The Besties - The Hidden Gems of the Past 200-ish Episodes!

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

We're celebrating our 200th episode, or at least the episode we assume is somewhere around our 200th, by talking about hidden gems of this year and the past decade, which is how long we've been doing this show, which is ... man. We need to go lie down for a while. Games discussed include: TOEM, Eastward, Beast Breaker, Crusin Blast, Antichamber, Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, Tiny Wings, Jazzpunk, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, Walkabout Mini Golf and Cookie Clicker! 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!

Yo, we've been doing this for 200 episodes, almost 10 years. Do you remember that the very first version of the besties was just a four-way battle royale in which we attempted to murder each other each week? It wasn't so much that. It was we had to pick a winner out of four people, which is a problem because it's A, an even number, and B, frequently no one would budge. So we just sort of hit this impasse that was a better version of the show though you think so like like the heat that that generated the nasty heat uh was was really something i think it was a better version of the show it was not good for our friendships because i mean i don't know if we've ever talked about it, but, you know, the kind of the tension rolled outside of the episode. Like, Frushdick sent me a box of asbestos.

Right. Because I said that SSX was better than, you know, like, sound shapes. Yeah. And that's a hill that we had to die on yeah let's talk about the box office charts for february 24th 2012 okay the week of our first episode okay i'm talking about number one top spot act of valor followed immediately by tyler perry's good deeds and then journey to the mysterious island so i don't know any of these flicks yeah I haven't seen movies was movies was wild Safe House The Vow Ghost Rider Spirit of Vengeance This Means War Wanderlust Gone okay 10th spot Secret World of Arrietty that's fine

2012 what was up guys were we all like the world's ending we don't really need to make movies and then if you don't remember that we thought this is good in 2012 like, the world's ending. We don't really need to make movies. Yeah, if you don't remember that, we thought this is good. In 2012, we thought the world was ending. Because of apocalyptic prophecy, we didn't. I don't want to rewrite the history books. Some people did. Did 2012, the movie, not come out that year? No, I don't believe so.

No, no, no. Yeah, it had to have come out in 2011, right? Because how would you make a movie 2012 knowing you're going to lose money on it? Right, because of the... The waves. The apocalypse. The big waves hitting the monks.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Ten years. Yeah, and yeah, it's like a well-oiled sheet. 10 years. Yeah. And yeah, it's like a well oil machine. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of all time. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I don't. That's wild. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I want to give a special thanks right up top

to the person who makes the besties spreadsheet that documents every game we played for 200 episodes. One love. Seriously. In your honor. the person who makes the besties spreadsheet that documents every game we played for 200 episodes one love seriously in your honor plant won't say your name because he's afraid of you but we all appreciate you uh my name is ross farshek and i know the best game of the week welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. And this week is a celebration of roughly, depending on how you calculate it, 200 episodes of this podcast we call The Besties. We call it Close Enough is what we call it. What?

It's a close enough situation. Close enough. There's a weird mathematical sort of silliness that happens when you cancel and uncancel a podcast five times. It starts to get a little difficult to count the number of the episodes when sometimes you did one in a year and sometimes you did 52 in a year. It's sort of like that photograph in Back to the Future where they keep disappearing and reappearing.

There's really no telling whether we exist or not. But we are going to talk about some of our favorites from the past and look at some of the more recent past and talk about some of our favorites from all of Bestie's time which is BT

which is what we call this era that we have been living in since 2012. Let's talk first about how we got started with this great idea for a podcast. So before Polygon was even born, there was just this glimmer in my eye that I explained to Chris Grant at length what it could be like.

I let him see the future, the promise of tomorrow of video games. And then we hired on uh russ and plant and griffin um i don't remember that this is pretty much how i remember it and then i was like boys bring it in and they were like yes sir and i was like got it i got the next big idea and they were like their eyes got all dewy and as they looked up to me from their seats around my rocking chair and they're like what's the future and i was like, their eyes got all dewy and as they looked up to me from their seats around my rocking chair, and they're like, what's the future? And I was like, one word, bestie. And everybody's like,

started weeping and stuff and that's how we got started. I'm pretty sure Chris Grant came up with the name for besties, that we should probably give him that credit. No, the entire game was my idea. Give me the year show that goes all year long. And of course we kept to that without ever wavering from that original vision. We got it and it and there definitely wasn't a robot at one point yeah oh my god oh my

what a fucking show that sounds like a joke like the fantastic four did that you know what i mean the brady bunch did it and we did it we had a we had a fucking robot for a little while on this show. Didn't we also used to call Chris Grant for tiebreakers? He was the robot. He played the cyber robot. Okay, got it. Yes. Jesus, God. What a great podcast, and we're so glad that you've been with us here for, let me look at my notes here.

Let me take a big drink of coffee. Nearly 10 years. And that's me spitting the coffee sound. That's the sound of the coffee coming out we are going to start though before we get into the heart of our look back at those 200 episodes and some hidden picks from there we are going to start with modern hidden gems yes something a little more recent uh what's what do you guys what what have you been keeping under your hat russ you have an acronym here, which is always thrilling.

