The Besties - Terminator Time Travels to Save '90s Garbage Games

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

At first, we thought Terminator 2D: No Fate looked and felt like a flawless recreation of the movie tie-ins for the SNES. Then we watched gameplay of the actual Terminator 2 SNES game. Time does not favor the cash grabs.In hindsight, developers Bitmap Bureau performed a modest miracle, perfectly recreating how we remember trashy retro games — without actually becoming one of them. This is the game that Terminator fans should rememberWe talk about this side-scrolling confection, our fading memories of movie-to-game adaptations, and more! 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!

Big confession time, guys. And it's embarrassing. We've been doing this for so long. I never talked about this with you guys. But I am a Terminator 1,000. And I was sent from the future because if this podcast doesn't exist, it's going to be bad for humanity. I shouldn't spoil too much, but it's going to be bad for humanity if this podcast ever stops. So I am a liquid metal cyber guy, and I'm from the future sent back to make besties.

When you say bad, what do you possibly mean? Yeah. Corpo. Oh. Like technology goes like crazy. Oh, man, that sounds terrible. Yeah. Fuck.

On the knife hands front, because I know you have night hands and I figured it was just like a thing that you had. I told you guys that was my, yeah, I told you guys that was my rheumatoid arthritis. That's actually from being a liquid metal sort of cyber guy. Right. So is that everyone in the future has knife hands or is it just you? No, just as liquid metal cyber guys. I'm usually a bad dude. Like, they usually use me for killing men who are in the laser war against us.

But I have, I learned how to love the child. I mean, I adopted as my son. Okay, gotcha. I so then he sent me back in time to make this kickass video game podcast now don't get me wrong do I know why this podcast existing prevents the laser bore and the corpo takeover and all that I do not okay I know I do not know why these two things are connected I have one follow-up question if liquid metal why not abs yeah I mean that's a good question Russ I could I could have abs I could make them up here right now.

I could fold it all in, fold it in, fold my metal. But here's a problem. Let's see if it changes your timbre. Can you give yourself abs, see if it changes your tone? It will. It will definitely, I mean, my diaphragm. I mean, I'll try it. If it's funny, it'll be the end of the thing.

Yeah, yeah, let me try it. Guys, what's up? You want to talk about Donkey Kong. Yeah, that's pretty funny. I think that can be the end of the thing. Smolie-moly. Did you say swoley-moly? You fucking stinker.

Look that face. Fucking stinker. My name is Justin McRoy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McRoy. I know the best game of the week. My name is Chris Bot in I Note game. Whoa. Wow.

Wow. My name is Ross Farshick and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties. We're talking about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a video game club. And just by listening, you've become a member. This week we're going to be talking about a new. game that feels old

it's Terminator 2D no fate Chris Plant what's that Chris Bot excuse me Do you think it was maybe a hat on the hat to have another robot You gave that up so fucking quick dude You bailed so fast Yeah I kind of realized I tried to serve it up to you

Fresh you just bailed I'm sorry Terminator 2D no Fate is a new video game movie tie-in of Terminator 2 Judgment Day. One of these came out back in the day on the Super Nintendo,

but this one looks and feels like how you would want it. It's pixel heaven, and we'll be talking about it more after this break. I don't remember playing the original Terminator game. Do you remember?

Does anyone... It's like I don't remember not playing it. It's one of those where like it seems like such a fixed quantity. Terminator, but probably not. Terminator 2 was the first R-rated movie I ever saw.

Nice. So, like, I'm sure I, I probably couldn't ask for the game because I didn't want to let on that I had seen the movie because I told my parents I was going to go see the American President. Yeah. You went to the theater, walked towards the American President, and then took a B-line over to Terminator? I told my parents, we're going to, Tommy and I told his mom that we're going to go see Terminator,

but I told my parents we're going to go see the American President's starring Michael Douglas and Annette Benning. And then after we got our tickets and we walked in, we just went to a Terminator. We also are a good boy. So if you had asked for the video game, we would have been like, can I have Terminator 2? Based on the movie I already saw. I'm sorry, very, very, very. So no.

I don't know. No, but I do remember actually we did have developed also by LJN, the American President, S&S game. Yeah. It was great. LJN's LBJ. Yeah, I'm in Annette Benning, Maine. Yeah, yeah. She had that spreadsheet. A lot of people like Douglas, but I'm main Benning.

