The Besties - Hey Hades, Get Funky!

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

Join the Besties in their quest of the underworld with 2020’s Hades. They explore the incredibly designed and nuanced gameplay. Discuss the mythological themes. And cannot ignore the fact that all of the characters are very hot. Plus, special guest New York Giraffe discusses their goal to become the God of West 23rd Street! 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!

Y'all know that I'm a candy boy. Sure. Like I love this stuff. Sweets and sugary snacks and sweets. I love them. Sweet boy. Sweet boy, Justin, is that what you said? I don't know.

Like a sweets boy. I'm a candy boy. And I do have a toothache. Oh no. And this is problematic for me because the only sort of thing I've been enjoying about quarantine is it's like dentist vacation. Yeah. been enjoying about quarantine is it's like dentist vacation yeah like i feel like i finally have a pretty good reason to not have my teeth seen too but now there's this like sort of physical like urging of my teeth like you should probably get this dealt with uh because you're

such a huge yeah boy so so i should mention um good timing griffin because yeah please literally went to the dentist yesterday oh filthy hands in your mouth how did that go so i was assured that it was okay and all precautions were taken interesting yeah they told me that at chucky cheese too when i went regardless it had been a while obviously since i had been i don't know if you've seen ken burns civil war but you know those shots that they have of like the triage tents uh during the civil war that was basically my mouth it was real bad i'm very worried that it's going to look like an edgy early truth campaign anti-smoking PSA in there. Not that I'm a smoker or anything like that, but it's just been so long.

It's just going to be just real like large marge mid-ghost transformation sort of chompers. It's definitely something that would give David Cronenberg somewhat of a boner. Probably not a full one, but half. Cronenberg would be full hog rage. Cronenberg, as he calls it. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. Yeah, my name is Griffin McElroy.

I know the best fucking game of the week. Oh, boy, it rules. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Portia, and I know the best game of the week. I couldn't be more excited because we're today we were talking about hades the latest from super giant is finally out of beta and into your heart and uh chris plant why don't you tell me about it uh hades is a roguelike action game where you play as the son of hades himself as you try to escape the underworld by hacking and slashing and gradually accumulating buffs and boons that make it a little bit easier.

And that's the game. Oh, also, everybody's super sexy. It's like a wicked horny game. It's so good. Speaking of bone and bird. You know what? It's almost as horny as these ads you're about to enjoy right now okay let's get the elephant out of the room hades only has a daughter maleficent and hades had their daughter

mal as indicated in descendants one two and three um so this is obviously breaking with canon. Right. This is not an accurate depiction of Hades. Disney lore. Disney lore says that Cheyenne Jackson played Hades and his daughter is Mal and he had her with Maleficent. Who is this for, Justin? For Descendants fans, the other D-heads who watched all the Descendants movies. I don't remember there being a sequel to the George Clooney movie.

How did they follow that up? They're on Hawaii, he controls the land. Now, Chris, you make an inaccessible cultural reference. No, this game, this game is so good. And it has, here's the wild thing about it. It launched alongside the Epic Game Store. It was hand in hand with the launch of the Epic Game Store. And that was a long time ago, right?

I think it was during the VGAs 2018, I want to say. Is that right? That sounds, that's the only possible. Wow, yeah. Right? That's right. That's gotta be right. And here's the thing.

It was fun then. Yeah, it here's the thing it was fun then yeah it was good i think that's reflected by the fact that uh the most sort of miraculous thing about hades and i don't think this is true of i love the roguelike genre but i don't think it's true of any other entry in it it's fun from the second you start playing it like it is it is instantly very very good and fun. The last time I felt that way about a roguelike was actually Dead Cells. And I think you can make like a lot of comparisons here

because Dead Cells was also very, I mean, it felt great. They have the good boom booms. They both have good boom booms. But it had like incredible, really well thought out progression hooks, which this game does too. It is a, in my opinion, Supergiant's best game.

I love Bastion. I love Transistor. But this is a masterpiece. Let's talk about the action part first, then we'll talk about progression. Because the action part is, what I think this game gets so right that so many other roguelikes get wrong, is you die at the end, and they're like, well, you gotta go back to the beginning. And in a lot of roguelikes, it's like, ugh.

In Hades, it's like, well, that's okay. I had fun doing that, so I'll just have more fun, I guess, doing it again. It's not a big deal. It also feels so different. There are six base weapons that you have.