No, I think that's just the name of it. Really? Yeah, that is actually, I'm pretty sure just the name of it. If it is an acronym, I have not learned what the letters stand for. But the game that I wanted to bring is a hidden gem. And again, these are all games that are more or less recent, but aren't big budget, you know, splashy. The Resident Evils of the world these are a little maybe smaller games but still terrific and the game that i'm bringing is called toem i think

is the way it's pronounced like poem but with a t oh i that makes sense does it i mean it that was a good way of explaining it. I just thought it was like toem, like it was like a bell being hit. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, if you're picturing it, it's like poem with a T. And the game is a, it's a photograph game insofar as you are a little critter, a little person that runs around these maps with a camera. And that's basically your only interaction with these worlds is taking photos.

The art style is 2D, but it's isometric 2D. So all the characters are like 2D, like hand-drawn, but it all takes place in like a 3D isometric world. Kind of hard to explain, but basically you walk through these worlds and you'll meet like critters. asymmetric world kind of hard to explain but basically you walk through these worlds and you'll meet like critters like you'll meet like a guy who looks like a fish or uh kind of girl scouts that give you different tasks and they'll say hey i need you to find a axe on a log or hey i'm i lost my sock can you go find my sock and in these small cutesy worlds you're basically finding them and then

taking photos of these things and bringing them back to the people that is like the main core interaction which seems very simple but it's also like super soothing and welcoming and like the vibe of the game the music is terrific has like really great lo-fi chill music and i feel like a lot of the games i've been playing these days have been like very intense actiony yeah i was gonna say when do you when do you who do you shoot like when do you shoot well you shoot photographs well i guess you shoot photographs oh yeah i guess that makes sense yeah but that doesn't make the like the the blood and coins come out not yet yet. That might be an upgrade. You actually do find a lot of upgrades for your camera as you play.

I found a tripod, so you can like set up your camera and then walk into frame to take photos. I also found a horn that attaches to my camera so I can like startle people to take photos while they're startled. Or get like little kids attention. Yes.

It's really terrific terrific i've been playing on switch it's on basically everything console wise but if you're looking for something like cutesy on the go on switch um toem is just adorable highly highly recommended i've really been showing myself i wanted to talk about eastward and i feel like this is going to be sort of our last chance to do it uh russ you you put some time into this right i did not as much as i would have wanted to because i have been a little bit inundated but i played uh right basically the first i played the prologue and then the first chapter more or less that's about how much i played too yeah okay and juice you haven't picked it up no i'm not familiar now it is it's such a wild thing right

it is it's an indie game made by almost entirely by uh three people uh small indie dev team from shanghai uh called i think pix pill and it is a a pixel art top-down action adventure game that is heavily inspired by zelda uh with some of the more sort of like 16-bit heyday era graphics of like a god it's so hard like a secret of mana or final fantasy 6 like something in that it's extremely extremely extremely inspired by mother three like yeah like shockingly inspired by mother three um and which is the sequel to earth yes the sequel to earthbound if you yeah if you're not familiar with how that works and then it never actually came out in the states correct right aside from fan translations uh that there are so many of at this point. Earthbound is like a tonal jumping off point, I think more than a mechanical one, because it is not a turn-based RPG, except for the minigame where you play a little arcade machine called Earthborn, which is explicitly a turn-based RPG that is sort of a very neat and genuinely robust sort of diversion to the game.

Yeah, minigame is not even maybe the right word for it. It's just a full other RPG inside of this RPG. And it's very cool. I don't think from a presentation standpoint there is much to knock this game on. It is genuinely astonishingly beautiful all the time, uh, with a soundtrack that is,

uh, going to be something I keep listening to in, in the coming years. Uh, I would put it on the level of like a Fez or, uh, you know, something,

something on that 30 Valley. Yeah. Like, yeah. Something that is, is going to be iconic. I will also say that mechanically, it has a lot going for it. You play as these two characters, John, who is this burly, silent protagonist,

minor dude who attacks things with a frying pan and uses bombs to blow stuff up. He's just this big, burly force of destruction. And he travels around with a girl named Sam who has basically like magic that she can use to support John in combat or solve puzzles. She can't actually like hurt things, but she can stun enemies so that John,

you can switch back to John and bang him over the head with a frying pan and get the blood and the coins to come out. And there are puzzles that they use where, you you know sometimes you have to split these two characters up and you know freeze these plants uh with sam and then charge up a pan attack to knock a bomb like a golf shot into the plants to blow like it's very the exploration and dungeon stuff and boss fights like they're all phenomenal i think the thing that the common complaint that i hear leveraged against the game and this is where it takes inspiration from jrpgs

and i'm not necessarily sure it was the best idea is in how it handles exposition and narrative and sort of like pacing just in general of your of your quest because it is it is it is wildly overwritten the this game like these these dungeons and all of the like gameplay segments are so cool and there's so many fun little diversions to do but you will go literal hours between those where you will be like running back and forth between points on opposite ends of a big city talking to people every time you reach one of the ends for like an insufferable amount of time. And I love that shit. Like I am a huge fan of JRPGs and you know that. Like, I am a huge fan of JRPGs, and you know that. But, like, it is overwritten and I think, like, underexplained almost. So that, like, it's a cool mystery, this world.

