The Besties - 3 Besties Are Here 2 Discuss Back 4 Blood

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

We're without Chris Plante this week, but we're not without a surplus of zombie-based video games to discuss, because, wow, there's a LOT of them coming out right now.  Games discussed include: Back 4 Blood, Resident Evil 4 VR, ElecHead, Inscryption, Metroid Dread, Dying Light on Switch, Final Fantasy X on Switch Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I'm about to upload a picture. I had an incredible circumstance happen to me. I need you guys. Are you guys ready? Yeah, sure. It better not just be a... Oh, my God. What the fuck is that?

Oh, shoot, Juice. I said it on the thing. You what? I said it in the Slack. Oh, my God. Okay, so when it opened for me, because it was such a big image, it filled the entire screen,

so I didn't see the description, and all it looks like is, and I'm not not even joking it looks like a vampire bite on your arm guys i was bitten by a wolf spider and it was a wild thing that's the biggest the biggest spider there is yeah that's the life here in the hills russ you've you've grown soft you've forgotten life in the hills growing soft and you're soft i wasn't you're both. You've forgotten life in the hills. Growing soft implies that I wasn't soft before. You're both soft. You've forgotten life in the hills. I literally live in hill country, Texas. Happy Halloween.

I got bitten by a spider. You know what's terrifying about that? Is that it's on your... That's your arm, right? Yeah. It's on your arm, which means it was like at chest height to make that angle. I was reaching in to pull some curtains closed. Oh, God.

And I got owned. You got owned, dude. Curtains in your house? No. No, outside curtains. No. Tree curtains. No, curtains somewhere else.

Okay. I would burn whatever that place was down to the ground. Yeah. It was Embassy Suites in Charleston. That was the first rescue was risky okay you might get in some trouble there fingers crossed that that place doesn't get randomly burned down the next couple days that'd be bad yeah uh but i got bitten by a wolf spider and things are really different for me now sydney says it's uh according to the you know the head shrinkers it's uh non-venomous

but uh you can look at the bite and see that it is pretty serious. Did you see the spider after it bit you? No, I identified the bite by Googling for wolf spider bites, and it looks 100% exactly like that. And I just feel like if you've been bitten by a wolf spider and you haven't gotten the support that you needed from your wife, who's a physician, reach out. Like, we gotta be there for each other this is a very serious thing that happened to us why would you know to google wolf spider bite well i went through

a lot of other more serious spider bites now can you be absolutely certain that dracula hadn't gotten to the wolf spider first and then passed his terrible curse by prop by proxy of the spider vampire spider vampire that's i can't be sure but we've gone along enough okay that he don't die from it. My name is Mr. McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I played a bunch of zombie stuff this week. My name is Russ Rushing, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the Besties.

It's a video game club where we talk about the latest in home interactive entertainment. It's a club, yes, but not an exclusionary one. In fact, if you wish to join, there's no membership dues. You just go ahead and hop on board. if you wish to join there's no membership dues you just go ahead and hop on board come on wait there's no dues you're a member there's no dues that was a big mistake yeah we should

have actually charged for this yeah sure we tried to do some dues for a while and then spotify said no i don't think you should charge any dues you won't be paid any dues for your

exclusive club so this is an exciting episode because we're going to be it's the the scary season is upon us look all around there's spiders as we've we've You won't be paid any news for your exclusive club. So this is an exciting episode because we're going to be, the scary season is upon us. Look all around, there's spiders, as we've covered. There's creepy skeletons, and all kinds of different scary things are happening right now.

And one of the big ones is that Left 4 Dead is back, as Back 4 Blood, a different franchise from a different team. Can I vote for the duration of this podcast and this is not a uh snarky thing uh but that we can refer to this game alternatively as left three dead because it's oh oh boy i like it it is for sure also that definitely 100 okay i'm gonna try to really quick explain what it is and i'm probably not gonna call it left free dead sorry okay uh back for blood they do a free play free to play it'll be left free dead i'm sure it's already in the works back for blood is a zombie shooter

where when you shoot zombies you are not a zombie but you will shoot zombies it's developed by studios that would be a fucking crazy somebody comes up at you with a crowbar like i'm gonna bash your zombie brains in and you're like are you though i'm a gun zombie someday there will be gun zombies uh turtle rock studios made left 4 dead 1 and left 4 dead 2 uh on published by valve and then they fled the coop and uh made a weird asymmetric monster hunting game that i whose name i forget at the moment we forgot last week too it's evolve i remember evolve long thank you and uh and now they have made back for blood which is as griffin alluded to basically the third left for dead game in anything but name but it's got a lot of it's got a lot of new cool clever stuff and some changes from the original sort of format while i'm preserving a lot of what

made those games great so we're going to talk about that in just a second so this franchise how long has this been dormant and when was the last because i sometimes i forget we're talking to like at this point multi-generational gamers on this show. I want to say, okay. So left for dead two came out in 2009. Incredibly. I thought it was far more recent than that.

