The Besties - The new Need for Speed is a fun surprise [The Resties]

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Need for Speed: Unbound deserved a better launch than this. After a decade of middling entries, EA has returned NFS responsibilities to the exceptional racing developer Criterion Games. The team has produced a street racing game that blends Forza Horizon with the thrills of the Midnight Club games. And it just looks cool! Frush also got Prodeus off his backlog. It’s a solid retro FPS, ideal for playing on a portable like the Switch or the Steamdeck. Plus, we talk through the Besties 2022 bracket! 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!

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. My name is Ross Froshtick. Welcome to The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week, we're talking about Need for Speed Unbound, a game that the people who publish it are not talking about apparently we've decided to because it's a pretty good game they either forgot about it or something it was a tax write-off who knows got lost between the cushions but it's a really cool game and i can't wait to talk about it but before we talk about it i have a question for you okay it is the holiday season yeah which means it's time to watch

holiday movies and i i have a theory that everybody has like one holiday movie that is bad that that they love but that is like deeply not good and yet because it hit them at the right time or just because their family watches it every year they go back to it over and over again this is not the grinch it's not charlie brown yeah those are good those are good right it's not it's a hmm maybe uh iq does that count as a holiday movie iq yeah do you want to explain what iq is to the audience because i think nobody knows sure in the mid 90s uh walter matthau paired with meg ryan and tim robbins for a rom-com in which walter matthau plays albert einstein and they're at college and albert einstein makes tim robbins who's just like a car mechanic into a genius to fool meg ryan into him. And it's basically a rom-com that devolves out of that.

Deception, the name of the game when it comes to love. And I've seen that movie way too many times. Is it a holiday movie? I've watched it a lot on the holidays, but I've also watched it a lot on non-holidays. So who's to say? Two questions. Why?

And why are you watching it on the holidays? Well, I think it was because, well, I think on the holidays well i think it was because well i think on the holidays it's just because i'm around and why have i watched a lot of times i think it was one of those movies that showed a lot on comedy central because it was cheap for them to license and so i watched a bunch of times now it's sort of in my brain it's very weird that's weird mine is mixed nuts which is, yeah. That is an actual holiday movie. Yeah, and also a bad movie. Kind of from the same era, I want to say.

Same era. It is the- Kevin Spacey's in that? No. What am I thinking? No. I'm thinking of the Dennis Leary, Kevin Spacey movie. That's not that?

No, that's the ref. The ref. I'm thinking of- The ref is a holiday movie, though. Yeah, it is. This is Nora Ephron writing about a suicide hotline on Christmas Eve, manned by Steve Martin. And it is every bit as disastrous as that sounds. And yet, my wife fell in love with it

when she was a kid and she made me watch it and I was absolutely miserable the first five years of having to do this. Yeah. And now, something clicks in your brain

and it's like a coping mechanism where you decide, actually, I now look forward to this. Yeah. It's also a Los Angeles Christmas movie, which not a lot of those does la story have a christmas uh b story i feel like it does i don't they make jokes about how it's warm during

christmas i mean it's like sardonic every every movie by uh the dude who wrote iron man three you know the guy who wrote uh predator what's his know? The guy who wrote Predator. What's his name? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know who I'm talking about. He was also in Predator. That guy. Yeah, that's right.

Maybe he didn't write Predator. Whatever. We're off track. We should probably talk about video games. Are you ready to do that? Let's do it. Okay, I'll see you on the other side. Okay.

Okay. Need for Speed Unbound. This is a weird one. There's a new Need for Speed game. That's not weird. That alone. What's weird in that, like, it feels like no one knew or talked about it. I saw people in the video game development community the day it came out being shocked.

Yeah. Which is, that's, those are people who are deeply involved in games. Surprised that one of the biggest franchises at one point has a new iteration what's even weirder is this isn't like a throwaway need for speed game yeah this is not it's not like they went to game loft and was like we need a need for speed game they brought in the best the best historically the best studio to make racing games maybe ever i mean certainly arcade racing games yeah so they brought in a studio called criterion which is best known for the burnout series which kind of culminated with burnout paradise the first i would say great open world racing game yes and uh then

that studio went on to make some of the best Need for Speed games, including Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. And then there was a whole bunch of trouble. The studio, like some of the talent left. EA at one point put the studio on a bunch of weird other projects, kind of in support roles, I believe on Battlefield games and Star Wars games. But now they're back in some form making a need for speed game and the result is a really good kind of old like what they used to do of need for speed games i kind of can't believe it i yeah it is surprising i will say from my perspective i it definitely ran under the radar until I just started getting emails telling

me that ASAP Rocky was in a game. And that was the only, that was like the, in every PR email I got for this game, they were so excited about ASAP Rocky. And all I know about ASAP Rocky is he was, I think stuck in Russia and they had to to bargain for his release at one point. And that's all I know.