There's a sword, a shield that you throw, a spear, gun, that you throw, a spear, gun, big fists, and bow are the weapons. As you use each of them, you get more of like, you learn

more about how to use them. So you are, you're Hades' son, Zagreus. Zagreus. You're trying to escape death, and each time you go through the your run trying to escape the underworld um you are granted different boons which are like basically power-ups to put it in a crass crass terms um different power-ups by different uh olympian gods and all these boons really change the way that you play.

This is going to be hard. If you haven't played, it's going to be hard to, like, appreciate the nuance of this. But there could be an attack that, so, for example, I'll give you an example. The bow has a power shot that you can charge up with the attack button and then fire it. You might get a boon that replaces that with, like a rapid fire uh is one that you'll get um you have a magic spell every

weapon has a cast it's sort of a a unique ability to you uh it doesn't change weapon to weapon but um you have a cast a magics button basically and you could get power-ups that change it from usually you'll just throw a crystal uh that hurts people uh that you retrieve after the enemy's dead but sometimes it can turn into a spinning blade of death or lob bombs or whatever and every time you play through you get completely different boons that completely change how you're playing what you're focusing on um and it already feels good but it feels every weapon feels really neat to use. And they feel, every playthrough feels really different because you're focusing on different parts of your skill set determined by whatever power-ups you got.

Yeah, I think Dead Cells is like, as I think Griffin mentioned earlier, like the closest analog. Because you start off essentially at zero, and what you pick up along the way dramatically dramatically changes the way you play through the level even if you you know even if you're using the bow in both runs you will feel dramatically different depending on your rng for the boons throughout that and that's really what's so cool is that you i think the more you play you have a better sense of how things synergize and work together to eventually like make you into this unstoppable force and it's it's super super satisfying i also i i just like related to that i wanted to mention i think you know we talked about sponky last week i as you all know adore adore adore sponky but the more i play and the more i try to like get people to play

it i do kind of wish that it was more approachable in the way that this game is more approachable because it's so hard to get over that hump whereas hades um makes it a breeze because every single thing you do is either progression or narrative progression, like you're learning new story elements. They constantly are rewarding you for playing more so than maybe just like your subtle brain getting smarter with the game. Yeah, I don't know if I want Spelunky to do that because I think Spelunky is such its own thing. I do not like Dead Cells. I mean, I played a good chunk of it, but it felt like some serious empty calories.

And the reason I don't like it is you start that game and you know you are not going to do well. Like you have to grind through the game to pick up the skills that are going to make you effectively just an unstoppable god. And I could never tell, am I actually getting better at this game or is it just getting easier for me and i just i i could feel my time being wasted

the thing and i and i get why people like it because that it's like i mean holy moly is that some um just dopamine hits what i like about this game and i think that the way it pulls off the trick is it's still a narrative game yeah when you you know when you lose you when you lose when you die you go back to the beginning of of the underworld before you even hop back in you meet all of your friends and you hang out and you get some more story and yeah you're the the menus are just a little better hidden when you are getting all these advantages it's because you're like romancing characters or you're just chatting with them or you're petting the dog and it's or you're having your your dad

say like oh you died again you fucking dipshit way to go yes but i i think that it's silly because obviously i'm saying and i can see what's happening but it really makes it work so much more for me it doesn't feel like wasted time and and justin you talked about that appeal of like you kind of look forward almost to failure in this game the way i would compare it is um how action move really mainstream action movies were made in the early 2000s ahead of marvel becoming the dominant thing right there was that transformers era where it was like action movies are just pure action we've got three hours of undiluted, pure-cut action. Action, action, action.

And it was like, wait, are there people in this? And it's like, no, but there are robot nuts. And you're like, well, I mean, I love action, but at a certain point, I am exhausted. And then Marvel's whole gimmick is they were like, what if between that we hung out like a sitcom and we're friends and people are like yes i just give me five minutes of hanging out in the shawarma shop and that is this game i mean i look forward to talking to my gal dusa because you know that i'm crushing on her she's clearly the best gal we all crush on dusa yeah. Yeah, I wanted to mention the thing that I think works the best about this game, and I think the thing that really creates its identity

is the building of your, like, character in each run. I think they do something that is really, really smart, which is you drop in, and basically, like, the game is just you enter a room, you are challenged by enemies in that room, you drop in and basically like the game is just, you enter a room, you are challenged by enemies in that room, you kill them. And then you get the reward for that room, which is usually, uh, revealed to you when you're like choosing which room to go into next. Right. So you finish a room and it's like, well, this room will give me some money that I can spend in a shop, or this room will give me a boon from Poseidon. Uh, so that's like one level of choice, but then every

