The Besties - Begun These Pre-Order Wars Have (also Spelunky 2 is good)

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

The gang reviews the sequel to the 2008 original, Spelunky 2. Discuss the recent pre-order madness. Explore Microsoft’s acquisition of game publisher Bethesda Softworks for $7.5 billion. And check in on the state of the console wars. 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!

Russ, welcome back from vacation. I love the Hawaiian shirt. I love the very deep tan. And you've handed me a card here that says I'm supposed to refer to you only as D.A. Wildman. Sorry, Da Wildman. What happened to you? You know, I sort of found myself in the wilds of America. There's a song by Paul Simon called America. You can call me out. Yes. You can call me out.

I basically, you know, rode around on a bus and just experienced the world. How is it out there? Yeah, how's it going? You know, it might surprise you, but things are not great. That being said, I had a lot of fun.

You know, just, I have... Russ? Russ? Russ? What people can't see is Russ was shaking as he was describing this trying to remember his vacation until he slowly just collapsed yeah should rush should uh hitchhike across america

so he could set a record for getting mugged like he will have imagine russ just like thumbing his way across america he'll come back he'll have have seen every nondescript ditch in this great country of ours as he's repeatedly mugged. The most muggable man in America, Russ Rushing. Sorry, did you say huggable? No, sorry. It broke up. Muggable because of his frame.

Very muggable. You look at me, that's dead weight. You don't want that. He's gonna lie on the ground like a toddler. He's not going anywhere. Russ, you can put him in your trunk. What do you got? Hey, I think Russ could really whip my ass.

In physical combat, are you hearing this, Russ? I thought you were gonna qualify it. Nah, man man no qualifiers necessary wow i think you got reach let's do a combat ranking of the podcast okay yes yes i am below russ that's all i know that's all i know chris and justin y'all slot in wherever y'all want but i am below russ for sure i do kicks i do do kicks so it's worth factoring that in when we're ranking spindly kicking legs we're fucked guys i think russ is on top i know what i said earlier but russ has the incredible power of child free sleep and i have not experienced that for so

many years that i've atrophied i don't feel like I can experience that level of the level of joy and contentment Russ has in his life. I am basically a member of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the year. My name is Russ Frederick and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Bresnik and I know the best game of the week. Hello and welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home computer entertainment.

I thought we were going to talk about Spelunky 2, but judging from Chris Plant's intro, we're talking about Girftlands. Finally, the episode everybody's been waiting for. No, we're talking about Spelunky 2. Follow up to Spelunky 1 that came out 17 years ago on vinyl. And now Spelunky 2 is here. You know those punch cards they use to send someone to space? That's what they program Spelunky 1 on. Right.

Here's a summary. Spelunky 2 is a roguelike, which're basically Indiana Jones and you are going through a 2D environment of caves moving ever downwards using bombs and ropes and jetpacks and anything else that you can find to eventually reach the end an incredibly simple

game until you actually start playing it and you die and you die and you die and you discover that it is filled with secrets which we are not going to spoil too many of after the break spie long key two let's be perfectly frank the thing i think most of us are interested let me be frank let's not ever conjure that particular specter again uh justin has been such a detractor of the entire sort of Spelunky franchise. I don't think that's fair.

I think it's incredible. I feel like I've always been very honest about the fact that it is my own personal taste, not a fault of Spelunky. Sure. What did you call it last, did you say Spethunky? You had some very charming way of,

anyway, you've had a very recent sort of reversal of a change of heart, a Grinch-like embiggening of your heart with regards to Spelunky 2. And I am very excited to hear how that came to pass. Maybe this is a useful jumping off point. I don't know. I knew that we were going to talk about on

this episode and i thought well the energy of me just being like i don't get it won't be very fun so i thought okay i have a week i'm just gonna sit down and like try to force myself into liking this game because i'm someone who okay as somebody as a quote-unquote, uh, my gaming, uh, persona is I like to be progressing. I like a narrative being told to me. I like to be progressing and feel like I'm advancing in whatever I'm doing. And the problem, the,

the thing that I had with Spelunky, the problem that I had was I didn't feel like I was making any progress. It just felt like I was spinning my wheels constantly. And even when I would get a little bit farther than normal, I felt like I'm just, you know, it was luck, whatever. I'm not actually progressing because then I'd be back to the beginning. And what I decided to do was,

and this was really the change of heart that I had that kind of unlocked the series for me and then locked my enjoyment of it. You die a lot in Spelunky 2. There's times when you die almost instantly. I mean, literally, not a joke. Sometimes the first thing you jump off of, there'll be a spike trap there. You jump off, the spike hits you. That's half your life.

You might as well restart. I had a four-second run in Spelunky. That's half your life. You might as well restart. I had a four second run. I looked at the clock. It was amazing. I jumped down. I got punched by one of those fists and landed in a pit of spikes. Four seconds. It was amazing.