That is horrifying. So that is 11, 12 years, 2009, a year after left for dead one, uh, uh, which was,

I mean, very much similar to this as a four-person uh it's sort of like zombie movie made into a game i do want to call attention to the fact that two valve published games came out within a year of each other and they were used to do that shit they used to do that yeah games um this is and it is uh unlike a lot of games like this the impetus usually is not on like eradication or racking up sick kills it's much more about getting from a to b and staying alive there have been other games that i think are in in this sort of sub-genre um what's the gtfo was one right that's similar to this um i still don't know what that

stands for but yeah okay uh evolve get the fudge oscar fudge oscar we gotta feed into zombies evolve is one um evolve wasn't really like you weren't fighting hordes in evolve though right no what i'm saying is like this sort of idea right yeah squad based survival co-op centric rather than pvp and now this this game back for blood is i mean as close to being the sequel to left for dead 2 as it i mean it couldn't be more obvious about it yeah it's a folk it's four character four survivors um there are actually i think eight in total but you know when you're playing it's four survivors. There are actually, I think, eight in total. But, you know, when you're playing, it's four survivors. Everyone's a unique character.

They all have, like, cute little backstories and, like, very identifiable characteristics. You are, again, fighting zombies in, like, chapter-segmented levels that kind of culminate in these in these like big act breaks where you're like holding down the fort in like a whatever a bar or something like that there are yeah the core of it is almost exactly the same two two sort of big features i think of left for dead that i i always think of um is the the ai director uh the idea for which was so novel when left for dead first came out in i guess 2008 um where every run you know you're playing through the same set of levels uh they added more through dlc eventually but um you're playing through the same levels over and over again uh but the ai director is a sort of um i mean just what it says on the tin right it's directing the movie

of your run through. And that means that, you know, it drops zombies on you at different points. It changes the number of special zombies that have these like horrible, annoying powers and, you know, changes where the weapons are and what weapons are available to you. So it's always different every time you play. That is definitely in Back 4 Blood in a real cool way way which i'm sure we'll talk about in a bit but also like justin said left for dead one and two had these buck wild set pieces like you have to defend a stage at a festival rock concert uh or you know refuel an airplane on this wrecked tarmac and

you know protect the plane from a horde of zombies which is also back in back for blood yeah i would say too maybe that's the one thing that i think it doesn't necessarily do quite as well as the original left for dead games i feel like they had a lot more fun particularly left for dead 2 with like really really that rock concert uh level i still remember to this day as being one of the dumbest things i've ever played where you can like launch uh fireworks out of these you know flaming lips air cannons from the stage to distract zombies and stuff like that there's definitely some of that dna um in back for blood but uh they i don't know i don't think they had quite as much fun with

the level design stuff they're the ways in which, like, I think sort of updated to match with modern mechanics such as it is. One of the big ones is the introduction of, like, a currency that you can get for, well, one, just sort of lying around the level a lot of times. Sometimes currency is awarded for special conditions, being special conditions in a given run of a level, like getting everybody to the end alive or not sending off alarms or something like that. And then you can use that, that currency that you get to upgrade your weapons, buy new weapons, buy traps, buy healing items, buy just like health, buy ammo, whatever. Um, which is sort of, sort of feels like you would see in like a MOBA or what have you, that sort of idea.

You mentioned the weapon thing, and that was, I think, another pretty significant change, is that weapons now have like a rarity system to them. So as before, if you found like a pump-action shotgun in Left 4 Dead, every pump-action shotgun effectively was the same. Here, you might find the exact same gun, but it'll do more damage or have better accuracy or maybe has attachments on it. So they added some depth to encourage people

to like switch up their guns in ways that they really didn't have a reason to do that before. It's a weird, it hit a little weird for me mainly because they want, they want want because the nature of these they and it's a four-person games they're always playing together they do not want you to get bogged down in like fiddling with your equipment too much right they want you to keep moving quickly but or or you know both in the in between areas where you can buy stuff but also also during the levels. But that makes it kind of annoying because you'll be using a shotgun that has several good attachments on it. Then you'll find a better shotgun, but you don't have the ability to take your attachments off and put them on the new gun.

So it feels bad. It doesn't feel fun and satisfying. It feels like, ugh. I've been collecting all these, you know, I've, I've been collecting all these great attachments, but I can't use them on this new gun. I have to go through that whole rigmarole again, which feels like I understand why they do it.

