The Besties - The Multiverse is Real and It Has Shaggy

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

This week we're diving into a wide swath of new game releases, at least one of which kinda came out of nowhere and ended up being super good! Heck, they're all good, but just very different.On the bill: Forza Horizon 5's new Hot Wheels DLC, EX-Zodiac, and Multiversus. We also discuss Drop 7, Dr. Awesome, Sword & Poker and other games that have been removed from App Stores. 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!

I watched Jaws the other night. I mean, you've seen Jaws before. Yeah, no, I've seen Jaws, but have I seen Jaws on a 4K HDR Blu-ray? God. No, not until now. And now I feel like I've seen Jaws. Yeah. Like, I feel like everybody else who's seen Jaws hasn't, like, seen Jaws.

I saw it the last time I saw Jaws was at a drive-in movie theater. So you haven't seen Jaws? I saw it. I saw it. How many pixels were Jaws was at a drive-in movie theater. So you haven't seen Jaws. I saw it. I saw it. Bruce. How many pixels were on the screen? There were several. I'm sure there were many missing.

You know? You think so? I think, uh-huh. Do you think Spielberg even conceived of 4K back in 1973 or whatever that movie was made? No, because he had film. And, I mean, if you really want to see jaws yeah you would go to universal i think that's who makes jaws yeah you would get like the original reels and then you would watch them and like yes they probably have nearly disintegrated by now but like at the same time do you really want to

see jaws or do you just want to see Jaws? So, you saw him in 4K. So, I saw him in 4K. And here's my takeaway. Jaws is the best Steven Spielberg movie. And... Yeah, I agree. There's a reason for that. Steven Spielberg, most of his movies, wonderful.

I mean, a brilliant director, right? Sure. But they're a little saccharine. They're all about like his issues with his dad he's finally making a movie about his family so glad that we're getting that resolved um uh but you know the you you know the beats that you're gonna feel with them you're gonna feel happy at the right points you're gonna feel sad at the other points uh and the credits are gonna roll and you're just gonna feel a general sense of euphoria.

Great. Yeah, sure. Love it. Describes a lot of movies just now, but sure. Well, yeah, but you know, like you know that you're going to get this Spielberg look of awe. The light is going to be like blaring through the windows as if like God himself likes to, you know,

like just hang out in your front yard. Sure. Like it's that. What's wild about this movie is all of the talent there like the composition is good the camera work is good the music obviously is incredible but it's like him doing the anti spielberg the movie is a is a big bummer for pretty much the entire movie and then they blow him up sorry spoilers jaws blows up i mean they blow him up and like literally human guts children their their newest friend the guts are

inside of it because no no they are yes sharks digest very slowly oh and that's all that's search on sharks that's a plot point in jaws is that the way you could tell if it was the jaws is you'd gut the jaws and find find the you know people yeah sure yeah yeah so in the green um so yeah so it's like it's it's all those things and also he doesn't do the schmaltzy stuff because you know the, the Jaws theme like, Yes, sure. You would think, oh, man, Spielberg, he's going to use that. If you have that in your hand, you're going to play it, right? He does play it.

He doesn't. That's what's shocking. They play it a lot at the beginning. But as the movie gets more and more tense, they actually cut away the music. He goes full indie. Yeah, sure. And not Indiana Jones. He does that later. He goes full indie yeah sure and not indiana jones he does that later he goes full like indie movie director yeah lucas did that in star wars a new hope when

they shoot the rocket into the death star the music cuts out right before that and i think they do the same trick when they blow jaws up right before jaws blows up the music cuts out yeah and then you have that moment because you gotta hear all the bodies hit the floor finally we are talking about the movies that have been ignored for so long which is star wars and jaws when are we going to get the word out on these people when when is gilbert and george lucas going to get their due when people finally see them yeah in 4k Yeah. In 4K. My name is Russ Farshek, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Justin McElroy, and I... And my name is Griffin Froschek, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Justin McElroy, and my name is Griffin McElroy.