time that you get a boon or there are uh Daedalus hammers that like fundamentally change the controls of your weapon which is like the coolest shit ever uh you get one of those at the very beginning of the run and it's random it could be a hammer it could be a boon from Poseidon or Zeus or Dionysus or whatever uh that's the first sort of thing and you get like, there are different rarities for the boons. And so you might get like an incredibly powerful knockback ability from Poseidon right at the very jump. And that informs like, okay, well, next time I have the choice to like go into a Poseidon room. Or sometimes you'll enter a room where there's two gods and you have to pick between them. Maybe I'll just go towards Poseidon because there's other boons that boost knockback

damage and there's other uh dataless hammer abilities that add knockback to different things there's just an infinite like array of like ways to build your character but the other thing it does and this dovetails kind of into the progression thing is you almost always also when you're like choosing between which rooms to go to one of the rooms will almost always be like a build thing like here's a boon for you and the other room will be here is one of the mini currencies that this game has that you keep when you die and you get to invest in this mirror that provides you permanent bonuses or this building resource that adds elements to the world permanently or this thing that makes characters like you better.

So you can get these artifacts that you can level up, which give you more permanent bonuses. Like that sounds overwhelming a little bit when Griffin lays it all out like that. It's just fun. I mean, it's just like, it's fun.

It rolls it out to dying also because your pockets are loaded down with all this cool new stuff. It's like, Oh, I'm going to go give this to this person and then upgrade this. And then, and it's one of the amazing tricks. I think the most impressive trick that Hades does is every single time, almost without fail, that you get a upgrade, a boon.

Or when you switch to a new weapon after you've been using one every single time, you have this sense of like, well, everybody's fucked now. Look at this. My shield's on fire. I'm going to the end, baby. I'm getting out of here. And like every single one feels meaningful and purposeful. Like it feels like, oh, this is changing everything. Like now I am set.

I will say I started a run the other day and the very first boon I got was a legendary boon. And the boon was, there's now a 20% chance for a fish to show up wait what i've never seen that one it was a poseidon legendary boon that increased fish chance yes there's fishing in this game for some oh right and that's okay that sort of highlights good boon the it is actually a really good boon i didn't know this was even a thing yeah so when you go fishing you can get like enormous amounts of resources.

How do you go fishing? You unlock a fishing rod. You have to buy the fishing rod. Anyway, what I wanted to say was this sort of goes... I've played this game for 60 hours. This sort of goes to the point...

Are you kidding? You've been playing this game longer than any of us over the years. Is it a building thing? Yeah, it's a building thing. You spend like a diamond to unlock the fishing rod. Anyway, what I wanted to say was, yeah, it's crazy,

which is to say the fact that they've been making this game since 2018 and sort of the amazing thing about these early access games that just sort of go in perpetuity for a while is all of these things that ordinarily in a normal development cycle, there's no way in fucking hell they would ever jam fishing in or have unique dialogue for every single encounter 30 times over like any variable props to greg gasavin who was the narrative uh designer for this game and also is the voice of hypnos uh and one other character but um he basically designed a narrative system that um

allows the game to know like with certainty what you've done before and adjust every single piece of dialogue accordingly so for example if you fight uh megara who's like the first fury that you fight um two times in a row she'll say hey you're back again we just fought a second the last time and i know you beat me that time but you're not gonna beat me this time like that's just a very basic example but that just expands throughout the entire game and the dozens and dozens of characters yeah megra has sisters the uh two other furies and sometimes when you're about to go in you'll be like oh i hope it's megra and it's not he's like oh yeah my favorite is definitely the one who just grumbles murder there's i mean it's it it is that system is ever present the first time i think it was probably

like my third or fourth run i made it to like not just a new world but like the second screen of a new world it was the furthest I'd gotten. And he said like, this is the furthest I've ever gotten. And I was like, that's fucking cool. Like there's no, why has no game ever done that before? There's, I mean, I guess Spelunky does it when you're like, oh, I've made it. This is the, whenever you die, you get the death screen. Like this is my new thing.