Cause they want to keep the pace frenetic, but like at the same time, it feels, it feels not particularly well thought through. I am begging, this is an open letter to developers of literally, literally every type of video game. If you're not making like a, you know, perpetual online, like big grindy game,

like a Diablo or a Destiny or an MMO or something along those lines, please stop doing that. Please stop saying, oh, it looks like you found the same exact pistol but it's green so this one's better baby it's so it's so overdone i feel like and it drives me absolutely wild i mean i get it from like a design it's oh they want people to not hold the same gun the whole time so i i get the logic but it is the same it is the same gun right like you're talking about they just change the numbers and they change the numbers it's it is the same gun, right? Like you're talking about. They just changed the fucking color and they changed the numbers. I don't love that because in the original Left 4 Dead, like if you found the kind of gun that you like and it wasn't always a guarantee, like say you really liked the assault rifle or, you know, the pump shotgun. If you found it and that's the weapon that you like and you feel like you're good with, you're like, okay, so I don't, you know, I don't have to sweat that anymore. Like I got the thing that I want.

Because these runs are not the longest thing in the world. And so you don't necessarily get that satisfaction of like, ooh, I found a blue gun. That's a sick find. I would say like doing a full act is probably two to three hours. So it could last a while. I know what you mean. I think part of it is like a hud thing where it just like isn't conveying properly how much more powerful a thing is yeah beyond like a random

number that means nothing um i think the big change here and you know i talked about a little bit with the gun rarity but the biggest change is that they just add a lot of depth to the the systems at large we haven't even talked about the whole cards we gotta talk about the cards because that's i love i love that system because it is it is persistent i i didn't really like click with it so you can explain it to me like a child right so you get i forget what they're called like supply points or something like that for uh finishing levels and fill in finishing acts and it scales depending on like the difficulty and how many of the like sub uh missions like on each level that you get like don't alert any hordes or make it to the end and you know six minutes or something like that and then there is a camp that is like the connective

tissue for all of the game when you finish an act or like you're between acts you go to this camp and the camp has like a firing range and uh uh a boxing ring uh which is pretty fun when you're in there like with a bunch of with a bunch of buddies um but then you can also sort of spend these supply points uh to unlock cards you can also find cards in the level um but they are i in my experience pretty rare i think maybe if you're playing on a high high difficulty they drop a little bit more commonly. But usually you have to spend this persistent currency on it that is different from the gold that you spend on weapons in each act. You unlock those cards with the currency

by buying them in different tracks. It's very weird. It's pretty weird. I feel like there's a better way of distributing the cards than that because like this is the track for fast builds where you just want extra speed and extra endurance and maybe you're uh you know running right up on zombies and bashing them with melee stuff so it has a couple melee perks this is one about ammo conservation and so every card in this track but also on the tracks are like costume pieces and other other stuff you don't really want basically yeah exactly but you have to buy them in

in order right because usually the last card in the track is dope and like enough to define your build the the whole card system i think to me feels like something that will allow this game to be interesting six months down the road for people that like continue to play it hardcore because eventually you get to this point and griffin you had this when we were playing together where you have this great synergy of like a bunch of melee cards in a row so you and you find an axe that's great and suddenly every time you get a melee kill you're regening health or moving slightly faster or getting damage reduction

and like they all stack on top of each other. If you're new, you basically got this very basic set of cards that don't really synergize but are just like easy to understand. Well, let me just as a counter to that, I played the game for a couple hours before I unlocked that card.

So it's not like they hold that stuff off from you for a super long time. I would make a counter argument to that though. As somebody who is, I just, I think that the idea of like introducing rogue, they call it rogue light mechanics or something like this is smart. I feel like the runs go on too long

to make that impactful, right? Like because the run can take, like your first time you play it, like if you're playing on the regular difficulty or whatever, you're going to make it through the first act or so before it gets like kind of overwhelming, or at least that was my experience.

And like, you're not, it's not like you're getting your ass handed to you and then, you know, back to the beginning and then getting a little more powerful, which is like how a roguelite should ideally work you're getting like a pretty long run where you're just playing a pretty decent if not all that throwing i don't know i just i would i wanted these i wanted to be just a little bit more interesting on like the basic uh the gameplay of it and i mean like i

feel like it's not setting the world on fire in a way that you would have expected the sequel to left you're talking about the cards specifically or just the game in general i feel like the cards would be more effective if they were introducing them like when i finished our first run i was like i am done playing this game for now. Like, I wasn't, like, itching to get back in for another run. Sure. And I feel like for a good rogue pacing, the runs can't be so long that you're like, fuck that, I'm never doing that again.