You're trying to figure out, like, what is this apocalypse that has happened? And why is this city existing underground? And why does this girl have some sort of weird spiritual doppelganger that she like there's a lot of mystery but not a lot of like explanation that will give you a sort of foothold in that story so it is just a lot of dialogue for characters who are very neat and a world that is like gorgeous and you want to know more about but you never really get as much out of it as you want. And so what you get is like, and I, I know this is like a very reductive, but like there is an incredible,

there's an incredible game of the year contender, 15 hour long video game inside of this. No joke, like 25, 30 hour long video game. And that's heartbreaking because what is, what is good in Eastward is so good. But like even me who is a fan of the genre and a fan of all the games

that they are sort of like taking so much inspiration from, I couldn't like, I couldn't finish it. It got to be too plotty for me. Yeah, it's unfortunately. The big caveat that i would say for like listeners who are considering it i think there are two types of people who would really enjoy it and probably enjoy it even more than we have um and i will say from what i understand the game gets

more enjoyable as it progresses it just you do have it does it does yes um but i think people who one just have a good amount of time. If time is not the resource that you're worried about when you play video games, I think you will enjoy this. I think what Griffin's talking about, about the mysteries and being underwritten, this is the sort of game that I think gets a really hardcore fan base because of those loose threads and because of people discussing the answers or what they think are the answers on forums or on social media. The other thing I would say is if you are really into the kind of tropes of RPGs, both like Western RPGs, JRPGs, action RPGs, this game is just constantly playing with expectations. So the way that Griffin describes the relationship between John and Sam, I think, is just something I hadn't really seen before in terms of having this support character who follows around this hulking just action machine. Murder machine, yeah. And then in the game within the game, I mean, right away, one of the characters that you get is, it's a merchant, I believe.

So the characters who fill out your party are, they're just doing things that are unusual. And like straight up, some of those things don't work really well, but they're really cool swings. And I think that's the kind of trick with this game again you for a certain type of uh video games person i think for some games we are these people even though it doesn't always work just like the gumption of trying is so interesting that it it's worth the the investment so i again i i agree i don't necessarily think it's like a unanimous everybody should play this game but i think if you are those types of people i i do think it's it's worth a try because i mean like you said griffin it's it's something

special it just it is it's just a bit heavy it's very cozy. And that's like an aesthetic that people are absolutely craving. God knows I am. Like, that's my shit. Yeah, I will probably finish it one day, or at least I hope so. And I mean, if this studio continues to make things, like, they're going to go on to make pretty incredible things. So, like, I don't regret the time I've put into it. continues to make things like they're going to go on to make pretty incredible things um so like i don't regret i don't regret the time i've put into it it's just always heartbreaking when like i feel like a game is on the verge of being something like truly truly special and memorable

and uh you know a game that sticks with me but has has stuff holding it back um and i i think that for me at least that describes eastward now let's talk about a real game for real gamers okay beast breaker no there's no fat on this one there's no listen here's what i can say about beast breaker there is no 15 to 10 hour game of the year contender locked away in this one. So that's a complaint you had that I don't have about Beast Breaker. Beast Breaker is, you ready for this? Combat Peggle RPG.

I gotta go. I have to leave the show right now to begin playing Beast Breaker. This one came to me hot from Rush Freshstick, who, whatever the video game recommendation equivalent of a lover is, that's Rush Freshstick for me, because this guy

has his finger on the pulse. He's one of the great, he's a Justin Whisperer man. He knows exactly how to get my engines revving. Beast Breaker is a game where you are like a little mouse with a sword and you have to fight these giant crystalline beasts um or break them if you prefer uh by firing yourself at them and bouncing around them a bunch of times to shatter different parts of their armor. So that's the basic idea

is that classic, extremely satisfying like, arcanoid you know, bouncing around very quickly and then destroying a bunch of stuff is sort of like the main satisfactory thing that happens. But like they have, it's sort of a meditation on all the different ways that that could

that you could explore those mechanics so like um there are special spaces on the monsters where if you destroy it then you get an extra turn what you're up against is a rampage which you have x number of terms to turns to uh kill the thing or it's going to rampage across the village and just kill everybody so you've got to stop it before then. But there's ways to slow the rampage timer, like taunts, which you can execute by building energy through bouncing around enough times in an enemy.

You can shatter specific parts and kind of throw them off the rampage and restart that timer. You can get gear that you shatter off of different pieces that you have to like quickly collect with a special shot to like grab the gear so you have it for the next fight there are uh special shots you can use like you build energy by with attacks and then there are special shots that are tied to whatever gear you bring into the fight and those shots can be like um like like if you dash through you normally you would just bounce off of one piece but instead if you're using this special shot you'll dash through multiple pieces and attack them all basically or you can use a special attack that builds defense

and then if you get caught by a monster's attack which is like basically there's a red part of the screen that shows where they're going to attack and if you are in that area at the end of your turn then you are going to take damage so it's also like making sure that you try to avoid that area while you are um it it kind of reminds me of pool uh like billiards insofar as you are constantly thinking okay how am i going to like hit this angle properly to get this right attack but you're also thinking where am i going to be left up at the end of the turn? And is that a good place for me for the next round or not? Um, that's if you like thinking like multiple steps ahead, this is kind of a great game for that. Uh, yeah. So it's, it's, uh, it's called beast

breaker. I mean, that's, I don't know if anybody else is saying questions about it, but like that you get the idea, man, if that sounds like something you would like then you would like this and just from a design pedigree standpoint it comes from uh asher volmer uh it's from his studio who made threes and a number of other incredible games so you kind of can get a sense of uh where that it's also pretty well written i mean like for what it is like the the dialogue did you think yeah it's like it's not cringy or or too talky yeah it doesn't get a lot of games like this where you're like you're you're like when you've got such an addictive central mechanic you want to just like get into it without a lot of chatter and this definitely yeah the art style

