The Besties - The Super Mario Galaxy Isn't Big Enough for the Four of Them

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

The gang reviews Super Mario Galaxy and picks their best game of the 2007 mini-series. Plus, Uncle Jake Nintendo Plante makes a special appearance to ask for the next great Mario spinoff? 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!

Justin, I have a question for you. Tell me the question, Plant. We're recording this episode before the PlayStation 5 announcement. That means it's going to show up right after it. I think this is an opportunity for us to write our prediction in the letter, close it, and then deliver it to ourselves afterwards, and then everybody will see, wow, these people know what they're talking about.

They are experts. Dino Crisis at launch. I just said Dino Crisis at launch. I'm sorry, stupid. God, stupid. I don't know why I said it. I panicked. I panicked.

Dino Crisis at launch. Is that your biggest prediction, or do you have something that everybody's going to look back? You want bigger than Dino Crisis at launch? Are you kidding me? I think it's obvious um i have a prediction and that is that during the uh the big announcement presser that is going to happen tomorrow mark cerny uh is gonna like do a move and his leather pants are gonna split like lenny kravitz that one time and his balls are gonna fall out. And that has

taken Chris out of the conversation entirely. And I realize that that is a maybe a controversial pick. I think Mark will come out and say, folks, we too are worried about the effects of COVID-19.

In fact, I guess you could say I'm Mark concerning about it. Oh, no. Oh, boy. We have put Chris into the planets. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best game of the year 2007 my name is ross farsheck and i know the best game of the we the we welcome we welcome back to the besties

where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment uh also hi everybody you might have noticed we missed an episode last week. It did not feel appropriate for us to do an episode of the besties and talk about silly video games last week. We're going to say the obvious that obviously Black Lives Matter and we support that cause. Something we've always done and why we always get together is we want to create an inclusive space. That's what we take pride in, right? That everybody feels like they can listen to the show and participate in this conversation. So last week, if you follow us on Twitter,

you saw that we recommended you listen to the show Spawn on Me. It's on Spotify and a lot of other podcast networks. We recommend you continue to listen to that show because, frankly, that show just rules. It kicks ass. That's a premium follow right there. It's excellent. And this week, we're going to talk about video games It kicks ass. That's a premium follow right there. It's excellent.

And this week, we're going to talk about video games and try to bring you a splash of joy and hopefully we'll be continuing activism in the weeks to come. So thank you for joining us. Now we're going to talk about Super Mario Galaxy. It still feels like a little, like, I don't know. It still feels a little early. A little early. We're pushing it.

I don't know, like, my, my, like, gaming has not felt, like, appropriate at all.

I've been playing a lot of, like, FFXIV, like, a lot of, sort of, like, big escapist,

sort of, you know, progression-based games lately that, like, I have just not been able to, like, sink, feel, like, good sinking my teeth into, like, because it feels that like, I have just not been able to like sink, feel like good sinking my teeth into like, because it feels like escapism feels like a, a privilege and a luxury right now.

And honestly, like Super Mario Galaxy is silly and banal as it sounds like I've been more into playing this game than I thought, because it has been nice to just kind of like dip into something kind of lightweight and play a couple of levels of something and like not have to like really fucking focus and completely tune myself out to the extremely important events that are going on right now I have started to see some some people who are out there like protesting and doing great work uh starting to talk about burnout uh and I feel like maybe we could do our small part to provide a little bit of respite if you need to take a breather

before you get back out there. Perhaps letting us whisk you away to the house sale days of 2007 will provide that oasis. It's funny when you mention burnout because I thought you were talking about burnout. Do you guys just want to do Burnout 3? If you just want to do Burnout 3,

no, no, no. You will not make the time I tried to play Super Mario Galaxy for the second time a waste. You will not make me that time have been a waste. We are going to talk about the game

Super Mario Galaxy. I'm so glad that this is the game that we have capped out this 2007 discussion with because I feel like there has been this mounting thing for all of these games where we have talked about recognizing the foundational importance of the games that we are playing, but also recognizing that they have had their lunch

so completely eaten by, most of the time have had their lunch so completely eaten by the games that followed that evolved on the formulas and evolved on those things coming into this i was so stoked to play super mario galaxy uh because it and particularly two i remember two being a fucking masterpiece and really really liking one but playing returning to this game has made me realize that super mario Super Mario Odyssey is one of the best fucking video games ever. Like it has, I feel like it so completely like innovates on and like does so much stuff better than any of the 3D Mario games that sort of followed it. And with that, I see Chris Plant sort of chomping at the bit.

