The Besties - The surprise big game of the season [The Resties]

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Frush and Plante discover Sniper Elite 5 is great... if you turn off the grotesque violence. The Sniper Elite series has been active for over a decade, but its mix of gunfights and Hitman stealth never clicked with the crew until now. What changed? Plus, the games that got us through our Covid infections. Discussed this week: Yoshi Crafted World, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Fall Guys, JSA, and Frush's new book, The Book of Fun.    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!

🎵 Hello everybody, my name is Christopher Thomas Plant. My name is Russ Frushtick. Welcome to The Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. Are you for real? That was a genuine, very last name. What was that? It was a sneeze. I'm sorry.

Did like half of your brain come out of your nose? No, no, no. I'm fine. I'm fine. This week, talking about brains coming out of your nose, we're talking about Sniper Elite 5. And the noise that you just made is the noise I heard many times throughout this extremely violent and fun, but violent and icky, but fun video game. Sneezing? You've heard a lot of sneezing in this game? The sound of like heads popping like watermelons.

Oh, is that what that sounded like? Yeah, that's what it sounded like to me. It sounded like all of the pressure in your cranium escaping in a matter of seconds take that nazis uh how are you doing i'm doing good it's summer we're you know living our best lives and uh things are looking up i'm gonna be optimistic this summer it's it's russ frushtick summer hot summer i wouldn't say hot but i i would say just russ okay that's great i i think that's good how about you i'm feeling good i get to spend time with you in new york city that's a pleasure always um i don't know i'm good i got a tamagotchi i don't know what more you want me to talk about

i mean i want you to talk about the tamagotchi now so i ordered a tamagotchi why because it's cute for nostalgia purposes i think that's it i think that i i think i ordered this a while ago in my kind of covid state yeah um wasn't wasn't thinking. They're not fun. They're not, but they are very cute. Yeah. And, and mine says Tamagotchi on it.

I'm holding it, looking at it right now in Hiragana. And I, it makes me so happy that I can read Tamagotchi. Oh, nice. On, on my thing.

Is, is it a thing I needed to spend money on absolutely not um was my wife confused when she saw it and that i wasn't giving it to our child yes yes she was she was very very confused um so now i'm kind of pretending that like oh yeah uh my child and i are we're gonna raise this together when in truth i going to keep it the hell away from him because he's going to break it. Well, or overfeed it. Oh, I mean, that's a best case scenario, if I'm being honest with you.

Anyway, I think we should stop talking about cute things and we should start talking about absolutely horrific things in Sniper Elite 5. You want to do that right after the break? Let's do it. Okay, I'll see you there okay fresh sniper elite five here is my best summary of this game think hitman meets kind of like a not a call of Duty, but like Siphon Filter. That's like a reference that nobody's going to get. I can make it even more simple than that.

Okay. Think Hitman, set in World War II, but without a sense of humor. Yes, yes. And I would say a great deal more action. It is very okay with you playing it as an action game. Yeah. You will not be that severely punished on even like a medium difficulty. Also, way more violent than Hitman.

Yes. The kind of iconic thing about this video game series is that I believe they invented the X-Ray kill even before Mortal Kombat was doing it with its fatalities. Maybe. I believe so and um the way it works is that when you uh snipe someone and the game knows that it's going to be a kill confirmed the you follow the bullet from your weapon uh uh through the air to the person's let's say head and then right before it hits uh you get an x-ray now it's not even really an x-ray because you can see organs also sure you can inside look of the body and then you see the bullet enter the body and i mean effectively obliterate the body from within. Yes. If it goes into a skull, you could see it penetrate the eye socket and then, like, exit the head.

It is absolutely horrific. It has always been horrific. I'm not going to say that it's uniquely horrific now because of what's going on in the world. Because what's been going on in the world has horrifically been going on for a very long time um so i i um yeah it made me pretty queasy but and i'll emphasize this up top you can turn it off and i did within moments i turned this feature off yeah because i i can't tell if it's meant to be like emphasizing the over the top nature of this game or it's like a genuine like we're going to every moment you're just going to see it. Regardless of the intent, it is not something that I want to see as frequently as they show it to me or even really ever. Yeah.