for me doesn't it doesn't really click for me it's a taste thing but um i think gameplay wise and as you said the writing both really really strong cruising cruising the world nobody stop him let him keep going uh hey i'm gonna talk about cruising blast it's a great game sure you ever play a game where you're like okay so i'm gonna walk you through the story of cruising blast cruising blast is the sequel to the cruising usa series it's like the first one like a decade um probably even longer if we forget that awful we cruising game much like the besties it's been Besties, it's been on a journey. It's been on a journey. It was released in arcade a few years ago, because they still

make arcade games. Twist. But here's the story about it. I had not played it. I saw it in the Nintendo Switch Direct, I don't know, like a couple months ago, and I was like, there it is. There's my game of the year. And everybody was like, no, you're wrong that looks awful um the art style is too much and I was like no no no it's

gonna be great and then we get an offer for review code and I'm like everybody's gonna take this right and everybody is like no and I'm like oh I okay I'll take it I'm like I'm going on a plane trip I'll take this game and then immediately I'm like it is the okay, I'll take it. I'm going on a plane trip. I'll take this game. And then immediately I'm like, it is the game of the year. I text message Russ Frushtick, and he is skeptical, would be a nice way of putting it. Made me feel like maybe I'm a real dumbo who has lost all taste in video games. So I played the entire game, and I'm having the you know time of my life like maybe maybe i've lost my edge maybe i don't know what good games are anymore um and you know what this is the longest preamble to why this cruising game specifically to a

cruising game yeah y'all i did i didn't have therapy this month that's what this podcast is for my point is i went on a journey tell me all your thoughts on prison i went on a journey with it and this game it rules the only problem with it and i think why i have to give this long explanation is it's 39.99 which is a lot of money for a game that you can pretty much see the entirety of and i don't know like six hours but and also it looks like a nintendo 64 game that got like adapted for the xbox 360 there is so much bloom and um like reflections that don't actually line up with anything in this game. It's absurd. I feel like you're burying the lead,

and the lead is there's fucking yetis in it that chase your cars around. Well, they don't chase your car. So there are a few courses you're driving all over the world, but they're absolutely absurd. Yes, there are yetis, and yetis is an understatement. I don't know what these are. They're like King Kong yetis. They are so big.

And every time you come across something that big in the game, you know that's only the start. So you see the yetis. You're jumping off a cliff over the yetis. You're now going down into the arms of the yetis. And because it has to go further, the yetis pound on the ground, opening a core to the middle of the earth. And there's a tropical world underneath. So now you're like somehow underneath ice in a tropical magic realm. That is this game. There's a sequence where, I think I posted this on Twitter, where you are jumping over,

I guess the Grand Canyon or something, and you're seeing a wasteland of hundreds of abandoned, like, passenger planes. But then an earthquake happens and rips a giant hole in the ground, and then you have to jump over that earthquake so you don't fall into the, you know, the gulfs of, I don't know, hell. And then you're like, oh, great, I made it. There's the finish line. And who's going to be here to welcome you but, like, eight fighter jets, you know, letting loose, you know, colorful American flares. It's just, it's so much. There's basically no way to crash. No matter how hard you try, it doesn't let you slow down.

You just keep going fast. It's great. It's so fun. My understanding is you can earn boost by flipping your car. But imagine a 1950s, that style car from Greece. But you do a jump, and then suddenly you're corkscrewing through the air to earn boost for no reason that has any basis in physics. So I don't think you actually get boost. I think it's purely style.

You can drift for boost. But even better than the car doing, like a 1930s car doing a flip, you can also be a triceratops or a helicopter. They also do flips and barrel rolls. Yeah. And that is good. That's powerful.

Morgan should just do that. Just do that. I want to do a call out specifically to a video on YouTube by Digital Foundry. Oh my gosh. Now you might know that Digital Foundry obsesses a lot about, you know, pixels and ray tracing and stuff like that. They did a video specifically on Cruisin' Blast and they absolutely loved it. And it was so heartwarming because i feel like these guys

are like on the day of daily crushed about like people obsessing about the level of anti-aliasing and whatever and they just had such a good time and i'm it just made me really happy for them that they could just enjoy themselves it made me appreciate the game even more because a lot of the points they're making is like is this game somewhat ugly yes are these intentional choices absolutely and like having them explain it was like watching you know some uh like a painter that is breaking all the rules you know and then producing something that you you look at and like like, I don't know why I love it, but I do. They're like, yes, a lot of these choices are typically wrong, but they work in favor of this game that is like intentionally gaudy. Should an entire map have reflections in it if you can't actually do the reflections right and they look hideous and pixelated? Probably not. Yeah. But you know what it works it's consistent

yeah it's good sorry one one last thing from that video so the game is called cruise and blast you get three i think three blast boost that just like shake the whole screen you know send you on a tear it's like flipping the nitrous and fast and the Furious. It is the core mechanic of the game. It's the name of the game. The one thing that causes frame rate slowdown in the game is when you perform a blast. It's amazing.

That seems not great. Yeah, that one seems like a negative. Unlike a lot of the stuff that you've mentioned so far, that one does sound kind of like a negative. Yeah, I guess it's bad. Hey, it's such a good game. What are you playing this on? It's on Switch.

Nintendo Switch? Fuck yeah. Yeah. So that is some of our more recent finds. And then after this quick break, we're going to get in the time machine. We're going to go way, way back, all the way back to 2012.

