The Besties - What Have You Done To Us, Dear Listeners

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

The Besties let the listeners decide what games to discuss this week. So hope you're all happy! First, Griffin offers a lackluster review of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered. Then the gang tackles Madden NFL 21, the recent release from the long-running franchise. And finally, they examine the twisted post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland 3. 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!

do you think cavemen were belly sleepers oh that's interesting we're cavemen doing tummy time is what you're asking yeah well because they couldn't be side sleepers right there's no way that was possible because rocks are not good for side right they didn't have the long body pillow they could use to tuck between their elbows and their knees like like i do right so you would assume that they would go all back and because you know, like stiff, I don't know, that's good for your back if you sleep on like a hard surface, but there had to have been people that were like, no, I'm going to do belly time.

And if so, how did they deal with like neck cricks and stuff like that back then? Well, they're probably, if Flintstones is any indication, they had a soft dinosaur that they did sleep on as a pillow. Like a big, I'm thinking like a mammoth or like some sort of big tusked pig situation. That sounds dangerous.

I don't want to poo-poo on your idea, Griffin, because everybody knows cartoons can be a valuable source of information. But as somebody who went to the Natural History Museum quite a bit, I know the truth is that... See, it's hard to tell because you only see the skeletons of cavemen, but back in the

day, humans had what we called side meat, which was a one-foot extension on either your right or left side of side meat. And that was for the sleeping. And then you would kind of comb it back to your back, so you had back meat during the day, side meat during the night.

The elders, the meat would harden into a chitin that made them valuable hunters. Yeah. It was sort of a rib chode. Oh no. You know, this isn't funny but it has been informative and I feel like we

have been not doing that enough. So I think that that is where the show will begin with this important trivia and not a joke. Side me. Rib chat. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best games of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy. Man, I don't even fucking know, man. My name is Chris Plant and I know the best sport of the week. My name is Ross Fraschek and I know the best sport of the week. My name is Ross Fraschig, and I know the best game of the week, and it's football. Welcome to the besties where we are ready for some football.

Ba-ba-bum, ba-ba-bum. Welcome to the besties. My name is Justin McElroy. As I said, I'm wearing my worst pair of gunners, which I am saying up front, my most heinous pro gamer. Your most heinous Bono as helicopter pilot gunners. And I'm ready. Why do I need this level of protection against the Blu-rays to my monitor?

Well, because we're going to be talking about some video games this week. We let you, the people, decide let's say let's say always a mistake when we give it to you but we let you choose between three different games and we're talking about three different games this week we got final fantasy crystal chronicles wasteland 3 and madden plant what are these games you want to know the best part i thought like everybody's like hey we want you talking about some games that are good that you're positive about and i was like i got it i'm gonna pick three games can't go wrong there we're gonna find we're gonna find something pretty great right little did i know one of the games would be effectively a broken mess. The other one would be, I don't know, like a recreation of last year's game.

But the third one would be, porridge would be just right, except for filled with bugs. You'll never guess which one is which one. There's some bugs in the porridge. That is true, Plant. There's some bugs in the porridge. But hey, it's good protein. some bugs in the porridge it's good protein so uh to give everybody an update on the vote we went to uh twitter.com uh forward slash the besties pod or just besties pod i don't know it's been a long and uh we offered y'all a choice of final fantasy crystal chronicles remastered remastered madden the new madden uh and wasteland 3 and final fantasy crystal chronicles

got half the vote and uh madden and wasteland got a quarter each so that means final fantasy will get half of our time that we are talking about games this week and madden and uh wasteland will get two in the back half uh i love it evenly this is on demand podcasting this is the i love it you decided what you want to hear about and we're there to service you and we're going to do that right after this quick break i feel like i brought final fantasy crystal chronicles remastered to our doorstep like i dragged it into the house so maybe i should be the one to talk about it and i know people have been critical of us

of being too harsh on games in the past, but buckle up because I feel like when a company makes as big a boner as Square has done with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered, like it has to be addressed. So yes, I will start with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles if that is okay with you three boys. Yeah, I mean, just really important contacts for everybody.

This game got a three on IGN. IGN, not known for giving out. It's actually not legal for them to do that. They had to get special dispensation from the Department of Justice. The DOJ had to say, yes, you can in this one instance. Okay, you have to understand what Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was first because straight up remastered is not that different.

It is not remake in the same way that Final Fantasy VII Remake is a remake. It is sort of a graphical polish with some ill-conceived system changes on top of it. So Crystal Chronicles was a GameCube game, and it was unique in that it was a co-op action RPG, which was a new thing for Final Fantasy, and honestly, not a thing that a lot of developers were doing back then. It is a loot-based multiplayer experience with ongoing progression, like characters that you save in a Final Fantasy game, but multiplayer. And the big thing about it is that it was entirely from the ground up designed around

local co-op using your Game Boy Advance as a controller. This was, at the time, I will admit, difficult to arrange, but we were a household with multiple Game Boy Advances and link cables. And so on more than one occasion, we would play Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles in this way. And what I've only realized after playing Remastered which has no local co-op is that final fantasy crystal chronicles is essentially an rpg party game uh everything about the game all of its designs are based around um what i would call a competitive

