The Besties - Metroid Dread is Here to Save Us All

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

It only took 19 years for a true 2D sequel to Metroid Fusion, and now that it's here, we're basking in the glow of what may be the best Metroid game ever made. We know Russ is on board, but how do some of the other Besties handle the greatness that has been placed before them? We also discuss the tricky balance of accessibility and difficulty, and whether there's an obligation on the part of the developer to include certain features. Other games discussed: Tetris Effect Connected, The Artful Escape, Farm RPG. Also some fun scary movies: Slaxx, The Boys from County Hell, The Columnist, and 13 Ghosts. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I have a question for you guys. Shoot. Okay, so Yoshi. Uh-huh. Yoshi is a race of dinosaurs, right? The Yoshis, they live on Yoshi Island, and they're just like a general, like, you know, oh, there's a bunch of Yoshis running around.

Sure, I'll go with it. I mean, that is accurate. I don't think anyone would argue that a type of dinosaur is called a Yoshi. I don't want to be, you know. It's fair. It's fair. I would say that maybe Yoshis are the dinosaurs of the Mario universe. Yeah, fine.

I would agree with that. Okay. Now, the question I have is, is there an individual also named Yoshi who is a Yoshi? Yes. yoshi who is a yoshi yes or or whenever we see yoshi quote as a character is it just one random yoshi they found okay you're saying it you're not asking does yoshi have a name correct because that's like kind of the yoda thing right you're saying does yoshi have a soul like is there a is there a individual is there a light of recognition in Yoshi's terrible eyes when he sees Mario? Or is it just the next Yoshi?

Yeah. I thought you were saying, is there Yoshi the Yoshi? Yes, precisely right. Is there Yoshi the Yoshi? We know a Chris Person the person. What? What? what what you know chris person creates amazing roundups of you know video game moments for the internet he's a person i have an aunt whose last name her maiden last name was human

and then she became plant so she was both human and plant she transformed but but in the case of yoshi that would be like there's a dog and you just name him dog which i guess has happened hey russ it if you're gonna bring up really whack shit here you need to prepare for the fact that plant may just swat it out of the air like nothing i'm sorry but you attempted to dunk and he slapped it out of your hand her name was human and then it was plant the discussions ended you lost good day sir my friend named his dog

after himself so when they go to the vet they go Bailey Bailey because his last name is Bailey oh so it's kind of like that but again I'm not dropping this it's gonna come up again because I'm not happy with any of these answers. I think we should just do this for the top of every show until we get canceled again,

which will apparently be three episodes. Not that anybody can, but somebody will. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I am a morph ball. My name is Russ Fresh. I can't even follow that. It's not true. My name is Russ Fresh, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive

intergaming. It's a video game club, and just by listening, you, my friend, are a member. I'm so excited to have you this week because we're talking about a very i don't want to get too ahead of ourselves but a very good video game is called metroid dread it's very good can i tell you about this game it is the conclusion of the metroid 2d story saga samus aaron who we met around when I was born on the NES, has battled her way through

the Game Boy Advance to the... Wait, her? Her? What? Nothing. Come on. Just Russ and I are making a dumb joke. About how Samus is a woman. It's a big surprise. Keep it going.

She got the Zero suit. She about how Sam is a woman. It's a big surprise. Keep it going, keep it going. Okay. Yeah, sorry. She got the zero suit. She got the other M. She's been through a lot. And now she is ready to finish the game, as they say. And we are not going to finish this game, because we don't want to spoil it for you, but we're going to tell you about

all the good parts so that you give it a try. Yes, and we'll do that in so much more right after this brief commercial message. Her? Oh man, this is a good video game. Do we need to, like, actually talk about what

this game is, because we might need to. I mean, it's like a Metro. This is not, okay. If you know, okay, a Metroid. God, it's so hard when there's like a genre named after it. Here it is. Imagine a big, like when you're a kid

and you drew like a map on a piece of graph paper and there are all these different doors, but you can only get in certain ones once you've unlocked the necessary powers. So it's like, oh, you got to go fast to open this door, or you have to have a certain bomb, or you have to have a charge weapon. And the whole game is going back and forth and back and forth, unlocking doors that you couldn't unlock before by getting the necessary skills to do it. And the story angle of this is that somehow, every time Samus lands on a new planet,

she loses all of her God-given talents and has to reacquire them from God himself. I mean, in this case, they actually do explain why that happens. She kind of gets like- Yeah, it's a very limp, but they do. Knocked out and- What do they call it?