So I just turned it off. Yeah, I have turned it off and on most because i'm just morbidly curious with how it works i'm now going back to just pull permanent turn off i i recommend for the average person turn it off i think what happened here is a long time ago again this is sniper elite 5 the sniper elite series needed a gimmick something that would make it stand out from all the other shooter video games out there and this was that gimmick it was a way of getting a lot of press and a lot of attention and now the series has gone on to be like a pretty good series and it doesn't need this in fact i think this is like quite off-putting for most people many people

and at the same time they're married to it because it is the gimmick it is the thing that brought in its most hardcore original players so i i think if you like turn off the extreme violence in this game you're left with actually quite a good game and i don't think you're losing really anything yeah no you're losing nothing don't don't even like think about it you could just turn it off i mean hell if you like it go for it i'm not gonna judge but i found it very off-putting but i like the game so i didn't want to deal with it anymore so i just turned it off the game is actually very good with settings for like every single feature in the game so you can really craft what you're looking for i thought before we go further we sort of describe

the game like from a minute to minute standpoint and kind of what you're doing because it is not it is not call of duty um insofar as like you know i know what you said at the top of the show, but it's, you can't necessarily go in guns blazing in every situation and be fine. I mean, I certainly got smoked doing that pretty quickly. Um, it is basically you get dropped into these enormous, like I would say maybe even larger than the hit man three maps. these maps are comically huge and you're basically given objectives hey assassinate this nazi commander uh blow up this anti-air station etc etc and how you go about doing that somewhat up in the air you're not going to get like you know the classic hitman moment where you like poison fugu fish and then feed it to the guy it's mostly like you know the classic hitman moment where you like poison fugu fish and then feed it to the guy

it's mostly like you could use explosives or you could shoot him in the face or you could stab him whatever um but in these open world areas it does give you a ton of freedom in terms of how you approach the objective because the maps are designed to be very open-ended and have a lot of different like ways at the thing uh which is very cool and so you um kind of make your way through these maps using stealth i mean i mostly played stealth again i know you could get their alternatives and the stealth mechanics are very neat because you constantly have to keep in mind the amount of noise you're making so for example obviously the titular sniper rifle is in the game but if you fire a sniper rifle even if you're hiding in a bush everyone's going to hear it and come right for you but you can do

something where you can use the environment to sort of mask the shot so if for example there's a very loud plane flying overhead there's an indicator on screen that says oh if you fire right now the noise of this plane is going to wash out the noise you make while firing your gun and it allows you to like take these shots that ordinarily you wouldn't because it would reveal your location yeah another example of that is i there is a house like kind of not a mansion but a large house and then behind that house was this very large yard and behind that yard was a creek and then on the other side of the creek was a effectively like a nazi checkpoint right and the first time i

well i walked down there i went through the house walked all the way down to the creek and i saw this just a ton of nazis i was like well i could pick one or two off but it would alert the rest they would definitely hear my weapon you know the creek's not that large and he'll probably like echo in here or whatever uh so then i was like oh i bet i could go back to the house so i went to the house but i was like, now the house is close to the city area, so that's going to cause a problem. So I climb up into the attic of the house, and there's a generator. And I break the generator so that it's just firing off

every two or three seconds. And it sounds like a gun going off, which people are like, okay, the generator's going off. It doesn't mean anything. Now my noise is masked, and from this house, hundreds of meters away, I'm able to pick off the people at that Nazi station on the other side of the creek. I do that, and then I can make my way across the ravine and, you know, be on my merry way. And it's those sorts of puzzle solving bits that I really, really, really enjoyed in the game.

It's weird. On one hand, it really bums me out how this isn't funny and as creative as Hitman. On the other hand, because the means of success are relatively limited, I felt like i knew what tools were at my disposal at any time that's the problem that i often get frustrated with with the hitman series is it feels kind of like an adventure game where i'm like yeah i could do all those things but i don't know what i can i don't know what is and isn't available to me yeah that's interesting i mean hitman relies especially the newer hitman games rely on digging into the menus to look at the list of challenges and being like how am i going to get

this guy to hit this explosive golf ball and that's like part of it like the ui is part of the game discovery and here you're right like you have a gun you have explosives your options are very limited i mean i did have like one of the assassinations i could like shoot a chandelier down on someone that's about as goofy as it gets um which is to say not that goofy yeah um and the whole story is told in this like you know bj blaskowitz like level of total no irony like i'm gonna save the world which you know you're fighting Nazis so true but it's just like very very dry

um yeah I mean that's not a bad thing I can't help but think that just overall as a package if you put this and Hitman next to each other like Hitman is clearly like a triple A full on game game like there is a lot going this and Hitman next to each other, like Hitman is clearly like a triple a full on game game.