So, hey, this game, right before we started, Chris did send us some footage of the original Terminator 2 game made by LJN and released probably, what, 30 years ago or so. It's so cool seeing that after having played Terminator 2D, no fate. Because while I played Terminator 2D, no fate, I was like, this is just like a Super Nintendo. game from 1993. And then I looked at the exact same video game made in 1993 by the LJN toy company. And I was like, never mind, this is a hundred million times better. This is a hundred trillion billion times better. Should have stuck to toys.

It's crazy how much this game captures a vibe and a genre that really went out of fashion with the kind of arrival of three-dimensional graphics and pop. and polygons and what have you. The people who are still making 2D games at that point are like, that's cool, but we're not going to do any more of these kind of like run and gun licensed heavy shooters. Obviously, you have your mercenary kings

and your metal slugs and all that jazz. But this is like a different thing. This is a different thing. The best version of this is probably, or at least like the gold standard for this kind of game, I think is Blackthorn on the Genesis. like it's a deliberately paced side-scrolling action game that is not, it's like defined by the fact that it's not a Metroidvania type thing.

You know what I mean? Like you are not trying to, it looks like a game like that, but you are not trying to like find better keys to unlock secret doors. That is not the vibe. If you went to like a three-star Michelin restaurant and you've got a tasting menu and you're like, I want it all based on my favorite food for my childhood,

it would be this in video game. form in that. Each level is kind of a different style of a different game, but it's itty-bitty. It's like maybe a third as long as it would have been in a previous game. It has none of the annoying bits. The visuals are upgraded to heaven. The sound and the music is incredible. And the second you've had your fill, you got that taste in your gut, boom, you're moving

on to the next section. There is no wasted time in it because what they get is these games can be so tedious because they are very thin mechanically. So once you've gotten a taste of that mechanic, you are done. I will say maybe that works to its detriment some of the time because it jumps between genres as you move between sections of the movie. It is a very faithful retelling of Terminator 2 Judgment Day with a little bit of the original Terminator kind of thrown in at the beginning,

a scene setting. But it's moving between like Battletoad style kind of hell hallways and the more metal slugs, slow, heavy kind of platformy shooter. And also there's like a beat-em-up section. But that never really comes back. It really is just that one sort of section where you're doing a beat-em-up as a nude Arnold. And I don't know, some of this stuff worked really well, I thought, and I wanted there to be kind of more of it. But it really sticks to the plot of the movie so hardcore that it's not just going to add more sections where Arnold is beating the shit out.

of people. It really does leave you wanting more, which is rare, yeah. Let's talk about it from the beginning and just go through a few of these sections to give people an idea of how it works. Your first thing is like you are Sarah Connor and I think it's like pre before the birth of your son. It's like kind of a flashback if I remember or like you have your son and you're trying to get to him. Oh, they've kidnapped him. Your son's been kidnapped by punks and you've got to fight your way, kill your way through a bunch of punks to get to him. But you're just Sarah Connor so you don't have any like special. magical abilities. You walk from left to right with a gun and if you get close enough to an enemy, you can tap wide to do a

sort of like close up maneuver, which even that is a small thing, but it's really smart actually because in a lot of side-scrolling shoot games like this, you get really close to someone and suddenly you feel ineffectual. So having like a close, not having to like shoot people at point-blank range in a way that feels kind of immersion-breaking is actually a really smart little thing. So you have that option like running up on somebody and just meleeing them rather than shooting. Yeah. Yeah. Shortly after that, it jumps to the future where you're playing is an aged John Conner's Connor. Connor.

And he's got like fucking futuristic laser guns and shit like that. Like it's full contra. Very contra. Yeah, full on contra. Just for that one level. Well, we'll talk about that because there's elements of that that come back later. And then it jumps back to Sarah Connor and you have like a stealth sequence. once where you're escaping from the mental hospital.

No, no, no, before that is Naked Terminator at the bar. Yeah, naked Terminator. Which changes here because not only is it a beat-em-up, but there are small but important changes. Like, you can't be killed as the Terminator. So what they do instead is the clock just ticks down extra time when you take damage. It's all these little tweaks to make it feel just a little different. Yeah. Arnold is on a schedule, and that's really all that matters. One of the maybe all-time best needle drops in a video.

game, by the way, in that section. I don't want to do too many more of these, because, like, that is the, for me, true joy of this game. Mechanically, it's, like, pretty straightforward. It feels great, but, like, none of these sections are, like, really reinventing the wheel or doing anything, like, particularly surprising mechanically. The surprise is that, like, and now it's this type of game for a little bit, and now it's this type of game for a little bit, and now it's done.