co-op which is i think a thing it's something that I actually reference. Crystal Chronicles is a game I reference a lot when talking about, like, fun co-op game design. Quick anecdote, me and Justin and the rest of the fam worked on a Adventure Zone tabletop game, a card game that is co-op, and I was really interested in, like, the idea of how to also instill the spirit of competition in a game where you are all sort of trying to achieve the same goal and Crystal Chronicles is the thing I come back to here is why in Crystal Chronicles everybody has a secret mission and on the GameCube version you had your secret mission on your Game Boy Advance screen nobody else could see it and

your mission would be something like pick up the most most gold take the most magical damage uh kill enemies with focus attacks etc etc etc uh because the gameplay is not that complex you have like a basic attack you can charge it up and then you can cast spells and you can like blend your spells with other players it's like very very simple but the element of complexity on top of that is you're secretly trying to accomplish these goals. Because whoever does their goal the best gets first pick of the loot. Everybody shares this, like, loot pool. And the loot that you pick at the end of the level is, like, permanent progression stuff. So, like, here's an artifact that gives you an extra heart container. Here's an artifact that boosts your strength by three.

Here's an artifact that increases your item capacity by one. Like, they are, it is the only way, it is the only progression system that is not item or armor based like you don't level up that's it and in order to get the stuff you want you have to do your secret mission the best that's fun like that was very very fun back in the day playing the dungeons were whatever the aesthetic of the game kicks ass the music of the game is amazing uh but the gameplay is very simple like that was the thing that was fun was this party game idea of kind of competing while playing along with your team. Because you had to watch,

like I would watch what Justin's doing and be like, he's picking up a lot of gold. But I know what his fucking mission's in and you would try and get in the way of that so that you could get a higher score than them. And do you think that is why it does not support local multiplayers? Because they wouldn't,

they didn't know how to figure out a way to like present that information to other players? Maybe i mean that you do not play game boy advance or you do not play uh crystal chronicles remaster with a game boy advance right it has online multiplayer uh which to the game's credit is cross play between uh ios ps4 and switch which is great what is not great is that like on switch to play online with a friend you need your switch first of all you have to have them registered as a switch friend which nintendo has not made the easiest process and then you have to use a special code that the game generates to like get your friend not great not great you can hop into a stranger's game very

easily and that's fine uh but yeah there's no local co-op there's only online co-op the bigger problem is like the genre of like progressive loot action rpgs has advanced tremendously since crystal chronicles came out and like none of that is reflected in in remastered but then there are certain changes that just kind of fuck the whole thing up like because you're playing online now everybody has instanced loot so when you see if you bust up an enemy and they drop gold that's your gold everybody gets a drop from that thing which is not how it worked in the original game so now if you get the objective that's like kill enemies by using uh blended magic attacks it's like oh okay well i'll do my best but that's gonna

you know depend on my teammates sort of helping me out with that but if you also get the one that's like pick up the most items you win because the items are instance now there's it's no longer a race there's nothing i can do to stop somebody else from doing that like that is a fundamentally broken like that just doesn't fucking work anymore you have you have essentially destroyed this like kind of cool system that you had in the original game it seems to me like they might have just like been like well what's going to be the easiest way to implement this online system and if we just instance all the loot where we don't have to share that information across the internet absolutely that and then somebody in the room probably went like well that doesn't that fuck

up the whole like sort of pseudo competitive element and they were like get the fuck you're fired get the fuck out of here like and that and you got to understand like that system covers up a lot of sins yeah front of hands you crystal chronicles design because there are a lot of sins it is super repetitive it was super repetitive back in the gamecube days like it it just is it has these bizarre you have to carry the cup around right and that's a hurdle that very few people i think are willing to get around the world is covered in this poisonous gas. And the way you stave it off is while you're exploring, somebody has to carry around this chalice that provides you with a safety field. When you're playing single player, you have a little mog that flies around with it.

But sometimes you'd be like, I'm tired. You fucking carry it. You're a computer. You carry it. You're a computerized mascot character. But so like that's,'s you know whatever that is what it is it is that's what the game is but like the thing that made the game unique the thing that made it stand out not only among like action rpg multiplayer games of its era but like i can't

think of another game that has done that co-op competitive thing like this which is why crystal chronicles is always the thing i come back to and they've they fucked it up like it just it just doesn't work anymore it is not like fair it doesn't feel good um and there's certain things like lag makes the spell fusion kind of impossible like if i cast fire you can put your targeting reticle on my fire spell and cast fire at the same time and it'll turn into fire raga and like blow up the whole screen which is fucking hard to do when there's even the slightest bit of lag happening uh there's no the only communication is through like 16 preset phrases so you can say like i'm going to cast fire that doesn't mean anybody else is going to listen to you um it doesn't sound good griffin it's not great it's it's it's it is honestly heartbreaking i I harbor a very deep fondness for Crystal Chronicles

because I had a lot of fun playing it in the GameCube days. But now looking back on it, I realize it is not because of the game itself. It is because of what it got out of me and my family from its sort of party game ideal. And that was such a unique, such a special thing. And without that, like, it has, like, virtually nothing for you. Yeah.