A physical amnesia, I think. A bird king, a bird king a bird king attacks her so that's the other thing about the story real quick samus was dna injected by her bird rivals but kind of surrogate parents who then got obliterated and now she travels the world fighting both metroids which can destroy the the planet and is it z or x yeah it's x but don't worry about it it's okay we don't need to explain sam is lower than anyone you could read there's a very good article by maddie myers on polygon.com if you genuinely care the truth of the matter is the lore is not what drives

why these games are so good and why everyone loves them why I love them um for many many many years Super Metroid was my favorite game of all time um and I will say at the top of this episode this game unquestionably competes with Super metroid as the best metroid game ever made wow wow okay so let's drill down on this a little bit okay it's not a major reinvention no of this of this franchise in the way that like metroid prime when it first was released it was a major reinvention which was a first person shooter and kind of like a side story right yeah um what what and there is supposedly i don't believe it when i say it a fourth one of those uh on the way um but this is a sort of the the conclusion of the 2d franchise what do you got what what separates this one in in your eyes sure i think i think the big

one is just the feel of it um the second you pick up the controller moving through this world i i honestly was like struggling to think of another 2d game that feels as good as metroid dread does just to move around the world she's like fluid she grabs onto ledges in like a smart like reasonable way that doesn't feel like forced it um it just feels uh in the way that like when you play mario 64 for the first time like that was sort of a groundbreaking moment this feels like they've put that level of thought and effort into a 2d game like and and some of that is like actual game feel but some of that is animation so like if you walk up to a wall you'll see samus like put her hand on the wall or if you or like she'll like peer into like little crevices just to add

this like extra layer of life to the world that just hasn't really existed in a lot of 2d games before yeah the comparison i guess is only slightly more recent is Gears of War. What Gears of War did for 3D action shooters, which, oh my gosh, video game genres are fun to say. But it was like, oh, you felt like you were actually in the world when you took cover. Like it sees,

and technically, hey, Winback is coming to Nintendo Switch Online. I've seen a lot of people ask, what the hell is Winback? And why is it on this thing? It's extremely important. Because it's the original game that created the system that years of war then kind of took and made much much much more popular but i that that is like the the clearest comparison for me of like oh this feels notably different than many of its peers even like i think that before this in terms of game feel i think the um like top bar was probably the ori series which still feels incredible as a

2d game i think this beats out ori for just like moving around the world and feeling amazing it feels great it feels great it's smooth it doesn't feel like i tell you the biggest hallmark of it is it doesn't feel like a hassle when you have to go back to um get to to some door that you couldn't open before it feels like fun and fluid um there's also the the the scary parts they're scary they're scary parts what are the scary parts for you in a game that so clear that in a franchise i would say that's so much power fantasy they very very very very very smartly in metroid dread introduce sequences where you don't have power you are powerless against the thing it doesn't matter how many stupid ass varia beams or how many you know armor points you got on your

suit they don't care they're these scary things called emmys which are not it's not a scary name when I say it out loud but boy when you see them they're like really scary robots that are coming ceaselessly looking for you hunting for you and they're like zones they have an area

that is yours and once you're in it it is a single like basically single hit kill or a capturing they refer to it as you're you get tackled by the thing you have these little these two brief flashes that are randomly timed which took me a while to figure out because uh they're like i mean instant it's basically luck right i mean i i mean it's i got better at it the more i played the game you get better at it but there's still like a randomness to it that makes it so you can't get the timing perfect and you can like deflect it the emmy but that just gives you like a second to run away and then they're back on the

hunt and there's like the little traps throughout that just give away your location. You eventually get like cloaking abilities that let you hide from the thing. But even that's not as overpowered as it sounds. You can like hide in crevices while they sneak around you. And it's just like this really, and then when they do eventually give you the ability to fight back against these things, you feel awesome.

Like it feels great. Hey, and then you have to kind of lure them to you that it feels so so satisfying yeah i was worried that it was uh because they made a big deal about the emmy parts in the marketing of the game like you kept hearing about it and i was worried that it was going to feel like a stealth mission type thing where you get spotted and it's over or whatever they actually feel it feels like a game of tag really yes you're just like it's it's not a lot of like oh i'm gonna sneak around you do some of that but it's mostly just like sprinting away and trying to like break line of sight which feels

super super good and then yeah you finally get this power to like take one of them out you can only take out one at a time and it just feels incredible and then after you do that you've got this whole new area that you can explore without having to stress about the fact that there's a robot chasing you so it like further opens this map up which is just like a really cool game design i thought that was genius to be clear when fresh says tag he doesn't mean the tag that you and I play. He means professional tag. Like if you go on YouTube and search for professional tag, where they have all those parkour sets around,

it looks just like that. Where you are like sliding under things and rolling over things. I think the thing that I appreciated about this is it is confined little sections. So you can kind of avoid them to some degree um i found it very forgiving where if i died once or twice with uh in an emmy zone and i just needed to get through it i don't know if the game did this intentionally but by that third time i started the emmy was so far away that i could run in the entrance and out the exit without even seeing them

if i just sprinted um so i found the emmy stuff extremely forgiving the stuff i did not find forgiving is the bosses which i like a lot but are considerably more challenging than anything else in the game yeah that's definitely true justin how i know you've faced a few of the bosses as well they're great i mean they're really smart and fun i mean like it is a challenge but there is definitely a they have a great gulf between this seems impossible and then you learn the thing and it's like oh okay and it's very clever how it doles it out. But once you get it, it's not impossible to execute. Like the execution of it is not difficult.