But like it folds it into everything. It ingests the logic and rules of the roguelike genre into the story itself in a way that is brilliant yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna tell you why most games do not do this almost no games do this effectively and the reason is if a triple a game producer was like hey we want to put in this line of dialogue and 0.2 percent of people are ever ever ever gonna hear it there's no way in fucking hell that would make the cut. But when you have a small studio and they've been making this game for two years on their own with up, you know, longer than that with updates and various things, and you have a

guy dedicated to ensuring all these narrative hooks, like that's what they're doing. Like they want to want to flesh out this world because they have like a passion for it. you know kind of you're already selling the game so money isn't an issue they're they're really just trying to make the product as good as it can be it's just like polish after polish after polish what one other thing about that uh why i think the narrative works so well is this is a small ish compared to you know big budget games team that has been doing this for a while and has like really honed how all the different pieces come together i i just honestly was not a huge fan of the art style of their games effectively until this one it just didn't click for me but there's something about the art which is i would call like tumblr horny goes legit um it is real and i i am now absolutely

obsessed with it now i i get it it it completely clicks for me the other thing that i think that draws us together you want to fuck everything in this game is that what you're trying to say because like i'm there with you of course i want to have sex with everybody i think that's the point i mean it is it is going for it the other thing that i think helps that uh with the dialogue is everything is performed in this breathy the cool kids at high school way yeah of like almost every line in this no matter what they're talking about is like i was bothered to maybe do two readings and that's all you're gonna get and like i hope they're good enough well it's it's every character is so uh is so believable in like their their what their personality actually is to to wit like every olympian god when you first like get their boons you you know call out to them like i call out to

you in the name of olympus and then poseidon is like ah nephew i cannot wait for you to escape and come to me or you run into dionysus and he's like yo let's get out of here and fucking party boy and then you have to choose sometimes in these chambers like oh do i want to go with uh you know dionysus or do i want to go with aries and it's like i'll go i'll go with aries this time then dionysus pops in is like you motherfucker i'm going to absolutely destroy you you're like oh i thought we were buds it really like they are so funny because they'll they'll try to kill you and if you survive they're like hey no we're cool again they are is actually my boon that i would have given

you if you had chosen me there are obvious villains in this game but then these these this pantheon of olympian gods are just as fickle and opportunistic and yeah like fucking mean as they are in like you know oh don't even comment about boons that you've already gotten yeah like where you'll you'll get you'll get something from like Athena and then later on you'll meet Hermes. Like, ooh, Athena's been trying to help you out, huh? Well, I don't really get it, the whole hunting thing. I think speed is better, but okay.

Or sometimes they'll offer duo boons that like blend the kind of focuses of two things. And those are like immensely powerful. I think I've only seen like two of those and there's like 50. There's so much shit. You get them by favoring two lines, right? Is that right?

I think so. Yeah, I've gotten a few of those. There's also like, you have a, they call it like prophecies, which are basically achievements. But you, like if you get every boon from this particular god

whatever it is uh you get a big boost of money that you can use to upgrade stuff or whatever and when you're actually choosing your boons sometimes you will see the line on there like this fulfills a prophecy so you're like actually seeing that like i don't really want to take it but i do want that long-term progression okay fine yeah okay yeah i'll take it um cut off this game i just wanted to mention one more thing before we wrap up this segment um uh supergiant uh specifically has amazing soundtracks i love the soundtracks of all their games bastion transistor pyre all have amazing soundtracks those soundtracks are the work of darren corb who is one of my favorite video game or overall composers in the world right now darren corb obviously did the soundtrack for this game as well also spectacular he's also the voice of the fucking protagonist of the game he

is the voice of zagrius really and skelly who's another major character the like that is really the epitome of this game is that you have all these people on the team that are immensely talented and all pitching in with their incredible skill sets in really interesting and amazing ways um so huge huge props to Darren Korb because holy shit great great work incredible performance also like it launching 1.0 uh simultaneously on switch is like i i i as much as i love this game i think it's unlikely that i would have picked it up unless it was on switch because it is so explicitly just the kind of game i want to play on there and it works fucking great literally only the negative amazing the cross save doesn't work just yet just yet but it is

soon oh i'm counting down the days i can't play it on switch until that cross save works is amazing. The cross-save doesn't work just yet. Just yet. But it is coming just yet. It will soon. I'm counting down the days. I can't play it on Switch until that cross-save works. I can't think of too many people I would not recommend this game to.