He's eating his glasses. He's taking his glasses off. He's eating his glasses. He's taking his glasses off. He's eating them. I'm so mad at Hoops. I'm honestly pissed because you're supposed to be on my team of Hurt Puppy video game supporters, and Mario Galaxy is the only Hurt Puppy game in,

well, let's not talk about Mario Sunshine. Yeah, I was about to say, what the fuck? Of the core Mario games, it is that. game and well let's not talk about mario sunshine but i was about to say what the fuck yeah right of the core mario games it is it is that it is so shaggy and messy and again going off a theme of what we talked about of people like reaching way outside their uh limits it is that video game it is well established my love for shaggy games only extends to Eastern Europe. I love that flavor. I love what they're bringing. I'm into it.

This is a, like, I definitely can celebrate the ambition of making, okay, if you haven't played Super Mario Galaxy, here, the main hook is this. Rather than walking in a 2D plane,

obviously, or a flat 3d plane you're in a 3d plane that is typically spherically constructed and that means that you could obviously like if you keep walking forward you would theoretically end up back where you started and when that works it's pretty neat it's a neat idea it's pretty neat there are several enemies and boss fights where like they make really good use of that you know it's like chasing someone in circles around you which if you think about you can't really do but like the idea that like oh i see this this point i'm going to drag you back around to this thing that i can use to to hurt you or whatever or just this sense of like it's fun the idea of like jumping from like off the edge of something and ending up back around on the other side of it that's cool it feels so good to long jump into

orbit every like every time i landed on a new little planetoid i was like i can i long jump into orbit on this one because that is still one of the best feeling things but for me we're sort of like i feel like this is one of the those cases where like the ambition outstripped the execution that for one the camera is like still in another mario game it didn't get the notice about how we're doing this thing well there's there is no camera that's actually it's actually worse than mario 64 because in this game they have to control where you're looking because certain puzzles are determined by like what you can see right you don't have control of the camera which is really jarring to one abysmal play any 3d game let alone a 3d game

where you're like on a planet is tough. The other place where it's like, it just sometimes feels bad to me, as often as it feels good. There's a lot of instances where it's the fun of jumping off the edge of the planet and ending up on the other side of the planet, except sometimes you jump off an edge

and you fall in the center of the planet and die. That's not fun. That's what I didn't really remember when I was thinking sometimes you jump off an edge and you fall in the center of the planet yeah and that's like not it's not fun yeah that's what i didn't really remember when i was thinking about playing this game how many like insta death pits there are and i realized like that's an element in classic mario games that is like very predictable and like happened a lot but in three mario games it's way less frequent but here it's like all over the place like oh black hole you're dead I feel like they got better about that in

in Galaxy 2 but like I said like the long jumping into orbit feels so good and on the strict inverse of that nothing makes me feel like a bigger asshole in the world than like time to long jump into orbit and then it's like no actually you just

jumped like a big idiot into space into a singularity where his body was torn apart at the molecular level so you fucked up last if i could just my i have a third one this is my last one and it's very this one is very contrary to the spirit of mario I feel like. There are these chunks of Stardewky that are all over, little crystalline chunks of star poop, star nuggets, star bits, maybe they're star bits, that you would theoretically, you use the Wiimote to point at those,

or Mario can run over them, or use the Wiimote to point at them to pick them up, which feels like a very ham-fisted way of like just using all the the meat on the we the we animal uh i think that i'm giving just killing chris looks like he's being electrocuted um the uh but then there are like these animals that are like feed me that good star dookie i need 400 pieces and they've like gated it in a way where like you need to go get some more star money for me to eat for me to turn into the fun thing that you want to go do um it just it that just doesn't feel good those are my big

