The Besties - The Best Ideas in Bad Games

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Sometimes the worst games do have some redeeming qualities. This week, the gang looks at the best game mechanics, unique story ideas, console technology integration featured in sub-par releases over the years. 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!

so uh as you guys know justin's not going to be joining us for this episode of the besties and you know a lot of people call him either the dead weight that we drag along or the sort of spinal cord of the entire sort of body of the podcast um definitely in between those two well i would actually say they're the same right a spinal cord really is just the dead weight that the skin drags along damn that's that's some you're on some hr giger shit over there it's a little too early in the morning for that for me but i did want you guys to know because i know that justin's been saying that he's been doing you know he's out there doing missionary work and you know he has all these like cool things he says he's doing but he is at a guinness book of world records breaking attempt for the world's largest

indoor potluck right now and i told him that's a bad like in the current sort of viral climate sure that that's not a good and he took like four or five planes to it's in cincinnati and he still took like five planes to get there oh i read I read about this in Washington Post this morning. It's all finger food. It's all finger food, yeah. So it's a lot of tea sandwiches, no-bake cookies. Fondue kind of dipping station. Right, but just your fingies.

You just put your fingers right in the hot cheese. Hand-scooped chili. Hand-scooped chili is, of course, a big component. Crustless pizza. They're doing a big double dare challenge. Yeah. Well, we wish him well. I don't wish him well.

I think it's sort of ethically reprehensible. Oh. It's his right as an American citizen. My name is Justin McElroy. I know the best game mechanics. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game mechanics in bad games. My name is Chris Plant, and I'm here too. My name is Russ Frushing, and I know the best things we're going to talk about today.

Welcome to the best teaser to talk about the latest Chris Gross game. I don't know that I can poorly ventriloquist his entire sort of bit. We talk about the best things. Magazines, perfumes. Classic. This week we're talking about video games. Watch out for Pac-Man. Pac-Man's coming back.

Pac-Man, it's not just Pac-Man anymore. It was Pac-Man, but now it's not Pac-Man. And Justin's not here, so it's just three of us, but it's not going to be awkward, though he is sort of our own like mutual like i don't know you two fucking clowns from adam but uh justin is sort of my my gateway into our friendship so this is strange for me yeah we're just gonna work through it okay he did wish us well he said take a sip of chococola and i said oh okay okay so we're going to talk about game mechanics that are very good inside of video games that are not very good which is a departure i think from format even for us just saying something uh but you know the release

calendar has slowed down quite a bit and you know there's a lot to there's a lot of other games stuff to talk about. And I think that this is rich. According to the responses we've gotten from the audience, it is a deep, deep vein. So I think we're just going to kind of bounce around, round robin. Yeah, well, so I initially had this idea

and what made me think of it, maybe I should just suggest, or I should start with what the uh impetus of this was yes and i do not want to talk a lot about ghost of shishima because we've already spent a lot of time talking about it i know a lot of people like it and that's great and i'm really actually super happy for those people it wasn't for me but that's fine but there is a mechanic in that game that i specifically wanted to call out that I really would love to see in other open world games that I thought was brilliant.

And it was using R2 to pick shit up in that game. So you're just saying the button command that they have. Yeah, the button command they picked to, so when you're in the world, you can like pick up cloth and various other shit and you use r2 to do that and that seems like a very basic who cares kind of choice right it does right but but then you think about it and i was as i was pointing out i was remembering what like wow it's kind of

nice to be able to pick stuff up with r2 and the reason for that is when you're what are you talking it keeps sounding like you're talking about the droid no i'm talking about the button on a playstation controller the reason i like it so much is because it means that i do not have to move my thumbs off of the sticks to look at the thing that i want to pick up okay my thumbs stay on the sticks and i can hit r2 and i thought that was a really smart idea and something that i would like love to see in other open world games now i should mention it's possible that other open world games have done it and ghost of shima collected it from other games that is possible so i don't want to give it full credit unless i know for sure but i would say i thought that was a really good example of something that i would love to see in other games dear listener though this may have started from humble origins we are going to talk about more exciting

things in video games i think that's interesting let's talk about some of our favorite sort of uh button commands uh i like uh reload on square you can't beat it baby that's of course the button that it should go on i i agree r2 is good it just, it's not glamorous, right? Like we're going to be talking about things like flying. We're going to be talking about like spinning blade boomerangs, right? Yeah. You know. Yeah, but how many of those let you pick up stuff without moving your thumbs? um i'll i'll start because i feel like thank you um my first my first one is kind of the uh the the the pinnacle of this because it for me it is one of the uh most heartbreakingly disappointing games of all time i i confess to um when i was just starting out in the industry

and like went to my first couple like game conventions like my first e3 that i went to there is an inherent sort of excitement to playing video games that aren't out yet and that other people haven't gotten to play right like that's the entire thing of e3 and an important part of being a responsible game journo is kind of divorcing that like inherent excitement from giving your critical thoughts about a game that hasn't been released yet right sure uh and that's, that's, I will admit to that not being something I was great at, at,

you know, my first couple of E threes, because when I, uh, saw dark void at E three, which was a title, uh, published by Capcom and put out by airtight games.