It's just in figuring out like the, what the trick is or what the gimmick is for a given. And it's not just like one thing you have to figure out for a given boss. It is a series of like best ways of dealing with stuff. Yeah, I think it's like a, a playing on tilt versus not situation where if you get kind of worked up as you're doing this boss fight and you're trying to like,

just go ham and fire missiles willy nilly, like you're just going to die. Like there's no question about it. But once you dial in the patterns and the attack systems and stuff like that, I, it feels better than like souls bosses in a lot of ways because i feel like some souls bosses you just kind of get screwed over sometimes

oh a role like the iframes didn't work or whatever a role wasn't precise enough and here it really is like once you dial it in you can dodge every single attack i watched a video on on youtube after the game came out of someone no hitting every boss like not getting hit by any boss in the game and so i mean that's an incredible design feat to make you feel like oh this is impossible i definitely will constantly get hit by this boss but in truth that's not the case like you can you can really just go through it without getting hit once to be clear for people who are just starting the game after listening this the first boss is easy so if you you listen to this and then you like play the first boss you're like i'm ready this is great i'm i'm a pro gamer wait till you get to the second one the one with the big like it has a belly and multiple belly

buttons that's the one where i think see okay that didn't bother that really on that yeah were you using a lot of rockets um oh i wasn't first i i would say that i had to play it five times to get yeah that's about right yeah that's about i probably did more i mean i got more frustrated by the emmy the emmy sections frustrating, but they're pretty fair in that if you get caught in one, it's probably because you're trying to get a little frisky. Usually when I would get caught, I'd think like, I'm not slowing down for this. I'm just going to haul ass through it. He'll never catch me.

And then I would get like halfway and they would just drown me. If you take the time time it's not hard but it is for like it is and it and it's not the kind of thing where it probably sounds annoying where like you'd have to you're like backtrack because these games are always a lot of backtracking like it's it you will usually have to go through an emmy section like once or twice before you get the ability to like take them out take it out take it take the emmy out so it's not like uh it doesn't make traversing the world annoying and sometimes you get um like it does a smart thing with shortcuts uh also where like if you go through and i know this is like a pretty old whatever but uh idea but it's pretty smart about if you go through an annoying section you turn around there's usually like a little thing you can blow up from

that angle that'll give you quick yeah access to this area again plan i know um we had talked about metroidvanias recently with axiom verge 2 which was a game that like you started playing and it was kind of tough for you to start and then it kind of clicked as you played it this is i think even more down the rabbit hole of like the core metroidvanias i mean it's a metro game but it's that core concept. What do you see as like the big difference here? What made it like more grippy for you? Well, I think this game is extremely clever in making you think you are smart and that you have freedom when in reality,

neither of those things is true. So the example I give is, you know, the classic thing with the original Metroid is they're, you know, breakable walls that you can bust holes in things that you would never know are there, and that reveals a shortcut or a mandatory path. And in this game, those are there too, but they are exactly where they would need to be for you to get to where you need to go to without like spoiling it. But it's never subtle where a breakable wall is. Except for like one point, which is extremely weird and icky. But you can find a guide for that.

You'll you'll know it when you find it. The thing that I want to talk about freedom, though, which I find I like, but I can see how this would frustrate me as how I normally play video games. In the past, we've talked about this, that if a game says go A direction, I'll go B direction just to see what it does. And this game does not want you to do that. If you see a door that is a teleporter to a world you've already visited, and that seems like not the helpful path, you should take it. Because if it put it in front of you, it knows the direction that you're going. And it is taking you to where you need to be to keep progressing through the story. And that took me a minute to just accept, because there were

times where I saw that I was like, well, that can't be what I do. I don't want to go back there. I'm having fun here. And then I looked up a guide because I was stuck for, you know, 15 minutes or 20 minutes and realized like, oh, no, I do need to take that teleporter because actually, if I go through there, it'll lead me right to the door that I couldn't open before, and that opens up a morph ball. This is not a critique. I think this is actually a very smart design. There has to be some support

that gets you through this game. It is hard if you miss one of those, which is, this was a frustration for me, is I wish there was some way to, like, if you miss one of those sort of signposts or it just doesn't click for you. And it's not a literal signpost, obviously it's like,

you know, hinting in with the path. It is not super hard to get like lost. Isn't the right word. Cause I was obviously a map, but like not clear about what you should be doing next. And that's mainly you know trying to play through it to get a good sense of it with limited time before we do this episode so there's a bit of a frustration there but i do wish that you had the

ability to at least check to see like where do you want me to go especially because you take elevators between like very large areas and it can feel very concrete to say like, I'm getting in a teleporter, I'm going to the next area. And it doesn't force you to do that. So it's like knowing whether or not that's the right move to given moment can be, can be true.