three that that i don't enjoy about super mario galaxy i'm gonna try to convince you why the game is actually magical so it started out as a demo for uh it was called mario 128 which maybe you've seen footage of and it was going to be on gamecube and basically they made it and then everybody nintendo was like absolutely not this is impossible and then uh four years later miyamoto was like oh we need something for the Wii. We don't even know what the Wii is yet. Like, they didn't even figure out the motion controls. And like, we just need a really striking Mario. Let's try this again. this doesn't make sense like this isn't fun it's not how mario works and the big reason it's not like mario works is because it's not a game about jumping like you can jump for fun but the main attack is that spin attack because trying to jump on characters is incredibly challenging holy shit yeah and that's the thing they figure out with two so and you mentioned like two is much smoother correct because two realizes there are two separate games happening at once.

There's the 3D globe spinning world where the focus of the game is like traversal and spinning. And then when it wants to do jumping platforms, it puts you in locked 2D environments. And it just shifts. Like you either get one or the other. And what I like about this game, but also what makes it kind of annoying, is it's just like whatever. We're just going to try everything it's okay if it annoys you at times because it's just going to be this like absolute zany mash of ideas two is two is unquestionably a better game and i'll talk about it later but at the same time because it's so polished you don't have that energy of just like

moment to moment this game is just completely subverting itself that's one thing the other thing i want to talk about the the star bits right i think that is weird to us now because we're not playing like a we with our family and it's not like a novelty just have a we around when that was around the whole idea of the we especially with awada was okay there's always going to be somebody else in the room because just looking at a wii is like inherently magical so we need to give them things to do that will then get them to eventually play a wii and the whole like path to playing making new people video game players was okay first the game has to be pretty so they'll watch it second we have to give them like fringe accessibility which in this game was the second player could aim the wand to collect those bits and that's all they had to do or they could fire

it they could shoot it yeah yeah and then after that it's like okay now you're gonna start your own save file which i love like i i love that as an idea you're right as like a one player thing it's whatever fortunately the the levels that you unlock are totally optional so you don't have to collect the star bits and not great also with it those are the those are the uh typically the motion control levels which um are not i would say the highlight of super mario galaxy or truly any video game that ever came out on the way yeah also and here's here's the biggest thing and i'm gonna spoil the ending i hope people don't mind me spoiling the ending of this game is fucking wild so the ending is you showdown with bowser naturally the whole time you've been collecting these luma stars right and during your showdown with bowser a black hole forms at which point all of the stars sacrifice their lives by funneling into the black hole and then

poof like 2001 style splash to white and then we wake up and now we're back at the beginning of the game you know mario's back on planet mario with princess peach except all the people we met along the way they're friends now and they're our planet. And then you get this message that's like, oh, to new beginnings, which suggests Mario dies. Everybody dies. And this is an entirely new dimension formed by the explosion of a back hole. Straight up, Mario canonically dies at the end of Mario Galaxy. Come on. They could have all time traveled.

No, no, that's not. No, no, this isn't a time travel. They say stars must die to create new things. They make it pretty explicit. Mario straight up dies. When the stars were like, we're going to sacrifice ourselves so you can be Bowser, did Mario have a minute where he's like, I've actually beaten him like 30 times.

I don't need to do this. Check this out. I'm going to grab that dude's big tail and I I've actually beaten him like 30 times. I don't need to do this. That's good. Check this out. I'm going to grab that dude's big tail and I'm going to throw him into a bomb. It's so fucking easy. Look behind that dumb ass. Do you see that big axe? He always puts it behind you.

I don't fucking get it. It's a dipshit. He just leaves it there. Hey, one of you motherfuckers, you're stars, just go get the axe. Go get the axe. Don't throw yourself.