It is challenging for sure, but I also feel like unlike a lot of roguelikes, unlike Spelunky, I think there's a type of person who is not going to get there with Spelunky. A type of person who is not going to get there with Spelunky, like a type of person who is

not going to be able to acquire the kind of skill and twitchiness that you need to like, you know, really make a dent in that game. I feel like Hades is just much more like approachable. Like you can, I feel like anybody can take a chunk out of Hades if they, you know, stick with it long enough. So one very quick thing on that note for people who are still skeptical of this because roguelikes difficulty, for the 1.0 release, they actually added

a thing called God Mode, which I believe makes you more powerful each time you die. Every time you die, you get a 2% permanent increase to your defenses so it's variable depending on how far you no i think it's usually it's i think it's just a two percent set i've died i think i've seen it like change to different amounts but yes it's you start at like

15 you start at like 15 damage reduction flat right so when you get hit it's 15 weaker i think it goes up to 50 but you have to turn this on yes uh i did this how you this how you motherfuckers got fishing well i've been hardcore well here's where my gamers are i think it solves the problem of um not making a game too easy but giving help to people that are struggling like if you constantly win at the game you will not get this bonus because it only happens when you die so if you're constantly having perfect runs, you don't get it. So the people that are seeing it are the people that are dying a bunch. And that's fine because it means they're still seeing the narrative.

If anything, I think it should be more clear what the thing does before you turn it on. Because I think most people, especially if you've got shit to do and want to see the end of the story, like fucking turn it on. i think most people especially if you got shit to do and want to see the end of the story like fucking turn it on it's kind of great yeah i i i think this is the benefit of early access right if you have a good developer is you do hear back from the community and you do get these things added and you're seeing data of when players are actually dropping off um i know that they added a lot of other things like tweaks to sound and visuals and they got rid of or you can disable camera shake, which is like really just should be top of every game option. Anyway, I know that we have a very, very, very special guest after the break. Is that right, Justin?

That is what I've heard. I'll see if I can get them into the studio here. I'm excited. You should be excited or scared. Either way, we're both kind of feeling all that all the time, right? But first, some commercial messages. Welcome back. Hope you enjoyed your brief respite.

I don't know what to say about what's about to happen because I don't have enough information about it. Why did I start talking, you ask? I've been doing this for 10 years and I don't know any other way. Ayo, it's me, New York Giraffe. Holy shit. Oh. What a treat, folks.

It's New York Giraffe who we have not seen since... Does anybody remember? What was the last time we saw New York Giraffe? Hey, it's been a while. I tried to forget. Hey, if you work for Spotify... Is it part of the Spotify deal? Yes, it was in the contract. I checked the dialogue. It was in the giraffe hey it's been a while tried to forget hey if you work for spot on the spotify deal yes it was in the contract i checked the dialogue it was in the contract specifically on page 1302 section b it said there must be a giraffe of some type and i specified new york in there

with crayon it worked out fine no one asked me asked me. It was fine. If you work for Spotify legally, you can't listen to the next 10 minutes of this episode or else you're going to cancel us immediately. Joe Rogan just signed out. To what do we owe the honor, Mr. Giraffe? You know besties. If you don't know, by the way, New York Giraffe is a giraffe from New York.

You know besties. It's been a while since we've spoken and I wanted to mention given the fact that we were talking about a video game called Hades at this point, which features quite a number of Greek gods, it made me think maybe there's a little bit of room for a little bit of NYG. little bit of nyg uh so you are giants proposing that you are fit to be a deity of some sort mr giraffe is that not just fit tall and fit oh it's in europe europe are you applying for the role is that where it's to understand my intention is to basically you know how in survivor you send in like a video to show you like leaping over trees

and shit that's the idea same same deal so i need to basically send my video sorry leaping over trees where where shit yeah so i gotta send my video somewhere so so where i'm like basically like i don't know hades zeus who's gonna take this but i gotta prove my point got it okay got it well that's the first thing you're gonna have to decide i think is what department of the pantheon would be the best what would you recommend a new address from hell hell yeah hell i think we all feel i should mention i should mention to be clear i am not looking for a big role in hell. I realize you got to start at the bottom rung and work your way up. I'm not looking for like, I don't know, God of Wine.

I realize that's taken. That's taken. I mean, you can do animal hell. That seems like a big ass too, honestly. Honestly, I was just thinking of like God of West 23rd Street. Okay. Sure, sure, sure. Like the flower district is what you're saying.

Well, there's not just flowers there. They got delis. There's some garbage. I think there's a lot of rooms there. That is my hell. You sure know a lot about New York, New York giraffe. That is my hell. You sure know a lot about New York, New York giraffe.