Like there is a lot going on in Hitman. And if you ever wanted to know the difference between like double a and triple a, like this is a perfect example. Cause you know, uh, sniper elite five just has, just isn't, doesn't have that level of polish and attention to detail that a AAA game might have, but the core of it is still very strong and still very fun. So I'm like totally fine accepting its limitations so long as like, you know,

I'm having a good time with the stealth mechanics, stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I like about these sorts of games, these whatever we want to call it, AA or B game or whatever, it feels like they had to actually make choices when designing the game.

Like there were things that they probably wanted to put in the game and they didn't have the resources for it. And they certainly didn't have the resources to just put in tons and tons and tons of filler junk like you would in a Ubisoft game, right? Yeah. So something that I find so appealing about this game Tons and tons and tons of filler junk like you would in a Ubisoft game, right? Yeah. So something that I find so appealing about this game is you get into the open world and there's a couple things to do and you go and do them.

And that's the game. I mean, there's more to it beyond that if you want there to be, similar to Hitman. But I really just like the simplicity of it there are times where the double anus or the old-fashionedness of it is kind of a mixed bag so in the first open world it's a french french french french it's a french uh shore town right yeah and the nazis have like built up encampments in uh forts and armories to uh stop a beach invasion and your job is to get land behind enemy lines shut down all of these um uh defenses that the nazis have installed and yeah like assassinate some mega Nazi and that when it works feels great

like the town itself feels really really well thought out the roads kind of leading up and down the coast the beach are all very neat and yet then there will be a point where you're in a farm area and you can't climb over a two foot.

Yeah. Like gate. Yeah. And it clearly wants you to have to experience the world in a certain way. And that feels like such a throwback. Yeah. I mean, that's really unusual. You know, you're talking about like limitations is just like that's stuff like

polish that they just didn't have time to do and it does hinder the game because you want to feel like you have a lot of freedom over this environment but because that wall is three feet instead of two feet there's just no way to get around it unless you like run around the literal wall and it just looked like you know as another example shot i shot a nazi that was driving a motorcycle while he was driving the motorcycle so he died on the motorcycle the game would not allow me to remove his body from the motorcycle to hide it in a corner it was just stuck on the motorcycle i had one yeah i had one with a naz driving a car, and I shot him, and he was, like, driving his passengers. And he basically pulled over, got out, and then dropped dead.

Yeah. It's like, oh, okay. Very, very, very careful. I appreciate that. So, you know, it's not the cleanest job, and yet I'm still having a good time with it. So it is sort of a testament to, like, I wish there were more games like this, like outside of hit man and this, there just aren't a lot of like third person stealth centric games anymore. They're kind of rare. Um, and this one's like a total K totally capable one.

There are like, just from a level design standpoint, some later levels. I think the third level is called the spy tower or something like that and it is like level design wise one of the most amazing looking levels i have ever seen in a video game it's like the complexity of like hyrule castle and breath of the wild in a stealth centric it's just super cool um so i you know i i have not even gotten to that yet because i put so much time into the first two levels i i like mine them for like every little thing you could do yeah and and there are like little collectibles and unlockables you can get i i did the same thing you did and then just in an interest to see more of the game i turned on like every accessibility setting you could i could find and i was like

suddenly flying through these levels it was so much fun um you can play it as like an intense sim stealth game but they let you not do that and and i was very down with that um i i mentioned the violence and stuff does sniping games feel ickier to you than other shooters uh i mean i think they do when they make like a whole like you know masturbatory moment over the snipe moment like once or twice in a game fine but if if you're like seeing these like slow motion bullet time bullets flying through the air so that they hit someone. I mean, that's why it feels icky. There's a remove when you're playing a video game. Obviously, everyone listening probably already knows this.

Where it doesn't feel like you're really shooting anyone. Because it's like you're playing paintball. Yeah, it's like you're playing paintball. But with the sniper, because you're seeing this up close shot of the gore that you're creating it just like does make it feel icky so i in addition to the x-ray stuff you can turn off the bullet time zoom in like gun gore whatever stuff um and just like treat it like as again a paintball game yeah i i think the other thing thing is the emphasis on headshots when you play sniper games. I mean, it's true in every shooter.

