a looter shooter, baby. And you can play it solo or you can play it with friends.

And much like this episode, it starts bad, but it's going to get a whole lot better. Okay, so Outriders. Outriders. This is a game that was made by the team behind Bulletstorm, which is a game that I absolutely love. They also made Painkiller,

which is like a back-in-the-day kind of shooter. And maybe their biggest title was that part of fortnight that no one played they actually did they do they work on the save the world part of fortnight um which is kind of wild when you think about it but uh this is this is their new effort and as plant said at the outset it is a looter shooter or if you really want to feel gross about it a schluter which i can't even say out loud without feeling my favorite water park so they've done if they've had a weird you know you say it's from the team behind bullet storm but that is probably it's hard to say right because it's actually been 10 years since bullet storm whoa um so so who knows uh knows? That's a good point. Since then, they've done Gears of War Judgment, then Bulletstorm Full Clip Edition, then Fortnite

Save the World, Bulletstorm Duke of Switch Edition, and now Outriders some 10 years after. The Duke of Switch Edition starred Duke Nukem. Is that right? Or was he... He's in it? Yeah, I believe he's in the switch version i'm pretty sure i think that does ring a bell yeah let's hit on on a real real quick summary of bullet storm just because i want to share a dumb anecdote bullet storm was a game uh where you like very meaty very gears of war

ish except it was a first shooter, and you could just destroy human bodies, or like, I don't know, alien bodies in creative ways. Like, the whole fun of it was you got scoring bonuses based off of like, oh, you threw a character up in the air, you ripped off their limbs, and then you slammed their body into a wall of spikes.

And it was like, that was like, funny. And the game was quite fun the writing was hit or miss the world design great it was at least it was at least kind of um self-aware is what i will say to the writing it didn't always hit um but when it did it was just fun it had a sort of camp that in the world of 2011 in video games uh felt very fresh because it was a very uh otherwise fairly uh self-serious this is a great year for video games holy shit we this is probably in our uh this is probably in our our power bracket if i had if i remember

correctly um but it was a very you know it was a very fresh sort of fun, silly diversion. This was also the time where I think the game was really inventive and I think EA published it at the time. Yes. But where maybe games were getting creative, but the world of games had not yet caught up. So the marketing for this game was like, it seems like a little snooty. So we're going to be real ass marketing for this game was like it seems like a little snooty so we're gonna be real assholes for this game the uh the pr team sent me i'm not shitting you uh like 10 pounds

of rotten meat oh like literally just a giant container with like biohazard tape all over it and inside was like actually putrid rotten meat um which let me tell you metal and bullets and stuff yeah yeah it was oh yeah yeah and it was like the meat was like had been like it was meant to look like it was like a body that had gotten like

butchered by weapons it was profoundly gross we should move on to our current game. Gross. Anyway. Outriders, I think it's worth mentioning all that because I think Outriders is sort

of trying to do a similar thing in taking the kind of like default genre of the moment, which is now the kind of like Destiny style shooter, right? And do it in its own kind of creative way, which I don't think it quite pulls off as well as Bulletstorm did. But I do think it's still very fun. I think this team, whoever is left from the original one, seems to really understand how to make moment to moment shooting things

very fun and and rewarding so i think you're underselling it plant like that i don't think i can remember a gulf between quality of action and quality of all other facets as big as this game i'm what i will i will do the story real quick let me hit you with a story real quick okay so wait can i can i can i request like we just replay the like reenact the first 10 minutes of the game because it's maybe the worst first 10 minutes it's so miserable but i'm no i'm going to give it to you extremely quick so you can feel comfortable skipping all cut scenes so uh humanity left earth to go to a new planet because we messed up earth so bad and we got to a new planet and there was a these these storms called anomalies that killed pretty much everybody except a few people and those few people are trying to eke out an existence on earth there are some people though very few people yourself included that the anomalies have

given special powers to uh during one of these anomalies the first one maybe you uh got tossed into cryo storage and then unfrozen 30 years later you meet up with some of your old buds but most everybody else is dead and now we're trying to like you're just trying to survive basically on this planet and push back against I know there are bad