JNCO jeans were in the air. President Obama was making another run at the White House. America's future never seemed brighter. And we're going to talk about some of our favorite games from our 200-episode history right after this. Cool. So before we get into some of our picks from the last 200 episodes, I wanted to talk a little bit about something kind of exciting that we're doing.

You got to say it up like this. Blah, blah, blah. No. Special announcement. We're trying to encourage people to listen to this. I think I have a button. Hold on. Let me see if I have a button.

Justin has buttons. Oh, good. We have a pretty exciting announcement. We've talked a little bit on our twitter the besties pod on twitter that um during this very heated uh intense holiday season with a lot of games coming out we will struggle to hit every game that we want to talk about on the main show on on besties which means that we are going to be starting to do, Plant and I specifically, bi-weekly episodes of The Resties, which will drop on Tuesdays.

You will see a new episode in your feed that will just be more games, more recommendations, stuff we absolutely love that we do not have time to talk about on the main show, on Besties. Now, I know what you're thinking, and I just want to make something really clear.

The games are the resties, not Plant and Frustic. The games are the resties. Yeah, but part of it is I think it works on multiple levels. It doesn't, and I don't want that sort of energy. Right. It's a great show. We wanted to go with Besties Nights, but these guys are cowards. I don't know what sort of energy right it's a great show for it's we wanted to go with besties nights but these guys are cowards i don't know what they couldn't bring the sexiness that a title like that

would imply i guess um thank you justin yeah no i'm very excited uh i know plant and i have a lot of stuff that we are excited to jump into so youier Automata, Breath of the Wild. The games that we always get angry whenever you talk about for 15 minutes. Pretty soon, I'm going to have my own spinoff show too that's just called Four Teensies where I talk about Final Fantasy XIV by myself. Ah, another great point, Griffin. I am also excited about the Reaper's Class.

So yeah, just wanted to set that up so you're not surprised uh we hope you enjoy it please listen through and and give us feedback if you have any thoughts on the show um but yeah it should be dropping on tuesday uh all right guys so oh wait did you say this give me in this feed and it's like yeah you don't need to do anything whatsoever it's worth noting like we considered for a little bit doing like a subscriber only thing we decided we didn't want to split the audience up so uh hopefully you enjoy more free content from us free free no it's not free except for the sunk cost of listening are you guys gonna keep dank nugs for yourselves This is a fear that's just not great. No.

Like what if there's like something choice? Well, it should be noted. I feel like a lot of times we talk about games that we don't necessarily like on the main show because they're big games and we need to talk about them. That will not happen on the resties. It will just be games that we actually find interesting or we like because there's no reason to talk about

games we don't like on the sideshow i i'm gonna spend probably like you know at least three hours talking about tales of arise i would not do that y'all on this feed i mean i would like to ah damn it we'll do ours off the air we don't have to record every conversation we have chris that's true that's very true we've been at this for a while and we have this big spreadsheet with all of our great, great gems on it that we've talked about over the years. And looking at the spreadsheet,

Hachimachi was the separate journey. Oh, can I specifically call out, I know we gave them some props early in the show, but like I don't know the specific person who created this, but this spreadsheet came from the Besties subreddit. I do want to give them credit on that front.

It's just the besties on Reddit. Yeah, this is so this is an enormous amount of work. So thank you to the person or persons who put this together because it's it's incredible. I want to talk before we get into like our actual things that things, did anybody have any... There were at least a few games on here, looking back over the list of all the games that we've talked about, where I had games that I brought that I suggested that I had absolutely no memory of existing. The two that really jumped out to me, and there is no way on earth that you guys remember BXX Haunted. BXX Haunted. Haunted.

I assume that's a bike racing game with ghosts. I know it's good because when I Googled it, the top result was an article I wrote in April of 2012. It was a 32- long non-linear mystery from the creator of carnival sort of like a found footage thing but it's 32 hours long and you can like jump through the footage at different places and like switch between cameras one of those kinds of things. Wait, wait, but it's a bike racing game? No, not BMX Haunted. That would be fucking good.

That would be really cool. No, BXX Haunted. And it was like a nonlinear narrative that you unearthed by watching all these different things. Wait, you played a game for 30 hours, and you don't remember any of it? I mean, Griffin's not on Final Fantasy XIV. I don't see why I can't deal with

DXX Haunted. It doesn't seem fair. I remember every moment I spent with that very special game. Were there any weird ones that jumped out to you all that you hadn't recalled their existence? Oh, like not great ones that we were excited to talk about?

Oh my god, I completely forgot that existed. On Blank Check, they joke about movies that don't exist anymore because no one discusses them. A lot of the games we've talked about, honestly, a surprising number do not fall into this list. Like a shocking amount I recalled pretty easily. I don't remember a game called Ow My Balls, and apparently we just talked about that.

Does that ring a bell? Ow My a game called Ow My Balls, and apparently we just talked about that. Does that ring a bell? Ow My Balls? Yes, Ow My Balls. Sounds funny, though. Episode six of the Besties, March of 2012. I will say, this is not a judgment of Ow My Balls. I'm sure that was a labor of love that a lot of work went into.