I'm not plugged in to the music scene. I'm sure he's very popular. But they did not lead with the fact that this was the developer behind Burnout and Need for Speed Hot Pursuit. They led with A$AP Rocky. It's bizarre. And there are so many other things that they could lead with. Another example is the art style which i really like it is both more realistic and more cartoony at the same time um the lighting in this game is stunning i i think for a racing game especially for anything in the need for speed

series but then the characters are um somewhere between like Western animation and anime. They're cel-shaded and they look just really beautiful designs. And I guess the accents of the world. So if a car boosts, little swirls pop around the car or the smoke that pops out of it, that's animated. Yeah. And the effect ends up being like Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse type of style. It's that kind of mishmash of different types of animation. Or like Ms. Marvel recently did that style. Yeah, it's really, really nice. Do I think it's maybe a little bit out of date?

Sure. But again, video games take a long ass time to make i did see i think it was digital foundry maybe in their video they were they were comparing it to ssx on tour which came out on the wii was like the last time we'd seen an art style like this that's wild which is yeah kind of a throwback. Yeah. But I mean, it looks good. They could have talked about the driving, which feels good. Yeah. I want to talk about the driving with you because. Yeah.

So, yeah, you know where my tastes lie when it comes to racing games. I liked Burnout. I'm sorry. I liked Forza Horizon 5. Okay. So I like open where i love burnout paradise like one of my favorite racing games of all time but most of the need for speed games and most of the forza games do not click for me because i am not interested in a racing simulation does not

appeal to me whatsoever this game walks an interesting line because it, even though I realize it is not a realistic physics driving game, it is closer to realistic than I was expecting. It's certainly closer to realistic than like Burnout Paradise had, which was like full on arcadey. And in my opinion, I think it's a little too realistic. Like I want, I would have wanted it to be a little more wild than this. See, I didn't really have that at all. For me, it felt pretty arcady, but I will say the type of car you choose in this game actually matters a lot. You're going to be married to that car for a long time. So what car, I know you have to pick at the beginning that between the three cars, what did you start with?

I made a bad choice i mean i made a car that didn't that didn't favor um drifting okay and that's what i should have done because that's i'm way better in these sorts of games with a drifting car rather than one that's like really nailing turns yeah like cutting into them at the exactly the right spot that said i just kind of made it work anyway which defeated the purpose but it ended up doing okay i i agree that it's challenging i think the real challenge and the thing that kind of surprised me and maybe frustrated me a little bit is i couldn't find a way to and maybe you can or can't do this in this but rewind the car i think there is a way i saw it in the settings where there was like oh you can

you get two or three rewinds per race but i don't know i never go back and and and fuss with that because it wasn't like immediately offered to me like it is in a lot of these games and as a result i found myself getting you know at best second third fourth place i yeah never was getting first place in races but the game also doesn't seem to be about that like it kind of wants you to be not the best racer at least early on in the bunch early on yeah yeah yeah yeah um it wants you just incrementally placing in races making some you can make calculated bets against other racers in it that you'll just beat that individual person yeah and money means quite a bit to you early on as you buy parts to upgrade your car that will like set you up for kind of a first big tournament yeah it's a

big departure from forza horizon where they hurl like 30 fucking cars at you right off the jump hurl like 30 fucking cars at you right off the jump here you are like really working up this one kind of shitty car until it's like actually playable and then obviously once you get that going the cars and upgrades start coming a lot quicker but early on you are pretty well locked down into your options i don't know if that's the way to play it but i know that they were trying to i mean obviously they were like narrative was like a huge priority for them because so much of this game has dialogue in it cut scenes in it people talking new character like so much of the game you in the first chunk of the game you have a character who is riding with you yeah the entire time and talking to you and so getting a lot of story just on during races during drives um do you want that from

this sort of racing game i do for for what this game is set out to do so i i think like on one hand there's an easy comparison here between forza horizon 5 and this and that they're both open world racing games right but forts horizon 5 is effectively a sandbox its open world is humongous yeah it is very very open emphasis on open you know you don't spend a lot of time in cities you spend it like cutting through nature and and whatnot right yeah and giving you a whole bunch of cars makes a lot of sense and cutting back the story makes a lot of sense. This game is much closer to burnout paradise where, yeah, there are fields that you can drive through.