Now the game's over because we did the whole movie and there isn't any more to do. So I hope you enjoyed the game. It's short and sweet and tight and really, really changes its whole vibe every like 20 minutes or so. Yeah. The thing that I keep coming back to is it's very confident in what it does and I think it does it very well. I also wonder how it exists within this world of like the most. modern version of this, which is like has more meta hooks, has more upgrades, which aren't necessarily, like I think for this game, for what it is, it's good. But I also, there is a limit to

like how much I think this game would keep my attention. I beat the game. I played on the easier difficulty and it took me about two hours-ish to finish it, like totally finish it. But when you beat it, you can then go back and like change the events of the movie. So instead of convincing what's his name at Cyberdine to like go and go into the lab and like help you out, you actually kill him right then. And then that in turn unlocks like what if late game levels where you'll have more of the futuristic stuff going on. So that is like an interesting approach to it. I just didn't necessarily feel like, oh, this is a game I'm going to keep coming back to.

No. Which I don't think it's trying to be that. I think it's trying to be similar to like a movie, you know, You're going to come back to it every three years and do a playthrough, and that's it. But you're right. It is of a different era in that way. I like that. I do, I don't know, like, what the hell Netflix is up to.

But if there was a game that, like, I would want on a streaming service that I could just play with my family without having to set anything up, this would be it. Like, this is the sort of game that would be great for that. And I do think it is largely about being able to see this game in 2D pixel form. That was a big chunk of the appeal back in the day, right? It was like, oh, it's the thing I love, but in the medium that I love. And it relishes the here is the iconic shots recreated in little pixel animations. Yeah, it's really rad. I want to go back to talking about like sort of modern takes on kind of classic stuff like this.

Not that I think that there's like a ton of stuff like this because I was thinking about the like the beat him up section doesn't feel particularly good. And we have so many examples from dot emu and what's the of like here's a classic Konami style beat him up, right? or the Scott Pilgrim sort of beat him up, which adds like leveling mechanics and sort of extra stuff like that loosely sort of River City Rampage inspired. But like definitely more changes to incorporating sort of like modern advancements.

This game doesn't do that. Really, I don't think at all. And it kind of gets away with it by being a holistic Terminator 2 experience. Yeah. Which is so cool. Like, it's really, I don't even, I don't love the Terminator franchise. I don't have, like, a lot of fondness for Terminator 2.

But just like seeing a developer say, like, this is our perfect version of if they had made, like, a flawless video game adaptation in 1993 of Terminator 2 Judgment Day. I don't know. It's like, very much an art project of like, wow, you guys really set a mission for yourselves there and absolutely gross. I also like the fact that, like, they don't hide from the fact, like, yes, we're a video game. So we can break the realities of things where when Sarah Connor is breaking out of the hospital, she fucking kills, like, 50 guys, like, shoots everyone dead, which there might be, what, a body count of, like, two people in the movie. So they're fine with that, which I think is fine.

Like, we don't need to stress about Ludo narrative dissonance in the fucking Terminator game. Yeah, no, I would rather not. There is an interesting quirk about this game that is more of a buyer beware thing. The normal digital release of the game is $30, like at base price. The physical copy of the game, which is more or less the same thing, is $60. Why? Yeah, I don't know about that. $60 is wild.

So I think my guess is that there's probably a licensing requirement that any Terminator game that you release also needs to be a physical release. And they were like, okay, but no one's gonna buy it. So just a heads up. I wonder if that could have been like a long, maybe that was like got appended to a contract at some point that could just never shake it. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's what happens. Any video game cartridges featuring the likeness of the T-800 robot. Right. I also wonder, does like Robert Patrick get money for this? Probably, man. He's in it. I mean, I'm sure all in Jordan's Nager gets money.

for this. There's one thing I know. I don't think Arnold is in this game. No, his likeness is not in this game. Whenever it would be Arnold, it would be like the pixelated version that could be like But it's definitely Robert Patrick. It's fully Robert Patrick. When he, when he in the fucking attract screen of this video game that I played on my

gaming PC, which that alone kicks ass, when he just kind of morphs up and gives you the no-no finger and he's like full-blown Sega Genesis glory. God. Did they teach them that in the future before they go back? Yes. It's been a while since I've seen the flick, actually. I don't know. It would be so good, man.