I mean, if we're going to, it's been a while since I've seen you, New York giraffe. If you're going to sort of fit in the pantheon as viewed through the lens of Supergiant Games, like you're gonna have to be pretty tight. What are you saying? Griffin, what are you saying? About the giraffe bod. I'm saying that you need to be...

It's all I'm saying. It's the right thing. You got to be toy. And you got to look extremely... Horrend. Griffin, hold on one second. Let me pull my shirt up. You see this?

You see this 32 pack right here? Have you seen abs like this? Oh my god. There's a nipple on each one. Well, that's taken care of. Look, I've got some boons planned out. I've got no

problem there. What kind of boons are we talking about? We'll start with the basic common boon. You're at the deli. You get three more napkins normally they just give you one for your egg sandwich you get three more napkins and that's just the base wow yeah wow um that's not good so far i would probably skip that okay we're gonna go up to rare ready yeah also at the deli you're in the you're in the milk aisle you're picking up the milk all the milk you find is only one day expired could be more but no with this boon all the milk

one day expired uh-huh is that something you all struggle with in new york because that's that's bleak man well i'm just saying sometimes it happens you gotta you gotta check the cottons but here you're guaranteed just slightly legendary what's the legend what am i gonna make my what am i gonna build my run around new york giraffe okay ready this is the coup de grace this will guarantee you make it all the way to the very end you know how hot dogs are great yeah yeah infinite fucking hot dogs you can't get any more hot dogs than that you thought you could have enough hot dogs how about infinite hot dogs but i feel like whenever i need a hot dog i can get one pretty easily right but i don't know that you get infinite can you just keep no you know who can the god of west 23rd street new york giraffe because his neck is hella long

can giraffes get covid no i'm just curious i feel like i asked that because i feel like near giraffe i have a suspicion that you have not fucking donned a mask yet right right? You're, you feel like you're always, hey, that's actually a decent question. You're walking around the streets of New York. Are you always six feet? Yeah. Distanced?

There has never been. Like up there, like you're. Yeah, there has never been a person that is more. I mean, obviously people avoid you as a rule, but like, even if they didn't, your head is such that. It's very high up. It's very high. There has never been a person that is more socially distanced than me and i'm not even a person i'm a fucking

giraffe i think we found a solution here and and it's it is godly in nature and godly in its grace that new york giraffe rather than being a a in the technical sense, will simply be a deli employee who will stand in between the customer and the cashier. And with his long neck, take the money from the customer, hand it to the cashier. Take the deli sandwiches from the cashier, hand it to the customer. Everybody stays socially distanced. Do you guys want to know something weird? A giraffe's neck is exactly six feet long. I just Googled it.

It's like God made them to survive. That is actually 100% true. Now, listen, New York giraffe, there's some other sort of like baggage alongside being a Greek god that you really should consider. Like it's not all just granting boons to people. Like sometimes you do have to jerk off into the ocean

and then like, you know, a godling being comes out of there. That's your child. And then you have to like kill them for their power. Griffin, let me just tell you something. There is no one better at jerking off into the ocean than New York giraffe.

Okay. Thanks. Thanks. New York giraffe. So cool to see you. New York giraffe. It's always awesome. Thanks so much.

What a treat. This has been the last episode of Besties. Sorry to Alex Bloomberg, who is canceling. Okay, he's just canceling. He's unplugging my computer. Taking it back in the car. He's driving away. Goodbye.

He's driving away. I'm yelling at this point. If you hear me right now, I'm outside your window, and I'm yelling because Alex Bloomberg took my computer and threw it in the trash. Hey, we have some emails from our listeners. Should we read those to get the taste of New York giraffe out of our mouth? I love New York giraffe. If you weren't excited to see that fan favorite, 90s besties fans will love that.

And by that, I mean besties fans who listen to over 90 episodes will enjoy that. Here's a question. This is from Joshy and also from CoolMemes2k16. They asked at the very end of this. If you could have a boon from any god IRL, what would it be and why? For them, the favorite was obviously hangovers.

Just give people hangovers. Yes, Dionysus' whole thing is he adds a damage over time effect called hang called hangover and that's pretty good it's hard for me to divorce myself from like what the mechanics of hades are because that is like my favorite thing i i you know i mentioned it earlier but the i think i really think the fishing boom would be dope because not only does it increase the chance of fishing it's for every single. So every single room you walk into, there's a 20% chance for a fish to show up.