There are like little cuts that you can make through parking lots and whatnot. But most of it's in a city and it's like it's almost like a kart racer. The game that kept coming to my mind was stuff like Blur or Midnight Club Racing. Yeah. Stuff that's like, you know, not a hardcore racing game, but not just a traditional arcade game either. And because it is that, because it is more focused, I think it makes total sense to like,

yeah, we want to make sure you're really good with at least one car before we kind of give you the keys to the city. And since we're already doing that, since it's already going to be quite locked in, put it put a story there to pull me through that because at least for that chunk because i'm going to be pretty locked in anyway you know i mean if i'm going to be confined i think a story kind of helps i also didn't feel like i was ever having to stop playing to to enjoy the story like if they were going to take me to a cut scene it wasn't

going to be more than i don't know like a minute and a half yeah they're they're pretty light yeah so i i i appreciated that did i could i really tell what was happening at first no but i eventually got a pretty okay sense of like what all the story is yeah it also is weird to me because a lot of the story is like fighting the man which is not not weird in video games like it's a pretty common like yeah fight the man is like a very common trope in video games but like knowing this is an ea game like knowing it's a giant publisher i'm not saying there weren't like little little folks the game, but it's just, I don't know, man. It just doesn't do anything for me. And like, I know behind the veneer that this is still like a mega million dollar property.

Yes. It's also the aesthetic of protest versus protest itself. And like every once in a while you get something that I think is like legitimate to the point it's trying to make, like Andor. Like I watch Andor and like I'm dumbfounded that Disney made that. Yeah. That there was no notes. And because it is flagrant and aggressive in its messaging about like capitalism. Corporate society.

And corporate society. And what happens when monolithic companies become governments and that's wild where this game it kept feeling to me like a ubisoft game like you know from like maybe 10 years ago where i felt like ubisoft had that period where like far cry and assassin's creed and like they had like skating and you know extreme sports games and all of them had this you know were anti the man even watchdogs more recently and then it's like yeah in what way and they're like you know fighting power yeah right like okay is there anything more you'd like to say and they're like no not really yeah i'm like but have you noticed that all the people in power are hypocrites and

it's like yeah i've caught on like like so much has changed with where global politics are in the last 10 years that like all of that feels very tame. Like their targets are like, there are such bigger targets that I think y'all could be going for. That said, whatever it's, it's fine. It's fine.

I, the, I just, it just doesn't do anything for me at all. Like I'd rather just like go ahead and race and realistically, like I can skip cut scenes. That's fine. Um, it just doesn't do anything for me. I, the, the, and this kind of goes back to what I was saying about the handling, the

car handling, it felt like it was between two worlds. And I kind of felt that way about the whole world in general, because the city itself if you were to just like drone your way around like just float around it and look at the buildings and the streets and stuff like that is like the most dullest dishwater city i've ever driven in in recent memory in terms of racing games like there is nothing correct me if i'm wrong there like, isn't a whole lot standing out in this city. What stands out are the special effects and the cars look very pretty and stuff like that. But the city itself is, like, pretty dry. I do agree.

And, again, I think the Ubisoft comparison comes to mind a bit. This is going for, I assume, is it literally San Francisco or it's, like, San Francisco-ish? Yeah, like it. But even Ubisoft, if you look at Watch Dogs Legion, was very colorful and interesting. Was it? I mean, it was certainly more than this. Yeah.

This looks like Watch Dogs 1, which was like grays and browns. No, I think that's intentional because I think that the animation is supposed to pop against it. But again, that's been giving,, I think, a pretty generous. Yeah, I it's I guess frustrating to me because I love the character models and I really like the the effects, the car effects, the boosting and the dirt and all that stuff that is so shaded. And all I could I couldn't get it out of my head. This game that came out and I want to say the mid 2000s called auto modelista. Have you played this game?