Should we take a break, and then we can come back and talk about the entire world of these IP tie-in games? Yes. Yes. We are back. I want to talk about license games from the past and the present. I want to start with the 90s stuff, because that's what this game is riffed. thing on. And as Griffin mentioned earlier, you go back and you look at the original Terminator 2 video game. And like, in theory, it looks very similar to no fate. In practice, it looks miserable

to play. This was like a cash grab at the moment to be able to do these sorts of things. And who, you played a lot of these games, right? Yeah, I mean, when we, when we were children, this was, uh, I feel like we were joking about LJN, but I feel like this is like the subgenre of Look at their logo, dude. It really sent me on a trip. This to me is like this period of licensed games in the 90s is like the, I think it is a factor of rental. Yeah. Which is no longer a thing to think about and wasn't really a thing before this.

But there was like this period in like the 80s and 90s where a game didn't have to. There was like a definitely games. cost a certain amount of money, but there were games where you could get like a solid day or two out of them. They were like perfect for the Cummings Renta Center. You go there, you pay $3.99, you take it home for a weekend. You do the entire thing. So the game didn't have to be, you know, it didn't have to rewrite your entire summer.

You know, it could just be a weekend and then you take it back. And I think there was also the element of gift giving where like, oh, mom knows what you like. You like that movie, so I'm just going to buy the game without thinking about it. You liked The Mask. Well, Black Pearl Software asked, what if you could do it on your Super Nintendo home console? All those shitty Simpsons games, especially. Yeah, I mean, not so unlike toys, right? Like, it's the same premise.

It just, now the toy happens to be the video game. I mean... There were a few that, like, broke out, though. Anything that Capcom made, right? Like, there's a huge difference between... The Gold Standard. Flying Edge and GavC and Capcom. And, yeah, Capcom made the Disney games, which I think are probably the most iconic.

That's Lion King, Aladdin, and... Lion King was... Oh, Acclaim? Virgin Interactive. Virgin. Okay. Entertainment. They did...

Aladdin was the big sort of, like, Capcom. And Capcom also did the Mickey Mouse platformers, magical quest, and all those. Who did the Super Star Wars that series? That was, I mean, Lucas Arts. right those are really good and jbc i think so yeah it does feel like especially when there wasn't a direct movie tie-in like they need to hit a date for a movie release yeah it seemed like they had the potential to be a little bit better although a lot of them were still shit uh the second you were like trying to hit a fucking december 12th released for a movie invariably those games would be dog shit

and yeah those would evolve into like mobile games later on and i do think part of the appeal going back to these games is how little respect they have for their source material. Super Star Wars, I think we all remember more fondly now because it is nothing like Star Wars. Like in one of them, you fight like a robot spider, Darth Vader or something.

Yeah, and there's like a, when you're going to the Sarlack Pit, there's like 12 Sarlaks that are jumping out at you as you're shooting lasers and stuff like that. It definitely had a lot of range in terms of what you were doing. But I think, again, that's why I think we like this Terminator game is because it also was like, Fuck it. We also need to make this game fun.

We don't need to make it authentic to the movie. The events need to be the same, but otherwise, like, go ham. I wanted to highlight one example of the game coming out at the same time of the movie, which was the Mighty Morphan Power Rangers, the movie game from 1995, which is a kick-ass beat-em-up, where you get to be whatever ranger you want and get to live out your Power Rangers fantasy, and it came out the same time as the flick, which also kicked ass. What a unique cultural zeitgeist that was.

There's also, there's a factor here that I want to touch on that this game is also, I think, highlighting. And it's a phenomenon that I know no longer exists today. But games that were in this era for the NES, S&S, Genesis, whatever, games that are definitely for kids, because at this time, every game is for kids. Like, this is not, like, if adults are playing a game, it's an adult playing a kid's game. Games are not for adults, but games based on R-rated movies. So you had like, I'm looking at a list. Total Recall.

This is just NES. Total Recall. Robicop 1 and 2. Rambo, Predator, Terminator 1 and 2. Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street. Jaws. There's all these games, Jaws is all, these games based on movies that you weren't supposed to see as a kid and probably weren't allowed to see for a lot of kids.

So it's like, I'm going to have the Terminator experience and this is how I'm going to ingest this movie. It's like buying the novelization. Yes, exactly, Russ. That's exactly it. Yeah. You could get toys back then for R-rated movies, which now, I don't know if you've been to a target lately.

They have a separate toy section for adults that is like concealed by the video games. Adult toys, you're just not finding out about this. You want to do R-rated toys? Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, R-rated. Okay, I'm sorry. I was confused, because I was going to say. I want to do a quick midstream correction here and say that the original Jaws was rated PG.

That's what I thought. That fact kicks ass. It was not an R-rated film. Parental guidance? Maybe if your kids are sensitive to seeing sharks. This is good. Yeah. I'm not a bad parent.