You know? We did wipe out. Itching to go back. We wiped out on the last scene of the final act. And we had one continue. And we beefed it on that one too uh because i think we're still figuring out what we're doing and then we couldn't play we couldn't finish that that that run right we couldn't finish that and we were we were inches

from the finish line and then it was like oh you fucked up bye but you do i think it's some some currency even if you fail yeah purchase more cards but just as right it is a it is a um the time spent in game to cards that you maybe don't even necessarily want but you have to buy them because you're going down the track ratio it it it needs work and i think maybe it could avoid sidestep a lot of that if they again just distributed the cards in a different way right like instead of going down these tracks and spending all of your currency to get the one card that you want at the end of it and a bunch of cosmetic bullshit that you don't want like do do booster packs not like micro

transactional booster packs but like you know then it's fun maybe then you get a card that you didn't know you wanted um that introduces you to a new play style that you're like oh shit i actually really like playing melee that play style thing is the other style that you're like, oh shit, I actually really like playing Melee. That play style thing is the other thing that I feel like the runs being too long interferes with. Like you don't necessarily want, like when I found, if you find a new weapon, the run has been going on for so long,

it does not encourage you to just be like, I don't know, try something new. Like try it, you know, because you don't want to mess it up because it has been such a long, long run. And I feel like that's sort of like getting in the way of the way they want you to be playing it. Yeah. I think the core gameplay is good.

I feel like, again, this is the sort of thing that if someone were to get like really, really hardcore into it, building a deck would be extremely satisfying. I agree with everyone that I think it takes too long to get there. Even just starting you with like four decks, one's like a melee deck, one's like a blah, blah, blah deck,

I think would have been good. And you do have some basic cards from each of those categories, but they really just give you kind of full freedom to build your deck out. And it's very overwhelming when you're really just starting out and have no idea how this stuff is gonna like work together and i think a little bit more hand-holding would have been helpful here yeah it's there's some of that in there right like each of the cleaners i think there's maybe seven of them um has has like set perks that they carry into each one right yeah uh i always played as this one character who had a bunch of like speed upgrades, like he

could break out of a grapple from one of the big boy zombies, like super quickly, once a minute. And he increased the run speed of the whole party by 5%. And he had like 20% more stamina. I really liked playing as him. And then I found that card that made it so that every time I got a melee kill, I healed like four point like a minimal amount of hit points but you kill thousands of zombies each run so i could just post up in front of a window during a horde attack and just hold the melee button and heal up like that's when the game kind of clicked for me that i realized like oh this is this is actually pretty cool like there's actually a lot of different ways to play this game um but i've been playing the game a bit

since since then since i found that build and enjoyed it and it kind of refreshed the experience of the game for me and i i don't know that i've unlocked another card that has been as sort of transformative that i feel like oh this is a whole nother way to play this game uh and that's not saying those cards aren't in the game but again like it's the way that you acquire them and the length of time it takes to even get the currency to acquire them in the bad way that they do distribute them it kind of kind of uh it takes the wind out of my sails quite a bit um yeah what i think is a great game like i think it's the gunplay is pretty fun and running away from zombies and trying to do all the different objectives is

like great um this is how i would i think is like the perfect wheelhouse for this game is and it's on game pass so if you you and maybe a couple other friends all have game pass spending two to three hours on a friday night online playing this game is pretty spectacular just because it's so easy to just like jump in and start shooting zombies and having fun like there's very little barrier to that specific thing and i also and i think that's like a rarity but i would also call out the fact that this game supports full cross-platform play and that is like one of the smoothest cross-platform experiences i've had in a very long time where i was playing on xbox these guys were playing on pc and we were able to get in the same lobby with like no delay whatsoever so like that's great like i really desperately keep you know we've seen in a

few games just want to keep seeing that level of accessibility in terms of like platform stuff it's great have you guys gotten the sense that i have that this is like do you think this is going to be a long-term thing like do you feel do you feel like like there's going to be a scene for this i i this game in particular yeah for sure yeah precisely um uh it's so hard to say right i can only speak to sort of my personal experience which is that i haven't picked up the game in uh you know almost a week or so like i don't have much drive to keep playing that said like i love this genre and there's not a lot of games that fill this like specific kind of niche um but it might just it honestly my my life in 2008 and 2009

is drastically different from my life in 2021 and so like i don't necessarily have the kind of schedule where i can um you know it's tough to get all of us together at the same time to record a podcast so the idea of all of us sort of uh taking time off from you know baby stuff or whatever uh really fun playing together though it was but there's all that's so hard though because like almost anything would be fun if i was playing yeah but i don't i think this game in particular is much more friendly for like oh we haven't played this at all and we can jump into a game whereas like we couldn't play destiny together like yeah because we're all different yeah not only that like just the prep of like getting into the lobby and what mission are we gonna do and blah blah blah like whereas this you can be

up and running it is seen it is really it is to back up russ's point it's fucking incredible like how easy it is to just you all pop into the same camp and manage your shit and go into the mission um yeah i don't know that it's fair to say that like any game multiplayer would be fun because again there aren't a ton of games like this co-op uh run based like zombie shooter uh that exists and this feels like you're having people over to your house to play like same you know it doesn't support split screen but like that's the vibe that it gives off and there just aren't that many four-player co-op centric games like that there's also pvp stuff which i wasn't able to test out so like it's okay it's not great um uh also in the old games you there was a uh zombie type called the witch.