The way I changed my brain that actually unlocked this series for me is I made the decision to stop giving a shit about how far I made it in, in the game. I stopped caring about how far I progressed. And I, instead, um, my, my kid is,

uh, uh, in virtual school and she's in the same room, you know, with me. So when, when she would get off of class and have a break, she would sometimes come and sit and watch me play.

And we just started, like I decided one, I was just going to have fun and enjoy it every time. And I was going to treat it always as a learning exercise more than a progression exercise. I stopped caring about what was progressing and started thinking more about what I was learning. Right. And when I did that, all of a sudden, I was advancing with every run. Because I was thinking about like, okay, well, I died almost instantly that time. But I did learn that if, I'll give like a bizarre example.

Like if I throw an arrow and it hits somebody and then falls back down to the ground, it hits me and I could die. So that's something I need to be careful of. Or even something simple like those spike traps, they leave their arrows behind and I'll pick up the arrow that it dropped and I can use that as a weapon. Or to make it even, like I used to get really hung up on items. There's items in the levels where you're collecting gold as you go, you get the gold and you can use that to buy items. That always was such a freezing point for me in previous Spelunky games or the previous Spelunky,

because I was like, I don't know what, I don't know how to min max this. I don't know what's going to be giving the best results. I don't know what the most powerful thing is. I don't know what, but't know how to min max this i don't know what's going to be giving the best results i don't know what the most powerful thing is i don't know what but when i switch to well i don't know i haven't used that i'm going to pick that up and see what it does and when i made that flip all of a sudden it it really became a lot more pleasurable because then it was not like oh man i had 10 000 gold and i was doing really well and then I wasted it on this pitcher's mitt that

didn't help me get any farther the teleport there's almost no such thing as like a quote great run in spelunky which is to say like as you get very very very good you might like end up with like a shitload of items but that happens like dozens and dozens and dozens of hours in. Every run before that, you might feel like you're having a great run, but in truth, every single run can end in a split second. So you don't, you shouldn't feel like, oh, I was unlucky. I would have made it had I, you know,

been a little bit luckier. You wouldn't have, you would have died. But what you did learn to Justin's point was every single item that you got't have you would have died but what you did learn to justin's point was every single item that you got and you know oh i know that sticky bombs are super useful for taking out the giant uh spiders for example like that stuff carries over there's your progression and the progression is invisible because it's your fucking brain i just as an interesting like side note to that so plant and i were playing on PC, which is coming out in a couple weeks,

but we were playing an early build before launch. And halfway through that, I found out that there was an updated build, and the devs told me, hey, just a heads up, if you update this build, it'll wipe all your save progress. And I did it.

I had a dozen hours into the game, and I did it because it did not matter because I was immediately able to get back to the point that I was just before, even with no save progress whatsoever, because you cannot wipe my brain. It's amazing. That's the cool effect. And when I really started to like get into a groove with it is it gave me that feeling of as you learn these things and you do them enough times, eventually it gets filed into that when I really started to like get into a groove with it is it gave me that feeling of, as you learn these things and you do them enough times,

eventually it gets filed into like subroutines of my brain that aren't conscious anymore. And then it's very cool. Cause it starts to feel like the reference point I was having popular culture is the bit in princess bride after they've learned how to navigate the fire swamp and they understand if they hear a popping noise like and they're just easily managed their way through it dark souls does this too right you play a section enough times eventually you're like okay stab that guy turn around kill that person and and and spelunky got to that point where i wasn't thinking

oh there might be a spike trap around there i was just in my periphery like keeping an eye out and thinking about it and not really consciously looking out for it to where that stuff didn't like get me as much. Cause I knew, I mean, I, I had forced myself into learning this stuff. Yeah. So this is a tip for people who are playing for the first time. And I honestly, I played swanky for so long that I ignored it until I reinstalled the game again last night doing similar to like what Fresh just said. So I had to replay through the beginning of the game. And what happens your first time through is anytime you kill a new enemy or pick up literally

any object, a little notebook appears letting you know it's been filed to the notebook and like what the object is. And that cue, I think, is a good moment if you're playing for the first time to like take a breath and be like, okay, what did I actually just learn from that? The instinct is just, you know, blast through and just pick up a whole bunch of objects.