It's true in every game. I guess I'm just bad at shooters. So there are a lot of times where I'm just running around frantically and just spamming bullets wherever they can go. There's something about the like the pacing of it that makes it feel icky to me but again it's like you said it's um it's a weird line to draw because why one would feel any worse than the other is just weird and and again like we are always it's this horrific thing of we are always seeming to be living in a moment of mass shootings. But it has been an especially hard time lately.

And it felt a little off at times to be playing a game like this. I don't know. a game like this yeah no i think it's just a thing that like i will always be kind of batting my head against how i feel about it and where my like kind of pleasure is coming from yeah i mean i don't i just the sniper parts of these games are fine but i play them more as like a stealth thief knockoff game and i can enjoy myself there i mean playing it that way is also super violent you could technically go non-lethal but predominantly you're just like stabbing a lot of people so that's still pretty violent but it doesn't have the like again the gun gore

like gun porn stuff that yeah it just feels weird how about hunting nazis that feels more good i mean i'm cool with hunting nazis so that's fine yeah but so here's my question about the hunting nazis obviously great there was a point i feel like when i don't know 10 years ago where hunting nazis had somehow gotten played out like it was just like the only thing in video games and it was like yeah i get it they're like the easy bad guy we can do it forever and ever i'm in and then games started to try other things for i don't know what it is it felt very fresh to me to be hunting nazis yeah people just sort of got sick of the i think eastern front of um or the western front i should say of um world war ii and then so there was a long time where there wasn't the World War II set games.

They are starting to come back. And I agree with you. Like, they're a very good villain, especially in a game like this where there's no civilians running around. It's just a bunch of Nazis. Yeah. So, yeah, no, I was fine with it. It is weird. Did you play multiplayer at all

no i didn't oh wait i had i had somebody invade my territory yeah so there is an invasion mechanic similar to death loop where you'll be doing your like single player mission to like accomplish stuff and you can get invaded by another player who takes command of i guess like a snipe a nazi sniper who's trying to like you know it's like a spy versus spy thing that happened to me like four or five times in a row and i didn't like it so i just turned it off and you can just turn it off like i think there are some extra rewards if you don't but mostly you just ignore it there probably are people that are like super into it and it seems like the sort of game that would be kind there are some extra rewards if you don't but mostly you just ignore it there probably are people that are like super into it and it seems like the sort of game that would be kind of

interesting to play in multiplayer it was just too much to keep track of for me so i didn't want to deal with it yeah i i had that same thing where it seems really fun and would be great if i could play it with you like if i we could choose to play multiplayer together. There might be a way to do that. I know you can do co-op. We should try that. But, yeah, having just a rando appear in my game who is great at this series

and excited to play a new Sniper League game just utterly destroyed me, and I have no clue where the bullet came from. Yeah. Not super fun. Yeah. Yeah, I think with it with the nazis thing i think part of my uh i don't know pleasure of it all is uh nazis haven't disappeared but they feel like way

more comfortable just being out in public these days like white supremacist nazis uh really really returned to form as just awful villains and i don't know maybe maybe that's part of like what lights up my brain now is like it feels like a real threat in a way that i don't know if it did 10 years ago i don't know i'm i'm really trying to piece it together um one other thing before we kind of wrap up the segment open world games do you do you like this like level based open world uh yeah i'm trying to think of so obviously hitman is another example of it um are there other series it reminded me of one of the recent ish battlefield games did something similar in some of the campaign levels where the campaign levels were like enormous. Um, I like it.

I, I, I, it's a nice change of pace. Uh, certainly from like normal open world games where the map is like an entire, you know, state, state uh here it is obviously still somewhat enclosed but as i mentioned earlier talking about the sort of level of freedom that it grants you to accomplish these individual objectives i think that is like a nice aspect of it it also unlike a normal open world allows for more freedom in terms of the setting. So you can have a level that's whatever, snowy mountaintop, and you can have a level that's a beachside thing. In the same game, you're not necessarily limited to it,

whereas if they were all in the same big open world, you might not necessarily get that level of diversity. Yeah, I agree. I feel like it is accepting the reality of open world game design. I can't remember if it's GameMakerToolkit or somebody on YouTube. I'll have to dig this up. Did a video on Halo Infinite and open worlds in general where, you know, you design a few chunks of what would almost be a linear game.