But plant, the principle is exactly. I mean, ratings aside, like, the principle of that is 100% the same. Like, I should not have had to try to conceptualize what Friday the 13th is about based on an ill-advised far more rental from our mom. You know what I mean? Like, that should not be how the tale of Jason Forty's and spools for me for the first time. Those games are legit fucking, like, terrified me because I never watched the movies. But, like, those horror games or even the Jaws games. That's the other...

That's the other thing about it that I think is actually really interesting is that This is a time period where the games like a lot of these games Weren't a natural fit or the movies weren't a natural fit for a game adaptation, right? Terminator 2 is pretty clean you're a dude with a gun But like how do you make a game out of Jaws? How do you make a game like I think there's some interesting stuff that people had to come up with to like You know rationalize some of this. So you see some, like, non-traditional game design that may not work great, but at least it's, like, kind of interesting.

Yeah. No, I think they did a really interesting job. It's strange because I wanted to say, like, oh, well, this kind of faded. Like, we had Golden Eye, and then there was a bunch of bad tie-in games on the Nintendo 64, and maybe this went away for a while. But really, every era has its handful of great, or at least good movie tying games. We have Spider-Man 2, right? we have take it or leave it the Matrix video games

which I personally think Oh take it Solid yeah I like them Yeah the Matrix rules Yeah there's that Hulk video game There's a Wolverine game that's pretty good Like we get these Is there? I don't think there's a good Hulk movie game

Is there? I thought there was I guess maybe I'm thinking in the other one Yeah not tied to the movie Oh there's that Lord of the Rings video game You know there's there's stuff now and then that we get but most of it is utter garbage. Fras, you were talking about before this

how we do seem to see less of it all around, good or bad. Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember the last movie license thing. So much of it is just the expense of game development is at a point where like it no longer makes financial sense to do this. If you're going to do like a full on 3D open world whatever to tie it with a movie release,

the math does not work. That being said, they still do. you know, there's a Stranger Things game. They still do like these indie approaches to these releases as like another marketing leg, but you're not going to see like a full release for a movie. Yeah, I think the exception is, and it's not literally this movie, The Game, but is Disney's approach of RIP is worth so much. It has so much inherent value.

We can shop around to all the different developers have no overhead and get them to take the risk on making video game versions of Star Wars or Aval or whatever. Or not even that. You look at Fortnite or you look at Call of Duty. Like Call of Duty just did a fallout collab, which obviously it's the same company. Microsoft owns both of them. But still, they just, and then Fortnite does collabs all the time, adventure time, and you name it.

It's much cheaper and easier to release a skin of a character that acts as a marketing tool for the thing you're releasing than it is to make a whole fucking game. So isn't it interesting also that like you look at just this year you've got a new Silent Hill Mortal Kombat 2 street fighter Resident Evil like the pipeline is moving the other the other way you know it's going the opposite direction the games are being developed into into films yeah sonic you know what I mean like it's it's I was looking for for examples of movies being adapted to the games and I can't like it's been years since I can find one that isn't like a that's like a real actual like AAA video game whatever that means anymore

you know released on a disc I got my mind I don't know if we've talked about this on the show cannot is incapable of conceiving what the Zach Kregor-led resident evil film is going to look like love the work of Zach Gregor just seems like

such an odd pairing We got Paul Walter Houser and Zach Cherry. My boys. Like, I need the two of them to be the ones that save the world. Like, my guys. My guys. I'm very excited. I think it's, uh, people are starting to really dial it in.

I think Fallout's a good example of this. The show is just like, you could, you can lean into the ridiculousness of the video game aspects while also like appreciating the source material and showing it respect such that fans and other people can get into it. Hey, I want, I want, I want. your suggestions, what movie, what classic film would you like to see get this treatment? If you could have the same team, same people, they got to do a follow-up, right? Was there a demolition man game is what I want to know? Because that seems like that.

Absolutely. Several of demolitions. I know Sega CD, check me, but I'm pretty sure there was a, I know there was a Sega CD. I want to say there was a 32x demolition man. Oh, yeah, there was indeed. Yeah, with clips from the film. There's a correct answer to this, and it is the fifth element. Would be very, very good.

Well, see, the problem is Ubisoft has been trying to make that for a long time, and Beyond Good and Evil 2 is never coming out. But, like, I feel like the, the, would that be the right fit for this kind of thing, though? You know what I mean? Like, can you boil that down to the, because I feel like Fifth Element has to be, if you're doing a film at a game, I think that has to be sprawling, Yeah, it couldn't be very faithful and be this type of game, I guess.