And, you know, you pick up a rock and you think, well, it's a rock. Like, I guess I use it to hit people. Obviously, a rock can do a lot more in this game than just hit people. It can set off, it can trigger traps, it can do a lot more in this game than just hit people it can set off it can trigger traps and it can do a variety of things and i think that i i found really useful because i made that mistake honestly going through spelunky 2 the first time i i talked to fresh about this um

while i was doing my review is you assume because you're good at Spelunky 1 that you understand Spelunky 2. And the reality is you do not. You have to relearn a whole lot of things. I mean, reading is the perfect metaphor for this game. That is what you are doing. You're learning to read the screen very quickly. And if you do not take the time to actually learn to read and continue to play it as if it were like Mario,

you'll hate the game i mean it it will punish you that's a really important distinction the other thing that unlocked this for me is i all the my main biggest thing that i couldn't get past the first time i played plunky is it feels really bad to whip and jump with your whip and whip at stuff it just doesn't for me whatever it is it just didn't feel right every time that i would like see a bat coming at me i would jump at the bat and try to whip him and then i would get hit almost every time right what i the the thing that i start i changed on this is like on this run that finally helped me with that is I stopped thinking about it as an action game or a platformer even and started to think about whip as part of a puzzle vocabulary versus my main tool for navigating this environment, right? navigating this environment right yeah if i'm ready for the bat when he's if i navigate myself to a point where the bat only has one course yeah and that's to fly straight at me then i'm going to

whip him every time if i'm flying at him and jumping at him i'm i there's a very good chance i could get the timing wrong because that's not like i haven't set up perfectly for that encounter right and that is the thing you can't just charge your way through and whip it everything that comes at you it's it's it's gotta be more deliberate i feel like i i we have talked a lot about what makes spelunky tick uh and i think that all of those things are better in spelunky 2 even than they were in spelunky 1 and spelunky 1 is like you know pretty close to a perfect game in like what it did. All of these things that we're talking about, it was so like single-mindedly focused on achieving those really very rare sort of game design ideas.

And it did all of those things like just as it wanted to do it, which is a very, very difficult thing for video games to do. And Spelunky 2 is a lot more ambitious and frankly, just like a lot more feature rich. There is, it's bigger in terms of like levels and it is a lot more sort of, it's not uniform necessarily the way that the levels work. There are, again, like we don't want to spoil everything

because the joy of this game is discovering things, but there's like branching paths as you explore through the world. And some, you know, it goes through that Mario, Super Mario Brothers like level numbering system of like one, one, one, two, one, three, one, four. But then like you'll reach an area that's not, that is not four stages in a row.

And you kind of have to like learn where that slots into your run. It has fluid dynamics and that's a very, very important system for certain levels where the fluid, if you touch it, you die instantly, which is probably the wildest thing about Spelunky 2 and maybe the thing that I'm not clicking with

is that that adds a kind of having a fluid physics system in the game kind of betrays the precision having this element of it's chaotic and an inherently not chaotic I mean it's chaotic in that like a bunch of shit can go wrong very fast but it follows

a system of rules that are learnable and dependable and having like you know a blob of of lava fall on you because it happened to roll off a certain surface some way is like oh shit okay so so i want to talk about that specifically because that's like i think really ties into the core of spelunky is a lot you know you're talking about lava specifically like uh lava was in the last game but here it will like ooze around corners and like if you blow up the floor of a bunch of lava it'll obviously

fall and pool in different places and that is kind of the epitome of like spelunky stuff where like sure absolutely occasionally you will die and there was nothing you could have done to stop it but i would say that's like one in maybe 30 times the other times the way i play like through lava levels now i'll see it and i'll be like oh i treat that the same way i would like a spike pit or uh you know a we of like a difficult enemy where i know like hey if something blows up near there god knows what's gonna happen below that lava when it falls but it's not gonna going to be good. So I got to avoid that whatever possible. And there are times when it happens and there's nothing I can do to stop it. And then you just have to maneuver around that. And again, that is Spelunky is like dealing with situations as

they're presented to you. Yeah, the way I had a similar beef with the lava at the beginning, I've come to appreciate it it it makes you think about what's above you versus what's below you and i think that is like the big change that it brings to splunky i think usually in splunky it's okay i'm working my way down i need to constantly be seeing what's underneath me i need to prepare for it um where the lava levels if you if a bomb goes off or there's a shortcut that you can trigger that can really cause some mayhem lava um you're gonna have to live with that and what i the shortcut for example i quickly realized like that's just not my goal for these runs like i'm

not going to set that thing off because like i am that is so far more advanced than it's i mean it's not a shortcut it's an extension it's so far more advanced than it's i mean it's not a shortcut it's an extension it's so far more advanced than like what my goal is and i think that is the other thing that you have to remember and i think it honestly it gets to what you were talking about justin of like having a purpose when you play this game going into each run and saying like this is my goal my goal is that i'm going to figure out what this one secret thing does, or my goal is I'm going to try to get a shotgun and a jetpack, and I'm going to try to get to the end of the main version of the game. There are multiple endings. I think when I start playing

like that is when I enjoy the game the most, but when I try to like make every run into a little bit of everything is when i end up like dying in some embarrassing way because i was just trying to do too much it does have shortcuts which is like the returning system of uh like the through line progression of if you reach certain points in the game there will be a uh a character who after you meet them a certain number of times and give them a certain number of things they will open up a shortcut so that you can jump right to that point in a run which is i i am very grateful that that is in there because while i agree with everything you're saying about treating each run as educational rather than like a