Yeah. And you connect it by, like, an open world you don't actually need. And I don't think that's always the case. I think there are games that are better than others but this is like the best of both worlds in my opinion i have all of that freedom but yeah you're right that the the kind of just plots of land that they need to include to connect say the beach to the mountains uh, in any open world game are just awful. And you know, they are the territory,

uh, of the grind in those video games. And then I feel like this game does a really good job of avoiding that. They're so far again, I'm, I'm, I've really dug into two of the open worlds. I haven't had any area that I felt was superfluous.

Yeah. I agree with that um so that's it separately five pretty good yeah it's on game pass it's like perfect for game pass because of its kind of double a nature that you don't necessarily want to like invest 60 or even 70 dollars on it you can just try it out on game Pass if you're a subscriber. There might be a demo too. I'm not sure. I played it on Steam Deck for the first couple hours. Honestly,

pretty good. I was surprised. But then I played it on a large TV and let me tell you, it was much better. Playing a sniper game on a TV was... There's a lot of radar stuff that I can't even imagine doing that on a 720p monitor. Yeah, I mean, like I said, it really didn't bother me.

It's one of those things of you don't realize what you are getting used to until you're used to it sort of things. Anyway, that is it. We will be back with a special bonus segment right after this. And we are back with a B segment to talk about the video games that helped us get through COVID. We did it. We did it. Yay. Yay.

Our families are healthy. We are healthy. Yay. Frush, what did you, what did you, did you play a video game to help get you through covid um it wasn't so much to help maybe it was just to like take my mind off i mentioned this a couple weeks ago on besties i've been playing fall guys for the first time since it launched um the game goes free to play on june 21st which is in about a week but um because i you know bought the game initially on steam i obviously own it

and in the lead up to the free to play uh happening the developers, I believe they're called Mediatonic, started just giving tons of stuff away to the people that bought the game sort of as a, hey, we know we're going free to play last hurrah kind of thing. And I think once it goes free to play, they're like entire currency model and customizations and everything will be probably a lot more expensive so they're being super generous before that happens for the people that actually bought the game um and uh what that means is i've been playing like one or two rounds every day in the morning just as like a light goofy hey i'm gonna level up my whatever pass that everyone has if you bought the game

and unlock some stuff and see what costumes they have in the you know in-game currency shop and just kind of f around it's like still like a very fun mindless i don't care if i lose kind of game and it's so light-hearted that um it just kind of makes for a nice like tonal change when i was feeling sick it was like yeah i'm gonna play this instead of feeling grumpy and ill what what costume are you wearing right now i have the um ballerina slippers and tutu on the bottom and on the top i have a big giant toucan oh and it's great that sounds lovely i know that i will say this from a customization standpoint there might not be another game that does it better than fall guys i just like aesthetically i love it

um it's so goofy and colorful it's like totally my vibe when i play these sorts of games uh having as much color as possible and um yeah it brings me a lot of joy i i think it's gonna have a moment again i know it had its moment when it first launched i think when it goes free to play i think there's gonna be another moment where a lot more people start playing it and because the game has been developed a lot more since it launched there are features where you can play with like a squad of other players and there's more challenges and more stuff to do so i think you're gonna see a lot more people sort of jumping on but all that all that is to say if you happen to buy it, or you got it through PS Plus when it first launched, try launching the game before June 21st.

Because once June 21st hits, that's essentially it going free-to-play. But if you launch it before that happens, they'll give you a bunch of free currency just for booting up the game, and you can unlock some costumes and stuff like that that you won't be able to get easily once the game goes free to play so that is my pro tip fresh what about fortnight are you really going to besmirch its name i love fortnight i'm still playing

fortnight too but you said they have that that fall guys has the better costumes so here's the thing about fortnight fortnight has amazing cosmetics and and probably way more awe-inspiring just from like a every single media property ever standpoint but they're not like giant bean-shaped like they're not critters yeah a lot of the fog a lot of the fortnight stuff like uhwise, just does not do it for me. I do not want to be like a flaming skull guy with like, you know, Janko jeans. That is not my style. Janko.