Okay. Look it up. Auto modelista was a fully cel shaded car racing game. I think it's the only one that I certainly that I've ever seen. And it like the whole aesthetic is what you see in the character models and the special effects. It was fucking dope. I realize for a mainstream game like Need for Speed, they probably couldn't do that because it wouldn't necessarily be as popular. But that's kind of what I want. Like the best parts of Burnout Paradise for me were like Big Surf Island, which is just like the most bonkers ass giant ramps and all sorts of crazy shit like that that it felt like a hot wheels track

and this just like isn't that and i you know i know a lot of people don't want that they want something more grounded but it just feels weird to me that they have all these wild special effects and things and they go the like more grounded route for the city and the driving model. I don't know. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think there's also, and again, this is not what they set out to do, but sometimes I want these things to be a bit more holistic in terms of the theme and the art style and everything else. And I think about, do you remember the Initial D games?

No. and i think about do you remember the initial d games no so initial d it was um a sega racing series okay mostly for arcade but it was based off of uh uh anime and manga called initial d and it was about i hope i'm remembering this all right but like the real life um drifting culture in japan and like street racing but not like you know like what you think of like modern neon street racing like people going down like the windy hills of japan and the mountains sure and racing on that and like i think about something like that it's like okay you have this very cool art style that is already borrowing from anime culture you have the cel-shaded effects why not go and do something that like puts it in an environment that also is connected to

manga and anime yeah like why why san francisco right like what what are we doing here and again it's not even that it needs to be in japan but you know plenty of anime is not set in japan but i some sort of logic to like why does it look like this what are we trying to say and how do we match that up with whether it's another property or it's the type of story that we're telling that all comes together because you're right it does feel like the person who designed and thought about the world and the person who thought designed and thought about the world and the person who designed and thought about the characters. It seems like they hate each other. Well, they either hate each other or they just wanted to make two different games.

And whoever was the lead director was like, I don't want to get between y'all. You just make your version and you make your version. And they'll play nice, I'm sure. And yeah, and I think the character one is much more interesting. Yeah. In terms of the game structure, how did you feel about the pacing of it?

Because again, you mentioned, you know, it doesn't give you everything right up top. It was a little jarring at first for me to be thrown into a game that is a racing game, but kind of has that single player shooter or action game pacing where it's like yeah we're gonna kind of make you just work for it for a couple hours well yeah and just the like structure of it with the like the way the days pass and like you're picking uh i guess tasks or whatever it is weird it's it's definitely not what i'm used to which again is like more you're you know for most open world games it's just like oh here's a shitload of icons on the screen you just drive to whichever one you want to do you do it you get

money you go to the next one you do it you get money etc this yeah had a bit more of a skeleton around it i don't know i again i don't think it's bad it's just it was kind of a throwback to something that isn't done anymore yeah it's almost like i don't they keep like adding layers that i didn't necessarily need because i would just like just want to be on races as much as possible and you can you can do that like there's not like a ton of stuff getting in your way but it did feel like there was like a lot of design decisions that were like well we're gonna make this a, just slightly more complicated than you're used to. Yeah.

Yeah. I agree with that. What, what car did you end up going with? Uh, it wasn't the Lamborghini, even though I was tempted. Yeah.

I, it was whatever one was on the right. I don't remember what it was called. Volkswagen or the civic. Maybe the civic. Yeah. I think it was a civic. Yeah.

Yeah. That's why I think it's like a Civic hatchback. It kind of looked like, well, it was all fucked up at the beginning of the game, but it kind of looked like a Nissan Skyline from the front. And I remember really liking driving the Nissan Skyline in other racing games. And then

I felt this way. I didn't feel anything like that. So that was the logic behind it. But I'm sure almost everyone picks the lamborghini because it's a fucking lamborghini yeah yeah i i made the mistake of not doing that too i feel like it's almost like they were like hey we know that if we put these other junkers next street you'll pick the good one and then both of us were like no no and this is probably a trick right yeah yeah i think we both try to break games a little too we. We thought about it too much. Yeah. I love it when you, at least when I was first offered cars to buy, it was like, do you want a Volkswagen Beetle?