If you got too close to her or shot her or something, she would scream and alert the biggest, gnarliest horde. And in this game, there's flocks of birds. And just trolling your teammates by just running through the flock of birds like a delighted toddler is still really fun. It's still pretty funny to say clean up my fucking mess boys it is funny that they downgraded from witch to flock of birds some birds yeah um i kind of want to play with you guys after we're done recording yeah it's like it's like we itch about for it um the so anyway that's uh back for blood uh we were we i we were pretty critical of it i feel like like, in that talk,

which I don't know necessarily... I think it's a good game. I think if you enjoyed the old games, you will love this one. But this is what's frustrating with games like this, is that I loved the old games, I love this genre, and this one just makes a couple choices that I feel like if they were different, it would cement it as a game I would keep returning to.

Yeah, I think a more pared-down version of this game would be even better even though this game is super good yeah i feel like also if you've got a regular crew of people that you're playing with like it probably changes the math definitely it's sort of like what steven was talking about last week with with far cry 6 like if you've got a regular gaming night with people like i feel like this is a very good way of spending it yeah um we are going to come right back and talk about other games that are really going to scare you. Just the scariest stuff. And you're going to wet your pants.

Yeah. So go get some new pants and we'll be back after this. I mean, you should bring the podcast with you because we are going to do a very important advertisement. But get new pants while you're here. You get it. Can I talk about another zombie game that's very near near and dear to my to my heart and my brain stubs the

stubs is back stubs is uh he never left uh no it's actually voodoo vood what. Voodoo Vince is back. What was the one with John C. McGinley where he was a detective? It was a, I think it was a PSP game. Whoa. That was not Stubbs' honest? Deadhead Fred. Oh, yeah. Fantastic. Remember that detective who was a brain in a jar with a trench coat?

Man, that was cool. Wow. That was cool. I know, right? I haven't thought about it for a little bit either. So which of those are you talking about, Griffin? uh i'm talking about resident evil 4 which where did that where did that was that the runner up in our big resident evil uh tournament of that is correct it lost to resident evil village much to my chagrin i still think it should have won yeah

and the argument was well it hasn't been updated in a while maybe when the vr version comes out people think differently unfortunately plant is still traveling he was the one that was fighting argument was well it hasn't been updated in a while maybe when the vr version comes out people think differently unfortunately plant is still traveling he was the one that was fighting against resident evil 4 maybe the hardest yeah well here's the thing okay has anybody else played resident evil 4 vr i don't know who has i do not have a quest 2 at the moment so no does it not work on quest one quest two okay um it's phenomenal it is so good it is good uh in uh on like the resident evil 4 level where not every version of resident evil 4 is great um like like chris's experience like i recently tried to play through resident evil 4 on the switch and it was a total fucking snooze fest really yeah and i don't know that I've ever beaten Resident Evil 4

in that sort of format. The one that I loved, and I think I talked about this on that episode, was Resident Evil 4 on the Wii, right? Because you had manual aiming. You could, you know, look around much easier. It was just much easier to fight in that game. Much easier to shoot and aim your shots.

And Resident Evil vr definitely falls into that that ladder camp but it also like it's not just the wii version where you're basically just using a controller that you can aim with it is you know fully immersive vr stuff uh and man alive it is it is it is a hoot uh the biggest like the biggest praise i can give it is that in resident evil 4 when you're playing it in just like the normal version whenever you walk into like a big you know uh fortress or whatever and you look around and there's a hundred zombies all over that is not a fun thing because you're like oh fuck i'm gonna have to very slowly and methodically shoot each one of these guys in the head, walk up to them, kick them to the ground and slice them with my knife to conserve ammo. That's going to be so that's going to take so long and it's so boring.