And hey, my name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I also know the best game of the week. Oh, God. Welcome to the besties. It's a video game club that goes all year long. And just by listening, you'll remember we're not going to ask for dues just yet. But who knows? We might do a Captain kangaroo moment and just ask you to send checks to us but for the right for right now no dues needed free welcome aboard we appreciate your time and your company and today we are talking about a lot of different games i

will mention uh justin and griffin is the name of the other person that's on this podcast. Continued to be on tour. I know Griffin is moving across the country, which complicates things a bit. We've been assured they'll be back next week. Who knows? But probably. In the meantime, you're stuck with us. But thankfully, we have brought a handful of very interesting games to talk about. And games that I think you'll want to hear about and maybe

play so we normally bring one game and maybe it's good today we asked what if we bring three games and they're all great yes it was a very different i'm trying to think of games that could be more different than the three games we've brought should Should I tell people what those are? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Today, we will be talking about Forza Horizon's Hot Wheels DLC, which is great. We're going to be talking about Multiverses, the Warner Brothers, Smash Brothers kind of clone. I only want to call it a clone because,

Fresh, I put three hours into this game just last night. Wow. And more beyond that. But, like, this is, I put three hours into this game just last night. Wow. And more beyond that. But, like, this is, I am into it. And we're going to talk about Exodiac, which I think 99% of the people listening to the show have not heard of. But they're going to really, really like it because it's a Star Fox game that's actually good. Yeah.

So, just a good week that is a good week and i'm very excited to dive into those right after this break okay let's dive in with the game that i've spent the most time uh playing over the last week um it was the game that really was not thrown at me at the last minute, which the other two kind of were, but that's okay. Cause I like the other two games, but this game is the Forza Horizon five hot wheels DLC, which is quite the mouthful.

And, uh, folks might remember from last year, Forza Horizon five was a game that completely grabbed my heart in ways that very few racing games have ever done. And this, I guess, DLC pack, it doesn't even feel like a pack. It feels diminishing, to even call it that. This, I guess, expansion has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for Forza in pretty remarkable ways.

Some background. Correct me if I'm wrong, Plant. They've done, Forza, the brand, has done like Hot Wheels crossovers in the past, correct? Yes, yes. So they did one for Forza Horizon 3. And then for Forza Horizon 4, they did Lego, where it was like a Lego world that you could crash through. Right. And then it's back here.

I believe with each of them, they get two big expansions got usually one is like kind of like the silly one and then the other one is the hey here's a lot more of the game one i mean i just want more silly here's the thing about uh the hot wheels dlc okay so imagine just getting dropped into effectively the closest like comparison i can make is like something that looks like the elden ring map because you've got like volcanoes and dragons and ice pits and everything in like a fantasy world and then through that you have these like crisscrossing loop-de-looping you know traditional orange colored Wheels tracks, and that's where all the racing happens in this expansion. It's, like, completely separate from the main game.

You can bring your cars that you've unlocked into this, but the experience is, like, a totally separate environment and feels like its own game in a lot of ways. I like that the car racing that you're talking about sounds so dangerous, so edgy, that you could actually hear the police coming to your house oh you were describing it yeah you know you're like you can't do that that's only allowed in the world of fun um it reminded me of for people that played burnout paradise many years

ago the they released this thing called big surf island which was very similar in tone it was like oh here's the more grounded you know grounded burnout paradise main map and then big surf island was like giant ramps and huge hills and all sorts of wacky cars and stuff like that very similar tone here uh although obviously it's all branded with Hot Wheels stuff. The Burnout Paradise comparison is good because it gets it why I like this a lot. I did not like the original Hot Wheels DLC, and I have some of the same problems here. It looks awesome, but because by nature of it being Hot Wheels tracks, it is way more linear than the rest of Forza Horizon. It's still an open world, but it's much closer to those early open world racing games

like Burnout Paradise, where it's really just tracks that you stay within, but they kind of go in all sorts of different directions. There are a couple tracks in a couple areas where you are actually on physical ground, like you're going through a swamp or something like that. But mostly it is just tracks. It reminded me, just because it's all like zero grab crazy twists and stuff it feels like a like an f0 game

yeah or a mario kart which yeah i mean that's been the joy of horizon 5 in particular is it feels like a bunch of different types of racing games all in one yeah and this is just leaning more towards i feel like yeah f-zero or kart racing um i do like the biomes though and that it does let you get in the muck i i was worried that it would be like okay there's ice and you know volcanoes but really that's just decoration around your lego track but no like it it throws you into all the the muck of the biomes pretty pretty well i felt like in in the actual races yeah not so much when you're in the open world they also integrate those um sort of surfaces on the tracks themselves so you'll hit a patch of the track that's like icy or like filled with water and you'll have to sort of navigate that and it changes your driving a lot

overall i just like the fact that it you know i think forza horizon 5 already felt pretty arcadey but still had a pretty decent learning curve in terms of like oh when am i breaking or how should i take this turn and stuff like that i think a lot of this um is much more approachable in a lot of ways so if you felt like forza horizon 5 was too semi this feels even more arcadey and even more approachable to the point where you can really just like for the most part kind of jam on the accelerator and and do well and yeah like you're having a good race yeah yeah i i agree with that and i think it's just easier to be on tracks.