And I was like, no, I'm not going to fall for this twice. Like, you're not going to get me again. Yeah. No, I was really charmed by this game. I don't think it's perfect by any means means but i think it deserved way more of a shot than it has gotten and i think if you are somebody who has ever loved the need for speed games this is a good need for speed game in in the truest sense it is not trying to do anything that the you know kind of modern open world racing games are doing.

It's trying to be just it's trying to do well what it did well a decade ago. Just more modern, better looking. It feels great. I do have one question, though. Yes. Criterion spent decades seemingly perfecting the best like crash the other car physics model imaginable and while you can ram other cars in this game it is nowhere near as satisfying as it used to be in burnout now i realize burnout did not have licensed cars they could do whatever the fuck they wanted with

those cars so i'm sure that's part of it but i cannot help but remember how much i miss like ramming another car into a pole and seeing that car like get totally crumpled and destroyed yeah i don't know what the deal is because cars do get fucked up in this game there's like a pretty intense damage model but it feels like there's like like car companies must have agreed upon i think that's what it is some some like what is the level of destruction? Yeah, there's a limit. You're right. There was a period, you know, over a decade ago where in racing games or any games of cars, you would see so much destruction.

I mean, dating back to the Destruction Derby series on PlayStation 1. And now there's like a very, very, very specific level of destruction that you see almost universally across all racing games. Like it's that same thing where it's like, yeah, like the back fender can crumple, maybe the hood can crumple a little bit, and the windows can break. But nothing more than that.

And it is kind of funny how i i would it would be a fun exercise to put it next to you know gran turismo the forza series and something like this with the same car the same licensed car and see like which one lets you destroy it the most yeah do they all end up looking almost identical yeah um yeah it's fun uh should we take a break and we can come back and talk about another game? Let's do it. Cool. I'll see you on the other side. Okay, we are back and you have a game to tell me about.

I do. This is a game that I like totally missed. Totally missed it. And, um, it basically, uh, well, the game is called Proteus. It's, uh, to be clear, spelled P-R-O-D-E-U-S, which is not how I would think Proteus is spelled. I think there's another way to spell it, but that's how they spell it in this game. And it is a throwback-inspired first-person shooter. So when I say that, I mean like Doom, Quake, that era of first-person shooter.

So much so that there's like a filter over the game that like gives it kind of almost a pixelated look to it there's um the enemies that you fight by default are just 2d sprites that always face you doom style but you can in the settings change them to like normal 3d models everything is is animated in like a, like when you're reloading or whatever, it'll be like in like 10 frames per second, like that level of like animation, like super jerky, all the like reinforce the idea that this is like throwback inspired. And yet it is a stunningly gorgeous game. It uses all sorts of incredible like lighting techniques

and it runs like screamingly well i played on a steam deck and it was soaring uh at 60 fps and above i had no problem running and i don't know i've played a lot of these games a lot of these first-person shooter games that like are from are inspired by this era right they like have a lot of enemies and they're kind of like you know you're hunting for keys and it's relatively brainless but it's fun like fun brainless stuff and this one just felt like the most fine-tuned of all of those it felt like really polished and as i said gorgeous and um i guess i'm just kind of shocked that i just never played it it came out on early access in 2020 but it just hit i guess full release uh in uh september so just a couple months ago

was the full release of the game so now it's fully out and it's yeah it's fucking sick we talk about uh a lot of indie publishers on the on the show that are doing really well i feel like we don't talk about humble games very often yeah you're right actually they they have been doing they've had a number of really solid titles i feel like they are maybe not as consistent as like a devolver in terms of picking like the really good stuff more than you would think i'm so i'm looking at the list right now. Okay. Their first two games in 2017. First two games, A Hat in Time, which did fine. Oh, yeah.

And Slay the Spire. Oh, wow. Yeah. I didn't realize that was them. Wild. 2019, I mean, they have a lot of games, but 2019, Void Bastards was them. Oh, great. A game that we really liked.

2020 had Eichenfell fell and cardo both we liked 2021 had unsighted and unpacking which are both excellent games yes that were games and then this year has uh proteus coral island signalis i mean yeah pretty solid track record. Yeah, no, that's, that is extremely strong and, and, and impressive because it really is very difficult to pick like the winners and losers when it comes to game publishing, especially with indies.