there's a bad team of some sort but I don't exactly understand that part of it yeah they also have magic so it's like that's part of the problem is there's two these magic groups that do not like each other at all and uh you yeah you have to fight back i do just for brief uh sake of this um you've probably heard that the servers have been a disaster for this game for the first week of its life um a lot of people couldn't play at all i think that's probably because it was on game pass and a lot of people were jumping on the servers all at once i say that because the beginning of this game

starts in the dullest way possible you get dropped on this planet and you have to like walk from person to person having dialogue trees with people you don't care about and then slowly walk to a shooting range and then slowly walk to have more dialogue trees with people you don't care about so i did that and i was like so unenthused there was nothing about this that was fun and then the servers crapped out so i had to do it again um which was just terrific um you know i don't as we've established and we've said multiple times on the show we don't make video games but if your video game starts with a training camp sequence where you're slowly walking from person to person talking to people and then you have like a little shooting range sequence probably don't probably like do that just make the first level super duper

easy and then people will like learn the mechanics while they're playing the actual game there is no reason to force feed people narrative and you know what yeah that instantly made me say like yeah okay i don't care about the story and i you will have no idea of why this game is worth playing in the first like half hour yeah it takes about 30. Nothing of the actual flow of the game is revealed during this time period. I'll go a step further. You won't know what is good about this game

for about two hours. So the first half hour is the story tutorial nonsense. And then after that, you still don't really get into the game as it's meant to be played you get these kind of like xbox original grade maybe xbox 360 rooms full of enemies that you shoot um and it feels like the ai is broken because there's cover everywhere which you would assume that you are meant to hide behind but that doesn't seem to work um and then you blast through all of that for me this game didn't make sense until i got to the first boss battle

which i i mean boss ish like larger enemy battle and i'm curious if that was the same for y'all was that the lightning guy that you fought yeah it was the first time that you get to the characters that can charge up their special powers um yeah yeah i don't know i you know i what i played i i wasn't actually totally taken by the boss stuff i actually really liked the other stuff and and i think in looking at this people might have like memories certainly of gears of war or of um division uh is very you know visually uh in in terms of it being a third-person shooter, very similar. But as Plant kind of alluded to earlier, like, at least for the class that I was playing, you do not use cover. You are encouraged to charge in and go nuts at people at close range storm roots of like super aggressive super quick um you know

enemies that are like dying left tons of enemies that are dying left and right rather than like i'm picking away at someone who has a ton of health and armor um and then once the bosses came around i was i don't know not quite taken by it but i also feel like i wasn't playing it right i want to talk real quick about what makes the flow and the basic like loop of this game cool at least for me i played as a uh technomancer and um sorry i threw up in my mouth but technomancer it's fine it's fine it's on par with the rest of this game uh i played as technomancer and uh the abilities that i have and i'm assuming this is similar to the other classes but the abilities that I have, and I'm assuming this is similar to the other classes, but the abilities that I have are they heal as they do damage. So by killing dudes with my, like, for instance, I have a turret, a cryo turret that I throw out and it freezes people.

And I have a big, like, missile barrage that, like, sets up a stationary launcher and just launches a huge line of missiles out. And grenades, like proximity grenades and uh uh you know etc oh an ability that gives me like a minigun or rocket launcher depending on how long i hold the button wild like huge feeling like you shouldn't be letting me have this this is like this is a lot of power but basically the flow is like using these abilities to create like an absolute onslaught that will keep you alive long enough to, you know, take out a big wave and then like trying to stay alive where they recharge or timing them to where like you always have one up and healing you as you try to like fend off these waves of enemies. I don't know what classes you guys did or if that, if that loop was different for you, but it always made combat feel really like fun and exciting moment to moment. Yeah.

So I remember you mentioning Justin that you were going to do the tech romance or techno man, sir, Jesus Christ. And so I, I'm a techno man, sir, Jesus Christ.