I mean, so a thing that I love about Forza Horizon 5 is the feel of your car on all the different materials. So if it's on dirt or mud or ice or going up a hill or any of these things. But that makes it very hard to control. And yeah, you can get zipped all over the place even if you're using the rewind button that kind of lets you replace yourself in the race here i felt like that is stripped away a fair amount and not in a bad way again like there's enough of it you can still drive on ice in this but it all feels yeah much more focused on just besting other players rather than besting the environment does that make sense yeah no absolutely i agree it comes down more to just like raw driving skill

than it does like oh i didn't break in time with hitting this patch of water and now i'm like completely spinning out yeah yeah exactly it is funny i would say it's funny though because the game starts like as with all forza games the first level or first race, as it were, gives you, like, the best possible car in the most, like, outrageous, like, cinematic experience, whatever it is. And it feels amazing. And you're like barely trying to like maintain enough speed to get around a loop so it is funny and i kind of wish they were like a little more willing to give you some of the cooler toys earlier on but i did feel having like experienced the top end of it more motivated to complete a lot of the challenges in forza the hot wheels

dlc just to like get to that stuff yeah i i was curious if that was a course correction after just the vanilla version of forza horizon 5 oh where you felt like you just had a lot of awesome cars yeah you felt like you had everything you needed and that was i mean that was great for someone like me who's not going to put 100 hours into it and likes it as a sandbox um but for people who are motivated by unlocking stuff i can see why that was a bit of an issue yeah um yeah i i mean it's it's hilarious how slow the second car is it just feels i mean it it's and it's probably not that slow but compared to what you were just doing, which is 200 miles per hour, it feels really slow. Yeah.

One other thing I'll say about the, I guess, open world design, it allows for just, I just found it stunning constantly. I was spamming the take a screenshot button throughout this game and i think that's because they have so much control over where your car is going and the verticality you know that gets added in these levels versus you know okay you're always going to have to be following the rules of gravity in a normal forza uh yeah i it feels a bit like a technical achievement because i don't know how i'm getting into technical stuff like this very achievement because I don't know how, I'm going to get into technical stuff like this very much, but draw distances are like, how far can the video game create the world from you as a player, from the camera?

Sure. So like, you know, the thing with Skyrim was like, oh, you know, there's a mountain and you can actually climb that. And the mountain you're seeing is not, you're going to climb. was like oh you know there's a mountain and you can actually climb that and the mountain you're seeing is not you're going to climb um and the draw distance here like how far away from the camera you see these tracks and like they look crisp and clear yeah i think they are very very good at the magic trick of like fading in distant things into higher resolution a lot of games are bad at that where you'll see like even in skyrim if you look at that mountain like closely it looks like a globby mess of polygons until you get close and

then it like loads in the high res mountain uh i think this they've just gotten so fucking good at doing that visual trick in forza that yeah it just looks and it's probably easier to do when it's just again an orange track is a very simple piece of geometry. Yeah. Yeah. So I like it. I like it too. I don't have a lot more to say.

Do you? No, not really. I mean, I would just say, like, if you love Forza, I would say not even a hesitation worth picking up. I think I had a lot, a lot of fun with this. It looks like it is not on Game Pass. But being on Game pass gets you some small discount i was gonna say i feel like that's like part of the business is you know make all the games free and then try to get people to buy that's true but yeah the original fours of five is so generous with stuff so yeah i kind of can't blame them um let's talk about x zodiac next

because i think multiverses is going to be a longer discussion i think it's ex zodiac by the way x uh you know it's a capital e capital x it's not seeing i thought it was somebody who is really into astrology and then they quit oh thank you let's talk about it um x zodiac is uh a game that i would normally kind of scoff at it is an indie version of star fox and it is like low poly kind of like vaporwave aesthetic i mean it is star fox one if you ever played star fox one it is so or or 64 i think that's true i yeah, some of the gameplay mechanics are like, I think 64 inspired, but I, I aesthetically,