Oh, now you're doing it already. We already crossed the event horizon, Mario. I wish you'd said something earlier, pal. it is literally the ending of outer wilds it is it is like yes yes yes we have all life in the universe has been extinguished but you know 14 billion years from now mario it's gonna be fucking great babe i i understand that i'm broken and for me like get my enjoyment of a game is inexorably tied to a sense of progress um in some games you know like rpg type mechanics that that's a big part of it that can be a huge draw for me obviously you're not getting that pretty much in any mario game but i i think another thing is the progress of like beating something and getting something out of it.

But for Odyssey, I think the joy of that was just in like the sense of discovery. Like I found the star. I found the thing I was supposed to do. And also the environments changed so dramatically that even just getting to a new level was like, oh, wow, this is like a completely different thing that you've just unlocked. Yeah. And that was the pull for me right like the pull for me for you know earlier mario games it was very much about the challenge of like can you beat it and if you beat it that's like the sense of of accomplishment that you get um and for odyssey the sense of accomplishment or the sense of progress that i

that i really crave is like you know finding the stars find the hidden stars being smart about ways to like get the different stars etc and i'm kind of embarrassed to admit this but like for me without that perfect sense of like fun playing galaxy like it wasn't just constantly that pleasure of like perfectly tuned mechanics i think that's where it really fell apart like i didn't know why i was continuing to play it and i think that's a fault partially with myself i shouldn't need someone you know flicking tic-tacs into my mouth to keep me playing the game but like i didn't feel that compulsion to play just one more level i think it is a pacing issue i think i think mario galaxy does not necessarily that element

that excitement that you have of going to a new environment does not exist when you're just going to one of these different galaxies because while there are different mechanics they are not by and large that dramatically different from one another they are similar enough i would some of them are cool though like i really dug the the little bee costume yeah oh yeah the bee because i don't know why you had to do the annoying thing where if you get i mean if he gets wet you're not a bee anymore, which is just pure, that's pure Mario. Like, oh, you know, if you get wet,

you're not a bee no more. Bees don't like that. Bees don't like to get wet, which probably they don't. Who likes to be wet? I agree. I think Super Mario Odyssey is probably like the perfect Mario game. I can't argue with it.

But what I like about- No, I know. And it's unfair of us to be like, well, is it as good as Super Mario Odyssey from 20- What I like about Galaxy 1 is, the best thing I can describe it is like, it feels like you're wrestling it. Like literally just controlling it feels like work.

And I don't find it frustrating. It just feels like I'm like really trying to master the complexity of moving this space. and it's like a weird challenge in the same way that when you first played the original mario right like just learning how to control something in this weird unusual space was thrilling where and i hadn't really gotten that from any mario game since where mario odyssey and even mario galaxy 2 is like well you played mario 64 you're gonna be okay like we're gonna make sure you feel very comfortable and that the tools that you've learned along the way as a mario fan are gonna be applicable and i again i love odyssey so much

but i never they just always end up feeling so safe for me mario games where it's like okay and i'm gonna do more mario things um which is like not really fair like this is clearly me favoring novelty of something like galaxy where it's just so cool that we at least have one mario game that they were like we're not gonna do the mario thing or the nintendo thing we're not gonna polish this into oblivion there are going to be uh galaxies where the background of the galaxy is just a jpeg repeating of like a child's bedroom um and that's gonna be okay uh and i'm just glad i'm glad that we got that and kind of amazed that this game won like every game of the year in 2007 so of all of of all of the games they

won game of the year at ign game spot nintendo power kataku and yahoo is that a recency bias that like did it come out close to the end of the year i feelN, GameSpot, Nintendo Power, Kotaku, and Yahoo. Is that a recency bias? Like, did it come out close to the end of the year? I feel like it did, right? Didn't it come out in, like... A lot of these, though, were fall. I mean, I think that what... This is me talking out of my ass, but as we come to the end of this 2007 miniseries, I think that this was not...