I've come to your humanity sins and also computers. I went against... I'm a technomancer Jesus Christ. I've come to cure humanity's sins and also computers. I went against my default nature, which would be that class, the turret class that doesn't require me aiming and stuff like that, and went with the trickster, which is the total opposite of that. I think Plant did the same thing. The trickster, the hook with all the classes, as Justin mentioned, you heal by doing damage, but it's dependent on how you do damage based on the class so in justin's case i think his turrets when you damage people you heal in my case as the trickster you only heal

if you're killing guys or damaging guys when you're close range to them but all of the trickster's abilities are tied to getting into close range so he has a teleport uh that can like slice people uh instantly uh you have this like melee attack that slows people down you have like a slow bubble that slows people down so all that bundles together to make give you more opportunities to like heal in those circumstances so kind of interesting i it is not my normal style of play just because i don't know what i can survive so the like blind running at things which you're encouraged to do feels very weird to me but and there's one that's in the middle of these it's a pyro something where you're like using flame powers i think um but it's a cool

i mean like the loop feels like it feels good. It feels like I don't know. It's always engaging. This loop is always fun at least for me. I had a great time with it every time. And I hate everything else about the game. Well Plant I did want to know

what was it about the boss fights in particular that you found like good? Well that's when I finally understood what the game is. i think the issue for me with the game at first was it looks and feels like years right like there's there's cover everywhere the design of like how you move kind of looks the same um and then i it wasn't until the boss fight that I realized no, it is the opposite of that game. Like, if you turtle up behind cover, at least with my character, I would get destroyed right away.

People would just flank around me immediately. Once I got into that boss fight, it forced me to start moving. Then I realized, oh, okay, I need to either get this boss to follow me into a room alone where I'm not going to be surrounded and I can like wear him down. Or I need to just zip around the entire map, taking out every enemy I can for health until I'm like, feel like I'm in a good good spot do some damage on the boss and then go back

and like do that loop over and over again um it's very high stress that like playing it that way yeah uh because i i don't know the language of it yet right like i i think that's like i wish i wish they'd like cut the tutorial and just have like a 15 second video where it's like you need to move like you need to move and here's how your health power works because on learning the language of a gears game and like there are just so many times where i was like doing well and then i would get in cover just because it was instinct and then i get wrecked or i thought i was doing okay and i didn't think my health was that low. But then I would die with one hit. So I couldn't read the game as well as I would like to. That said, I think it is a game that, if I get over that hump, I will like it quite a bit.

I mean, it passes the bubble wrap test better than most games. What is the bubble bubble wrap test the bubble wrap test is it's fun to pop bubble wrap um and like in this game it's fun to pop bubble wrap like it just feels good to shoot these weapons and again it's it's a mistake that they make it with the first 30 or so minutes of the game you don't really get your first weapon that has like um and like i don't know what they would call it effects like fire effects or whatever until probably like 30 or 45 minutes and once that happened i was immediately like oh i get what this is this isn't a looter shooter where just numbers go up like the gun feels different and it feels fun and that should have been the first five minutes it's also really

flexible in the sense that like each of your weapons as they get as they get up in uh quality rarity whatever um there are like slots that you can put mods in and they're actually pretty flexible about letting you when you dismantle a gun that has a mod on it you then add that mod to your collection and like with very little resources you can pop mods in and out of guns that really let you make like an a quick build that feels like really supports the kind of play that you like to do right so i've like i really like using the minigun so i've like loaded up on minigun mods so that's really my like big staple because all my mods are sort of like leaning uh towards that you do end up it's kind of irritating that like when you do get a new gun you do need like for me at least a lot

of times a new powerful gun will come with a mod that you have no use for so like job one needs to be running back to the doctor that mods your equipment and taking that mod out and putting in a mod that you can use that supports your play style um but the flexibility is cool uh it just leads to more time in menus by the way the menus i don't know if you guys had this or if it's just like the angle i found them to be on on my tv unreadable uh even in high contrast mode there are these gray boxes with very thin black text on them. And like, I tried to change the UI and stuff and still like so hard to parse this information.