In Resident Evil 4 VR, all that shit feels really good and it's really, really fun. And, you know, that's the classic strategy in Resident Evil 4, right? Ammo is limited so you can stun a zombie, kick it to the ground and cut it with your knife until it dies and you only that's the classic strategy in resident evil 4 right ammo's limited so you can stun a zombie kick it to the ground and cut it with your knife until it dies and you only used one bullet uh in vr you can do that strategy um but other zombies are still going to be coming up on you and it's kind of harder to like just have them in your periphery so i would be like a a serial killer just like slashing a zombie on the ground that i just stunned while looking over my shoulders in both directions not even looking at the zombie i'm dispatching so

i can keep an eye on my you know on my sidelines to make sure nobody's creeping up uh it is it's not scary necessarily it's the tension is like always at maximum i feel like whenever you are fighting zombies and i think that was the case with resident evil 4 originally it's like i mean it was a little scary at the beginning when you had very little resources yeah but very quickly it turns into like a thriller as more than like a horror game yeah because you've got a shotgun and various other weapons yeah and and there's so much about resident evil 4 that is great right like it's got these treasures that you have to hunt down which was gone until resident evil 8 uh because you have like you know the the merchant uh that you can sell those treasures to

to uh buy and upgrade these incredibly powerful weapons if you've got i gotta know when you met the merchant for the first time how took how close up in that grill did you get oh I got right up in it like there's there's I forgot they introduce him like through a cut scene you like see him creepily walking by a window and Leon's like who was that and I was like that's the merchant dog he's got he's got a lot of great things for sale stranger uh yeah that's that that part is great and it's also just like a it is a buck wild game like plot and tone wise uh and just yeah they did make some changes to the dialogue i know from this was gross standpoint so that's great yeah you're not necessarily uh

being completely lecherous about the president's daughter that you're supposed to be rescuing uh every other scene uh yeah it's it's just it's just a trip i can't i can't remember the last time that a vr game came out i think it's probably that lone echo game that was so great where you're like a robot pushing yourself around a space station i remember i played that over the course of like a couple nights and it gave me the worst headache uh and i'm hitting that point again with resident evil 4 because like i i have a lot of games that i could be playing right now but i can't like if i'm in my office and i have some time to kill i will throw the quest on and and play resident evil 4 because it's just it's so much fun so the last vr significant vr game that we played on the podcast if i recall was half-life alex which was a game that you really

did not like no i absolutely loved half-life alex although i do agree that it took a little while to like get to that point yeah um why where do you see is like the significant difference between these two experiences where resident evil like clicks for you and that didn't it's funny right because half-life alex is a much more modern game than yeah resident evil 4 by by the span of like i don't know 15 years i don't know when resident evil 4 came out um but i never felt like i was having much fun in half-life alex and part of that was just sort of you know the how the combat worked and felt and level design stuff. I think that this is so counterintuitive, right?

Half-Life Alyx has so much stuff that was integral to its design that it was in virtual reality. A lot of like, pick up this key and throw this thing and look at all these physical interactions. And that stuff is definitely novel. And it's certainly the only kind of stuff that you can do in virtual reality.

But I didn't think it was that fun. Resident Evil 4 doesn't have a lot of that stuff. Like your inventory management is kind of cool because like you have your holster at your hip that has your one handed weapon in it. You have a holster over your shoulder for like the shotgun or the rifle to go into you have a grenade on the right side of your chest you have your knife on the left side of your chest your left shoulder has whatever healing item you have equipped in there so like all of that is pretty cool also whenever you take uh phone calls from your handler uh hunnigan i think is her name uh you have to like actually pull out your phone and

tap on the screen to like move through the dialogue. But all that stuff is appended to the game that was already there. Yeah, you can't go into the pig pen and pick up pig shit and throw it at a zombie. Right, exactly. Which would be like an Alex thing. It would be an Alex thing, right? Those physical VR interactions. But Resident Evil 4 already was a great game that felt really you know in certain versions like fun to play like wild design a compelling sort of like progression thing uh and it was just a lot of

fun right and so the vr stuff on top of that is oh i see the necessary changes you made to this to make it sort of you know not just be a regular video game that you looked at in first person in vr like there's there's some cool additions here but those cool additions are on top of a great game and i don't know that that was true of alex where they weren't appended on they were like that they were the core of the game and it it felt yeah i still think uh alex is worth going back to griffin i know how you felt early on but i i do earnestly think it is pretty spectacular it just might take a little bit to get there i do want to ask about resident evil is the briefcase still in it yeah yeah the briefcase

is still in it uh you manage that stuff in in there's no sort button there's certain things that like i feel like when you remake a game if you anything, there will always be people who get pissed off. Even if that thing is like, hey, we took out the part where you look up the president's daughter's skirt or whatever. People are like, no! No, I love that! The integrity! That's how I met my wife! Wait, what?