I do imagine the Final Fantasy VII Remake team and the Crystal Chronicles team going to Square Enix, boss person, and the Crystal Chronicles team being like, okay, we need, like, just a little bit of money to make this good and worthwhile at all and the final fantasy 7 remake people are like i mean we pretty much have everything we need we were thinking about adding a big kokobo just an extra big kokobo um it's gonna cost like a trillion dollars to make it because you gotta see this and then the boss is like uh yeah i think like we all know where this is.

This is an easy choice. Final Fantasy VII Remake, take all the money. You can use it for all you need. I was going to say, that's the crazy thing about Final Fantasy Remake versus this. This is the par for the course for Square Remakes, is them kind of half-assing them and not making them super great. Final Fantasy VII Remake was like them doing it totally legit in like a way that is totally an aberration from all their other remakes which is kind of remarkable um you know they've done okay ports but they usually kind of

don't put a lot of effort into them to be and it sounds like they needed to do something like that something not maybe as visually ambitious but creatively ambitious just to make this work and fun like i mean listening to you griffin it sounds like for this game to work as a remake like they need to make some pretty serious changes yeah but i mean at the same time the changes they did make have kind of broken the game what i haven't talked about is like this game works best as a co-op game we would sit down and plunk down in front of it with our mini Game Boy Advances and play through it as a team, right? Because the whole lore of the game is you are part of this caravan exploring the world, collecting this precious myrrh to protect your village from the poison. So you're like part of this caravan, right?

You're part of this team. Well, in Remastered, you're playing online and God, where to start? Okay, only the lobby creator makes progress in the campaign. So if the four of us wanted to hop in, play the first level and like collect the myrrh that we would need,

which is what advances the campaign forward throughout the years, only the person who created the lobby actually makes progress in the campaign. So there's no way for all four of us to play the campaign at the same time also every time you finish a level your two options are replay that same level or disband the party so the four of us if we wanted to play through the campaign we would have to take turns starting the lobby on each level disbanding between each one and then moving on to the next one there's no shared

world and like in the original the whole world was shared we could go into town together we could go to the blacksmith and like upgrade our gear we could check in with our families in the town together we could explore uh there are like cut scenes as you're exploring the world which are unskippable and pretty vapid and annoying in this one you can't even do those together. Like, so that's broke. Like you've, that's another co-op sort of like pillar of this game that has been completely destroyed. While you were describing this,

I realized the way to solve the local co-op problem that we were talking about where no one has GBAs. Okay. If every individual person has a code like A5 assigned to their specific character, at the beginning of each level, a giant grid shows up with a bunch of different objectives, but you only know your secret code and everyone just, right?

That's a great, yeah, that's one potential fix for it. But like, it's so many things. And I have to disagree it's not an issue of i don't think it's an issue of budget or both you know financial and time budgeting i don't know how many like how large the team was that worked on this but like stuff like you can't only the lobby leader makes progress like that is one decision that fucks the whole thing up and there are a handful of those there's new things that like i haven't gotten to i haven't finished you when you finish the game

you can start playing these like rotating new game plus expert dungeons but like i don't know like what sort of inner reserves i would have to tap into in order to like make it that far because I again am the audience for this game love the original and after like a dozen dungeons or playthroughs of dungeons or so like I my soul was pretty thoroughly uh crushed so yeah it's it's it is super disappointing again like I don't relish in taking dumps on games, especially ones that I'm really looking forward to. But this remaster has a very faulty perspective on what made the original Crystal Chronicles really good and makes a handful of really terrible decisions

that kind of drops the ball. It's also worth noting that the only reason that that dookie was so long and did take up so much of the show was because of democracy. Indeed. Which I think is a lesson we can all sort of take something away from. We didn't. You wanted it. There's your dookie.

Y'all, after the break, we have two good games to talk about. Good! Good! Excellent. I don't know about morally good, but good. Good. Good. What's trip hawkins got for us baby what's trip up to what's trip doing y'all give me that trip trip baby now i said i want you plant i want you all to play madden football how many people play madden football

raise your hands. Okay, so what I see is Justin raising his hands so high that it's become ironic almost. Clarify your baby. If it don't begin with a nine, I'm going to put my hand down. 96. 97.

98. I had to put my hand down and cash out. It's off. It's off. Is this the longest running franchise in history? Yeah. In video games? It would have to be, right?

Have to be, right? Yeah. I have to imagine. I mean, unless you talk about something like Pac-Man. Fight Simulator. No, I mean consistently, like year to year. Oh. Like, definitely the most games in the series right

no question i mean like you could lump it in with something like mario or something like that if you want to get cheeky about it but i feel like we've come a long way i mean long way from the days when the ambulance would drive onto the field uh running over players in the process what a different game um here i'll keep it simple i'm not going to talk about all the like the nitty-gritty sim stuff there's stuff like madden ultimate team which is where the microtransactions are franchise mode there's like a story mode that used to be like a long shot it's bad i forgot what sorry i forgot sorry i'm so sorry i know i use my time crystal chronicles also microtransactions. You can spend real money on

a pouch that gives you more gil or faster recovery or costumes. Sorry, I just had to put that in. I saw that at the title screen and I was like, are you fucking kidding me? Sorry. And now I'm done. Here's the thing. All that stuff in Madden, if you are not a person who plays