Yeah, my monitor's on my desk. So it's kind of right in front of me and I didn't have that issue, but I could totally see it being an issue on a TV. On a TV, I found it really just muddy in general i was playing with a series x on like 4k tv um but had some natural light coming into the room right and it was hard for me to like make heads or tails of a number of sequences yeah we should probably talk about the like overall look in general my my first impression and still my impression after

several hours is this looks like if majesco made a gears of war game and apologies to majesco i'm sorry 90s kids will love that reference um it it looks like if gamma went to gamestop and was like i my son likes gears of war And the guy tricked her and was like, well, Outriders, uh, that's kind of what it looks like, which is a shame because the gameplay is actually quite fun.

But the art design of this game is just like, it's beyond like, it's, it is the same problem that is with the story, with the acting, with the dialogue, with the, uh, the design. It the acting, with the dialogue, with the design.

It's like everything looks like on a detective show, if there was a video game at the center of the story. Do you know what I mean? Like if there was a Law & Order episode about a gamer crime, this is the game where they would hide the clues to who killed them. Like this level of like, who the fuck would play this? This does not look like a real video game.

Everything is just like the most like, I've seen my nephew play video games and this is what it looks like. So we'll just make it look like this to a point where it feels, what's irritating about it is it's also, you can, okay, okay again i don't know the hearts and minds of these developers we don't make games it feels almost willful like no one's

gonna pay attention to this no one's ever gonna care about this let's just get through it and focus on our core competition you know someone was extremely like someone worked on this for many many years you know someone cared deeply and this someone worked on this for many, many years. You know someone cared deeply. And this was the thing that they, the story they wanted to tell, the look they wanted to show. Like there are people that like spent a lot of time on this.

I wish they leaned into camp a little bit. Like in that Bulletstorm way, like they're so close to being sort of like flippant. And we don't have that in an open world looter shooter like this, where it's just like sort of. I mean, it's Borderlands, right? Like Borderlands does what you're talking about, more or less. Yeah, but funny. Like imagine if it was funny.

Like there's these scenes. You go on these like wanted missions. It's also worth noting that like mission structure is also incredibly lame like it's this you're do it's a good thing that the gameplay is fun because it's not like each mission feels substantially different from right from other ones they're all kind of feel basically the same but you go on these that are like um basically wanted missions where you're like gonna execute a bad a bad guy and it's like you after you kill everybody in the room you have to go to the guy you're supposed to kill and it's like trigger a cut scene to end the mission and the cut scene

is always your dude knocks knocks them over and shoots them in the head wordlessly like that's the cinematic it's each of these there are four they're like three or four missions in the first two hours of the game that are like, you show up to try to rescue somebody and there's someone holding them hostage with a gun. And then a different person shoots them. And then everybody eventually gets shot. And you're like, oh man, what a day.

End of mission. Am I wrong? Like there's like two or three missions that end exactly that way. They care so little about their story that you can replay side quests where the quest giver dies. And they're just back to give you the quest again. In the very first area, there's this shopkeeper that you walk in and he's like i've got some really great stuff i should mention a very unfortunate shopkeeper who is basically like the gremlins shopkeeper yeah like that level of racism yeah very tasteless

but like somebody runs in and shoots him and then you go on this mission to like avenge his death and then you give head to tail and that fool's just there again. Like, Oh, I got some good stuff for you. It's like, do you want to, do you want to do the quest again?

It basically is what he's saying. He's like, do you want to do this again? You're like, no, I'm good. Thank you so much. I do appreciate it.

He's just there. Uh, yeah, it's, it's very silly. I, you know, I,

I think if you can, and, and for what it's worth, they make it very easy to ignore that stuff because every cut scene is skippable all the dialogue stuff you can like very quickly a button through so it you're right like it seems clear that they knew that like a lot of people wouldn't care and good news because i certainly don't um and i'm able to get back to the things that i enjoy about the game much quicker which yeah it yeah, it's good. It does kind of feel like a game that like 25 year old Russ would drop like hundreds of hours in and 37 year old Russ is not going to have

that level of time, but that's okay. You know, we don't have that. I could see them. I have not experienced much of how the different powers like work together, for example. Yeah. I could see like with the the they nailed the most important thing and that's what i actually wanted to hit on like i feel like this game actually could have legs because the core of it is so pleasurable like i could see you hopping on with some friends and like doing some harder missions that require some like teamwork and coordination and stuff um i could see people doing that. These things of like story and –

they're literal when you pull up – sometimes in the loading screens, which on the Series X, by the way, are extremely brief. It feels fantastic to be playing an open-world game that misses the speed. But there are loading screens, and sometimes it just says in big letters, lore. And it tells you some things about the world. Amazing. Quint, did you have any?