progression like the thing i think that is true to a certain point but i also feel like i have reached points where i'm like okay i know a fucking lot about this i would just love to see like i would love to see what the next level looks like but that's not a contradict i mean that's not contradictory to what i was saying because by the time i unlocked that shortcut i felt like i had learned all the learning that i needed to do in that in that area like i got it like i knew what all the different things did it's just a question of like did i execute well also the shortcuts aren't like um things in so many roguelikes where it's like well now that i've got the shortcut i can beat the game using this the shortcuts are just for

training you do the shortcuts to train up in certain areas and then when you're ready to do like a real run you go back to the beginning and play from the beginning because you need one thing i didn't love about the shortcut yeah the first one that i unlocked was at one four um which which is like you know the end of the first world everybody starts in the same first world it's like a mine type deal um there is a at the point that you shortcut to there is a door to a second world and and there's also a box that has a friend in it. A friend in quotation marks. A partner, right? And I got a friend every time, and it just was annoying to have to go get them and then take them to the doorknob.

But I guess it's because some people don't want to take the friend. Yeah, no, definitely not. The friends are terrible. Yeah, they're AI. I found it helpful because it kept me from focusing too much on how I was doing. Sure. You know what I mean? It really forced my hand on the whole educational aspect of it

because it gave me another opportunity to watch someone do something different. And a lot of times you know you could learn something from that there's a different enemy behavior or things like that speaking of terrible friends i i would be remiss if we did not talk about the multiplayer in this game it has online multiplayer which was not in the first palunki which we have not i don't know i have not messed around with uh but i have messed around with uh what's it called russ steam it's like steam uh play couch play i forget what the term is on essentially it it allows uh another steam user to simulate local co-op right so i'm basically i dialed into griffin's computer and played on his screen now it should be worth noting when when the game comes out on steam uh that on september 29th online multiplayer will be in there in theory um so

most people will not experience the game using the steam remote play they'll just use online multiplayer yeah but i i don't i don't know how i've not heard how the online multiplayer i've heard there's still some bugs to work yeah i have, I have too. The net code, from what I understand, is like the kind of the biggest last piece of the puzzle. But all that said, because we were playing sort of in simulated co-op, we had to share one screen, which is how it works if you play local co-op in Spelunky. And I'm sure this is true for the online multiplayer too.

It is a level of slapstick comedy that I have not seen in a video game maybe ever. It is the number of accidental Rube Goldberg things that can happen and completely mess you up is exponentially increased with each additional human being that you throw into the mix. And that's amazing right like i will be teetering on an edge and uh accidentally drop the boomerang i was holding

which will fall into russ and knock him into a pit where there's just like two cavemen bouncing around who will just play volleyball with his dead ass body and all of that started because like i was accidentally standing too close to a to that's very funny there is also a so opportunities for trolling the likes of which i have not seen since like the witch in uh left for dead which was always my favorite thing when i would like play left for dead with all the joystick uh buddies is like they would be like griffin please god don't don't anger the witch who was just this monster that if you got too close to her or shot her, she would freak out and kill

everybody. I won't, I won't, I won't. This game has so many ways to do that. And it's absolutely hysterical. There's a jar that if you wait too long in a level, a ghost comes and will slowly hover towards you. And if he touches you, he kills you. There's also a jar with an expensive diamond in it. But if you smash that jar to get the diamond out you summon the ghost right away uh and it's very fun to do that with russ uh who just begins begging you please god don't touch that jar please don't get that jar and i'm like but the money is so good the money's in the jar we need the money yeah if you treat if you treat those experiences as like not for i i you know to justin's point not for progress but just for like

fun hangout you will have such a fucking blast it really is um tremendous and uh i think that's really the best way to experience it with someone else. It also, for what it's worth, gives you some padding because a death isn't necessarily a death. If your buddy dies, they turn into a ghost and can float around the screen, helping you by blowing wind at items and knocking them off shelves and even freezing enemies now. They really buff the ghosts.

So it actually is somewhat of an easier game if you are like super coordinated which most most people aren't it's it's much easier the the by far the farthest i've gotten in this game has been playing with russ uh because you can also revive your ghosts if you find like one of those uh coffins that have the buddies in them it's your it's your co-op partner and they revive with like full health and it's it's you can just sort of chain those together it's i've i've very i've really enjoyed spelunky 2 i am like really having trouble making a lot of progress in it but i find the multiplayer to be like it's by far it's like defining selling point yeah it is absolutely

fucking delightful. It is so good. And I'm so glad that more people are gonna get to do it with the online stuff that's in there now. I do wanna say one more thing. At this point, I looked the other day, I'm at 65 hours logged in Steam. I have played so much of this fucking game.