You are frequently working with folks that are like, you know, maybe they've been making games their whole life, but not necessarily like a mass market. We're going to have this played by hundreds of thousands or even

millions of people um so it is very difficult to like do that talent scouting and pick and choose winners and losers and they seem to be doing quite a good job yeah yeah i don't know are there like how much does this genre appeal to you the like old school rebooting the old school format genre or do you would you rather play like a more modern style game it's one of those things that if you'd asked me two years ago i'd be like yeah i'll definitely buy like 50 of these yeah and then i played a couple of them and i was like okay i've had my fill i don't i don't need more of these, and yet there are, I feel like, a handful of them every year. But if it's a good one, I think I would like it.

I think, like, that's such a trite, boring thing to say about video games, right? Like, what if they made a good one? I'd like it. But it is true. Like, there are a bunch of farming games, and I don't necessarily feel like I need more in my life right at this moment. But if another one came along that was as good as Stardew Valley, would I drop everything to play it? Yeah, 100%. Yeah.

And I think that's kind of where I am with this sort of thing, where I don't download these the second I hear about them or even hear like one nice thing about them. But if word of mouth sticks around for a while i'll eventually check it out like i will definitely try this one just because i trust your taste in video games yeah and this one has like online co-op which is again kind of hit or miss for for a lot of these games um i think there's pvp i didn't try the pvp or anything like that but yeah it it uh again again it's weird because i feel like especially with early access stuff frequently i don't i'll maybe hear about my maybe i heard about this game two or three years ago when it like first went on kickstarter and then i'll like totally forget it exists uh teardown was another example of this went on early access i heard about

it totally forgot it exists and then it hits the 1.0, and I'm like, holy shit, this is like an epically polished game, and it's because they've been in early access for two years. Hades, same deal. Like, this is, in a lot of ways, you know, it's not perfect for every game project,

but for certain game projects, it's really showing how much you can get for indie indie developers because they can you know essentially fund the most expensive part of the game which is often polish and like qa testing and all that stuff just through their early access programs yeah and and i mean and it's the marketing right like these games do need gradual word of mouth and each update becomes another chance to get in front of players to get repositioned on the steam store. Um, it makes,

it makes a lot of sense versus just dropping your game completely formed and hoping for the best. I do want to mention one other thing about Proteus. It has a, uh, super Mario three inspired like world map when you're selecting levels. Like you actually march a little guy around on the map to like select your levels. And which is just like a fun aesthetic touch. But in each of the levels, there are like collectible currencies that you then use to unlock upgrades.

currencies that you then use to unlock upgrades and i feel like this is a more modern idea that has been infused into this old school gameplay style that i absolutely love because i find myself like really encouraged to go and replay old levels to like find the three pieces of ore that i missed so that i can upgrade my double jump uh a little bit higher or unlock like a plasma cannon or something like that yeah um i mean this is the the big question i mean it goes back to what you're that i can upgrade my double jump uh a little bit higher or unlock like a plasma cannon or something like that yeah um i mean this is the the big question i mean goes back to what you're saying with need for speed right of how much do you give the player how much do you save and keep on hand as incentive and how do you not make it feel like you're just withholding to you know eat people's time yeah um because you you want a little bit of that you want a little

bit withheld uh because because it's fun to feel rewarded and fun to feel like you're growing even if it is somewhat artificial yeah um yeah dang okay i'll check this out i mean this seems like a good steam deck game it's incredibly good on steam deck but i would also add it's i haven't played it on switch but it's on everything it's on xbox played it on switch, but it's on everything. It's on Xbox. It's on PlayStation, but it's also on switch and, uh, look it up to see how the reviews are in terms of the performance on switch.

But if it runs well and you're looking for a good shooter, there is not, there are not a lot of options on switch for first person shooters. And this seems like one that could be really strong. So I should play this with Mosey. Is what you're saying? I think you'd love it. The gore in this game is fucking hilarious

because any enemy that you kill will explode in a giant 3D sea of blood that fills the screen. Your gun gets covered by blood. The ceiling, the floor, everything gets covered. That's every single enemy. And you're constantly facing like groups of enemies that are like 20 enemies at a time 30 enemies at a time so there's