I do have a trick for you. Are you ready? So if you go into the map one, you can see if you've used any doors, it'll say like used next to it. But two, you can select the type of door or like when I say door, I mean like, oh, you open this door with the bomb. You open this door with a charge, whatever, whatever, whatever.

Whoa, really? You can mark it. And then it shows you all the other version, all the other doors that have not been opened of that type. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. the other doors that have not been opened of that type so my gosh yeah so it makes it like very clear especially if it's like well i just unlocked this skill i will give me a tutorial how to do a morph ball which i've been doing since i'm eight years old but they're not gonna give me a tutorial to do that yeah the map is extremely useful it's not super intuitive but if you i recommend spending

a little bit of time with it just to kind of figure out its ins and outs because it becomes invaluable um the further you go in the game yeah so the this came up recently in our episode on deathloop where um there was sort of this divide where justin i think wanted something a little more guided and i wanted something a little more open-ended and i actually think metro dread is the perfect example of a middle ground between the two, where you have that level of guidance, if you like dig through the map, and it'll tell you, oh, here's a door that you needed to break with a missile, but you haven't broken it yet. And you can find that in the map, but there's no tutorial that really explains it great, but it is there in the map. The last like four or five Metroid games have all been like, go here now.

It might not give you the exact path you take for every step of it, but it does give you a waypoint of exactly where to go. And that's always been something that puts me off about Metroid. When I think back to Super Metroid, I love the fact that it was so vague about where you were supposed to go next because I could get lost in the world. And this is the first game in a very, very long time where I had that click again for me. And finding the right way is part of the satisfaction of enjoying the game because it's like, oh, wow, there's this whole new area that I can now explore because I finally found it. and in the meantime while you're struggling like trying to find that area you're still enjoying just moving through the world we talked about the game feel earlier so i think this really walks that line very perfectly obviously if you get stuck there are guides online the map as plant

said is very useful but there are a lot of things in here that like click for me for a metroid series that haven't in a very long time yeah the the I mean, it's just very clever in how it gives you that original Metroid feel in a fair way. My favorite example is, you know, using the morph ball bombs where you, you know, break a single block to find a hidden entrance. If you just look at the map, it will show you these like tubes that go from place to place in the map so when you know the tubes are there you know that there's a hole to break in a wall to get into that tube uh so it's it's constantly like again if like i think you're spot on fresh like if you look for it it will it will help you yeah it's nudging you but it makes you work you do have to

actually look for it so if you it's not saying right away you know here's the the dotted line that gets you from point A to point B this game I'm gonna say it it's good there it is I mean there it is

it's a good game oh real quick you guys played on what you played on i played it on the oled switch oled i played on the switch light switch light oh wow walmart let really let me down this is a fun just sidebar uh i ordered the oled pre-order the oled from walmart in july and they just stone cold and there's tonsunk old. And there's tons of people, search Twitter, there's tons of people in this same scenario where they're like, just didn't,

I mean, it's just not there. We might have it. They didn't send them no update as of right now. Wow. No idea. So it's great.

They just didn't, just didn't do it. So bizarre. Here's the good thing. It works well on any Switch. I will say it looks good on any switch i did i don't love the feel uh you frequently have to use the uh l and r buttons you have to use like every button it is yeah well but you you frequently have to hold the like shoulder buttons

and on the light it doesn't feel using those a lot does not feel super great especially for extended periods of time yeah this was a game that i played a lot with the joy cons and then switched back to my split pad pro and it helped so much it's so much more comfortable using that um i do miss the rumble because it's one of the few games that like does the 3d rumble that nintendo does but yeah having a actual controller whether it's like the switch pro controller is also very good um helps a lot yeah let's uh let's take a break you get the idea it's good like play it it's good yeah i don't know play it it's good we'll be right back her well uh we we we mentioned it last week, but we are doing a survey.

If you want a free way to help the besties, free except for, I guess, it uses your most valuable currency, which is your time, it would really help us out if you would go fill out this survey. It's fun. It's interactive. It's an interactive survey because you're answering questions, and that's obvious on the screen when you're clicking things, it's a bit.ly forward slash survey besties. It helps us to know what advertisers would be a great fit for you.