it reminds me more of the first, first game, um, to the point where it's like, even the light. So you've got like a wing man or someone talking to you over the radio. And I think the, the voice that you hear is the same,

like fake voice that you heard in starfox which is the like like that gibberish comes through in the radio too the art style completely starfox they've even we were just talking about draws it distance they even copied the draw distance of starfox which is like not not far in the distance it's like all foggy and you really can't see that far which is like a gameplay mechanic like they design the game with that in mind but it is kind of uncanny how similar it is to the original starfox you can do a barrel roll you hold down the shoot button to like missile lock onto your different targets yeah that was a 64 thing so yeah yeah yeah um it's the shocking part for me is not just that like oh it does a lot of what i call indie buzzwords but does them all like well

um i think the thing about low poly is yeah sure it's low poly in theory it's easier to design but to design it beautifully and for it to actually click is something that was you know carefully thought out over as like the original starfox yeah that's really hard the vaporwave aesthetic you know making it look like something better than a band camp you know art is hard it's hard to do these things well so sometimes they get overused by people who see them as kind of a shortcut to a certain aesthetic. But here, everything is just used so well. And the game is actually fun, which I didn't know was possible.

I kind of thought that Star Fox was like kind of a one and done. And that trying to go back to it has just been a bad idea from the beginning. No, it's fun. It's still fun. The original games are still fun. Yeah, Star Fox, Star Fox 64. to it has just been a bad idea from the beginning no it's fun it's still fun the original games are still fun yeah starbucks starbucks 64 but beyond that i just i mean even when nintendo tried to kind of recreate that magic with the ds version no yeah that was bad it just did not work and this really gets it it i i don't even know how i don't know what makes a good starfox versus a bad one i will tell you my experience with starfox and the levels that click versus not and part of the reason i like the

original a lot and uh 64 a lot but the other one's not so much i think the best starfox levels are levels where you are navigating both like environmental hazards as well as fighting enemies and i think a lot of the later starfox levels turn into a lot of the later games turn into a lot of like open space stuff and also they add like third person go wherever you want kind of like tank levels that don't feel very good and at the at the core i think starfox like does that first level extremely well where you're flying through this like low poly city and like dodging falling towers and stuff like that yeah and this game pulls from that and basically uses it to define its entire being yeah and that's why i think it works it's also interesting to play this game because it runs at a very very smooth 60

frames a second um and if you go back and play starfox any of them really they're all like chugging like really struggling i mean the fact that the first starfox game came out on snes was a miracle to begin with but it ran at like 12 frames per second, like something pretty bad. If you bought the SNES Mini, try Star Fox 2. Yeah. It's wild. It is playing a slideshow. Yeah, like a lot of those early 3D games ran that terribly,

and it actually makes me want more games to try that aesthetic but use modern technology technology because playing those games at 60 fps can look and feel really cool yeah feel like a very different thing um which i think uh ex zodiac does quite well yeah did you get any of the bonus levels uh probably not i i got through like i think three levels but i don't think i got a bonus so on i don't know if there are other ways to trigger it but in one of the levels i found like a disc and then after beating the stage it was like oh you know bonus level unlocked and it threw me into a similar low poly vaporwave version of a space harrier which we talked about, I don't know, a couple weeks ago.

Yeah, sure. And it's just like a throwaway Space Harrier level. Well, it's funny because Star Fox is similar to Space Harrier. Yeah. And it looks like there are other types of games in there. I went and watched the trailer and that hints at a few other

of these kind of like goofs. Yeah. And I'm hoping that this is how it always is that the main game is starfox yeah but then as fun bonuses you get these other references rather than doing the starfox thing of like now we force you to do this other thing yeah for an extended period of time that you don't enjoy right um if you don't enjoy this you can just crash and you immediately go back to the main game.

Yeah. Yeah. That'll certainly be interesting. I think that it will kind of grow based on probably player feedback just because it's still in early access. I don't know how long they're planning on being

in early access, but as far as early access games go, I was pretty impressed at how clean this was. only 10 bucks yeah like i mean this is a great game for 10 bucks yeah um that was that was why i first grabbed it and then tried to force you to play it it's like you know when you see something that looks this good for that low of a price, it's kind of a surprise these days. And it just isn't really a genre that's been tapped a lot. Right. I can't think of a lot of Star Fox clones these days.