I don't necessarily agree that it is like the best year for video games as our readers have said but I do think what's cool about 2007 is it is a very much a fulcrum year of like things changing and setting the stage honestly

for where we're going to end up and I think that you do see a lot of like novelty bias with so many of the games that we've talked about are about, like, they're doing something very new that in 2007 especially felt, like, hugely ambitious. And I think that, like, Galaxy is a really good example of that. Like, I bet in the moment it just felt wild

that they were pulling it off, like, that it was happening at all, you know, that it was functioning at all. But I think that that was 2007 was a period where I think everybody was very on board with the idea of like something that i think speaks to why it probably won game of the year so many places is it was an amazing family game in a year of m-rated hits right ever all the other games despite all being very creative in their own way blood together in this like miasma of adult mature shooter games and then you have this thing come along that feels so unlike the rest of what is happening in games i can see how in that moment of you know outlets deciding what was the best game that maybe it's like splitting the vote all the shooters split the vote and then galaxy is like well we all agreed that galaxy was good yeah here's this oasis of like calm after we've

spent an entire year playing games like Modern Warfare. It's so funny because this also speaks to the Nintendo of 2007, like the post GameCube Nintendo that was sort of meandering and the Wii was obviously a hit as a video game platform, but as a game developer,

everybody was frustrated with Nintendo even though the Wii was in every single home in the country. Everybody was saying like, platform but as like a game developer like everybody was frustrated with nintendo even though we had even though the wii was in every single home in the country everybody was saying like but where's fucking modern warfare on the wii i think we did eventually get a modern warfare where's bioshock on the wii where's like we where's all the the the big third party you know hits that are coming out right now you are pigeonholing yourself into being just the family friendly, here's a handful of high quality games. But like now arguably that's still kind of what Nintendo is

and we fucking love them for it. So like, I feel like this was the year where maybe like we started to reckon with that a little bit of just like, yeah, this is not, Super Mario Galaxy is different from the rest of the games that came out this year and the Wii and the Wii U especially are gonna falter sort of third party wise.

But like, damn it, Nintendo. I'm glad somebody's out here doing it. Also, now they're like 13 years later. Oh, you want Bioshock? We've got it. You can play it on the Switch. We got it. We heard you.

That's it. So what was the best game of 2007? Oh, wow. I would say this is kind of a weird way to look at it but in terms of like the game that i think was closest to like done like i would say it's either portal or model warfare i think both of those are like they feel even looking back at them they still feel kind of modern and kind of they work. I mean, obviously, the story elements of Call of Duty are a little.

But the but by and large, like the actual game itself, as well as Portal, both of those have aged like very, very well and have it continued to inform game design since then. Whereas a lot of these games that we've talked about haven't. I feel like Portal is the game. whereas a lot of these games that we've talked about haven't i feel like portal is the game okay if we're just basing it on like this replay that we've just finished doing yeah portal is the one that i had the most fun playing yeah i don't think it is i i would disagree that it is the most important sort of like foundationally speaking i think uh modern warfare is probably the easiest one to make that case for but man it's just as like a little, maybe it stands the test of time a little bit better because it is so standalone. Like it is so its own thing.

And, you know, the only innovations that have happened on top of Portal are Portal 2. So there's not even that much to like look at and be like, oh man, this could have been so much better. Yeah. Portal is just kind of, and this is like, I think, you know, everybody who played it had the foresight in 2007 to say like this is a perfect little game like this is a this is that I remember that being like why we uh I think we gave it game of the year joystick was just like yeah it's just fucking three hours in and out it's it is perfect

every part of it is so well executed uh I think that I think that's probably where my vote goes surprisingly justin i think i probably liked uh i think it was probably bioshock like and mainly just remembering how that how that made me feel initially and seeing how much the groundwork for for the future of games that like i really love and that's kind of outside the mechanical aspects of bioshock or at least on the combat mechanic side but there's so much about storytelling in games that I feel like is is building on what Bioshock did and um then that was really cool to go back to and and see uh I think it still feels really like especially if you were not familiar with that story I think it still holds up remarkably well yeah I think uh for me influential

remarkably well yeah i think uh for me influential is call of duty just because i mean it caused tons of publishers to dump tons of cash into like wannabe shooters right and there's just so much of it if i if i'm thinking critically um what do i think is like the most interesting game yeah for me it's portal i i think so many of these games or it would be portal or galaxy the rest halo cod bioshock uncharted god of war they're games that we've talked about this a lot throughout this they're games that are wanting to be adult but are mostly turning out to be rated in for mature and i they're like starting to get at that idea of, you know, like what is a serious game? What is a mature game?