That sounds alarming. Like if you are in a hotel, there's going to be fish everywhere. I walk through a lot of rooms every day in my day-to-day life. I don't always want to be confronted by fish. I think it would be charm for me, just the ability to blow a sweet kiss.

If you just blow one sweet kiss at an enemy. In my day-to-day life, the person at the DMV that doesn't want to recognize what I've written. The haters online. Yeah, the haters. Thank you. Yeah, just a little sweet kiss blown into the air. You could probably just do that, Juice. I guess I couldn't.

I don't know. The year is 2020. I'm not sure everybody wants sweet kisses blown their way. Yeah. Also, Josh asked me specifically, what baseball team are you repping in Blaze Fall? I'm a Casey Mintz fan. Obvious.

This is from Vanny. What weapon do y'all favor the most i personally like the fist and the spear i i think the spear is unquestionably the best weapon in the game right am i alone here so i upgraded the shield is what i what i used my uh my stuff we didn't even talk about aspects yeah it's basically like modifiers that like add a a weird mechanic to a weapon uh like justin i think is about to explain the the chaos chaos shield yeah so the shield uh so the shield one of the aspects you can get is uh it has a special attack which is throwing it right captain america style but um the you can uh get this aspect to the Shield of Chaos that

it throws it very slowly and it just spins with spikes all over it. And you can recall it to wherever you are in the level. So it's basically like, throw it out at a bunch of enemies and then recall it and run away from it, basically. And it's just, you've got this spinning death

blade following you around. I think Fist is my favorite. There's an aspect that gives, changes your, you have an uppercut is the special on the Fist, but there's an aspect that makes it magnetic. So it will draw in the nearest enemy. And I had my very first boon, the one that like appears as soon as you start to run

was a legendary boon from, oh my God, not Neptune, shit.'s the poseidon uh that adds a huge knockback effect to your special so essentially i was yo-yoing enemies i like very easily finished that run because you just suck an enemy in and uppercut them and knock them away so like nobody could ever touch me it's fucking great so so my preferred favorite and it's really telling that we've all really picked a variety of weapons is the bow um i upgraded an ability that basically makes it work like the gun from uh the fifth element where you fire one uh arrow right and then all the other arrows kind of target it um and i can clear the game steadily every single time now with that upgrade to the point where i needed to start switching to be able to get more resources like just trying different weapons so they it really

is um an incredibly balanced game to the point where you can use any of the weapons and um just really crush yeah uh we had one more question we had a lot of questions about the game's horniness uh i'm gonna go with this one from ian which gods uh would be best worst to go on a date with uh you can also include non-god characters as i've said dusa best by far uh demeter probably worst um jelly skelly's up there i like the skeleton uh i mean sisyphus for sure sisyphus is so chill sisyphus just has this big rock uh that also becomes a character if you like to hang out with sisyphus enough uh and you know sisyphus is in pretty high spirits considering his like sort of eternal punishment and damnation uh but he's just really very very nice he's just very nice yeah uh i said i gotta say nix uh

she's purple she's super nice every time with zachary as i keep giving her gifts and trying to flirt her up and i can't seem to get much uh traction going there was i'm trying to make that mom until like two hours into the game yeah okay all right i'm saying so there's gonna be a little bit of opposition but the heart wants what the heart wants uh my vote is for thanatos who is the god of death who is a fuck maybe the hunkiest of hunks in this video game like he no one has hunked more than thanatos has so really terrific hunkage right there yeah the longer we talk about this game the more intolerable recording this podcast and not playing this game yeah yeah i keep trying to think like

pretty much every character in this game and like i'm like well maybe i was wrong maybe the chaos god or like i mean it's hard not to love anybody there are these rooms that will randomly appear uh in each kind of world the game is broken up into these different sections and all they do they exist purely to give you gifts hard not to fall in love with them you know maybe not to syphony the one who yells murder murder murder no no no i'm talking about the people who like uh like eice, who's like, I got a nice song going and I'm cooking a stew. Y'all playing anything else?