like almost like a serious sam element to it okay this sounds good yeah it's it is a lot of fun for um for the listeners uh my son has a collection of old games that he found on my Switch and discovered that Slaughterhouse was in it and started playing it. And I sent Fresh a picture because I was like, ah, this is really funny. And then five seconds later, I was like, I'm a bad parent. And promptly deleted that game. Even an old game, you know what? It turns out your four-year-old should not be playing a game

where they cut creatures open with a big knife. Maybe not a cool thing to do as a parent. Dressed as Jason. Yes, dressed as a legal knockoff Jason Voorhees. That's very cool. I'm trying to think of other stuff I've been playing. I've been zipping around ahead of, we're recording before the Game Awards

and before Polygon's 10th anniversary, which by the time people hear this, we will have begun celebrating, which will be very exciting. So it has been a bit of a zany time. I want to say, I can say that I've seen

the new Avatar, but I can't say anything about it. No, you're not allowed to talk about it because I bought tickets, but not until early January. I'm so excited for you to see it. Yeah. And what else? Was there anything I wanted to ask you? Was there anything in our top 16 list that you're going back and spending more time with?

Oh, that is a great question how about we actually go through that list really quick just to let people know because not everybody's you know following us on twitter that's religiously to know what games we picked so uh for for you our listeners we will begin the annual tradition of the besties choosing the bestie, the very next bestie episode. This is going live on a Tuesday. That episode will go live on Friday. And we will have begun. We have 16 games in our bracket,

and we'll gradually work our way through it. 12 of those games were picked by us. Four of them were picked by you, our listeners. 12 of those games were picked by us. Four of them were picked by you, our listeners. The games that made the cut are not in front of me right now. I have them. I have them. Great, great.

I'll read through them. Okay. God of War Ragnarok, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Marvel Snap, Immortality, Case of the Golden Idol, Cult of the Lamb, Vampire Survivors, Mario plus Rabbids, Sparks of Hope, and the four reader picks were Pokemon Legends Arceus, Stray, which is the cat game, Horizon Forbidden West, and Nobody Saves the World. It is a really good list. And we're missing one game that we're going to talk about in the besties episode so don't worry yeah yeah don't worry i can already feel there's one game that is absolutely notably absent from that list of 16 maybe you could figure it out we'll talk about it on the episode it's called elden ring and it's pretty good um uh yeah i stuff that i'm i'll be real with you i don't have a lot to go back to but people on our show do that's true i feel like i feel like more like y'all need to get back to

citizen sleeper i'm hoping people get back to pentament um i i do i do need to put a fair amount more time into God of War. Okay. And just for my own pleasure, I would like to go play some more Mario and Rabbids. Yeah. And I definitely need to spend more time in Horizon Forbidden West. Yeah. Yeah. My focus is mostly on the narrative stuff. So Citizen Sleeper, which I started dipping into recently,

Pentament, which I'm just a couple hours into it, and the other one. Oh, yeah, Case of the Golden Idol. I have not played at all. So I'm extremely excited because everyone loves Case of the Golden Idol, and I loved Obra Dinn, which is what it's been compared to. So, yeah, i've got some homework ahead of me in the next week yeah i mean speaking of polygon i can share this on the besties page

but we just released our top 50 which fresh and i contributed to in case did i oh yeah i did i did yes you did case the golden idol placed very high on it no thanks to you i might say um but yeah i i am i'm looking forward to that i i i i would love for horizon forbidden west to to click with me now that i have some time uh since it came out i want to for just for fun the just for fun games i want to spend more time with nobody saves the world i really liked what i played in that game and i haven't played it on steam deck yet and it seems like it'd be perfect on steam deck yeah you're right oh that of that game. And I haven't played it on Steam Deck yet, and it seems like it'd be perfect on Steam Deck. Yeah, you're right. That game, that was a delight. I feel like that was one of those games

that if it had come out in mid-October or something, we would have seen more Game Awards nominees. I just feel like it would have done better in this race. Not that any of this stuff really matters a whole lot. But, you know, turns out it's hard when your game comes out in January to maintain that level of hype for an entire year when you are a small independent game. Cool. Well, I think we did it. Should we wrap up?

Yeah, let's wrap it up. Cool. Well, I want to thank y'all for listening. It is always a treat to have you here listening to the Resties. You can tell I'm stalling because I'm not sure how this show ends, but now I remember. This has been another episode of the Resties, where

the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. Resties!