What is a game that wants to say something? But they're still batting up against the fact that your only way of communicating with the world is by, for most of them, shooting somebody in the face or in Kratos' case, like ripping out their eyes and forcing it down their throat. And I think like that honestly that like gets it how much things have changed in the last 13 years for the better

um one we're seeing triple a games try not to have that be the only thing you do in these games even some of those games or sequels tried but also just indie games have gotten so much better i guess that's like the kind of perfect merger of what we saw with the small game like portal and with you know the ambitions of these triple a games was telling stories that matter that are adult that are fascinating and engaging and don't rely on the mechanisms of like the last 30 years of video game history so yeah like when you say like 2007 was a fulcrum i think that's spot on i i think years after that have been much better because we've gotten to actually see the fruit of that change but it was certainly an important year are we ready to move on i think so let's do the rest

of our program um let's take a quick break and then we'll be right back uh hey everybody my uncle here jake plant uh he works at nintendo his name is jake nintendo plant is what he was called the company's named after him but he was hoping that you could help him figure out the next great uh mario spinoff so i'll just let him get the phone one second he's gonna come through the door hi i'm jake plant hey jake hey jake um hey jake just wondering if you could have a talk with chris about his character work that he's been doing it feels like he's been stepping on russ's toes maybe like a lot even since we relaunched the besties and i'm just curious if he feels any level of guilt about that so uh i actually don't listen to this show oh okay fair yeah fair yeah yeah yeah uh so i work at nintendo uh and did i

mention i'm chris's uncle um and we are trying to figure out the next big game for mario he's golfed he has carded um he has painted quite Quite frankly, I've spoken with Miyamoto, and we worry that we've run out of things for him to do. So we were hoping that you, the besties, who I've never listened to, would have great expertise on something that we could do for Mario next. Yeah.

No, it's interesting because you're right. He has been pretty versatile but it does seem like Mario has ignored his actual literal job that he's had for literally ever oh yeah because he's never done any fucking plumbing ever like yeah never and you're not talking about like fucking pipe dream style puzzle game like no i'm talking about running the logistics of a small business which is not an easy thing to do oh interesting i was even thinking about the act of plumbing like diagnosing like a leaky toilet i mean that's part of it that's part of it but also building a client list and knowing how much to upcharge

like how much does a washer cost yeah talking to his like nephew about yelp like not understanding necessarily how that works when you say his nephew you mean toad because canonically as a nintendo representative i can let you know he does not have a nephew no he does luigi has name luigi's son uh-huh uh it's one of the cooper kids and what yeah so that's why i doubted one of the cooper kids after he killed king it's ludwig actually he's uh he's ludwig's dad so uh and and who are you to say what a family is fucking jake yeah you're you're such an absentee uncle that you can't even be bothered to listen to your nephew's podcast yeah what about mining mining mario gets down deep into the dirt we've seen him we know how he can do it with tubes

but this time they've taken the tubes away from him so there's no pipes for this boy this time now he has to dig his own pipes through the ground and it's so good because we're getting in on some uh rising trends like mining and video games and he'll be able to like put together it's so hot he'll be able to put together different rocks to make uh coins something i don't know he makes the coins out of gold. He makes his own coins, counterfeit coins, Mario bucks. He calls them. He tries to spend them places and no one accepts him.

And then he starts his own colony under the ground where he welcomes people as long as they are completely mentally, physically, sexually subservient to him. Whoa. Mario in his underground kingdom. so i like where we're at is there a way that we could combine these two ideas of uh mario digging infrastructure with mario peepee poopoo um cleaning up toilets i mean even underground societies need peepee poopoo toilets like where do you think they're gonna to pee-pee-poo-poo? It's a way that he shows his people that he still cares about them.