I mean, my final thought is I could see a world in which a year from now, they have completely gutted the story from this game and it sings. I mean, just with like, that's how video games work now. You know, they put it out. People seem, people, developers seem to not want to edit games before they come out once they are out and they get the negative feedback like gosh or whatever we tried um and i do think there's a world in which this game is significantly better in a year or two not in the like oh they released it broken sort of way but in the kind of warframe oh we figured out what this

game is yeah i think diablo 3 is probably like the best example of that where they really just dialed in the gameplay stuff over that year and focused on what worked and like really uh examine that part and and it was a dramatically better game a year after it launched and i think uh we're only going to see more of that. I actually think this game is closer to greatness than Diablo 3 was at launch because it has that core loop so well dialed in. So. Yeah, but they really the one thing that has been interesting in the marketing of this, and I don't know how close you guys follow this, where people can fly have been saying that like this is not something they're just they're designing as a live service constant experience like constant updates kind of thing um that like it they have made it made

it fairly clear that i think that they're like not promising maybe is a more accurate way of saying it like constant frequent updates uh i mean that makes sense content i don't know what the end game is like uh so that's sort of the x factor of like how many if you wanted to go nuts on this game how many hours would it provide but i also realized that like they probably don't want to commit to hey this is something we're going to be working on 10 years from now like bungie is still working on destiny six years, seven years in whatever. Right. Right. So I, I, I think like, look at Avengers. I think the model, if you're a smaller studio and you want to get in the destiny business,

release the non endless update version of it first. Yeah. And then like, if, if, if this all works and people like it and people are into this series, then go release like outriders endless edition or whatever um i i think i think just getting the core game right is a better way of you know kind of like testing that investment than going truly for broke and putting every dollar in in one game that's going to supposedly last forever. Yeah. Yeah. Shall we talk about other things? Well, we should take a break first.

Yes, let's. Well, yeah, for sure. Then we'll take a break. We'll talk about other things. So given Outriders, and maybe not having the most grabby title and premise, insofar as I've literally forgotten the title multiple times while

recording this episode um i thought we could do better i thought maybe we could lean into the uh generic sounding nature of this game and maybe do it even more generic than they have and i wanted to enlist you guys in this effort. Now, I think we need to start with the title, and Outriders is pretty damn generic, so well done on that, y'all. But I think we can do a little better. I'm going to suggest a word,

and we can build off of that word. That word is cyber. Okay. Okay. cyber okay i mean cyber war right like war okay cyber cyber war cyber war is good i think we need a cyber war though cyber war um uh horizon would be a good one to have in there. Okay. Cyber War, Extinct Horizon. Ooh.

Ooh. That's actually almost too... Yeah, Extinct I think is not used enough in games, so I think we need to replace Extinct, but Horizon is okay. What about Horizon Revelation? Oh, that Cyber War Horizon Revelation. place extinct but horizon is okay what about like horizon revelation oh that's like revelation revelation i can't even remember it long enough to say it uh do we have a plot for cyber war uh what is it called cyber war horizon revelation i wrote it down so i don't forget it Okay so Earth is dead

I know they did that too but I think Earth is dead Let's make that clear The new planet Is called Neo-Earth Neo-Earth 2 We tried it once

It was just mars yeah well we find out in like six months after the game launches that there was a neo-earth one that also got blown up but that's done in a flashback that's in that's in prequels yeah that's in that's in um cyber war horizon derevelation origins new dawn new dawn okay so we're on new earth too okay um what's our what's our what are we fighting against uh i think there are maybe colonists separatists that want neo-earth for themselves because of the natural resources beneath it. Hmm. And also they're Nazi zombies. Yeah. Yeah, and they call themselves the inhabitants.