Madden already, I don't think any of that stuff's going to convince you to play. And if you are a person who plays Madden already i i don't think any of that stuff's going to convince you to play and if you are a person who plays madden none of it's especially better this year in fact some of it's worse but there's a new mode that i want to talk to you about it's called the yard and it is bonkers it does not make sense it is a new entirely new game of football that they designed it is 6v6 in which you are the same players and you switch sides so if you're on offense as the quarterback you're the safety on defense and the rules are just flagrantly nfl blitz if you can't break people's bones so you can snap it to like players that aren't the quarterback um players can't rush you uh until like a timer goes off i mean you're saying this like this is imaginary but like this is how people the idea is this is how people play

flag football in like their yard that's for fun for fun yeah yes um but also there are all these house rules that you can uh turn on or off so like you can pass it to anybody if so long as they're behind the line of scrimmage sure so you can pass it around like four times and then just air out a deep ball from a running back to your quarterback in the end zone yeah all of this i i know i know if you don't like football you're just rolling your eyes the thing about it is it's just fun they finally did it they made fun football game that you don't need to know all the complicated rules about i understand that it's very hard to just pick up madden and play um because oh boy howdy um uh is the game more complex than ever

but if you ever thought like man i'm right I miss football games from when I was a kid. I miss it just being enjoyable and fun and grindy. It exists. It's called The Yard. I hope they actually invest in it and make it even better next year. My only fear is a thing that Madden games tend to do is they come up with something like this

and they're like, long shot. It's a great story mode. We hired talented people people to do it and then the next year they're like no talent like we we abandoned that idea we know that you all liked it but we didn't have the energy for it and we can only do one interesting thing a year at a time well i i actually heard that the game is currently being review bombed because yes there's like the hardcore audience that is pissed about them adding stuff like the yard and not making the actual football game better which i fucking don't care about like you could honestly have people rolling on the ground i wouldn't know the difference but i'm more interested like potentially more interested in a separate mode that doesn't

have me playing boring football yeah the, they should have two different products. Like Street, for example. Like they did this already. Yeah, made by another team in that you can download without having to get this. And I mean, we had a handful of questions from listeners about like, how do you make Madden good? And the problem is you can't do the thing

which you need to do, which is stop making an annual release make it a living game you can still charge a mountain for it madden ultimate team makes gajillions of dollars but from what i understand when i understand is these contracts with the nfl expect a certain number of games yeah and same with like all these sports games they they also want you making these games because they get some cut so until those contracts get brought back to earth which i don't think is going to happen anytime soon we're just kind of stuck with this okay so you know enough about this game does the madden ultimate team stuff

carry over from a previous entry like if you spend real i i don't i stay the hell no i do an ultimate team i i'll be i'll be super real with you like i i anything like that even though i've heard the microtransaction stuff isn't super bad the second i i see that sort of like rip open card packs i'm like not for me it just seems crazy to me that someone would spend whatever x amount of dollars to get joe montana in their fucking ultimate team and then a year goes by and then Joe Montana dies horribly. Bye! Yeah. Can't say you choose Joe Montana too, not even 49ers Joe Montana.

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I'm not gonna drag the podcast into it. I just am saying there's a reason this game sells so much each year even when the fans are absolutely furious with it. and it's because the very core of it is still a great simulation of football uh in terms of stuff that i hope that

they do for next year and next generation it would be great if it finally actually looked better i don't know what the xbox series xps5 version is going to look like but holy cow has the game looked the same for a long time um and and yeah i think like actually figuring out how to make franchise mode compelling um and rivaling stuff like nba 2k it's got to be tough to do a franchise where you want it to be better but you also need to leave some room in in the like places you can grow like on the roadmap there it can't be too much better it has to be to be like somewhat better so we have some room next year for it to be better i think they would kill for that problem

honestly i think it's like we just don't have time like the idea of having the ability to do more than you want maybe they come by it on us then it's just like i don't know it's done print it so in the in the first segment i fixed the multiplayer problems the local multiplayer problems in final fantasy i'm gonna fix madden right now okay all right so the ball no more ball it's a frisbee the characters no more humans they're dogs done uh this game exists you you are referencing a real game right no wait are you you're joking you just coincidentally didn't know about this yes i did not jerry rice's dog football on the wii wait a second i gotta i gotta look up the game jerry jerry rice jerry rice and ninus's dog football oh it's a real game in the deep in

my subconscious i knew about this game and and and yes you're you are jerry rice oh my gosh the images of this you are jerry rice and picture Madden, right? Except for you're on just a green pastoral hillside. And you can click a button and you see all the routes that the dogs are going to run. And then you hike and then you throw the ball. I like that the only human is Jerry Rice. I think that's great. There was a Wiimote skin shaped like a dog bone. In case anybody was curious about Jerry Rice and Nidus' dog.

skin shaped like a dog bone in case anybody was curious about jerry rice and nitis's dog hey listen we can say jerry rice and nitis's dog football exactly three more times before i'm going to insist that we make a full episode of the besties because i love saying it so that is fair warning do not let this particular genie out of the bottle and one of the screenshots jerry rice is on full sprint heading towards the end zone and being chased by three dogs and also a cow. Pretty cool. There's a screenshot

where the dogs are lined up in the line of scrimmage and then there's a quarterback behind him, except it's a guy with a guitar on his back and spiky hair and sunglasses. Do you guys remember when they made a football game called Backbreaker in 2010 yes

that was something another kind of fucked up thing looking back on it you should call a game a terrible injury that you can sustain while playing football nfl blitz 2 where you uh you got that mortal kombat x-ray mode where you'd see their bones break and then you would uh pump them full of syringes to give them illegal drugs. Cool stuff. Yeah. Oh, that wasn't called NFL Blitz. Blitz the League. Not licensed. Hey, let's talk about the game that is, like, good good. Like, actually good.