Remember at the Last Supper when Jesus washed the feet of the disciples to make himself humbled before them? Such is a man who wishes to enter the kingdom of God. This is what Mario will do for his people. And thank you for the smooth transition, Justin, because the profession that I was going to suggest

was youth pastor for Mario. Perfect. thank you for the smooth transition, Justin, because the profession that I was going to suggest was youth pastor for Mario. He's got the mustache for it. I mean, I'm just going to say. I don't know what that means necessarily. I know that you and I had many youth pastors during our tenure with the church. He's got a Jim Moosey mustache. His mustache looks like Jim Moosey.

There was a fellow named Jim Moosey at our church who did have a mustache. Thank you, Justin. That is narrow casting to literally one other person who is on this podcast. So, yeah, I'd love to see him sort of, you know, pick up a Bible. Just see what he thinks. I would love to hear him say, you know, just I want to hear the word Jesus come out of Charles Martinet's. Just to see like what kind of spin he'd be like.

A Jesus. A Jesus, a Christ. I'm washed in his blood. To be clear. I'm made whole again. My body will die, my spirit lives on. For God so loved the world. A Luigi.

Amen. So the game that you're describing, just because I want to be clear here, For God so loved the world. Luigi. Eggman. So the game that you're describing, just because I want to be clear here, is Mario, his mind, an underground colony of which his disciples live. Their only reward is the ability to go pee-pee-poo-poo. Otherwise, they must listen to his... They are also paid in Mario Bucks.

I didn't want to point out they're paid his you know company store money uh script mario script okay okay um and also oh sorry the other reward is everlasting life pretty good pretty good deal actually i would do that i would get in so i actually have to run have to hop on a plane back to uh seattle i don't want to say you shouldn't be doing that. You shouldn't be just frivolously riding on planes right now, Jake. It's my own. It's like a kind of Wonder Woman invisible plane.

It's what we all use in Nintendo. But I'm not going to say yes. That explains why sometimes I would look out the window and just see Reggie in a seated position just sort of flying by me. That makes a lot of sense now. I thought that that was like some sort of crazy Pizza Hut power that he had, but you're suggesting it's the Nintendo's fleet

of invisible airplanes. Thank you for clearing that up, Jitter. Right, well, yeah, not gonna say yes, but not gonna say no, and we'll get back to you. Thanks, Jake. Thanks, Jake, so appreciated. I'm back, it's me plant thanks plant for coming back do we have any uh messages from the from the from the fans at home there's one

that i want to highlight and it is from uh jeremy on twitter he said besties have you guys thought of doing a segment or social media bit about best games to play and services such as xbox game pass or playstation now a lot of people are quarantining uh and they're using these services to burn through games and need guidance so we talked about playstation now a little bit the other week so we'll skip that for this time and maybe talk about another time but i do want to talk about xbox game pass i want to see if y'all have anything that you recommend that people might have missed and russ said i can't mention near automata

so i'm definitely not mentioning here on this podcast but we will talk about other games i want to call attention to a game called astroneer which is a game that came out on pc a while ago and then came to i think early access xbox and it's on xbox game pass now it's basically like an astronaut sim you land on a planet and what's cool about it is that it's all about like the logistics of like spreading like oxygen tubes throughout the planet so that you can explore deeper and deeper into it. And it's got this like low-fi, low-poly aesthetic that's really neat. It's very multiplayer friendly, which is really cool. Yeah, I played it a ton on PC ages ago, and it keeps, it's gotten like a bunch of updates since then. So definitely recommend it. I feel like it hasn't gotten a lot of shine on it,

and worth checking out. I actually would like to dovetail onto that, because in a similar vein, I wanted to talk about Subnautica. Subnautica, if you have not played it, I feel actually literally jealous of you. It's one of my favorite games of the last 10 years. It is a survival game in the vein of like Minecraft or Dust or whatever, where you are basically you have a tiny submarine and you have crash landed on this alien world and you are diving down into the ocean to try to find resources and ways to build up your sort of like underground colony and everything in the world from coral and fish to like different plant life whatever it's all resources that you can mine and create like better and better stuff and the sense of discovery one with like of resources like