But we give ourselves shit for our many format changes on this show but we used to sometimes well we need a fourth game yeah and would bring would would stoop down to an ow my balls which meant one of us had to vociferously i would say defend ow my balls just because they wanted to win the week, which is not the best way of doing a video games book club podcast. True. But one other one that jumped, like I had absolutely no memory of Marlo Briggs and the mask of death. That sounds like a cool,

that sounds like a Justin game. It does. Yeah. It was like a, this is also pretty early on. It was a sort of like God of war style. Google it. Cause it was like a this is also pretty early on it was a uh sort of like god of war style google it because it was oh it was zoot fly remember zoot fly who was supposed to do a um uh ghostbusters game for the longest time and it never it never uh came together but zoot fly did

this third person action adventure it was like a very self-aware almost like meta level um uh game from 2013 that was on uh xbox 360 and microsoft windows kind of reminded me of you guys remember matt hazard yeah matt hazard the action game about being an action game but somehow got a sequel at one point uh anyway those are a couple that jumped out at me but those were not my like favorite hidden gems where I don't even know if you could go back and play Marlowe Briggs right now if you want to. Maybe. Now my balls just got released. It's

HD now. Oh, excellent. Okay. You can really see the balls now in this new version. Who wants to start? I will start, fittingly, because this is a pick from our very first episode of The Besties. And the pick is Tales from Space, Mutant Bob's Attack.

Whoa. Is this a Vita game? This was a Vita game, correct. It originally came out on Vita. This is a game that was made by Drink drinkbox studios a company that still makes games today still makes great games today um most known for the guacamelee series and they've got a new game coming out that i'm blanking on the name of but keep an eye out for that but tales from space mutant bobs attack um you basically played as a um alien who starts out as like a microscopic spec basically and as you progress

through levels you just get bigger and bigger and bigger through absorbing different objects in the world now i know you might feel a sound you might think that sounds a lot like katamari damacy it's not because a it's 2d it'sscrolling game. And B, it uses stuff like fluid dynamics and like puzzle solving. It's not just about rolling a dumb ball around and sucking up the Eiffel Tower. Super sick game. That was a hateful and venomous way

of referring to Katamari Damacy. Well, you know, she fits. Mutant Bomb Attack, I absolutely love. And what's really cool about this game is uh you can play it now very easily it's on steam um i think it's like 10 bucks uh but just terrific it is cool that you can play it that's one of the things is well i feel like there might be some picks in here that are unlike marlo briggs right which i actually update quick update five bucks on steam baby go get that mask of death for yourself go enjoy it's got talking that do you remember when we used to

do sub awards for every game it won best talking mask we can't we gave that's the award that we gave uh good for marlo uh yeah the other thing i would just call out for mutant blobs it does not over it's the overstay it's welcome it's like a six hour thing it like kind of nails everything it's trying to do i just absolutely adore it uh highly recommend it if you've never played it um yeah so that's it uh i could i could do mine uh because mine is a very cool game that i had really forgotten about until i saw uh saw it on this list and remembered just how cool it was. It's a game called Antechamber,

which is an indie, like 3D first-person puzzle platformer thing, sort of in the milieu of a portal, but way more sort of abstract than that. Basically, you have a portal, but way more sort of abstract than that. Basically, you have a gun, sort of like you have a gun in Portal, only this one does different shit. It can suck up different colored blocks and shoot them out. You can find different upgrades for it that allow it to do different things.

But all of the puzzles in Ant Chamber are, first of all, nonlinear. It is not like Portal where you're going from, you know, one test chamber to the next. You are exploring this enormous non-Euclidean facility where the puzzles are tracked in this like huge screen in the main hub that you can then jump between at will uh and all of the puzzles are based around impossible objects um which is again uh purposefully i think a difficult thing to kind of like describe visually um i mean it's mc asher basically if you if you know it is mc asher ask right so there are uh that that great thing that you get in puzzle games that deal with like illusions and stuff like this sometimes where like uh you can walk through this wall

if you are not looking at it right like if you're not looking at it and it's not sort of temporarily locked in place then you can walk backwards through it um every single puzzle in antechamber and there's a lot of them deal deals with some variation on that uh and that that sort of like lateral thinking is not something i have seen in a puzzle game since we're like each individual puzzle is is tailored to that very specific puzzle it's not like Portal where it's like, oh, I figured out how to use the portal gun to build momentum and do big long jumps. So now I'm gonna use that

to get through the next few puzzles, which is great. I love Portal. But in Antechamber, like every puzzle I feel like is its own thing and they connect to each other in very, very strange ways. And it was a game that I just feverishly played through.

It was a game that I dreamt about between sessions because you have to spin your wheels so much to make progress in it. A very, very, very cool game from a developer named Alexander Bruce uh who i have not actually kept up with but i yeah alexander bruce uh i really enjoyed running into him at gdc around the time that this came out he would literally just kind of sit in the corner and chill and seem i had the same yeah disconnected from the rest of it and then has not released anything since this game, from what I can tell, did very, very, very well. So I'm sure he's comfortable. But I kind of admire an indie game developer who had a mega hit, maybe does not have to make a game ever again, can just be chill and quiet. Is amazingly not saying wild, awful things on Twitter.

It's a bold idea. not saying uh wild awful things on twitter it's a bold idea um maybe one of my favorite like demos i've ever had at like oh yeah uh an expo like this is what you when when you are going to these kinds of shows as a member of the press like it's the dream scenario of just like somebody who's like yeah sit down check this game out and then he didn't help me fucking at all. He was like, oh yeah, that is weird, huh? And I was like, you, I want to know. It was just to be able to sit back and just say like, yeah, play my game, figure it out. It's very, very, very difficult. That shows the level of confidence in a game

that you very rarely see, I feel like. A great, really great game, I feel like. And it's also the kind of game that probably a lot of people haven't checked out. So yeah, clear your schedule, clear your dream schedule and play antechamber It's it's I mean, it's definitely on Steam and it's phenomenal My game is something that I bet everybody who listened to this show from the beginning is played But I doubt many newer listeners have tried which is a game called tiny wings

Do y'all remember this? Yeah, of course I remember Tiny Wings. I still play it on Apple TV sometimes. It's so good. Tiny Wings, very simple. You are a bird and you go, it is not Flappy Bird. You are a bird and you can't really fly.