Sure, sure, sure. Janko, yes. So there are some Fortnite costumes that I gravitate towards, you know, giant, like colorful beings and stuff like that. But all of Fall Guys is giant like colorful beings and such stuff like that but all of fall guys is giant colorful beings and so i have a dream though and it wouldn't surprise me if this happened some sort of fall guys fortnight crossover given the fact that they're both now owned by epic could very easily happen when the game goes free to play uh something similar happened with rocket league but if i can be a fall guy in fortnight bam i am in wait could you just be a car in fortnight for no in fort they added uh when they did it for rocket league they added like one of the pickaxes

it's like shaped like a car it's stupid yeah okay here here here's the games that got me through this. So I mentioned this last time. My wife was in the hospital. She is out. I think I mentioned that too. Doing much, much, much, much better. My son, sick for like a couple days. Then immediately, somehow, more energy than ever. And then I get sick, and I am waylaid. So I

am taking care of my child, and we decided to learn how 3D movement works. Didn't go great. Did not go great. So we decided to try something else, and that was Yoshi's Crafted World. And I would

say 75% of that has been a delight. I just magic really enjoyed it the other 25 is teaching him that he can aim eggs to throw sure in the foreground and in the background to solve puzzles and that really cooks his noodle um not not great lots of frustration there he's getting better at it, but... For a game that I thought was going to be the kids game on the Nintendo Switch, that's actually a really complicated thing to get kids to kind of work their way through. So, the other game is Kirby and the Forgotten Land,

which, no joke, is climbing my game of the year list, my personal game of the year list, every second of every day. This game is a masterpiece. Because I have been enjoying it. I know you and Griffin have been enjoying it, and I think finishing it up. But Mosey just loves it

and can straight up just play the game on his own. He's just gradually making his way through it and the fact that someone who it's his first video game effectively i mean again outside a little bit of sonic um that he can just work his way through that game is awesome and so many little things and little details in this game that i being a snappy pro gamer zipped right past because i was in a hurry to to win the video game but he just wants to explore and see what's there so he's constantly finding all these like hidden little cute things they're hidden behind like a bush or you know through a hidden wall or behind something and just bringing lots of joy to himself and to me and that's what matters

it was my happiness um do you think that's great do you think he appreciates sort of the the history of king ddd's relationship with kirby so he he doesn't seem to know much about king ddd but he's a big fan of the uh the waddle dees oh and the town he calls he's like oh the waddle dees are my guys and he likes to save my guys i get it yeah and then he likes to um he really loves that he can just go and hang out in the Waddle Dee town and just chill in his house. Whenever he's done playing for the day, he has to make sure that Kirby goes to sleep in his bed. And usually before he goes to sleep, he has to have dinner. So he'll go and eat a cake, a Kirby cake. Yeah.

And it just rules. It makes me so happy playing a game and remembering like oh yeah i used to play video games like that where i could have fun just role playing as curvy with like the loosest amount of role play yeah the you know you're talking about the cake thing i when i was playing through it i was like okay so i have 300 coins right now i need to use the attack power up so i'm going to spend that first and then if i feel like i'm going to run out of health i'll buy a cake later the idea that i would just buy a cake because kirby of course would want to eat some cake right just wouldn't even occur to me so it is lovely to see a game uh through the

eyes of a child yeah and he gets mad because you can save the cake for later but he's like why would i do that if you eat it now you get to sit at a table with the waddle dees that no that's true and it's it's true i mean he's spot on i very hard to argue with him do you play with him as the bandana waddle dee so i did it first but now i we just kind of passed the controller back and forth um so that he can play through as much as possible and then if it's like too difficult i'll take over yeah but we're getting to a point where that's less and less um so yeah at first i tried to do the waddle d thing but i realized i was not really allowing him to figure out how to play on his own.

Yeah. So I bounced off. I think I'll do that more once he's more competent at the games and I don't feel like I'm interfering or masking his success. It does get genuinely hard. Even on easy mode, which I assume he's probably playing on easy mode,

it gets genuinely hard. Yeah. There are some snow mode. It gets genuinely hard. Yeah. There's, there are some snow levels where wind gets into play and that's been a challenge. Yeah. Um, but I would say overall it's, it's very welcoming.

I think for people listening at home, it is definitely one of the best, if not the best switch game for, you know, someone that is just dipping their toe into gaming on their own. Yeah. Like a four or five year old is like kind of probably the sweet spot. Yeah.