So it's cool to, you know, try something a little bit different. Yeah, for sure. Okay, should we talk about some multiverses? After the break, let's do it. Okay, so multiverses is here it is a let's just boil it down it's a smash brothers clone featuring warner brothers characters right yeah yeah yeah that's right i mean it's a smash brothers clone but it's much better than that sounds yeah i i don't think it's a shitty smash brothers clone for what it's worth but it's very

clear that like more or less every mechanic that's in smash brothers they added some stuff so we'll talk about that in a second but the core like how the combat works how the damage works how people get launched and stuff like that is directly lifted from smash brothers there's not even a doubt yes the big changes uh would be it's free to play yeah but only kind of you when i say it's free to play you can download it and there are some characters that you can play as without paying a dollar pretty good characters for what it's worth like i think it's uh superman wonder woman and maybe Finn from Adventure Time? So, like, actual brands. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, everyone in here except for Rain Dog, and we're going to talk a lot about Rain Dog, is from something that you're familiar with. Yeah. I was skeptical of the cast. So the roster is people like the Tasmanian Devil, Bugs Bunny, Velma, Shaggy, you know. Tom and Jerry. But then, yeah, Tom and Jerry, like classics.

But then it's like Batman and Harley Quinn. And you know what? Also, we got some characters from Steven Universe in there in Adventure Time. And also Arya Stark. Oh, and also LeBron James. also aria stark oh and also lebron james well lebron james because of because space jam is now i think part of the looney tunes the multiverse yes yeah rick and morty are like coming at some point yeah um it's it's a weird cast but at the same time it's kind of something for everybody it is it reminds me of you know you look at fortnite and fortnite took like two or three years to get to this point of

like wild characters showing up all together and here multiverses i think very smartly is launching with that level of diversity right off the jump yeah and uh the reason it works is because the characters are actually all fun as hell like i laughed at the lebron edition when i heard about it because it just sounds awful it sounds like such a cash grab like okay they're just gonna fill this game with characters who are not that great just so they can kind of do the Fortnite model and this game's going to have 100 characters, none of them who are that good. I was wrong. I was very wrong. LeBron plays like

shut up and jam Gaiden levels of bizarreness. His basketball is his weapon so it's like you like chess pass to somebody to knock them off the edge you can like shoot like effectively a three to do this like vertical shot that's very powerful

you can dunk on people um your up attack like when somebody's over you is lebron throwing the chalk in the air um like just very silly uh but it feels great because for lebron he feels unique because you are using this ball and basically using the other player as a wall where you're bouncing the ball off of them over and over and trying to create these combos of like okay i'm gonna pass it into their head get the ball back dunk it right on top of their head that's gonna send them up and then i'm gonna shoot a three that knocks them out of the arena yeah um it's hilarious and no one plays like him nobody else on this roster plays anything like him um have you have you seen any of the characters like or played any of them that you thought were interesting uh well i i did i played through the tutorial as Shaggy, I guess. So I tried his range. He didn't feel super great.

I had some fun with Finn. Finn was like fun to bounce around with. I, I, the like immediate game feel, and I don't know if this is just cause I'm a snob for Smash Brothers, doesn't feel quite on the level, just in terms of like, I don't know. There's something a little mushier

than i remember smash brothers feeling um but i mean i like like the level of silliness that they're willing to go with these characters were like shaggy throws a hamburger or whatever he you know pulls out of the ground he has a hamburger a special move um so i like that they're willing to kind of go out there and try new stuff with them without feeling like to you know up their own butts in terms of seriousness yeah and i like how just weird some of the way the characters play art so tom and jerry is just tom the cat trying to kill jerry the mouse and by doing this he will inadvertently hit whoever he's fighting

so yeah how does that work because i didn't play as so like the you'll well when you have jerry that that's the other thing is you can lose jerry so like you uh tom swings a tennis racket at jerry and like jerry dodges it and it hits oh you're aiming at got it but then also you one of the shots is you fire jerry with a slingshot um so jerry will like hit whoever he's going at and i believe then does a few attacks on his own but if you fire jerry and he goes off the edge you just lose jerry for a little while oh no jerry that changes your attack set and makes you like a fair bit weaker you have a simpler attack set. It is funny that like he finally was able to kill Jerry.

That's true. After all these years. That is true. Mission accomplished. You can do it. And then he's just left wondering what it was all for. Yeah, my immediate thought was, okay, because this is a free to play game. Yes.