Like John Wick would be like... Yeah. That would be such... I know that's not an older, but like that would be so great. I would love to see this team try a predator that has like a little bit more like organic elements. That would be really cool.

Yeah. And there is a John Wick, uh, I think John Wick hex came out for what it's worth. But not, it wasn't like a... Not the recreat the movie in the game sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah, that'd be tough.

Was that good? Titanic. There was a VR. John Wick thing too, right? Man, you could see a super hot VR collab for John Wick would be fucking sad. Sam, that would be good.

They did something like it. There was a VR John Wick thing. It just wasn't super hot. I do want to point out before we get to the question. Hey, let your kids play super hot if they never have. I taught Cooper to play super hot. It's fucking sick. It's like I'm training. It looks like I'm training.

I want to open the door to her room like the scene in Wayne's world where he opens the door of the ninja's training. Like I wanted to open the door Cooper's bedroom like yeah she's been training in here since seven she's gonna be ready for anything the universe has i gotta charge my oculus quest now because i do want to play super hot right now it's too good it's really it's really really good uh sadly meta just shuttered a bunch of VR studios because uh that's the way things are going so yeah i'm i'm literally watching him plug it in why don't we talk about king con the movie the game we made it all this time oh yeah

yeah king king king the movie the game super good and i was kind with the movie right? King Kong the movie. What a game movie. What a great game. That is a game I wish more games to take in some learnings from. It's got a really fun way. King Kong, the movie the game, sorry, Peter Jackson's King Kong, the movie, the game.

You've never experienced it. Is a first person action adventure, but more heavy on the adventure where the presence of fire, whether or not you have a torch is a very big thing. You're like, you get your weapons, not like in a classic way, but like you just find guns that someone else has and you can like borrow their guns. It's very narrative heavy. It's like got big cinematic moments. It's a very cool. I think that's one that he was wrong too.

Yeah. You fucked shit up as Kong, right? Yeah, I think that's one he was very involved with. I feel like I remember Peter Jackson being being very plugged into that, which is the same as Lord of the Rings things, right? He was he was very instrumental in those games. Just adding one other note here. there is one big movie tie end game that has been tremendously successful

in the last five years. And that is the Jurassic World Frontier games. The Jurassic World Evolution games. That's where you're building the park. Because they're smart enough to be like, yeah, let's get, let's pull it back. Let's just let you build a dinosaur theme park.

But even that is like, you're not recreating the movie, which I think is what we're going for. There is, I think, a new Jurassic. Park game that is coming out in the future that will, I think, be a little bit closer to at least the vibes of the movies, if not the recreation of the events. The thing video game also beat so much ass. It beats so much ass that they remade it and released that, I think a couple years ago at this

point. I don't think I ever played that. Oh, man, it's so good. It's a, I mean, it's a third person shooter type game, but it is also a survival horror game, obviously, where you never know if, like, the dude you're rolling with is about to turn into a big bloody octopus or whatever. Night dive studios did a remaster of it. Like, at the end of last year, it's pretty solid.

Yeah. Cool. Hey, have any questions? Yeah. We do, as a matter of fact. First, more statements. But a funny note from Michael, he said, he thought Justin was, we were talking about most anticipated games.

I thought Justin was saying the remake of the end of the greatest, RPG of all time as the game description and not the name of the game. People were very upset that we weren't actually saying what game it was. It's a secret. I'm not going to tell you what game I'm talking about. Jay McConnell also wrote in saying, I am unbelievably happy that Griffin is playing satisfactory.

It's one of my favorite games in 2019. Remains my favor of the genre. Griffin, are you still? I had to liberate myself. Good for you. Genuinely, it's so rare. The only other type thing I can remember is like the times I've had where I've been

playing wow and not really enjoying it and being like, what the fuck am I do? Like, Satisfactory kicks ass and also I have like 45 minutes of gaming time per day and I cannot spend all of it playing Satisfactory. So I reached a nice sort of stopping point with it and had to peel myself off. That is a game that I think if I was playing it multiplayer and like a constant server, it would be the only video game I've ever, I ever play. Yeah. But it is kick ass.

Does it get to a point where if you like, stand on a mountain looking down at your creation, it looks like Big Ball Factory, like it looks that fucking cool where everything is kind of like going. Yeah, man, people have done some shit with this game that is like pretty staggering. Yeah.