Excuse me? But damn, a sort button would be so choice in that briefcase. Are you physically picking up an egg and putting it in the briefcase you are one cool thing i don't remember if this was in the original version or not is like you know guns are different sizes they take up certain yeah uh you know this is a two by four shape that you have to plop into this grid uh you pick up the gun you can actually rotate it so you can have it be vertical or horizontal however you need it which does make inventory management yeah i think that wasn't the original.

Was it? Okay. I didn't know that that was a thing in this VR version until I picked up a gun and sort of idly laid it down by my side and I was like, oh shit, I can- I want to play a whole game that's just that. That sounds fucking incredible.

What, yeah, rifle Tetris? Sword and luggage. Yeah. I cannot vouch for it enough. It's a weird kind of game i feel like to think of as a goatee contender or at least like a top top fiver but uh i can't remember the last time a game has grabbed me this much vr or not like especially this year um yeah given that it's fantastic given that it's cap, I got to imagine that it will probably have some sort of time to exclusivity

and eventually come to other VR platforms. Obviously people with like really beefy rigs, I'm sure would like to just play it on their desktop with like a Vive or something. Is there a wireless Vive? Because I will say that like being able to play it natively on the quest no you know link cable or whatever to your to your pc uh is is sick like it's it's it is as

everything is on a wireless vr headset compared to a wired one like it's so great yeah it's so good i'm not sure but i but i do know even the oculus these days is uh the quest 2 specifically supports wireless link oh really it's supposed to be pretty good so like there yeah i think there are a lot of like good opportunities that i hope won't just limit this to one platform i also i mean let me just close this by asking like the quest 2 is obviously better than the quest 1 but not like a graphical powerhouse yeah did you find it to look a little rough or no no i think it looks excellent but again i'm comparing it to resident evil 4 no sure a billion year old game um no it looks great

right like your your the textures of your uh you know weapons and hands and you know faces and cut scenes like all that is close up enough that like it looks great uh it is still you know you look out at the billboarded like 500 pixel uh trees in the background it's like well that's that's that's not good that's not great but um i think the stuff that needs to look good looks looks pretty good uh anything else what else have you guys been been playing i've been playing a bunch of stuff on the I got the OLED switch and I'm like I really like it by the way

I don't regret that that purchasing decision and I've it's kind of like reinvigorated me to go back and play really big stuff it's that screen is nice and big I like that well the whole thing is a it's really big I was playing I'm coming from a light well yeah if you're coming from a light it's very big I'll say do you not like that. Well, the whole thing is a – it's really big. I was playing – I'm coming from a light.

Well, yeah, if you're coming from a light. It's very big. Do you not like that? Is the bigness throwing it off for you? I really – it's so weird. Like, I really – I mean, the screen looks better. I thought I had preferred the form factor of the light, and the weight of the light was much easier on my carpal tunnel syndrome right but the i will say the gripping it the holding it especially with those what did you call it russ that you recommended yeah yeah using that like it really has made it more comfortable for

for long term yeah um so i they just actually ported dying light to the switch which is a game i never played another zombie game another zombie game yeah and i weirdly it's a game that has like a still to this day a die hard fan base around it which i don't i didn't really understand because it just kind of seemed like a mindless like zombie killing open world game um and it is there's there's fun parkour stuff and uh other great stuff to do in the game but it is it is kind of that uh but this switchboard is great it's really great and it's really cool to see a developer bring a game over to switch with the kind of like attention that techland did and not make it a i feel like the go-to port now for the switch is a cloud-based solution for larger games and they're doing that

for the sequel for dying light 2 okay yeah well i mean it's the the cloud stuff i will say is is pretty good i played through a lot of control uh the cloud version, and it was fine. But there is a latency there that a native game just doesn't have. And Dying Light, it definitely doesn't look great. And it runs at, I think, at a variable like 30 to like 40 frames per second. It's not bad. It's not bad, right? It could be much, much worse.

But I'm actually enjoying it. I'm having a lot of fun, you know, exploring the city and finding all these safe houses. And it's very tense at night when like the big bad zombies come out and chase you and kill you over and over and over again. Another one that I've been playing on switch uh on the oled is final fantasy 10 which is i think the only mainline final fantasy game i have not finished um i've actually this year sort of been going through a couple of final fantasy games that i um had never really some of them i've never even played before like final fantasy 2 um, I think, is the last one. And I don't love it still, but there's a sort of stubbornness, I feel like, where I have to complete. I have to catch them all, so to speak.

Yeah. But it looks good on this big screen. Hey, Griffin, guess what? What? You don't. You don't have to catch them all. You don't. I pray.