You kind of have to like dive bomb into the descending arc of a hill and then shoot up the ramp of the next hill to get back into the air. And the goal is to time this so that you have these kind of natural arcs and it's very smooth and fast and that you are avoiding the change

from daylight into night. You're running from the... Running from time. Yeah, you're running from time. The game itself is a delight it just feels good but the reason i'm bringing it is the the music the music for this game is it is one of the most relaxing songs video game or not that i've ever heard. I could just listen to this app open for days on end and it would bring me a level of peace that I'm rarely afforded. It is so good. I don't know if we are we able to splice in and you think that if we are there would be music right about here. Субтитры подогнал «Симон» it's just the best right yeah that's if i could touch on this too why this one is like

tiny wings is from a time that was very early in the life of polygon and it was also a time where like a lot of us were spending a lot of times like being in one room together or like being in an event together or whatever and like this is a game it was you don't really have these like there's this great streak of ios games for a while where like everyone really cared about it like everyone really cared about your score everyone really cared about how well you did that like people paid attention to the leaderboards in a way that like they definitely do not anymore uh for for hardly anything i mean to a point where like i did a song called the million point man that was just about my return to playing tiny wings competitively like i had a shooter for a

while and then i came back to like try to get it going again um that that was how uh how much i cared about um yeah when and when you say cared about it too like there just weren't that many games being released compared to today right like games like this mobile or not it wasn't like how it is now with you know steam uh really going into old man territory here but you know you didn't have steam getting a dozen releases every single day um and having something that felt like very small and precious and like just very very beautiful um from the art to the gameplay to the song like it it felt kind of like a little bit of magic and that still happens today those games exist um, there's probably just more of them now than there has ever been.

But then it felt like, I don't know, it was like a solve in a kind of game space that didn't have anything quite like it. So real quick, I just want to share. I just found this. High school's on a mission and a million points is there instead. And you find yourself wondering why you got out of bed i'm gonna take your tiny wings to fly yeah and show what it's all about gonna get up in the fever mode and then he's never gonna come back down you get the hang of it I wanted to there was so many great ones that I could have recommended but I was trying

to strike a balance between like very good and you might have missed it and also did something that hasn't been improved on in a major way because there's a lot of games that like where they sort of laid the groundwork and we celebrated them because i feel like we've always been champions of innovation

if nothing else here on the besties um but that game is jazz punk oh yeah man yeah so jazz punk is one you very easily could have missed is pretty early in the besties history. But you can still play it right now. You go get it on Steam. It is a absurdist in a way that like a lot of games say they're like absurdist, but what they really mean is they're kind of like Rick and Morty. This is like actually genuinely like mechanically absurdist where you are. is a cold war themed uh first person game with pretty simplistic graphics um kind of looks like a um a blend-o game right um like quadrilateral cowboy or or stuff like that um but you don't have a great idea of what exactly it is you're supposed to be doing like on a micro level uh know, you're supposed to infiltrate a consulate on a macro level.

But on the micro level, you don't actually have a great sense of what you're supposed to be doing. And this game really rewards just kind of messing around with it and seeing what happens. just kind of messing around with it and seeing what happens. Like while you're trying to get into this consulate, you can like wander down an alley and there's a pizza box. And then when you open the pizza box, there is a screen that starts booting up and the pizza is a keyboard. Like there's keys on the pizza where each key is a pizza slice. And then you're sucked into that game

and you're playing a game called like Brain Pizza. And you're suddenly in a different first person game where you're in a world made of pizza and you're being chased by pizza zombies. And in one hand you have like a paddle and then the other hand, like a pizza cutter. And you're trying to get to a pizza cabin which looks like a pizza hut in the middle of the woods and that's just like some random thing that

you found lying around none of it is in service of anything like it's like none of it's like and then you get you don't like do that and then like get a special point or something or like an unlockable thing or whatever it's just some weird thing that you were spending your time with. Weird indicators pop up like you're the 1032nd person to inspect this pile of trash. And there's nothing there. It's just sort of like, I don't know. It's a very specific thing that is very funny because it is using mechanics as a joke. Like a lot of video games try to be funny through writing,

but they're not mechanically funny. And Jazzpunk is mechanically funny. Like, I'll give you another great gag. You go to a payphone, and when you're looking at the payphone, this bizarre like cardboard cutout of a human hand with a pointer finger pops up, and you're like, oh my god, is that what my

hand looks like? That's ghoulish. And you can input a number and then when you pull away from this interaction, you see a cardboard hand on a stick fall to the ground. That is what you were apparently using. You have no idea and it is

using mechanics as a joke in service of the comedy. Yeah, it does like video game meta comedy without being about video games. Like without just telling you what the joke is. The achievement thing that you mentioned, Justin, I think is the perfect example where I think a lesser game would be like achievement unlocked. You got achievements for doing nothing! Brr! And this game, The Hand is another great example of like,