And, uh, it helps us to, uh, keep the show running. So if you would take a moment to do that, uh, you know, it's pretty basic stuff. Um, and it's anonymous. So, Hey, we'd really appreciate it. It's bit.ly forward slash survey besties. Hey, everyone, Russ Froschek here. Sorry to jump into the episode. This is very weird and does not happen often, but I'm gonna do it right here. We are about to talk about accessibility. I am not personally super happy with how I conveyed my perspective on accessibility, mostly because I should just know a lot more about the space

before publicly speaking about it. So I sincerely apologize for that. If you're upset by the conversation, please understand that A, I totally get it, and that is a totally reasonable reaction. And B, we are trying to right the ship a little bit by having a true expert in the world of gaming accessibility in the form of Steven Spahn of AbleGam gamers steven knows way more about this space than any of us by like leagues so we are truly

honored to have him please check back for that episode on october 22nd for context here was the original conversation we had on the matter again i'm sorry here's that conversation fresh you had a question for us and i think it ties in well with a listener question. So I'm going to share that really quick. This one's from Lucas. What's your take on the game single non adjustable difficulty setting? How do you feel about game difficulty as it relates to game accessibility? I think this is our segment B. This is not our full listener mail section. But I think it's worth prefacing with that question for what you want to talk about right here. Yeah, so the question that I set up in the rundown was, is it okay for big franchises to be difficult?

And they are actually very related, the questions. I'm glad you mentioned the reader mail question. This game, there's been some back and forth on the internet surprise surprise about whether there should be an easy mode which this game does not offer just starts at normal and gets and normal is very hard or pretty hard um and it also doesn't offer like accessibility functions if you for example uh you know can only play with one hand or have hearing or vision difficulty stuff like that um so so none of that is in there and the question is is it okay for games whether they're big franchises or not to

remove to just not have these settings and i think a lot of people conflate game difficulty with game accessibility and i do think that there are two different things although they frequently end up kind of in the same bucket so let me just define them real quick game difficulty is very simple there's a hard mode you'd take on four times as much damage as normal that's like game difficulty game accessibility is uh the one of the earliest examples that i remember was in celeste where celeste is obviously a very tricky platforming game uh in the accessibility settings you can turn on uh infinite jumps if you want to which more or less removes the challenge from the game and you can just experience it from like a narrative point of view so i think that's more in the realm of game accessibility um obviously game accessibility is like a really sensitive

topic because a lot of people uh feel strongly about hey i should be able to experience this thing despite me having uh you know some accessibility issues my personal what i consider to be relatively minor in this scenario is I'm colorblind. So there are certain games that I struggle with if they don't have colorblind settings. I don't know, this is a really thorny issue. My general attitude for both of these topics is a developer at a studio will spend three to four to five to maybe six years working on a game. It is their time that they're spending and their investment that they're

spending. They have the right to determine what sort of experience the players have when explain playing that game. They've made that front loaded, you know, commitment. And if they don't want to offer an easier difficulty setting or they don't want to offer accessibility options that would potentially also make the game much

easier for people that is their decision to make even though it's a bummer for a lot of people that just can't make play that game see i i i get what you're saying i think that this needs to fall on the like console caretakers nintendo xbox playstation all of them have a thing called a certification process which is like does this game meet the standards that we require to be on our platform and i think that there are certain things that should be added to a cert process so that a developer if they want to be on these platforms if they want to be exposed to this large of an audience are required to hit them and i think a colorblind mode is a fantastic example of one of those there are you

know indie studios that i mean celeste being a great example that include these features i think it is bizarre that a game effectively first party nintendo game even though technically not developed by nintendo um can't include even the basics i do think that there is like a recognition of not every game can have every single accessibility feature even though and i think that's the yeah we're seeing the comparison i would make for something like nintendo is far cry 6 has roughly a trillion features yeah so it's jarring when you play something like Metroid Dread and it has none. Well, okay, so we're kind of crossing

into a few different territories here. You talked about certification process and having certain accessibility features required. You mentioned colorblind mode. I think the question there is, where do you draw the line on what is a should be included versus not accessibility i certainly wouldn't want to be making that judgment call as much as i'd love to see colorblind mode

in every game i you know i know there are other people that would want other things required in every game so where do you draw that line i do know that like sony as an example for first party you know of their first party development has made it a huge development priority to make sure all of their games have accessibility, but it is not a requirement to put a game on PlayStation 5 to have that.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, I really, I think it's two different conversations. I really do. I feel like accessibility and difficulty are two different conversations. I think accessibility, we should be, you know,

difficulty should not come from my items are hard to find in the environment. I think it gets tricky, though, because some accessibility features do make the game considerably easier. This last example I gave, or there's a lot of features in Last of Us 2 that, for example, auto-lock on. You just hold the trigger and it instantly locks onto someone's head nearby. So like that makes the game dramatically easier.

And if someone wanted a much, much easier experience, they could craft that for themselves. Man, I'm really torn about this. I don't know. I'm going to talk without having like a really strong, like I'm trying to suss out my own feelings, right? Like I, at first blush, I feel like you should be able to experience the story of Last of Us because it is like a narrative heavy game without these impediments of gameplay.