Okay, got it. Because they were there first. So it's us, the resistance versus the inhabitants. Okay. the resistance versus the inhabitants okay and lastly who is the main baddie of New Earth 2 a bald man in sunglasses

yes he's in sunglasses and he has multiple forms so like at first he looks just like a bald man in sunglasses and he has multiple forms. So like at first he looks just like a bald man in sunglasses in a suit, right? But then he turns out he has a bionic body and that's the revelation, right? And then at the very end, you realize he was never a person at all. He was just code being put into this cyborg. And his name's Colonel Storm.

That's good. That's good. And he's your nephew. Colonel John Storm. He was part of the New Earth Liberation Army. It made him insane. We have fun here. We have a good time here.

So look for that on iOS. It's coming direct to Apple Arcade. What's the title again? Sorry, one more time. It's Cyber War Horizon Revelation. The prequel is called Cyber War Horizon Revelation New Dawn. That takes place on Neo Earth 1. Which they didn't call Neo Earth 1

because that would have just been stinking thinking. You know, you gotta stay optimistic. Okay, we have some reader mail. Yeah, please. Okay, I will dig into this. Okay, some questions. We have a reader who asked a question and a reader who answered that question.

Oh, I love it. From Matt. Matt asked, is it viable to play completely single player? And Mads answered this very thing. I know I'm not one of the besties cast, but I played the whole campaign solo as the Devastator, mostly on the highest world tier available to me,

and that went fine. It's much more fun with friends, though. Can we talk about highest world tier available to me and that went fine it's much more fun with friends though uh that's the world tier thing we forgot to mention that real quick actually before we like it there is an adjustable on the fly difficulty that they call world tier and it's basically like enemies are harder but the rewards are better right yeah i mean is that the basic idea and like as you play you unlock higher world tiers um and then sort of like when you come up when you get to it's honestly it's really fucking smart it's like really it's so smart because basically what it is is like you play through and it gets harder as you play

and then when you get a hit sort of like a wall or a good balance or you find it's like getting too hard you sort of freeze it there like that's what i did where i got to a point where i was like i've replayed this too many times i'm gonna step it back one and leave it there that's where i that's where i'm comfortable it's so much smarter than having you pick a different and there's a lot of different stages there's more like sort of like degrees of alteration beyond just like easy, medium, hard. There's like several. I mean, I think I've seen at least six or seven that I've unlocked.

Relevant to that, Grayson asked, help. One friend wants to play on low world tier to rush to the end game. One friend wants to play at max possible world tier. What should I do? That's funny um i think play on the easy one because otherwise everyone will be miserable yeah and i've heard the end game is is where this game really gets good um of course so i like i we didn't talk really about the demo did we oh yeah i heard you can carry over demo progress yeah so like that i think that was a

smart thing that the team did is there was a demo of this game that was like the first i don't know like five or six hours um and you could carry things over and people who did that seem to be enjoying the game a lot more it's almost like they realized like hey the beginning of this game not the hottest let's get people hooked um get them through the hard part and then they'll just be at the fun part when the game comes yeah if you have game pass though it's like it's very accessible because you can uh get the demo play it for free and then just get it on game pass for free like they really are trying to like make it easy for people to get on on board with this but i think it's worth i mean it that's what i did i played the demo the night before it came

out so i i when the game launched i was right into the the actual meat of it yeah that's as far as the world to your question i don't know i haven't noticed any sort of like problems sort of i think i meant like five difficulty five um yeah i think i think maybe somewhere in the middle is is probably the right answer But it is amazing because, like, yeah, like, I died multiple times on this, like, the electric guy boss fight because I guess I wasn't geared for it or whatever. And the fact that I didn't have to restart the mission to make that fight easier was incredible. I really don't remember another game that has done that. The only, like, analog is Diablo 3, which has seven difficulties and increases the loot as you increase the difficulty.

But I don't think you can change that mid-mission. It's pretty wild. Yeah, it is wild. One last question from Evan. For those of us who haven't yet gotten into slash don't want to get into a consistent looter shooter, is there anything in here for us? No, Evan.