And there's just so much cute animation and little details that on top of being welcoming, if you are the type of person who is new to games, I think you're more likely to appreciate all of these little things yeah that again like for us i think i don't know you kind of get in a zone and you blast through something and don't really appreciate everything that's going on yeah um yeah what does he think of the kirby or does like the x-ray sniper shot the uh well there is the kirby with guns oh yeah there is you said that i was like i forgot there

is the kirby with guns yeah i mean they're like pirate guns it's fine yeah the first one's kind of just like a big pistol and then yeah then you can upgrade it into not doubloons i don't know yeah those good those guns um the pirate guns uh no his i i think his favorite character i think you can spit fire yeah and the upgrade of that is like you just barfing like flaming comets uh big fan yeah all of the upgrades are spectacular and and keep going like i kept thinking no there's no way this is going to get more powerful. And I would get, like, another upgrade that would just, like, fill the entire screen with explosions or whatever. Yeah, that game is great. It's definitely on my list for a potential game of the year, although I do not think anything will beat Elden Ring.

No. It is extremely, extremely good. Any final recommendation? Yeah. My book is out today. Wow. The day you're listening to this is the day

the book... The day of fun. It's called The Book of Fun. The Origins of All Things Fun. And you can find it if you just search book of fun frush dick in google uh or you go to my twitter account i have it i have it pinned and all sorts of stuff on my twitter handle um we'll have it pinned on the besties pod handle too i think that's the least we can do i appreciate it uh for those that don't recall i pinned i plugged it recently but it's basically inspired by a podcast that chris plant and i did with a lycra frank

called the history of fun and uh it basically dives into the origins of a variety of very fun activities pastimes uh from video games to roadside attractions to holidays from around the world uh i have a fondness for icelandic christmas uh for example a couple pages on that and it's all illustrated by the very incredibly talented sunny ross who did an amazing amazing job um love their artwork and it's just um yeah it's great i'm really proud to have it out it's the first book i've ever published and um you can get it uh pretty much wherever books are sold online certainly uh and maybe in your local bookstore or you could ask your local bookstore if they'll stock it maybe they will um but yeah it's it's available now i love it my my

recommendation isn't nearly as cool as that because I did not publish a book. But I'm going to recommend it anyway. I think everybody should go watch JSA by Park Chan-wook or Joint Security Area. I think that's like the full title. And it is about men on opposite sides of the South Korea, North Korea line. And an incident that happens between them.

Totally. What sort of thing is this? So did you Park Jin-wook made Oldboy and The Handmaid. Yeah, I know Oldboy. And yeah, he makes thrillers, I would say. This is kind of like an American 90s spy espionage political thriller for a beat. And then it becomes something, I think, very, very, very different. And that is something that he does a lot of with his films.

I think that they play with genre in really interesting ways. I think his most recent movie, Just One, let me see. It wasn't The Palm Door. He took home Best Actor at Cann uh for a movie that is coming out i assume this summer um but yeah if you are curious i would recommend it i think you do have to pay for it i don't think it's streaming anywhere for free right now um that said if you want to try his other films the handmaiden is absolutely amazing it is streaming on amazon prime just a heads up uh it's for mature audiences only that's what i will say about that one um and that's it. Those are my recommendations.

And you should go read the book of fun. And look at the pictures. And look at the pictures. My son loves the pictures. He turns the pages and is very into it and then tries to eat the book. So I'll take that as a compliment. That's very impressive.

My son, he just loves the words. He's like, Sonny sunny i'm a fan but i love fresh dick and i'm like oh that's nice that's very sweet of you but then i kind of get upset because i like sunny more than you oh snap i know i know um uh recap very quick of stuff that we mentioned in this we talked about sniper elite 5per Elite 5. We talked about Yoshi's Crafted World, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Fall Guys, JSA, Joint Security Area

by Park Chan-wook, and the Book of Fun, a book by Russell Froschick, his very first book. We did it. We did it. Next time, we're going to talk about stuff. We'll see. We did it. Next time, we're going to talk about stuff. We'll see. We'll let you know.

We're recording this very early, so next time is like even further into the future. It's hard for us to nail it down. What matters is we made it through another episode of The Resties, where the best of the rest discuss... Oh, damn it! Where the best... Damn it! Where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest.

Resties!