With Metroid, I feel like it's the sort of game where there's not a lot other than the mechanic. It is a much more mechanical experience and it's sort of like you're not if you're if you're removing a lot of those mechanics to clear the way for a narrative like you're not really getting much out of that like you're not it's not necessarily like an experience that like not everyone desert like has to experience the story of Metroid to have a complete, you know, life. But at the same time, like I don't want to, it feels weird to be the one who's like, this is a good enough story to be accessible.

Like that's wild. I think that's it. But okay, third hand, fourth hand, like if our concern is like experiencing the story at a certain point, like you can watch playthroughs to get that. You know, like what are we trying to preserve at that point? I think that it is not up to any of us to decide what are we trying to preserve.

The comparison I'd make is it's like when film directors say they only want their movies seen in IMAX with real film, right? And then people watch it on an iPhone and they get a wonderful experience out of it. But it is not, you know, the director's vision. That is how I feel with games when you, again, add these features that maybe it does completely change the game. Maybe it does completely change the game, but it allows people to get their experience with it in some form that they otherwise literally would not have had at all. And it's this weird thing where it's like, I guess the fear is like somebody is going to play the game who doesn't necessarily need these accessibility features. and then they're not going to have the experience they should have had i i'm not really sure what the the concern is well let me let me just counter the director example just for a second imagine you're a game developer and you feel let's pick splunky as an example splunky is obviously a very hard game no accessibility features whatsoever you feel like that is the pure core experience for playing Spelunky. Someone comes to you and is like, you need to add accessibility features to this game.

And your attitude is, this is going to fundamentally change the experience that people play with this game. I don't want to do that. Don't you think it's your right as a creator of that game to say i don't want this in the game that i've been working on i think a director who has final cut approval would feel the same way yeah it's it's their right in the same way that chris nolan can be an asshole you know i just don't i just fundamentally disagree with it and i know that that's a real example i know that i don't know know if Derek still feels that way, but that is how the creator of Spunky felt for some time.

We're getting, we're getting like way off the path. No, no, it's, yeah, but there's something to it. I mean,

it's like at a certain point, I think what you're starting to see, get to is like, do you believe that mechanical design is art? Like, do you believe that the design of a game mechanic if there if there's an art to game design then you should it then all expressions of that are valid like there's no no one should be forced to like change that that art to make it more accessible in the much same way that we wouldn't expect an author to like use

a more limited vocabulary to make their book more accessible to to other people um who may not have the same vocabulary that they do we wouldn't expect them to like limit their vocabulary here's here's another example i'd give going to a museum if you're visually impaired and listening to audio descriptions of the art that you see you are no you're not no no no no you're changing the discussion because i accessibility features and difficulty are two different like i know i'm talking about accessibility is that not an accessibility feature what so so again i'm talking about things that like that not an accessibility feature? What? So, again, I'm talking about things that, like, you fundamentally, if you go to look at art at a museum, right,

that is the way that the creator intended you to see it fundamentally, right? Right. And then if you go and you listen to audio descriptions of it, you are experiencing it in a completely different way, but you're still experiencing it, right? That is how you make museums accessible sure i agree with that but a game and you are you're not experiencing the game as it was intended but it is giving you some version of the game so that you can still appreciate

it and be a participant in it that isn't it isn't it up to the artist who puts that painting on the wall like if they went out and said, you know what? I never want a placard next to my art. I never want an audio recording next to my art. That is my choice. I created this thing. It's up to me to decide how my art is appreciated. Oh, absolutely.

But if I was a museum, I would just not want to hang their art. Yeah, then you wouldn't. Sure. I mean, I argue the opposite side of this too when it comes to like live theater because a lot of proponents of live theater feel like it should like it that experience is sacrosanct and it it is not uh advantageous perhaps to film a live performance and make it accessible to people who can't physically get there and i've argued for a very long time that they are limiting the yeah the audience of who like loves live

theater or loves theater period in in this country because you can't it's not accessible to to a lot of people um so like in that in that sense like i i guess i'm arguing that is a very similar argument i think where i'm on the the opposite, but the creators, the theaters in this example are the theater creators, the playwrights and what have you know, are aware that they are limiting their audience. They are making a choice to limit their audience. I'm not saying it's the right choice, but for them, they are making that choice for themselves and their piece of art if they wanted to throw a movie you know hamilton on uh disney plus they could do that

but yeah but they're only doing that yeah but what we're talking about really is like what what we should expect from people like not not what everyone everyone has a right to do whatever the fuck they want i mean like you know anybody could release anything. It is, is it like, is what should we expect as, you know, we the gamers? You know what I mean? What should, what is like, I think that there's a lot of things. I mean, like captioning, you know what I mean? It's like a great example, like where if it wasn't expected, it may not happen. You know, like you wouldn't want to leave that up to individual people.

Like I don't want captions. It's all easy experience. Guess what, motherfucker? I watched your movie. Everything is captions. Everything. My hearing's not great. I have some hearing loss.