killing this fish with your knife and realize like oh my god it's me i can turn that into rubber and this will help me make uh you know uh flippers that'll help me swim better etc the progression is really great like really really addictive but it's also got this wonderful sense of partially because it's underwater this wonderful sense of like swimming into a place and realizing like oh fuck i should not be here i am not ready to do this i am terrified and i'm almost out of oxygen i have to just keep going deeper to hope i find something and uh it is absolutely fantastic subnautica i do want to call attention to one quick thing uh plant just waved to someone like he was in mayberry he's like that was insane in your office how could this happen i noticed

that too and i didn't want to say anything but hachi machi what a trip my window faces the front door so i can say hi to people they walk by it was so nice uh griffin uh i have a couple real quick one literally a minute m-i-n-i-t uh is on the game pass that one is like pick it up in an afternoon where you have some time it's fun as hell i'm pretty sure we've talked about on the show before where you have 60 seconds and you get to explore and after 60 seconds you die and you have that time to like finish out loops and collect items and hit checkpoints and do like whatever you can to continue exploring this world uh knowing that you have an extremely limited window of time to do that the other is and i didn't realize this was on there is uh bloodstained

ritual the night oh yeah a lot of people slept on that and i i've been jonesing for a good metroidvania to play right now i've dipped into a few uh the new shantae game that just hit switch uh which isn't really clicking for me and the messenger which i got to like the twist part of that game and then it wasn't doing it for me anymore and it just made me wish i could just erase bloodstained from my memory and play it again because that is just the richest like mechanically speaking progression wise speaking like the richest metroidvania game to come out in recent memory uh and the fact that it's you know free on game pass is fucking exceptional so if you

haven't played that one go play that one i'm gonna call it a quick bundle of games that i would say are the things that you may might be interested in but probably won't spend money on um and that's the joy of a service like this we've talked about world of horror on uh on the podcast that's on here uh lonely mountains downhill is one of my top three games of last year i think it's just absolutely fantastic and it's just a simple biking game and then also uh i mean outer wilds is the other indie but i don't know a nice way of saying this a lot of xbox exclusives are better in the game pass format because they're good or interesting but maybe not something that i would want to spend 60 dollars on um so that includes disneyland adventures which was a connect game which is so cool so cool

and it's it's kind of a mess so weird so cool i i know a lot of people don't necessarily play racing games so i want to make sure people try forza horizon 4 because even if you don't like racing games it is such a blast uh really if you like any open world games it's worth a try and crackdown 3 i'm not saying it's a perfect game at all but for the low low price of free in the time of a weekend oh you need to subscribe but yeah yeah it is it is really enjoyable and especially with a friend if you want like a taste of that original crackdown feel it certainly accomplishes that and I recommend you give it a try and I think that's that's it on my end yeah oh man

I have such a good game that I'm playing but I you can call it out if you talk about it briefly I I know no no we'll talk about it next time because I'll also be playing it boy that would be very annoying to hear as a listener I cannot imagine anyway thank you so much for listening to the besties.

We hope you've had fun and gotten a little break here. Hang in there, like literally everybody on the planet. Yes. Do we want to next week write is Clubhouse Games? Is that correct? Yes. Yeah, I wrote chess on the rundown, but I guess we could talk about all of Clubhouse Games.

We could probably talk about all 51 of the clubhouse games games uh holy shit i'm excited to talk about that one it has been uh a fucking incredible little little thing for me to have in my little switch appreciate it appreciate you clubhouse games fat cammon fuck yeah justin where can people find us i like crib Cribbage. Is Cribbage on there? Cribbage is not on there. Eh, well, maybe next time. We're on Spotify, as you probably know, because you're listening to it.

You can follow and listen for free there. If you want to share the show with people, use the URL besties.fan. It's also where you can send mail to us, mail at besties.fan. If you could share the show, tell people, hey, this is worth listening to, just shoot them that link,

and they can listen to it, and that would be really nice. You can also follow us on Twitter, at TheBestiesPod, and if you want to join our newsletter, it is the pinned post on the top of our Twitter account. That's going to do it for us, so be sure to join us again next time for The Besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends

pick the world's best games The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!