It made me wonder, like, how much do they care about the idea of like a tier list right so if you look at smash brothers consistently there are like let's say five or six characters that are quote at the top of the tier list because of various patches and stuff like that and because this is free to play and there are characters locked behind money effectively like real money uh whether that's a problem and whether you feel like okay right now the top of the tier list is whatever superman um is it a problem if someone spends money on superman and then two weeks later a patch comes out that nerfs superman and he's shitty that's a good point yeah i do not know and i mean presumably this is a problem that league has had to deal with because obviously league is also free

to play and has rotating playable characters um for free but yeah i just don't know i it's possible that they just don't care enough to the point where people that get super serious in it will just constantly be buying those characters and people that are more casual will just like play with who they have and not really care yeah it also feels like like if you pay for it right now on a yearly basis right like if you just paid i think there's like a 30 or 40 dollar founders kit or whatever okay it gets you most of the characters unlocked maybe all of them. I'm not entirely sure.

But like, oh, if I saw that as, okay, once a year, I'm effectively buying a video game for it just to buy the characters. Sure. Not the costumes, not like all the other stuff, which is where the real money gets to you. I think it probably would equal out, and that doesn't seem like a bad deal to me that said it

takes like usually a couple weeks for us to parse what is good or bad about a free-to-play game you know they they make it difficult to tell yeah for all of these they are pretty smart about it i just looked it up so for 40 you can get the founders pack standard edition which includes 15 character tokens for instant character unlocks um so that's 15 characters for 40 which i guess maths out probably pretty close to like what fortnight charges but obviously it's a different thing because fortnight is just cosmetics um i i believe that that would get you every character that's currently on the roster i think that's maybe like one or two more and i would also say like if it they give you these character tokens arguably you could say like oh i don't really give a shit about tom and jerry uh i'm

gonna save these for another you know whatever r Rick and Morty when they get added. Yeah. Which is good. I mean, I like that for silly. It did also seem, and I didn't dive into this either, that there's another currency of like a coin currency that you can earn just by playing the game. And those can also be used to purchase certain things. I don't know if you can do it a full character as much as like cosmetics. When I bought characters, it showed a few different currency options. Yeah. And then, yes, then you use, I think it's called like Galenium or something.

Yeah. The free-to-play games. We can just say it's money. You can use money. Well, I think it's like a thing that you earn in the game. But you can use that to unlock like special costumes. So I put a little bit of money into this because i wanted the roster and uh i i now have a iron giant that is wearing like summer swim fest

costume oh good i was worried it's very it's very cool he's a cool guy um he has a floaty on oh good yeah so he's a cool guy yeah i noticed i actually went through and clicked all the alternate costumes the characters just out of curiosity and there's definitely some good ones in there uh they've got like the classic um batman animated series yeah nostalgia is a hell of a drug which is very good um it actually makes me worried that we won't see a lot of these characters showing up in the game that i do play regularly which is fortnite because maybe warner will be more uh i guess uh covetous of their own characters have you heard the rumors for like the leaked roster uh no can i can i share some please drop some drop some knowledge on us the wicked witch of the west yeah sure um uh gizmo from gremlins oh i love that uh joker from

the movie joker wait wait no just just joker just just normal um but alternate costume of sad joker mad max oh yeah right on sure the animaniacs i i assume all three of them uh scorpion uh scorpion sub-zero uh ben 10 in ted lasso i think ben 10's already oh no i'm sorry uh the star child is in it. You really just walked over Ted Lasso. That doesn't shock you? Oh, yeah. No, sorry. I admit. Well, this is all rumor, right?

We don't know. It's rumor. But the great thing about this game is you truly never know. Yeah, you wouldn't. That is possible. It wouldn't be that far off. I think this game, at the very least, highlights the perils of monopolies and how all of these game characters come from the same giant mega

corporation well did you watch space jam 2 no i didn't the plot of space jam 2 is just this basically is like lebron james goes into the internet and then like has to play basketball in the multiverse yeah and the movie's bad yes but it seemed like a great premise for a video game was it was it said like hey maybe one company shouldn't own all these characters uh i think it was doing that thing that disney likes to do where they make movies about how awful disney is and then they're like don't really care but we're okay because we made the movie sure don't you understand like toy story is like a critique of consumerism so we're good right yeah um yeah i i am very curious how fickle i am if i will keep playing this you're not going to i know you chris point i i know that i will the rest of this week because i am like in it it