it lets you, it trusts you to know enough about video games that you will get the joke. That you will get like, this is not like other video games. Also, this is a game that I liked when it came out. I love a lot more now. I think back when we started doing this show, I don't know, I liked the traditional structure. I liked feeling smart about knowing how a game works

and how it should work. And I think now going back to games like this, I realize like, yeah, it doesn't have much structure at all and it's not necessarily saying something but that's kind of the point and that's cool in its own way yeah uh wow we've talked about a lot of video games today so many video games oh gosh i feel bad for anybody who has to recap yeah chris um real quick i just want to share some reader mail because we had some other good uh hidden gems of of recent days i believe this is from nolan the i'm guessing nolan the o is a frog symbol

uh have you guys played sakura uh sakuna of rice and ruin you play as a japanese harvest god fighting demons at night and growing rice in the day to protect yourself and your found family one of the more unique blends of farming and fighting uh i played that a little bit it's on switch right yeah i think uh yeah i played it a little bit it didn't i didn't stick with it though um it's a very very gorgeous looking game though yeah that's not i i kind of forgot about it now i want to go back to it when things are a little less busy uh this one's from sean i feel like it just hit critical mass this summer but walkabout mini golf for the quest 2 is an absolute delight it has just enough fun hilarious features to make it a 10 out of 10 evening hangout with a few friends i need to dig

out my quest 2 because yeah it seems like like there's so much good stuff on it. Well, and they just announced the Resident Evil 4, the VR game that we've been waiting for to finally decide which is the best Resident Evil game ever, is coming out October 21st, I think. God, that's soon. Can't wait. That's awesome. I am so excited for that. That's right. There's plenty more besties to come.

Don't worry, friends. This isn't a beginning. This isn't an end. It's a beginning. One last one from Cameron. The Steam release of Cookie Clicker has been a great time. The game dominated my high school when it was at its peak and truly molded my high school experience.

So it's nice to be able to experience a proper standalone version. Also, WarioWare is the best gacha game I've ever played. Justin, you're a big Cookie Clicker guy right i love cooking i've played through that game so many different times i can't it's hard because it's so early in the genre and yet it'll in many ways it has not been uh superseded in terms of just like the satisfaction of the numbers going up exponentially it's just like it's hard to beat cookie clicker and then it gets into like weird shit where like you're making dark packs with grandmas that are turning demonic and it's amazing it's one of the first games that understood the absurdity of that genre and really like leaned into it um i love cookie clicker um i do want

to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties. Holy Jolie, Sir Noxus, Floyd12123, ChefCook2014, and my wife. I'm not even going to try to do the voice, but you know what they were going for. Please. Come on, Ross. I've been so gone. My wife. My wife. Thank you.

Good job, Ross. Gosh, the second time you really put some stink on it nailed it good um uh are you ready are you ready for yeah i'm gonna miss some stuff i'm not gonna hit like every little game we mentioned i'm gonna talk about the stuff that we actually got into uh we talked about uh toem which sounds like poem. It's a photograph game. Talked about Eastward, which is an action RPG with gorgeous art, somewhat inspired by, like, Zelda and Mother 3. Justin brought Beast Breaker, which is a Peggle RPG. Is that fair? Yeah.

Sure. Okay. I brought Cruisin' Blast because it's a blast to return to the Cruisin' franchise after all these years. We also talked about Griffin Hat Antechamber as one of our classic hidden gems. That is the kind of Portal-esque puzzle game. Fresh brought Tales from Space, Mutant Blobs Attack, which is a 2D Katamari fluid physics platformer game i brought tiny wings uh it's got a great song and justin brought jazz punk uh which is indescribable first person absurdism

and i i strongly don't steam there's dlc too by the way that came out three years after the original game oh yeah and then we talked about a bunch of like other little small things we didn't do honorable mentions so this is where I'm going to say, hey, everybody, you got to try that Tales of Arise. You got to try it. And the Outer Wilds DLC, there are too many games out right now. Oh, is that DLC out now? Griffin.

Griffin. Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Griffin, after the podcast, I don't want you to look at any other screens. I need you to play this. I will tell you how to get to the DLC because that's a little tricky. It takes about 10 minutes. Okay.

This DLC. Don't ever change that game. Boy, so fun. Everybody got everything out of that one. This DLC is going to be in our game of the year conversation. It is unbelievable. Yeah. It comes with a physical

pocket watch that you have to rewind and then hide in a shoebox and leave in your backyard i think you would actually like this dlc but i can't explain why without spoiling it but yeah don't say what i told fresh was uh people's concerns about nausea people's concerns about it being too obtuse i don't think you'll have those problems with the dlc and you can play the dlc without playing the rest of the game because it's frog fractions for us yeah it's frog fractions for okay that's it i did it next week on the main besties show we are going to be talking about super monkey don't do that okay i'm sorry don't you don't know but i again i wanted it's the besties. Next week on the besties.

I wanted people to not be, again, surprised when there was an episode in between this and the other one. But I don't know how a good way to convey that. So just don't be surprised. Next week on the good show. Amazing. We're talking about Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, which is a game I've been very excited about for quite some

time i want to see those dlc characters i want to know who's in it apart from hello kitty i want to know so we're going to be talking about it we might also talk about some of these there's there's a lot of games out so don't be surprised if we throw in a few other things super monkey ball wait do i have to play this we're talking about super monkey ball oh, man. I don't want to. Oh, I got diarrhea next week. I want to say a quick thank you to Rachel for editing this podcast. Third it. That's going to do it for the besties. Be sure to join us again next time because should the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

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