Literally last night, I reached an area that I have never been to before never seen before totally brand new to me not like a final area like an area that's like in the middle like somewhere that i've like walked past 10 000 times at this point never noticed it didn't know how to get there finally reached it and it was a fucking incredible moment. And the fact that that's still happening 65 hours in, yeah, is outrageous. Like that is amazing. And there's still more to do. Like there's still a ton that like the internet has had this game for a week and still has not really beaten it. Fresh sent me a video from this area. And I won't say

any specifics of what happens in it other than looking at the video so much was going on that i did not understand that it might as well have been a different game it's just deeply confusing it says it's secretly frog fractions uh we are going to be talking about a lot more, including the console wars finally beginning in earnest. A lot of Sony cronies and Xbox going head to head. But first, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back. How fucking hard is it to put up a website where it's like, click here to buy the Xbox. Click here, buy PlayStation 5.

It'll be there. It'll be there November. Click it. Amazon has been making online store pages for quite some time. I want to say 20 years. But you don't do that. Now it's like, hey, Griffin, it's your old buddy, Bezos.

And you want that PS5? Click here. Click here. It's a picture of a puppy dog, and the puppy dog's like, oops, we fucked up. Just make the website where you click the thing, and you can buy the thing that'll beat your house in two months that you don't need it's fucking easy uh and it was a wild week as the both the pre-orders went live for playstation 5 which which happened first uh and xbox uh playstation 5 was kind of a mess because it was announced on tell me if I have this timing right, but it was

basically announced on Tuesday that on Thursday the pre-orders sorry, it was announced on Tuesday that pre-orders would happen Wednesday. Tuesday night, pre-orders just popped off everywhere.

I think Walmart broke the dam because Walmart literally tweeted like, are we gonna wait? Fuck nah, fam. Come get your PS5. Like literally tweeted that. Like, are we gonna wait for what we agreed on with the manufacturer?

Fuck that. We're Walmart, baby. Rebel Edge. And then like everybody else was like, oh, well, if Walmart's doing it. Right. And then they did it in sort of a staggered form. And then we had the Xbox.

I completely missed that mess. So maybe somebody who is more plugged in can explain how that went. Yeah. So Xbox was a little bit better insofar as before it happened,rosoft like several days before it happened microsoft was like hey pre-orders are going to go live on uh this was um september 22nd at 11 a.m eastern time um it's going to be available here here and here and here and so just be ready so that's great that's that's a good start um 11 a.m came around and and sites basically started shitting the bed pretty hardcore um i was able to get into microsoft.com home of the xbox uh and after 10 minutes of failing pages

on microsoft.com i was actually able to pre-order an xbox series x even though i am not sure why i did it but i did it and um but in terms of the other websites basically the same situation happened uh which was just like an enormous amount of traffic came flooding into these websites and websites that theoretically should be able to handle this sort of mess definitely did not. And it was just kind of a shit show. Yeah. That was the thing. The sites being crappy is a very, I mean, like, there is a, that was a consistent theme

over both of these launches of, like, stuff just not. I tried it on Best Buy, and on Best Buy I was able to, like, get the item, the the PlayStation 5 into my cart and then just reloaded the cart and it's like I don't know I don't know what's happening right now and it would just crash the page or whatever so that and it seems like that's kind of the immutable right so this is a problem that uh you're not gonna see someone build the, I'm completely not in this business, I'm basing this on like when we've done like ticket sales or whatever,

where a lot of people are going to try to do the same thing at the exact same moment. You're not going to see these sites build the kind of infrastructure that can withstand this sort of demand because it is so rare that they would need to fill this sort of demand. They should figure it out because you know apple figured it out and don't be surprised if we see video game console releases every other year you know if you're apple though you figured you're just people are coming to you to get the thing right well and at&t and every wireless provider yeah yeah i mean also i wanted to

answer a question that uh fresh threw out there why did you buy an xbox series x because this week microsoft also went and bought bethesda just fucking bought bethany esta just oh yeah it was like we didn't even talk we also didn't talk about the fucking playstation 5 event which happened i think the day before we recorded the last besties where they're like yo final fantasy 16 coming come and get it come get your come get your exclusive xbox 360 and ps3 that game looks like an mmo wow it looks tight as hell you're out of your mind um i still i mean the this is wild the heat of the betesda announcement was absolutely 100% not a question time to build demand for the pre-orders. Absolutely not a question.

The wild thing to me about that is like, when will there be a Bethesda Xbox exclusive game? I mean, like, not for a while, right? I think next year. What game do you think that's going to be? It might not be Skyrim. It might not be Elder Scrolls or Starfield. It certainly will not be either of those games. It will be.