Evan, there is not. That is a big nope. No, that's the biggest possible nope. Yeah, that's the reason to play the game. So if that is not what you want, I would go the other direction. If on the opposite end of things, that's what you like. Yeah, you should play this game and then just spam that B button

during the cut scenes. It's a great podcast game. I've been churning through my Audible backlog of books with this one because really, you don't need to hear a word out of these idiots' mouths.

Not a single beep. Shall we go to honorable mentions, Fresh? Yeah. I'm still playing a heck of a lot of monster hunter i talked about it last week i really liked it some people thought we were too negative on it i whether that was not clear or not i really adore monster hunter rise i think it's awesome and um you know i guess we did uh highlight the fact that it's impossible to get into if you're new to Monster Hunter, which is still true. But it's great. I've also been playing The Binding of Isaac Repentance, which is the last expansion to The Binding of Isaac, which has been going on for 10 years.

Very similar to Monster Hunter insofar as it's very difficult to convince people to play this game if they've never played this game before. insofar as it's very difficult to convince people to play this game if they've never played this game before but it added just a crap load of uh content to binding of isaac and i've already sunk just hundreds of hours into binding of isaac so maybe one day i'll convince you it'll be my near game where i convince you all to actually play this someday um but i adore it and um it actually um brings to an end the like story that's been kind of building throughout the entire series of the game so uh pretty great it's on steam right now and it's coming to switch and i think xbox later this year but one of the consoles later this year i've tried binding of isaac a few times i need to go back and the problem yeah it's such a brutal learning curve when you're

starting out. It really is. If you're able to get over that hump, it's terrific. You tried it. You didn't like it. Move on. Find something else. Justin, what are you playing? Me? A couple things. I got into Undermine,

which I don't know if y'all have played that one. I don't know what that is. Okay, cool. Great. Are Undermin, which I don't know if y'all have played that one. I don't know what that is. Okay, cool. Great. Are Underminers? Let me see. Let me make sure. Yeah, it's just Undermine.

I've been playing it on Switch. I'm assuming it's probably on other stuff because usually if something's on Switch, it's on Steam too. It came out in 2019 on Steam and just last month, or sorry, February, on Switch. just last month or sorry february on switch uh basically it is a think it is a roguelike um it's halfway between rogue legacy and spelunky how's that it's a roguelike isometric game where you are going through a dungeon and collecting um basically mining for gold and other minerals that will help you upgrade your gear and kill more monsters and protect yourself and survive longer. And each time you die, you keep some of your gold and you use it to permanently upgrade your characters. Or your character who, you know, each time you die,

you're the next one in their line that you come back as. But you can find blueprints that let you get new equipment, make the mining quicker. Each room feels very different. There's some rooms are minefields that you need to be aware of. Some are just filled with bugs. And then you get very distinct upgrades that really make each run feel very different. Like you can, in addition to just swinging your pickaxe, you can throw your pickaxe.

And sometimes you might find an upgrade that makes it ricochet off of enemies. So you really will lean more on throwing your pickaxe during that run. But if that's your kind of thing, this is my kind of, I know it sounds amazing. Like your shit. Yeah.

Undermine is the name of it. It looks great. It's very, it's very fun. There's some fun, like I'm still finding like weird, I know. It sounds amazing. It sounds like your shit. Yeah, Undermine is the name of it. It looks great. It's very fun. There's some fun. I'm still finding weird rooms that I haven't seen before on each run. Each run feels very distinct. It's very cool.

Awesome. I got back into Supernatural, which is a quest or an Oculus sort of exercise platform where your teacher is like a it's sort of like beat sabering gameplay but you have like uh teachers who are uploading new workouts like distinct discrete workouts every day uh of varying lengths and difficulty um griffin and i got into it a while a few months ago and then my oculus broke so I've been out of the game, but then I got back into it. And Supernatural has gotten increasingly weird, I think, with the daily pace of updates. It's pretty strange. Like, for instance, on April Fool's Day, my favorite coach, Rene or Pollard, put up a Polka playlist. That is where you're getting cut.