Okay. You have the good good game of the week. Start my timer. Did you start my timer? Okay. Beep. Okay. Here we go.

You've just wasted, like, four of your precious time. We can't play this. No, we definitely know. It's a karaoke track. It's not gonna, it's not gonna pay anything. No, I don't like it. I don't like it. It's a karaoke track.

No. It's a karaoke track, so it won't pay anything. Roger Daltrey is not happy. And it's also, I mean, it's fair use. No. How is it fair use? This is my time. Oh, no. And it takes a while to get the teenage wasteland it takes a while like a good minute and 20 seconds this is my this is my time the name of

the song isn't even teenage waste i know i don't know why it's bob o'reilly but it's not it is not teenage wasteland this isn't bob o'reilly this is a different song that i wrote oh okay hey we're gonna have to cut all of this out and it's pretty accurate karaoke version no version legal fair use i don't agree unless maybe we are critiquing whether this is a good carry on i can't hear it if you keep talking do a parody justin quick do a parody of it so it's fair use yeah please what do a parody so it's fair use is that what you're planning on doing doing like a parody. Justin, quick, do a parody of it so it's fair use. Yeah, please. What? Do a parody so it's fair use.

Is that what you're planning on doing? Doing like a parody, like a weird parody? Well. It's a CRPG. Okay. And that's all right by me. Not one or two, it's three. Talking wasteland

it's got turn-based fights oh wow there's more and the bugs are a fright but i guess that's all right talk in wasteland. Okay, there's just a 28 second there. So you got it, guys. Got it. No, sorry, sorry, sorry. 29 seconds. But we've already used up like three or four of them. Justin, how long did you spend writing this? This is all off the dome.

Three days. I see the vomit on his sweater. Vomit spaghetti. Behave. Don't scum your save. We're only talking Wasteland. So welcome to my segment.

It's called Talking Wasteland. It's so exciting to finally talk about a good video game. And it's Wasteland 3. You have like four minutes now perfect i yeah uh uh i don't have a lot of experience with this franchise which is a fun way to go into it i haven't played the other two so i don't know um but you uh basically post-apocalyptic you are a ranger who's sort of like in this world sort of like a um law enforcement officer that's sort

of working for themselves and something of a mercenary there's other groups of law enforcement that you're uh working with and you're in colorado uh which is i guess a different milieu for the uh for the franchise there's definitely stuff in here that is referencing other wasteland games. I'm not super familiar. I played the second one. Okay, perfect. Um,

well, uh, good, good, uh, good. Um, so you,

uh, basically are building a team of, uh, up to six that you take out into the wasteland with you. Uh, and that's really neat because it's got the typical like crpg stuff of there's checks that you can only pass if you have a certain amount of you know lock picking skill or uh you know weird science is one that lets you like interact with technology

uh and then there's some that are more conversational like hard ass or kiss ass are different stats that you can build up and like negotiate conversations better um and then there's also stats for weapons you know you're you get better at sniper rifles better at small arms like shotguns and pistols whatever um but you have a six-person team which really lets you cover a lot of the bases which makes leveling up a lot less stressful which is something i hate in these games where like i have to choose between being good at fighting and like unlocking stuff that i want to unlock um but you have a six-person team and you really can spread it out so you're kind of you know you have people that are good at different things that really lets you

in combat um it's very cool to be able to set up like okay i'm gonna have my sniper post up over here i've got a combat medic who's like really fast and can get to people quickly um and the more points you put into these different skills like first aid or animal handling or whatever um every other level you also get a perk that gives you unique ability so like if you put lots of points in shotguns which is I think technically small arms put lots of points in shotguns eventually you get a perk that lets you fire like a bleeding round or whatever

which is it's just cool because you have so many people on your team that you can you know really fill it out and feel pretty comprehensive. The other thing that I think is neat about this game is you're making choices constantly and they feel like meaningful. To give you an example, the kind of thing I'm talking about, there's one mission where there's a band of refugees that is trying to get into Colorado City, which was protected from the apocalypse for reasons. And they're trying to get into Colorado City

and they had paid a woman to help them. And this woman had contracted out the work to get the refugees in. And the person they contracted did a bad job. So you go and kill them. And then when you go and talk to the woman who initially hired them, she's really appreciative, but she's also helping refugees. You can give her a pass and say, you know, just keep helping refugees and we're square, which makes the refugees of the wasteland like you more.