is what i am thinking about one week is an eternity in chris plant time that's true that's true i hey i'm still making my way through yakuza he is in so many levels of inception he's like on the sixth level he's sitting on the beach and years are going by that's that's true um uh we let's talk about the co-op here or like oh yeah just team play because that's the the i think, the big difference. Yeah, so there's a, you can play with a partner, which is not totally, like, Smash Bros. has that, but what this game has is there are characters that have, like, support abilities. So you mentioned Rain Dog, who is, you might not recognize, because he was created specifically for this game,

you might not recognize because he was created specifically for this game but rain dog can has an ability to pull people so if you get launched he can pull you back onto the level using like a tether because that's as classic rain dog fans know that's his power pause rain dog is not it's not like it's raining outside it's like a reindeer but a dog yeah correct i just want to make sure that everybody's on the same page it looks like the dragon from how to train your dragon but a dog yes like a shih tzu sure like yeah it's um one of one of our co-workers um pointed out that it looks like the art design from that game Gigantic. Do you remember that MMO? No.

Oh, that. Good for them. They're going to get away with it. Yeah, I think it's pretty smart. I believe the Iron Giant has a protect protect friends uh yeah mode that's what he does that's his default is protecting yeah so yeah so they're all they're all kind of built for it i i can imagine whether i play a lot more of the game or a little more of the game that i will definitely watch youtube videos that are like every assist from every character in metaverses yeah because i am so

curious how it works it the it kind of intimidates me that's the only problem with it which is not a reason not to add it to the game that's a me problem but i i wish i could care more about it and really get into it because it looks so fun and And I know that there's no way I will ever be. I'm not good enough at Smash Brothers normal to be good at Smash Brothers where players are like using magical tethers to pull each other back. Yeah, this is definitely a new level of like skill ceiling. But the good news is you could just not play co-op and never have to worry about that. Right? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. And you just play free to play set free for all yeah in in your kind of like once you hit the play option jesus you can select uh 1v1 uh i believe it is like team v team so tv 2v2 yeah there's a two versus ai versus bots and then there's the free-for-all mode. And whichever ones you have selected, it will pull randomly from those. So you could say, I just want free-for-all in 1v1, and you'll be good to go. I will say having the co-op versus bots where you can kind of practice the assist worked for me.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed that. And it felt way less, you know, way lower stakes. Cool. I mean, it's a good game. I think we're going to be talking about it again at the end of the year. I'm going to put that out there. Okay. That's a bold statement.

I guess we'll see. Are you going to play more? Are we going to play together? Yeah, I'll play with you will you be my friend uh the classic end of every episode where i desperately ask for friendship somebody cares uh should we ask some questions sure of me sure. Ask me some questions. Okay, first question is from Ragsy. What's a game you loved but is functionally no longer playable, i.e. taken off the App Store, it ran on Flash,

and has been patched out of existence? I'm assuming MMOs would be on this list, too. That's a good question. There are a few iOS games that I think are no longer on the App Store. I want to say it was called Hook King or something, where you just had this hook and you were swinging off of the ceiling. I want to say it's called Hook King. It was just like this simple 8-bit graphics-style iOS game that I just sunk a ton of time

into i was totally obsessed with and i just do not think it's on the app store anymore i think it just didn't get updated for newer versions of ios and it's just gone it makes me sad yeah i i i have that feeling about a lot of early ios games yeah this was an early ios game yeah uh i'm trying to remember the name of that's the thing is these like games they just disappear there was uh kind of a riff on uh trauma center do you remember trauma center on the ds um oh yes i do trauma center under the knife and it was like an anime medical game where you use the touch screen to like perform surgery yeah and there was one on uh ios where you like would circle or kind of drag your finger around little viruses or wounds uh to heal the body and it was great and was made by at the time i believe was it ng moco it was like a

large ios developer and yeah now it's just gone i don't think it like runs on a new iphone even if you like found a way to kind of hack it on yeah um yeah i thought of one more actually yeah sword and this is also an ios one sword and poker there were two of these games and it was an rpg poker game where you had like a grid and you were placing cards down and making like poker hands and then doing more damage and stuff like that so good i played those games over and over again and they are just like vanished from the app store. You know why? Because Konami, I guess, owns them. And Konami doesn't make a ton of great games anymore. They just make a lot of gambling games.

Anyway, I'm not bitter. Sword and Poker was great. Gaia Co. was the original studio that made Sword and Poker. The only other one I have very small is Drop 7, which we've talked about on the show a couple times. And it's just gone. It's just gone. Sad.