And I attempted to do that and I didn't do a great job. And I was like, instead of remaking this, I think I'm just gonna stop. But yeah, it kicks ass. I think it's like, I think it's a really interesting genre that is doing a lot of stuff from other genres I really love.

like. So I do love satisfactory a lot, and I'm sure I will come back to it someday, but I had to quit because this Terminator 2D No Fate was the game that got me off of it, and it was a perfect kind of. Yeah, it's like a band-aid. Yeah, a little bit of a palette. Palat cleanser is maybe offensive because it makes it sound like it. It's just really nice to play a game because it's fun. I mean, really genuinely, like it's, it shouldn't be as much of a commodity as it is, but it's just like it's fun to play. Yeah. We have any honorable mentions? I am reading a book that you guys are really like called There Is No Antimimic's Division. The author is just named Quantum QNTM.

And it is a sci-fi. Don, don't go searching for it. I hear the clickety clacking. Just let me tell you about it. Kills me. TCB. It is a sci-fi novel about, okay, so what the, the book assumes is obviously there's there's there's monsters right and in this world there are

psychic monsters that the government has to kind of keep track of so you can imagine your your x-files or whatever cross-government agency tasks with tracking them well nested within that group of monsters that are like psychic creatures are creatures that are by their very nature erase memory of their existence. So they are designed these psychic enemies, these psychic creatures, their abilities, their powers are all sort of manifested around erasing the knowledge of their existence. And that's how they're operating within secrecy. So this agency is people who are trained to notice things outside of what others would notice and are trying to use different methodology to find these creatures that are trying to escape notice. And as the book continues on, what's fascinating is,

and what I think makes reading it such a cool experience is a lot of these entities have the ability to erase the knowledge of their existence from the characters, but you, the reader, do not have that knowledge erased. So you'll start to see characters operating using a different rule set or a different set of logic, and you don't understand why. And then you realize they've forgotten. They don't understand. They don't, they're kind of losing track of the book as you, the reader, are like keeping track of it.

And all the different permutations of that, like, all the different ways that those, like, psychic creatures manifest themselves in the different ways that, like, the agents have to have a protocol of like several different methods of recording. So it's like some people use dictophones with a notepad with a recorder because different entities have different ways of erasing knowledge of their of their existence it's a very cool book it's called there is no anti-mometics division

um and it's it's it's really what the book starts to uncover is that maybe this isn't the first division like this and maybe that we've done this before on a very grand scale um and it's it's really really cool

it's great um i played through act razor on Super Nintendo. All right. That game rules. I had a device that I got ages ago, the Miu A-30,

and just booted it up, installed Spruce OS, which is a good custom flash, custom firmware, and just ran that game. I wanted to finish it because I'm trying to finish more games rather than just messing

with my devices constantly. And so I finished it. And I think what's so special about that game, it's a mix of like side-scrolling action game and also like, city building. Yeah.

And that meta element makes the, they, like, work hand in hand where the action sequences play into the city building and vice versa in both narrative and gameplay ways. And I think it overcomes the hurdle that a lot of games of that era did. We were just like, oh, this is just a really fucking hard game. Like, it's just super fucking hard. Whereas you can make that game pretty manageable if you just spend a lot of time, like, building up the cities and doing the little quests and things like that. So I think it's a perfect pairing.

Sadly, the sequel is very bad. Yeah. It's a rare, a rare miss from Quintet. I think Quintet is maybe a developer that I have more nostalgia for than any other. They only developed, I think, like a half dozen games or so, but they are all really rad and a little bit, like, weirdly interconnected. My favorite is. What's another one? So, Illusion of Gaia is the big one.

I think all the games were published by Enix. But then there were like really good, just sort of action RPGs like that. Soulblazer is one of them. Teranigma is a really, really cool one that came out pretty late in this kind of like 32-bit life cycle. But yeah, rad. Rad stuff. You should play illusion of Guy if you haven't.

It's a really neat game about, it's like if the seven wonders of the world were like an RPG quest. And each one was a dungeon. very interesting. I'm definitely going to, I think I might do a run of their games. I have been playing two things. One, I bought a board, which is a screen. It is a 24-inch sort of horizontal screen. It's called board?