Or you can say you're going to jail, which makes the law enforcement people like you more. But the thing that's cool is if you choose to side with her you're also trying to staff up your base your your headquarters you need someone in your garage you need a doctor you need um someone working in your kitchen whatever and so if you help her and say okay i'm not going to rescue she'll send her sons to go work in your garage and then when you go to your garage those are the dudes that those are the characters who are there. And you're like, you chose to sort of be on board with them. So the choices you're making are like really big and meaningful

and you're living with these people. And a lot of times you'll rescue someone as part of a mission. You go back to your HQ and they're like, hey, I want to join up. I want to be part of the squad. And you can look at their skills. Like, are you a good fit for whoever? So really, like the choices you're making feel really big and meaningful and worthwhile.

I think that's one of the biggest complaints that some people have with the new Bethesda RPGs is that although there are moments where you make big choices, generally speaking, you don't feel like you have a lot of options in terms of how like scenarios play out. I think we saw a glimpse of another way with Outer Worlds, which gave you like a few more options to solve some problems. But even that, I think by nature of these games being like fully like 3D, very detailed, it kind of limits the number of variables that you can do just from like a budget standpoint. But by making it an isometric style game that is kind of like pulled out in terms of the

camera, you can do a lot of that in text and it makes it feel the world feel a lot more live. It is not a good or bad kind of thing you're off you're almost always choosing between two like less than savory options lesser evil as the witcher would say okay uh thank you russ value a treasure as always um there's a uh crime family that you can throw in with and they decide that they want to take over this market in the middle of of the wasteland uh and the market is run by guys who they're called the monster army and they all dress up like different hollywood monsters and that's like their gang's thing right uh this bazaar by the way is next to a clown museum which is delicious and you decide like

okay am i gonna help these mafia guys take over this market or am i gonna protect the market and turn tail on and it's like completely changes what the market is the kind of discounts you get the people that are there how they treat you and you are constantly being thrown like interesting story stuff that i want to go do like you'll get your um there is it's there's an open world that you drive through in a vehicle. Uh, you could upgrade the vehicle with like different weapons and speed improvements and improve your chassis and stuff. And that's how you get around to these locations. And then once you go in the locations, you're in the isometric, um, you're, you're,

you're in the isometric view and it you're constantly getting like radio messages like you'll get like distress alerts or mysterious weird signals and then crap happens to you that you have no explanation for there i opened up an apartment and there was an android in there talking in like very weird code and he handed me a briefcase and told me to keep it safe and gave me no explanation as to why or what it is and wouldn't answer any of my questions about it it's weird like the weirdness is off that there's a mission where a woman is complaining about a noisy neighbor in her apartment building you go in and you find that it is full of clones of this scientist who have been making clones of each other to keep

themselves company and the original clone who is actually a fourth generation clone the original side is long dead created a bunch of clones because he was lonely and couldn't make friends and also wasn't great at science because there's been some degradation so these clones try to kill you when you go in when you wipe them out and find this guy he's like i'm sorry i was lonely it was really bad you can then invite him to be the scientist in your hq if you want he's like you're gonna let me be a real scientist okay let's go it is hysterical and like there's a ton of flexibility um i do have to mention the bugs as we alluded to the bugs in the portage uh can be a little rough i didn't experience

a ton of really brutal stuff i will say that i was playing this on both my laptop and my i tried to um install to my desktop uh and play it there and the cloud save synced okay but on my desktop i couldn't um leave locations which is a large uh hurdle to progress unless you want to like live in a certain area i have no idea what that was if it's like a cloud save issue or what i like reinstalled the game and and and everything um and there's a lot of weirdness like that usually more of an annoyance like your party has to be together before you leave an area and you'll click them all and tell them to all go to an area and you'll click them all and tell them to all go to a place and you'll find your other dude like yeah two miles away like come on

stupid i said everybody we're all going justin you took up a lot of time with yourself yeah i need you got a policy i'm done yeah fine well you just betrayed the readers the listeners trust you i said i'm done now you need an apology song because you went like three minutes over so if you could do an apology song. Okay. I talked about wasteland. It's a Paul Simon thing. Oh, that's like a makeup. Yeah, no, that was still more good.

How about we do reader mail? Well, the first one here comes in from Jeff, who's listening live. He said, fucking great song, J-Man. Thanks for putting in the work to make such a special episode I'm sorry the other guys tried to interrupt you Rush do you want to read this email that we got sure

this is an email from Al Giraffra Giraffa no relation I just listened to the latest episode and wanted to share this is the Microsoft Flight Simulator episode wanted to share a wonderful experience I had in Fight Sim. This year I've been doing paramotor training. If you're

unfamiliar, it's essentially paragliding with a motor and a propeller strapped to your back. This is for the readers, for the listeners, do not do this. This sounds very dangerous. And cool. It sounds like a badass thing to do. Yeah. Look really cool and scary. You basically run in the air and fly.

It's amazing. I, let's see. So last week I completed my training and this morning did my first flight totally alone. I'm usually on the phone with the instructor. The flight I had planned took me like eight miles from where I started and it involved navigating via landmarks and terrain. So last night I booted up flight Sim, found the field I was launching from and planned out my flight in the sim.