That's fine. Were you planning on Wet 2? I mean, they have a lot of studios, y'all. Yeah, and two of those games are going to PS5. They didn't just buy Bethesda Game Studios, which is a developer. They bought eight studios. They bought Bethesda.

Right, they bought ZeniMax. Arcane and id software and yeah both arcane right yeah no they have a ton of stuff i mean i yeah i think you're right that they'll have there's the arcane leone game that is going to ps5 first death loop that looks rad but they they revealed finally like what the actual hook of that that like groundhog's day hook of that game during i think the playstation five press conference that game looks fucking cool as hell i am very excited about that yeah and then you got ghostwire tokyo i guess coming in coming next year supposedly yeah um that that is i think that's the new um is that tango tango yeah tango yeah and now everybody's wondering what what's microsoft gonna buy next you know sega tweeted i guess earlier this month a photo of sonic sitting next to two neon green milkshakes uh and fizzies or whatever they are and people

are like oh here it here it comes i mean that would they have to be eyeballing at least one hey microsoft studio you could give them very little money because that will not sell consoles. Because Microsoft's foothold in Japan is still pretty limited compared to Sony's and honestly compared to Sega's. For them to acquire... I mean, it feels pretty deep in the rumor mill,

but that would be wild. It's a wild... If you think about this pick... Okay, so this is i mean it feels pretty deep in the rumor mill but that would be wild it's a wild if you think about this pick okay so i this is a question for you guys first question will microsoft the as the owner of bethesda will microsoft make bethesda games xbox all bethesda games xbox exclusive i think no no no i mean they're're not, because they're, they're, they have been, they have been, well, yeah, it'll be PC, but they. Okay, sorry, not PlayStation. They, they, I don't know about PlayStation, but the, the thing that has gotten me really excited about Microsoft in this, this, the past couple of years is their willingness

to kind of not be so possessive, I guess, of their stuff. Just this week, there was also a pretty great Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Direct last week, where they announced a new Monster Hunter game. Yes, I do. I do want that. But they also just like surprise released the second Ori game on Switch, which is a Microsoft game like joint uh so both of those are on their

cuphead is on there uh so like i i don't know i feel like i feel like that is an exciting trend i think that but to me if i try to imagine i xbox any of these you got doom dishonored wolfenstein elder scrolls elder scrolls fallout starfield rage rogue warrior i mean we can all have some fun if we want um but like i mean that's devastating i mean i can't think of yeah i think they're going to come out so i think even as a timed exclusion think of it like netflix right like you can go to target and you can buy a house of cards on dvd you'll embarrass yourself but you can go and do it like that it'll be the same thing will laugh at you you these games are going to come out

on game pass presumably first you'll pay like 10 bucks a month to get all these games but if hey if you want to go and spend 70 to buy the game on playstation and it will probably have less features i'm i'm gonna assume that they're going to optimize it for Xbox and PC. That option is going to be available. I don't know that. Because why not? Like, it's free money. I disagree, actually. Yeah?

So specifically when it comes to games like Fallout, like Elder Scrolls, games that are literally system sellers that people buy consoles for, I do not think the financial benefit that Microsoft would get for selling those games even a year after release would measure up to the mindshare benefit of, hey, you cannot play Fallout or you cannot play Elder Scrolls on a PlayStation. That is a huge, huge advantage

to discourage people from getting a PlayStation versus an Xbox. Or if I, I think that that will happen. I agree with you in theory. I, however, would be surprised if they care about this at all. Part of the thing with Bethesda is a relationship with their fans, right? These are like long dialogues. If I'm Todd Howard, I'm not going to.

There is some part of me that's like I mean money is money is money but like I am gonna get a guarantee that like these people who have been with me for 20 years are not gonna be like left in the cold and unable to buy the games like it just seems it seems wild to me even as a time to like I feel like what I'm just thinking like you don't want to mess with Howard that if Todd Howard leaves Bethesda though when he had that hot mic at E3 and he was like cursing some dude out because he was so pissed Todd Howard he's an intimidating dude yeah he's fucking scary he made a bunch of great games and he's kind of the Wizard of Oz basically so no but I mean I my bet is for we're just pulling this out of our asses i say time

exclusive i i feel like play it first on xbox for three months they get all the juice and then later they'll they'll pick up because they still want the money right like they would love the money that you would spend on fallout and elder scrolls and all that all that stuff if you look at the decisions that microsoft has made and like the different studio acquisitions they've made in the last like four years as them trying to win back the console wars as like reductive a term as that is uh i think them spending seven and a half billion with a b dollars on this like monolith of game development uh that contains all of these different

studios that make all these like pretty great games i don't i don't i mean that's such an enormous shot across the bow like i don't think that these games are going to come out on question for y'all a question for y'all before we wrap this section uh what is name name the publisher that you think mic Microsoft could still purchase that would be the kind of like coup de grace. This would be like, oh, this is the Megaton. Obviously, it can't be Nintendo. It can't be Sony.