It's called board. Okay, that wasn't taken? No, I guess it wasn't taken. And when you buy it, you get this big, big-ass, nice screen. and it comes with like 50 little figures, little, I don't know, totems, little objects that correspond to the 12 games that are on it at launch. And the games are, I mean, there's a lot of different kinds of ones. There's like a Match 3 one. There's a sort of Othello style, like territory claiming one. There's one that's basically Limnings, except like you're putting pieces down

to make the little paths for the liming. So you put a little staircase down and then they will run on top of that on the screen. But then there's also like really simple ones, like snake. There's like a snake game that you control the snake with like a little piece that you move around the board or like an asteroid space shooter where you're moving your ship piece around the board

to kind of do all the stuff in that game. There's a little virtual pet thing and you're like pouring a watering can on it to like wash it and do all of that stuff. It is super neat. I've only had it for like four or five days or so. But Gus, my four-year-old is quite taken with it and really enjoys just the kind of like tactile, I think, experience of, you know, moving a little actual physical thing around to manipulate a video game. It is, it's 500 bucks. And I don't know that right now it has quite enough going on to justify that. But there are more games sort of coming. There's no subscription. description thing, like, I think Next Playground, which is another thing I adore and is always releasing sort of new stuff. You have to be, I think, buy a game pass in order to do that stuff. This doesn't have anything like that, at least not yet. But it's been really neat. It's been

a fun sort of, their big pitch is like, you know, no more screens in front of your faces as you play games together. Now you just have the one big screen. It's still a screen, but it's flattened on the table. So you're not like high. hiding your face. I've also been playing a, I hesitate to call it game, but an app that is on Steam called Pixel Art Academy.

Pixel Art Academy Learn mode. Henry has been very, very, very into pixel art. Messes around with it on his iPad basically every day and is really developing some skills that has been kind of cool to see. So I've been fiddling around with Godot again and trying to figure out if there's like any way I can help him figure,

figure some of this stuff out, but there's a game called Pixel Art Academy that teaches you pixel art and it does so through like a dozen different kind of ways. Like you can recreate pixel art from other games. It like has those as sort of tutorials, but then it also teaches you like this is the fundamentals of like line work and this is, you know, best best practices for making a curved line in pixel art. And then it has like review technology that will like look at the art that you you make and be like, okay, so there's stuff here and here. This line is a little bit, like, it's pretty sophisticated stuff. And then there's, like, interactive lessons where you make sprites for Pico art games.

And I don't know, I've put, like, 10 hours into it. I keep kind of just, like, when I have nothing else going on, picking it up and messing around. And it's been very, very cool. And a neat way to learn about this thing that my son is extremely proficient at. So those are my two days. I guess I'm just a good dad, guys. I guess my whole thing for both of my shits this week is I'm the father of the year and possibly the decade.

And so early in the year already. Yeah, no, I know. But I got the award. I got the award already. Dude, that's great. The dody. I got the dody. Yeah.

Wow. I mean, I just played Sonic Racing Cross Worlds. My son loves Sonic. I didn't play it with him, though. So that probably makes me. That's good. He kept in the secret. He was banging on the door, actually.

Please, Papa. And I said, go away. Go away. Papa! I love the blue mouse, Papa. Yeah, I started calling me father, and I don't know what to do with that. Oh, no. Father.

Hey, Sonic Racing Cross Worlds, so good. It's just a great car racing game. And they keep adding stuff to it constantly. They just added Pac-Man, for some reason. There's an entire Pac-Man. track where it feels like you're on the set of pixels. It's great, man. That game is awesome.

It's good. I heard there to Fortnite's doing a South Park thing. You guys check that up? They are actively at the moment doing a South Park event. There's skins and an area, Cartman World, et cetera. It's pretty good. People seem pissed because the stick of truth is in it.

Did you tell what it does? That's a really cool. It's a cool idea. Yeah, whoever gets it can basically decide where the final circle is going to close in on. So it kind of forces everyone directly to your position. So people have come up with like clever ideas of like doing it in like a bunker. Some asshole like put it way out in the ocean. So suddenly there's like just a water battle.

So it's pretty smart. Yeah, that's cool. That's neat. Okay. I think we did it. Did you do we thank people? Let's thank some people. We have some members over at the Patreon.

Patreon.com slash the besties if you want to join us for content. We got Javier. We've got Matt, we've got Bennett, we've got Subzug, Subzugi. One of those pronunciations is right. Thank you for being members. We have a new Resti's episode. It's actually the big predictions episode, which is live right now. If you happen to be a member, you can also vote on who was right in the predictions episode because there's some contention.

There's some disagreement. Very nasty. So we've left it up to the listeners to vote. I love it. Very exciting. Next week, we're going to do a double header. Mio. Memories in Order and Pathologic

3. I didn't know the franchise existed and here I am staring down the barrel the third one but I hear it's got a doctor in it so sounds cool. You love those. We love it. I love a doctor. That's going to do it for us for this week on the Besties. Be sure to join us again next week for the Besties because

shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!