When I actually flew today, that pre-flight plan actually really helped me pay attention to things so I didn't get lost. It really sold me on the magic of this Flight Sim and will likely plan any cross-country flight I do in the future in the sim. It should be very clear he's not paramotoring across the country.

That seems like a bad idea. Anyway, great show. sure i think i'll stand in your truth if you want a paramotor across the country fucking go for it they did it in pilot wing 64 so it's possible this is some behind the scenes stuff uh from emails to cleo there's two pretty big games dropping friday avengers and tony hawk pro skater one and two remake why weren't any of those games chosen for this week hey i'll let you know we want to be able to play the games alongside of you most of the time uh it's not always super fun when we spoil games for people uh the exact moment they come out they're obviously going to be exceptions for games that are really big, but these aren't those games. They're good games. They could be really promising games. It's also the timing. Friday releases is just weird because the episode comes out on Friday,

so we would need to get it a little bit early and also try to get the time in to actually play it is tough. Like we said, this should be a book club, right? Like, unless it's a massive release, we want it to be something where you get a chance to play it too if you're interested so you can, you know,

feel part of that discussion. Also, we don't have, we don't have, I don't know about y'all. Don't have it. Don't have it. Don't fucking have it.

Don't have it. But no one, no one gives stuff to me and Griffin anymore where nobody's, where's Elch's? Here is from Trenton. Do you think we'll start

to see more classic games being remade over remastered what game most deserves a solid remake what games should never be remade and only enjoyed in its original form uh so i mean i i i i i think we'll continue to see this like blurring of the line between remake and remaster, right? Like we have the new Demon's Souls coming out. That is, I don't, I guess you could call it a remaster, but there's a lot of visual redesign. I mean, they're calling it a remake.

Like it's essentially, it's explicitly not a remaster. Like they're changing a lot of shit. Well, I mean, people are calling all these things different names, but like a remake is, Final Fantasy VII remake feels like a real remake like it is a it is a different game a reboot if you will but is it even that though because then a reboot would be like it's an entirely different story completely it's useless semantics i feel like but what i'm saying is i think i think we'll see more of that i think that this old school idea of, honestly, the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles thing of,

hey, we're going to up the resolution and sell it to you again for $40. I think we'll see less and less of that just by virtue of how stuff like the new Xbox works, where you'll be able to play the game that you already bought and play it with improvements that the that the actual hardware can provide i cannot think of a i cannot think of an edge case like crystal chronicles though of like a remake or remaster that anyone would make that is so uh uh the the original is so built upon like weird hardware like that looking back like crystal Chronicles is a pretty daunting remake because the original used a fucking Game Boy Advance as the controller and trying to like reverse engineer that. I don't,

I can't think of another game that would be, unless somebody did like Eye of Judgment using the eye toy for PlayStation 3, but like now we're going to do it without the thing. E-reader based game. Yes. Yeah. I would love to see, you know,

I think would be fun. I don't, I have no reason to think this would happen, but I'd love to see Bethesda return to some of the earlier Oblivion, or sorry, the earlier Elder Scrolls games that already have like the story and all that stuff is already scoped out, but like update the mechanics to something closer to like a modern thing.

So you could enjoy those games and those stories without being buried under the the unwieldy engine are you talking like oblivion or you're talking about like a dagger fall like earlier dagger fall dagger fall like you know i think once you get to i actually think once you get to oblivion you're you're you're okay but if you go back to like morrowind and daggeraggerfall, some of those, that would be cool too. I haven't played the first couple of those because it's just like, it's a slog mechanically. So it'd be cool to see those updated. But you know what's also hard about this

is a lot of the games that we grew up with or even played in our college years or whatever don't fit the mold of what makes a super successful, profitable game in 2020. I mean, Griffin talked about the hooks of microtransactions that they put in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. I think finding games that have that sort of thing from the early days of gaming

would be tough. That said, let me hit you guys with the biggest idea of the year. Worms Battle Royale. Whoa! That does sound pretty great. Fucking good, isn't it? Worms Battle Royale. I'm almost surprised that it wouldn't exist.

A hundred worms all with their different tools, trying to destroy each other. You do Lemmings Battle Royale. You just got to be the last one in the line and you will win. As far as what game should never be remade and only enjoyed in its original form, any classic PC adventure game. There's no way to make those, I feel like.

I'm thinking about Quest for Glory is where my mind went. I don't think that. I can't imagine a good- Are you crazy? That would be amazing. I don't know, man. The text-based ones are unplayable.