I was going to say this is a manual for kids. I don't care. Yeah, right? Can't turn the volume up that loud. You didn't balance your audio. Anyway, I feel like this discussion is probably insufferable for a lot of people but it's only because they would love to be in here uh hashing it out too i wish i knew what griffin thought because i don't have a strong i don't know i don't know i don't like there's a very easy like obvious answer to this i certainly

have feelings but it's extremely difficult and then we're again not even delving into the like is it okay that this metroid game is dramatically harder than any metroid game that came before it i don't like that's the whole other issue but i don't think i think we've gone long enough on people i will say this i do think though i don't think we can all agree is that there is a problem if you're someone who is defining their self-worth through your gaming achievements. So me. Like me. You mean me. Yeah, like if you're somebody like us.

And you feel like that making that experience more accessible somehow cheapens or lessens your achievements. I feel like that's where a lot of the counter argument on this comes from. Yeah, I don't actually. And that, I think we can all agree, is bullshit. Is bullshit. That's bullshit.

You need to do something different. You need to get some other chiefos, some real life chiefos, maybe. Y'all, I have some reader, listener questions. Are you ready for this? I hope they're not as spiky as the last one. Yeah. You brought that one.

No, no. It was a really good question. I appreciate them bringing it. You brought it. They had a complimentary question. This is gone. Stop praising yourself. Me and Lucas are simpatico then.

Okay, okay. This one's from Ty. Is Metroid Dread worth playing with no prior experience with metroid games or is it simply a trip down memory lane for folks that remember chris plant i yeah i as someone who has no love uh really for this series i think it's a great game to play i don't have zero prior experience, but actually I probably have worse. I'm not a huge fan of the games.

So the fact that I am enjoying it, yeah, I think this is as good a time as any to start, which goes to our second question from Katie, aka Dr. Pepper the Third. As this is apparently the fifth and final game in a series is there any important metroid lore i need to catch up on going in or is knowing that samus is a cool bounty hunter who kills metroids and hates a purple dragon named after the director of alien sufficient uh okay so i'll address the fifth and final game of the series. Before the game launched, the developers were like, this is the end of the arc that we've been telling since Metroid 1.

It should be noted, this will not be the final Metroid game, and I'm not even counting Metroid Prime 4. I would be shocked if there was not another 2D Metroid game that came after Dread. It might take 19 years to come out, but I don't think this is the end of the series series as metroid is um so i guess i would say to answer the question you don't really need to know the game starts with like a very brief explainer of like how we got here and that's probably plenty for most people again there are wiki pages and articles all sorts of the all over the place if you really care. But there's this game is like 95% gameplay and 5%

lore. So I really wouldn't stress about it. And there will be more Metroid games. I'm obviously biased. I do really recommend the polygon explainer by Maddie Myers on this, because it is concise, which a lot of the explainers aren't and really the only reason i would read something beforehand is to know what the hell the giant bird creatures are because i had no idea about all the bird creatures and it turns out they are crucial to the metroid lore so yeah i guess they don't really explain that at the beginning, huh? Well, they kind of do, but it's very fast, and it helped that I had read before seeing the kind of pseudo cutscene.

The thing with this being the final game of the series, I really have a feeling that they know that they've put themselves into a corner with this lore not being super great and being extremely repetitive. Like, how many times can samus you know keep uh having her suit destroyed i i have to imagine whatever comes next is a reboot that is like a separate timeline uh because if they want to take this into any like modern direction i think the the lore needs a full demo and rebuild at this point. I do not think that that will happen.

But I do agree that I think at this point, it's hard for me to imagine them pulling this trick out of their hat again and having the same reaction. I think it might be time. I think Jeff Grubb on twitter was saying that this is kind of like a link between worlds and it might be the game uh the next game might be the like breath of the wild for for metroid where it like totally re-envisions what a metroid game is i would be very very into that because i don't know how many more they can do of this format but yeah we'll see

you guys been playing anything else good um i wanted to call out uh so i as i mentioned i played metroid on the oled switch which is very good um i wanted to call out another game which is incredibly good on the oled switch if you've just purchased one and that game is tetris effect connected which has arrived on the switch obviously we one and that game is tetris effect connected which has arrived on the switch obviously we've talked a lot about tetris effect being one of the best puzzle games ever made uh it manages to improve on tetris which is quite the feat um and it uh looks absolutely stunning on the oled the music sounds great uh whether it's speakers or you're playing with headphones um

and i found that i when i play something like stressful or intense uh i always end the night playing like a round of tetris effect and it like chills me out to no end so it's awesome fantastic plan uh i it's spoopy season so i got another movie recommendation i watched 13 ghosts not the old one the not well i guess new issue one it's like 20 years old it's got uh tony shalhoub it's got shannon elizabeth sold stop it's got are you already said tony oh wait wait for this matthew lillard and let me tell you matthew lillard is the most underrated actor of his generation he's i've been fucking saying this forever matthew lillard rules he's unbelievable he gives he gives no joke he gives an oscar effort in this movie do i think he deserves an oscar for this movie no i mean you still have to have the words you know to say yeah but but he's like putting it out like he's there he's putting in the effort

out there i i don't know if this is true or not if this is you know urban legend but i heard that like he had to quit acting for a while after the scooby-doo movies because he blew out his voice box doing the shaggy impression. Like, what a guy. And now he runs a tabletop company for, like, tabletop games. Yeah, he's great. Anyway, 13 Ghost, if you want some real kind of late 90s, early 2000s cheesiness, everybody wears these really bad looking, they look like white Oakleys with like lights inside that allow them to see ghosts. Hey, you've got it.