that is where you're getting getting cut to uh there's uh they do playlists that are um it's called like cult classics where like it's the best songs from like cult movies and so rather than talking about like working up a sweat or whatever it's just your instructor like so do you remember reservoir dogs like yeah i do but like and then you get to hear great lines like come on make joe pesci proud swing hit those targets uh but supernatural is still very very fun um and and uh all those coaches are are great uh it's a very fun platform if you're looking to get fit. What are you playing? I am playing a game that I can't talk about. So instead, I'm going to talk about For All Mankind,

a TV show I've been watching on Apple TV Plus that rules. I was extremely skeptical of Apple TV Plus when it launched, I think understandably. And now I've come to realize that it is the best version of network television for the modern age. Between Ted Lasso and Mythic Quest and this, it's hitting all the notes of what I wish network TV had become over the last 20 years. And for all mankind specifically, for people who don't know it, it is an alternate reality drama set in a version of our world where Russia got to, or the Soviet Union got to the moon first. And then it kind of just like extrapolates from there

what would the space program and the world to some degree have looked like had that happened um which is basically hey people kept investing in the space program because uh an honest to goodness competition formed uh and it's great it's a little soap opera-y in the beginning of the first season. I hear the pilot is bad, is what I've heard. And that it gets better. I did not mind the pilot. Okay. But I'm also somebody who thinks the first season of Halt and Catch Fire is great.

I'm not on that board of people who are like, I need the show to be amazing right away. I think you actually need a show to you know lay the groundwork i think there's also probably a number of people who want this show to be closer to what it is in the second season it spans decades um and at first like it needs to just you know still be about the 60s so things aren't that different yeah um between reality and the show's reality at first. Because it's like real people, right? Like it has real – Yeah, like John Glenn is a character in the show.

Buzz Aldrin is a character in the show. I mean I won't go into great detail about that. My dad presumably – he was born in 1955. Presumably he's a character in the show. Somewhere. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He is.

And I can't believe that they got Justin Theroreau to play him um a huge get huge i didn't know we could pick tv shows uh amazon prime has a really fantastic animated uh adaptation of invincible um oh yeah by robert kirkland uh it's a it's a really fantastic thing with a absolutely stellar cat i mean like phenomenal cast um and it's it's well worth uh checking with an absolutely stellar cat. I mean, like phenomenal cast. And it's, it's well worth checking out. Hey, what's next week.

Yeah. We're going to mix it up, baby. We're going, we're going to pick up our cousin to go bowling, which is we're drinking. We're sipping a little hot coffee next week. We're going to be in much the same way that we once

chose the permanent, factual, indisputable best Zelda game of all time. We're going to be picking the best Grand Theft Auto game of all time. Now, are we like sensible people starting with three? We are not. No. No, we are not.

We're going to do them all. We're going to do them all. Well, kind of. Basically. So we're the big ones. Within reason, we are going to be completely, 100% within reason, complete. Yes. We're going to do eight games. Things that we're not going to do. We're not going to do expansions.

So like GTA London's. We know they're great. Lost in the Damned. Wonderful. We're not doing them. We're also going to include the PSP games inside of that. Stuff that kind of reuses parts of an old game.

So no Liberty City stories, no Vice City stories. We're not going to do online. It's just a very different thing altogether. So that leaves us with GTA's 1 through five also vice city san andreas and to make it an even eight uh chinatown wars yes wow okay should be should be interesting i think it'll be fun yeah i think it'll be fun too very different games very very very different games more different okay... Okay, quick question.

Is Grand Theft Auto more different from Grand Theft Auto 5 than Legend of Zelda is from Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild? Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is very... Not very similar, but pretty similar to the original Legend of Zelda.

Let's discuss this on that. That's a good question. We'll save it. Put a pin. Think about it. That's going to do it for us. Make sure you follow and a review would be so helpful on a podcast platform that you enjoy this show on.

Please tell somebody about the show. You can follow us on Twitter at TheBestiesPod and that is such a big help to do all that stuff and you know, it's the same stuff every podcast asks for. So they don't have to pay for advertising. So please do that because I don't even know

where we put an ad. The View? I don't know where we would advertise. But thank you for listening. We appreciate it. 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? Besties!