It would be so great to get those with a modern interface, even if they looked exactly the same. Final question for the episode from Jordan. Is the next console generation getting you guys excited at all? I'm getting less excited and upset. There's still no price. So it's funny that the price is the thing that Jordan calls out here

and not the fact that Halo just got shoved. I don't know. I can relate to that. just got shoved i don't know it just seems like i can relate to that because um so the uh this week the new nvidia graphics cards got announced right right um and i think there is something about having a price even though those prices are a lot of money um that makes them feel real um same with what's the low end and high end for those cards for people that don't know the low end is like 400 is that right griffin like 400 499 and then the high end is 1500 cool yes i mean that's the 1500 one though is not it's not for consumers right now it's for it's for yeah you can do 8k

gaming that's the pitch with it. When this generation, our current generation, was announced, I was so excited because it had been so long. And there is something about this iterative generation, which I think is very different from that one. I just, I don't, even with the, like if you talk about the Xbox separately, I don't know what I would play. I would get it and I don't know what i would do with it

like it would come in the mail that first day and be like oh cool i'm gonna plug everything up i don't know what to do with it that is really killing my uh excitement at least with ps4 five you got like what the spider-man thing will be launch window and and some other stuff i ask pc is just so so ahead right now that it's like there the consoles immediately don't feel as special as what's happening when pc gaming and because these new graphics card are coming out you can now get a ray tracing graphics card for less the the used market of graphics card dropped yesterday you could essentially make one of these consoles now as a pc right and so like the question is like what do they do on top of that that makes it special and i think the answer is like they're

exclusive games uh you know uh xbox is gonna have game pass and and ps5 has like a pretty good launch you know window window lineup. But like what's going to be different about it? For me, it's not. I have a pretty high end PC that I just built earlier this year that like is what I do is my road dog. But also like the thing I'm excited about is the Switch because like I play almost everything on the Switch now because it aligns with like what my quarantine sort of lifestyle is. with like what my quarantine sort of lifestyle is. And when the Switch came out, that was a revolutionary sort of thing for me because it sort of perfectly slots into how and where

and when I like to play games. And I'll buy them and I am excited for them and I'm excited to finally get the pitch, which I still feel like they haven't made. Like that's what I'm excited for is the pitch um but it's not it's not that big revolutionary thing for me yeah i'm not saying it won't be it's just like it's it's yeah and it's just you know also a symptom of the weird awful times we're living in now is that like the pitch has been slightly delayed by the global pandemic i get that but yeah i don't know it's weird i also

think the selling point for this and it can't happen until the game is out and uh fans do this because the game company itself will never do it is going to be cyberpunk 2077 um when people make those side-by-side videos of here's what this game looks like running on your original xbox one and here's what it looks like on an xbox series x um and then someone else is like and here's what it looks like on a pc yeah yeah actually i i what what okay this year if you guys had both the boxes right what would you guys be excited to play in in this holiday yeah cyber punk for cyberpunk demon souls if it comes out which that's if i want confirmed i want to get punk assassins creed i'm excited for not like buy a console excited for but it's excited for assassins creed valhalla

um sure yeah that's a good one cyberpunk valhalla spider-man yep astrobot i keep mentioning astrobot but it's gonna be wicked yeah the most exciting game of the year is spelunky 2 and that's not even that's a ps4 game that's true i just yeah i feel i feel i don't know i would be curious to hear from the listeners like and and from you guys like i feel like i am still waiting for i mean honestly i'm waiting for e3 i think is what i'm waiting for like i'm waiting for this week where all of a sudden i get an idea of what the holiday of gaming is gonna look like because right now I feel like I don't really know and it's a weird place to be in as somebody who really likes video games and somebody who you know feels like they have an understanding of the the games industry like I don't know what the fuck I'm gonna be playing in late November here are the games that that that we have ahead of us

the remake of Mafia. Star Wars Squadrons. That was good. A new Crash Bandicoot. The new Dark Pictures game. Then we get into November. There's Watch Dogs. There's Assassin's Creed.

There's Cyberpunk. There's Pikmin. And there's Yakuza. Ooh, actually, I just remembered. M13 and Destiny 2 Beyond Light. Baldur's Gate 3 looks hot as fuck. That's out in September. That's out in just a little bit. I feel better to look at this.

The November is pretty good. November is good. There's a lot of neat stuff looking in November. Call of Duty, Black Ops, Cold War. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, yeah. Anyway, we should wrap it up now. Kingdom Hearts, Melody of Memory.

I mean, obviously. Yeah, we got to put it into this we did we did democracy it worked we did a democratic episode never again next week not so much next week we're gonna talk about Marvel or Tony Hawk or both we're talking we're talking

about but I think I think a lot of people want to know about Tony Hawk and I think a lot of people want to know about Tony Hawk and I think a lot of people want to know about Avengers. Only one way to find out. No, not again. I'm sorry, the people. I've always stood up for your right to choose and celebrated every choice you ever made and never talked about it being a bad idea

to put a two vote. But I'm sorry. So that'll be a fun episode though. If you want to hear it, make sure that you follow and listen for free on Spotify and please encourage someone else to do it. Just give them the link besties.fan and they're going to be enjoying that right away.

You can also email us mail at besties.fan with your thoughts and feelings on these two titles that we'll be discussing at the besties pod is our Twitter account. And it's also where you can find a link to our mailing list you can be the first to find out when our uh special edition jordans are going to be going on sale uh those will be a limited run so you'll definitely want to get some of those uh oh and i got a big update for everybody uh order confirmed uh from ebay my copy of jerry rice and nidus's Dog Football is shipped. So now everybody else can order them.

I'm getting in before that price spikes. Because I know once this episode comes out, that price is going up, up, up. Buy now. Buy now. It's also on Steam. Thank you so much for listening to the besties. Be sure to join us again next week for the besties. But until then... Yeah, I messed it up. Let me do it again.

Shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games besties the besties it's a spotify 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!