The house is made of glass. It has Latin. It's great. Where can people watch that? I think it's on HBO Max. HBO Max seems to be the answer to all questions these days when it's streaming. See, I disagree because i want

to mention three from shutter that i've been enjoying for the scary season one is slacks s-l-a-x-x dangerous clothes it's a movie yeah murderous pants uh it's great last night i watched the boys from county hell which is an irish vampire movie uh which is a little bit sort of the shawn of the dead but a little bit more a little bit darker than the Shaun of the Dead, but a little bit more, a little bit darker than that. It's very cool. Sorry, sorry, wait, wait, wait, before we go forward, did you say County Hill or County Hell? Hell.

Hell, yeah, it's good to, yeah. And then The Columnist, which is a Dutch movie about a writer who gets tired of people criticizing her on the internet, so she starts murdering people. Got it, wow. It's great. Yeah, it's really really

really good uh but game wise i wanted to say two very quickly one is farm rpg griffin mentioned it last week um if you're looking for something like very brainless but also like kind of neat and and relaxing oh so relaxing uh it's a it's on ios and you just sort of zone out and have a farm and chill it's great and the numbers go up that's important to note the other one is like the polar opposite of that it's the artful escape this game is great like the artful escape is an uh it's an indie thing uh and i think it did not get much play when it was released. It is released by Annapurna, developed by a company called Beethoven and Dinosaur.

It is a, I guess you'd call it maybe an experiential platformer. Yeah, I like that. Where you are Don't sound surprise planned. We talked a little bit about this on the Resties. No, I know, but I like that term.

You didn't use it. Oh, oh, fair. No, I coined it just now. You're the nephew of a great folk singer who everyone is expecting to be sort of following his lineage, but you have the heart of a sort of glam rock idol. And it is a beautiful journey of like uh finding yourself and experimentation and a very surreal sort of uh landscape you have a button to play guitar

almost all the time and you can just like hold button to do guitar solo and playing your guitar like wakes up the world around you, uh, and like brings it to life. And it's like not a mechanical thing. It's just like, cool. You do it because it looks cool.

And you're like sliding down a hill, wailing in your guitar. And like these giant alien plants are growing all around you. Um, it's really well acted. It's got like a surprisingly, um, great voice cast in,

in the game. It feels like it takes itself pretty seriously. And, and not in a bad way in a way that like really makes the experience hand, like Lena Headley's in it. Carl Weathers is in it. Jason Schwartzman, Mark Strong.

It's got like a really, Michael Johnston was like, like the lead. It's kind of like a really great cast and it's just i don't know it's something you really should sort of like vibe on it's not challenging in any way there's almost no challenge to it it is very much about the experience but that experience is it's not on switch though right it's not on switch it's on game pass um okay so you could get it on game pass for free if you'd subscribe to that um but yeah it's i i would actually recommend playing it on like the

biggest nicest tv you have because it really is headphones are great too it's like you very much have to okay yeah hey experience who do we have to thank thank you very much to the people who have written reviews for the besties uh read the rose wompity womp womp clay kramer the uncool and husky sushi really appreciate uh y'all for writing reviews appreciate everyone else for writing reviews as well thank you uh keep them coming please we always appreciate it we are nearing 4 000 reviews on apple podcast which is just so fucking cool we love to see it that's wild uh okay stuff that we talked about today i mean pretty much metroid dread for a long time and then i as y'all said treacherous effect connected uh the artful escape farm rpg and then just a series of movies because I'm making an impression here.

We got Slacks, The Boys from County Hell, The Columnist, and you know we got the Tony Shalhoub 13 Ghosts. You should check that out. Next week, we have Far Cry 6. I think I will be traveling, so I might not be here for that. We also have Arrestees appearing Tuesday before that, and you know that I'll be traveling, so I might not be here for that. We also have Arrestees appearing Tuesday before that, and you know that I'll be talking about Tales of Arise

and Outer Wilds DLC, not Outer Worlds. So we've got a lot of good stuff coming up. It's a busy season. It is. It's the reason for the season. That's a beautiful plan. Thank you. And thanks to you for it is it's the reason for the season thank you

and thanks to you for listening we hope you'll join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games per Besties!