I pardon you. But the problem is I'm already I pray, I pardon you. But the problem is I'm already like eight hours in and that's like just enough time where I feel like if I walk away from it now, I'm a fan of the song. Yeah, it's probably gonna be over

in like two hours, right? Something like that. I wanna talk about a game called Elec Head. That's spelled L-E-L-E-C Head. It is a puzzle platformer you are a robot and the whole game uh centers around the fact that you are filled with electricity so every platform that you stand on will basically get filled with electricity that doesn't hurt you but it does cause things to happen in the world so um you know if you're standing on a

platform and it's connected to a moving platform for example having it electrified will cause the moving platform to move it is extremely simple at its core um even the graphics are like very simple 2d pixel graphics but the design at work for how these puzzles sort of operate is like super clever and fantastic i'm gonna really struggle like selling this game it reminds me of uh the person who made it regardless but braid when it came out obviously was like a very in very interesting puzzle platformer in the way that it like caused you to solve puzzles it feels like that in the way that you don't have a lot of tools at your disposal but you have to use them in a very clever way and um it's i've just been like totally smitten by it it's on steam it's probably

on itch.io for 10 bucks it's like a very relatively short a couple hour long puzzle platforming game, but I've just been totally taken by it. Though like minimalism is really cool. Even on the Steam page, I just noticed this, that Steam description for Olekhead is a lightning emoji plus a robot emoji plus a puzzle piece emoji. And that's it. There's no other description on the page. It's just a really, really well-made, dope game. I've been hearing about it on Twitter for a few days. I think I initially heard about it from Patrick Klepek on Twitter.

So I tried it out, and I was just totally taken by it. It's by, the developer's name is Nama Takahashi. And wow, it is just like super, super good. That sounds very fun. Yeah, it's awesome. Juice? I have been playing, it's called, it's Inscription? Yes, it was mentioned last week.

Yes, and it's by Steven. I picked it up as a result of his recommendation, and I'm going to bully you all into playing it. That's already started, by the way. Don't make it sound like you haven't already been bullying us. Yeah, I'm going to continue the bullying campaign to get you to play it. And I just want to tell you, if you're listening, we're going to be talking about it next week. So go play it. you like uh deck building games or escape rooms or just dark gothic stuff or mystery or good stuff

yeah yeah play it uh inscription with a y i n s c r y p t i o n just trust me on this one we're gonna we'll talk about it more next week but like please check it's from the crater pony island if you ever played played that one um anyway but please i insist uh i just also real quick wanted to say um that i finished metroid dread yay um and whips ass like that game rules like it's fun the whole way like even the last boss battle with with all my rockets and all my fucking life bars and all the collectibles i'd gotten was still balanced in such a way that it took me a few tries several tries to to finish it to finish it out it was just like so thrilling and i loved it and it was so cool and it doesn't overstay its welcome and it's just like really really good and i and playing it on the oled

switch is like night and day it's really i mean it's a massive massive difference um yeah because you played it on an lcd first right yeah i played it on the on the light yeah I was never able to compare the two directly like that. But yeah, I'm sure it is pretty dramatic. Yeah. And yeah, I was able to dock it towards the end to play with the Pro Controller. I haven't docked my light

basically ever. Well, you can. Obviously. This is what I'm saying. I haven't done that. So I meant I've been playing with the light for so long that I haven't been able to dock it. I forgot like, you know, it's pretty good. It doesn't look bad. Yeah, it looks better on the OLED though. Yeah, for sure.

But those are both very good games. Cool. Plant? What about you, bud? Plant? Plant? I recommend the Criterion Collection. Now which movie exactly? The the whole all of them okay you heard it here first very good all of them uh i wanted to thank the following

people for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcast uh thanks to izzy slp dub lemons shaku uh a foreign flower and oh, New York Giraffe Fan. I'll let him know. Did you make that one for us? I was a sad, sad sick person. I'm living a very sad life. One of these days I feel like I'm going to get goofed into saying a name that's like scratch my butt or something like that. Yeah, sure.

So games that we talked about this week include Left 4 Dead Left 4 Dead 2 Back 4 Blood, Resident Evil 4 VR, Elec Head that was the puzzle platformer deal Metroid Dread, a gothic card horror game called Inscription Dying Light on the Switch and

Final Fantasy 10 on the Switch if you want to play any of those go for it, next week we're going to be talking about Guardians of the Galaxy and Inscription and maybe Riders Republic. And so, you know, check those out. Guardians of the Galaxy

will surprise you, my friends. I don't know about you guys, but my expectations could not have been lower for Guardians of the Galaxy. Every single signal it was sending out was like visible snake lines and i don't know why they're so embarrassed it's pretty good uh we'll talk about that next week cool yeah you gotta end it

i gotta end it too huh god it's exhausting being me to do all those things together. Hey, thanks so much for listening. We'll be back with you again next week for the besties. Until then, be sure to join us again next week because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!