Do we want to talk about the Nier thing really quick? I don't know what that means. Have you not seen The Secret Room? No, I don't know what that means. you not seen the secret room no i don't know what that means okay so a few people asked about this someone found a secret room in near automata that no one has found before okay but it's extremely suspicious the the person who posted it is like hey um like i'm kind of new to the. I don't know how to publish a video on Reddit. I hope this works. I also happened to find a hidden room in Nier Automata that if you clip through the walls, they don't say this part. Modders figured out if you clip through the walls, it's not there.

Yeah. And other modders who actually, like, add things to the game were like, yeah, the level of detail in this secret room that the player found you could not add this unless you were the game's developer like you have to be one of the most brilliant like creators on the planet to do this pretty much the only way this thing got added was by the original developers and that this is a plant um so is there footage of it and there's footage of it and it's like the person like goes to a wall and then it opens up revealing like a tiny door and they go down a giant pit and they go through these like big heavy wood doors um and there's like mysterious figures in it that can't be killed i mean it is somebody on our twitter i i'm sorry that i i can't say who uh oh chris back said uh that it has that nostalgic playground kind of rumor vibe

uh and that is exactly it except you can see it like there is a video of it it's not just somebody going on twitter and like yeah there's a secret door that nobody can see but me okay somebody posting video well because i know that they have a new version coming out on switch coming on switch so do you think this is just like a marketing stunt to promote the new version my hope is it's a marketing stunt to promote near automata 2 and not just the switch version it because it feels like a lot to do for a Switch port of this game at this point. That does seem like a lot of work. Yes. And draws attention to the PC version, which I don't see how that helps.

Yeah. Yeah, it's just curious. Okay. But I'm excited. I would love for Nier Automata to get a sequel oh really really i didn't know that yeah no i wouldn't care about this franchise that you've talked about i'd be okay with it i feel like i've done really well this year you have you know what you know what kind of i think killed it a little bit for you is me finally playing this game and

it being like not my favorite game that's true do you um have you talked to schreier or maddie or kirk about uh suikoden i've talked to maddie about it and i feel really it's it does ring a lot of bells although let me just be fair to uh near automata i did not hate it it just was not yeah yeah no no you had a much better experience than our friends at triple click yes who played suikoden whichever two yeah and it was hell for everyone involved except for jason trier who demanded everybody play it yeah this was more like oh you played my game i played your game we both respected them but also realized not really ours you know like yeah i'll never be like a mega um blinding of isaac fan binding of isaac yeah

thanks um okay uh should we call should we call it a wrap yeah uh before we do that i wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties. We have James Marion, Like Bart, JTingle87, and Sage Camilla. Thank you for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to everyone else for sharing and talking about the show and all sorts of great stuff. Plant, recap everything we've talked about today. Ooh, this week we talked about Forza horizon 5 hot wheels edition multiverses and x zodiac we also talked about uh i don't know we didn't do our honorable mentions oh yeah

man i saw nope it was great i also saw nope and it was great people should go see nope yeah okay now we did it we also talked about nope uh and we talked about a bunch of games that you can't play so i'm not gonna listen because that would just be torture um uh next week i don't know we don't know i know that xeno blade chronicles 3 came out i do not know if we're going to talk about it i don't think it's a good idea i certainly don't think we're going to talk about it next week because if we do talk about this game, I want to make sure that we actually have time to play some of it.

I don't think it's a good idea, Chris Plant. I have a feeling that Griffin's going to come back from his trip and be like, you know what? I moved across the country. I had a tour. I also played the entire Divazina Blade Chronicles 3 twice twice and i'll be like

that's amazing i don't know when you sleep yeah um and then we'll learn about it from from him yeah i think that's the approach because there's no it would take at least 10 years 10 hours 10 years for me to get into xenoblade after having tried to get into these games and i don't think yeah i don't know i don't think, yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's going to happen. I'm sorry, people listening at home. We've got to be honest with ourselves. You know I'm going to try it.

You should try it. The problem is, from what I understand, the intro is like 30 hours. Yeah. And me playing 30 hours of any game is not likely. Yeah, I don't think you played 30 hours of Elden Ring. No, I did. I definitely did. Very rare, though.

Yeah, it is not common. Okay, that's it. We did it. We did another episode of the besties. Oh, and hi, I'm Justin. I was here the whole time. I've aged because I spoke with a wizard. Is that...

You crushed it. Thank you. That's going to do it for us at the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games Besties!