I feel like I've been playing a lot of stuff. I know, Juice, you've also been playing Ori and the Will of the Wisps. It is a shame that we did not dedicate a whole episode to it because it is one of my favorite games of the year. I finished it a couple days ago and it is an improvement i really liked uh ori and the blind forest but i never finished it i feel like will the wisps is a more straightforward metroidvania uh in that it

doesn't have the like create your own save point system and like all of the kind of weird shit that blind forest did but it is really very very good i basically started playing it right after i finished hollow knight and i think it's not i mean hollow knight is maybe top five favorite games ever made for me so it's not quite there but it is uh it has some of the best flow yeah of any game like you can double jump into like a hang glide into a launching yourself off an enemy projectile and grapple hook onto like a spinning wheel that launches you up into the, like you can traverse great distances very, very quickly.

It's on- Getting around is a joy. It's on Switch. Which I think is still important for Metro Mania. Yeah, for sure. It's on Switch. It's also a beautiful game. It is like, I genuinely-

Music rules. Teared up. The music is good. It's on Switch, which is where I played it. It's where I would, you know, it's a great little game for Switch conceptually but the i had a lot of crashes and uh uh there's a lot of load weird load stuff like if you run through an area too quickly you will just stop at the edge of the screen because it's loading the next area uh so from what i understand it's a tough port to get

done but there's some technical issues there but it's really good um yeah that's me too ori ton of ori how about you um uh i'm playing sponky 2 a video game we just spent a lot of time talking about but it's out on pc now so if you were waiting for the pc release it is now live there i've been playing a few different things uh i've been playing some metro ex. Finally going back and playing that. You know what? Turns out, pretty good game. Pretty good game. If you like good games, shooters specifically,

I'd recommend going back and giving it a try. I don't know if I talked about Kill It With Fire on the show. I don't think so. It's a game where you look around a house for Spider, and you kill the Spire with fire. Okay. But as the game goes on, it just gets a lot bigger, and you get a lot more things than just fire to kill the spiders.

I don't want to say much more because it's one of those games that just, the fun is in seeing what direction it takes you. And then lastly, Flight Simulator. what direction it takes you and then lastly flight simulator y'all the pleasure of flight simulator now is uh waiting for people to discover discover the uh the unrealities uh that have snuck into the game did you all see the big hole no no oh the black the black hole that is absorbing the... Brazil? Yeah. In Brazil, there has just been an unreality hole that is just sucking the ground into the expanse of nothingness. And it is perfect.

It is beautiful. Oh, can I get... Oh, I want to do one more. Can I do one more quick plug? I've been playing a game on iOS called Death Come True. It's on a lot of other platforms. I added that to to your steam account i don't know if you noticed that uh i've yeah i've been playing on my phone actually where it's great it's a fmv game where which is um directed by the creator of the danganronpa series um so it's a but it's a very good use of fmv it's a roguelike, if that doesn't make any sense.

But you wake up and you are in a hotel room. You don't know who you are. There's a cop there who tells you you're a serial killer. And that is where it starts. And there is multiple people attempting to kill you in the game. When you die in the game, you wake up at the beginning of the day again cognizant of the things that have happened before and this is an fmv game so there's like narration uh of like what has just happened to you what you might need to do differently you have different options

depending on what you've already experienced and that's how the story unfolds it's designed to be played that way uh like i said it's on ios if i think it's on switch playstation 4 uh death come true is very cool speaking of dango and rompa i haven't played it yet but i just learned about paradise killer which is like an open have you played it yeah hit rules it's on it's on switch now it's it is a wild uh open world detective game in the style of like of a Danganronpa where you go around and find clues but like all the characters are like so wild

the Lady Love Lost I don't know what the name of the main character but like all the character names are like completely Lady Love Dies is the name of the main character if you played Hades and were like you know I want more horny video games in my life, this game is for you.

The other thing about it is, wow, does it have 1990s Sega energy. It's like if the Daytona USA team was like, hey, we're going to make an Atlus game next. That's what we're gonna do in 1996 um oh my gosh the the the music and the visuals on that game just rule we'll we'll have to make some time to talk about that in depth after y'all have had a chance to play it what we are making some time to talk about next week is star wars squadrons is to be the... So if you have any thoughts about Star Wars in any respect,

mail at besties.fan. Just give us all your... Or tweet at RussFreshtick. All your Star Wars opinions on any aspect of it whatsoever. And we will be sure to read all of those and cover them in depth. Make sure you follow and listen for free on Spotify. I assume you're doing that already, but if you would be so kind as to ask others to do that, besties.fan is the URL. That'll take you straight there.

We're at the besties pod on Twitter. There's also a link there for our mailing list, which you can go check totally out and get the latest and greatest in the besties. But that is going to do it for us for this week. So be sure to join us again next time for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley.

And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!