But what is, is there a publisher left that you're like, that's the power play? I mean, well, let's name the big publishers. It's Ubisoft. It's EA. It's, I mean, I don't see. Capcom, like if they if they really did go for like sega and capcom to like finally find purchase in the soil of like japanese

game players like that would be to to force those people to say like now you now you if you want to play monster hunter now you fucking have to buy our xbox like that could that would be like pretty huge on a sort of global scale i would not be surprised if you see one of the two i think it makes more sense for sony at this point to buy konami and announce it with a metal gear solid in development by kojima i don. Konami doesn't make games anymore. Yeah, they may. Yeah, I don't. Guys, come on. They make pachinko machines.

Do I have to literally explain this to you? Konami is a game publisher in name only at this point that does own the rights to the Metal Gear franchise. That would be all they're buying. It's Konami. It's Metal Gear. It's Kojima. Yeah.

We own it all now, and we're buying that in fucking balkan time. Do they get the pachinko machines as well, though? Do they get the pachinko machines? No, they'll split it off into a separate division. I mean, Konami doesn't want to be in that business anymore. I think Capcom makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think Capcom is the one that makes the most sense to me, because I think at the end of the day, what they're looking for is properties too, right? That's the appeal of Bethesda. Not only do you get all of the talented studios, but you get a ton of big names. And with Capcom, you get Resident Evil, you get Monster Hunter, like you said, Griffin, you get Street Fighter and Mega Man. I mean, you get some really iconic games i know a lot of people don't like this microsoft acquisition and i'm i myself am

not a huge fan of uh giant corporate consolidation because i usually does a number on creativity i will say this though in terms of uh hypocrisy it is it was a little weird uh on social media seeing people who are pissed about this who are always like i love it last of us sony they're really pulling away with this generation look at their hot exclusives and then microsoft's like yeah we have exclusives too and they're like yeah but you can't do it that way you have to do it the other way yeah yeah um it's wild it's exciting real quick round the horn pre-orders what'd you get or or what didn't you get uh i i'll start i managed to secure a playstation 5 from amazon at midnight the tuesday and completely miss xbox pre-orders don't care it has no game do you don't want to burst your bubble because justin hooked me up with that tip

he texted me at 11 p.m my time was like hey get that get that amazon ps5 and i managed to do it the disc the disc drive full version because i want to watch my all my great blu-ray cassettes uh did get an email uh the next day saying hey just so you know you might not receive this item on the day it's released due to high demand and i like does that mean i'm not going to get it until january or a week later like i would love to a little bit of clarification on that Amazon, but they have not afforded me as much. And I was like, yeah,

I was in the middle of a huge depressive episode when I got that. And that was just like the fucking, it was the one spec spec of light I was looking forward to in my existence. And I really kicked it really took the wind out of my sails. I was driving. I was driving for like 15 minutes when the Xboxbox pre-orders went up which is of course a span of time where they sold out like literally instantly so didn't get one of them plant nothing yeah i got an xbox uh series x um i was at a drive-in watching jaws when the playstation

pre-orders went live so that i was trying to get one for fresh. We failed. Will there be another run of, I mean, do we feel like this is not it for the calendar yet, right? We'll have another run. Yeah, so I think there will be more for both consoles. I think they're being a little conservative

because they're not entirely sure how many they can produce. So as the weeks go by, I think there will be more opening. It is interesting though, because Microsoft tweeted this morning saying, hey, essentially, we're not going to have any more ourselves,

but check with other retailers and they might have more. So if you bought one at Microsoft.com, that's probably going to be it for Microsoft.com until launch. But I think with PS5 and Xbox, there will be other opportunities. I don't know wario 64 people seem to like him and he's making a shitload of money on referrals oh my gosh good for him um y'all let's hop into some questions really quick

uh okay because i know we want to wrap uh we'll do these kind of rapid fire uh this is from mushroom boy on twitter uh farthest each of you have made it into the game level-wise? Sponky. Sponky, too. I mean, the furthest I've made it is with Russ, I think, too. Again, without spoiling things, like maybe the fourth or fifth level? Pretty far. I think probably the penultimate level right before the...

Yeah. Right? Yes, okay. The world right before the, quote, final boss. Yeah, I have not gotten anywhere close to that by myself so yeah i've made it to the quote final boss justin uh uh i've made it to the fourth level of the second world several times but that's about it i've made it to after the final boss. I won't say more than that,

but there's stuff that's after. From Christina, I'm jumping into Spelunky 2 without ever touching Spelunky 1. Is this a mistake? No. It's a godsend. It's a miracle.

Yeah, that is the thing because there are some very, very slight subtle changes between the two. Just as a simple example. The snake hitbox, like where you can jump on a snake versus not is like maybe a millimeter off from Spunky 1. And that took me like the longest time to like rewire my brain.

So no, you're totally fine. This is definitely the best of them. So enjoy it. One final thought from a listener from neutral jump hotel this isn't a question but i'd love you guys uh if you guys talked about how wonderful the caveman is in spelunky 2 my going theory for why i like him so much is that he feels like the only entity in spelunky who is less capable than me uh i agree with that and the caveman has been tweaked in in this version in two ways now the caveman can pick up objects so if you throw down like a key that you need or a pet for health the caveman will pick it up uh also the caveman can trip over gold now

which can really cause some problems for you when you think you're about to jump on him yeah it's i also just just as a little detail, if two cavemen happen to walk into one another, sometimes they'll start talking to one another in random caveman speak, and it is just the cutest goddamn thing. It's so great. Until you jump on their heads and

sacrifice them for... It's trying to break their necks. I love seeing a caveman. I'll jump down and just all of a sudden see the caveman holding my dog. He's just walking back and forth holding my dog like so proud of himself um i just i want to just before we wrap that was the last question right plant yeah yeah just like a quick recommendation for people that are listening in my opinion the best way to play spelunky is to treat it almost like a poker game um which is to say find like three or four friends and don't look online in terms of

like what you're supposed to be doing and just share experiences between one another. In addition to like playing multiplayer together, figuring this game out because all the everything is like presented to you, but it's like can be a little bit subtle. Figuring this game out on your own is an amazing, amazing experience. i had a moment in the shower two weeks ago not to get a little blue but i was in the shower and a realization came to me where i was like wait if i try this in this exact spot what's gonna happen and i like sent it out to the number of people i was playing with and everyone was all excited and pulling that off and then seeing it actually do the thing that i thought it was going to do was like a mind blowing,

super fucking cool moment. Um, so if you can play it like that, that's really how I'd recommend it. Anybody else been playing anything else that we want to talk about real quick? Uh, I've got a game I want to talk about really quick. I,

I've been playing this game called rivals, which is on itch.io and on steam. And Griffin, I think you especially will really enjoy this actually i think all of you will uh it is a video game made for fans of wilco and alt country that is obra din ask um in that you you're effectively given a collection of like posters and uh cassette tapes and vinyl records And you play the role of this woman who is writing the, I guess, biography of one of the band members. And you have to go through all of this information to figure out the order of the chapters. So like the gameplay itself isn't

super dynamic. I mean, you're effectively just organizing a whole bunch of possible chapters but it forces you to go through and really really learn this fictional band's history um by like reading about them by reading interview transcripts and by listening to like some pretty damn good alt country songs it's it's really really really charming um I'll play anything that is similar to Obra Dinn that is still a genre that I wish would be. Yeah, that detective genre of piecing together information is super cool. I've been playing 3D All-Stars,

the Super Mario 3D All-Stars a bit, and I feel so mixed about it because so little has been done. Virtually nothing has been done to these games to like make them uh feel like a you know special package aside from the fact that there's three of them in one thing uh and i played i played like i don't know i got like 35 stars in 64 uh before like that like a lot of in 64 games it is so hard to go back to it because the camera controls are just not very good. And Sunshine has never clicked for me. I find that game to be... I think it feels

good. And I think the water pack stuff is fun, but the hub world is so obtuse. And it's very tough to just find what you're supposed to be doing to like find the next level uh and of course galaxy is great we talked about galaxy uh during our 2007 block but galaxy i i have a switch light and i play everything on the switch light and when you play in handheld mode you have to use the touch screen for things which is like whatever you don't have to worry so much about the star bits because it's easy enough to drag your finger over those. But there's certain platforming elements,

like there are these blue stars that you have to point your thing at, your Joy-Con at to like latch Mario onto it. And you have to use the touch screen for those when you're playing in handheld mode and trying to string that together with the actual buttons is fucking bad. like it doesn't feel good at all uh and so it's like it's a great game and i'm happy to have it on my handheld but if that sometimes i run into things where it's like that

feels bad that's not good at all um i'll tell you what feels good is talking about video games and we're going to talk about another one next week here comes the name name of it. It's called Hades. Hades. So go play a bunch of Hades. We're going to talk about it next week. It's out on Switch now. It just hit 1.0. It's fucking great. It's on Steam as well. It's fucking great. It's such a treat. You can follow and listen for free to our show on Spotify.

You can follow us at The Besties Pod, which is also where you find a link to join our mailing list. You can email us. Mail at besties pod, which is also where you find a link to join our mailing list. You can email us mail at besties dot fan, or send a link to our show. Besties dot fan. Just tell people to listen to it. Really appreciate it.

But that is going to do it for us for this week. So until next time, be sure to join us again next week for the besties. Cause shouldn't the world's best friends, pick the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!