That was like a rocketeer game, right? It was a rocketeer game. I was a rocketeer. Well, it was like a alt, alt universe rocketeer with like nikolai tesla like giving you all your upgrades i i was so psyched for this game coming out of e3 because like it looked tight as hell it felt like pretty cool the flying in the game

was like fantastic and uh the score was was fantastic and then the game came out and was just kind of bad and that was so disappointing for me because i was so ready to be like completely blown away by it uh airtight games was a studio that was formed largely out of the core development team for crimson skies oh yeah which was an xbox live arcade title no no it's a full it started an original xbox game original xbox game yes and then there was another crimson skies game after that yes high road to revenge i think it was either the sequel yes that was the sequel so uh crimson skies was like the best like plain combat game or at least like you know not not uh ace combat style yeah it was like a super high five

fighter just yes it was like an arcadey biplane sort of combat game and it it was fantastic it was fucking cool that game really was awesome and so when it came out that this new team had spun out of there and were making this rocketeer action game called dark void like everybody was like ready to be ready to be wowed uh and the the score for that game was created by bear mccreary who is of course one of the most like prolific composers of all time and i enjoy his work this was like the best he's ever done it is a weird like lightning in a bottle like masterpiece the theme song to dark void is like one of my favorite video game theme songs it was my phone ringtone for a long time uh it is an incredible bop uh i remember also he made like an 8-bit megaman style remix version of it that

was also like pretty fresh and also my phone ringtone for a while it had like weird a weird imbalance of production values where like the music was fantastic and the game looked really good and then it was also buggy as fuck like it was impossible certain levels were like really impossible to be and also they made a big deal out of having vertical cover combat kind of like gears of war style you know shooting but going up a wall and it was pretty uninspired and it was just cover-based shooting it was just cover-based shooting but on a different sort of. So yeah, that game had some of the best feeling flying that has ever been in a game. And there haven't been that many great

like rocketeer action games, right? And still like it just dropped the ball and was so, so, so heartbreaking. Should have stuck to the air. Airtight Games is such a weird developer because they went on to make Quantum Conundrum which was kim swift's uh portal puzzle game which is cool it was really neat i had a lot of great ideas and then made murdered soul suspect for square years yeah right that's i mean that's a strange body of diverse yeah um uh y'all i have to tell you

about a very special time in video games uh fair warning gonna talk about some ubisoft games ubisoft in the news oh my god because uh i'm looking at this now pretty despicable uh everybody should google that um they've been having a number of uh troubles uh for rampant harassment uh claims of their company but I'm going to talk about a period from a long time ago. Maybe, I don't know, like 10 years ago? When this was all definitely going on still. Hey, hey, hey. If we were not going to talk about games from bad studios,

we would just not have the show. But one of your games, Deadass, came out in 2018. That was two years ago. No, I'm not talking about those yet. No spoilers. Okay, okay, okay. No spoilers. So I'm going to paint you a picture. Ubisoft now, people are like, oh, big studios, 18 that was no no i'm not talking about those yet no okay okay no spoilings so so i'm gonna paint

you a picture ubisoft now people are like oh big studio similar to like ea activation right like they have far cry and they have rainbow six siege and they have uh assassin's creed a while ago i don't know maybe about 10 years ago they were trying to get to this level but we're definitely not here yet and their strategy was we will just fund things that are truly bonkers and i think people forget now that assassin's creed is super popular assassin's creed was a deeply weird game when it first came out it was just like weird parkour game set in like historical settings there was nothing like it so i distinctly remember a pre-e3 demo where we were in um in california looking at

like all the stuff that was going to be in e3 and they showed assassin's creed 2 which was already still pretty weird they're talking about how you're gonna like fight the pope or whatever um and they're like okay we have these other games and because we think they really capture our innovative flavor and those two games were driver san francisco which i'll talk about in sean white skateboarding not snowboarding skateboarding and i want to talk about sean white skateboarding first because it is definitely not a great game but sean white skateboarding is sean white skateboarding already off to a strange start also sean white as a skateboarder has a power he never had as a snowboarder which is the ability to create green material that trails him so he can grind through the air and

then grind these like imaginary green poles that he just materializes throughout random cities it was it was basically a Silver Surfer situation, but with a skateboard. Yes. But he's not a skateboarder or a Silver Surfer. This is like if they made a game called Gary Kasparov Extreme BMX. It's not your discipline, bud.

Listen, what is he, the flying tomato? He skateboards. He's got a side passion. But come on. If I'm going to be in the shoes of Sean White, you know you're going to put me on some slopes. tomato he's skateboards he's he's got he's got a side passion but come on if i'm gonna if i'm gonna be in the shoes of sean white you know you're gonna put me on some slopes right like that's that's where i want to be so there's that and i don't need to talk about that game any more than that because it's impossible to find i do want to mention uh it is sean white's birthday today

he's 56 years old today so happy birthday to sean white i can't i know we haven't seen him in a while but that can't be true um driver san francisco also uh what a wonderful game they say hey uh driver remember that that game from like the playstation 1 era where you just drove around in an open world it was like gta but you couldn't get out of the car it was okay you could like run into people who were trying to have a nice meal uh on the sidewalk what if we did that game again but made it google maps and you are just flagrantly inside of the story of the hit bbc show uh is it life on mars life on mars correct life on mars in which you which you are in a coma in the real world, and you are trying to solve a mystery in your coma world. And because you're in a coma, you are now in San Francisco, and you have the ability to leap out of your material form into the sky

and increasingly get higher and higher. You can pull further and further back as an upgrade system. And then put yourself into the driver of any vehicle in San Francisco. And it is wonderful. The game itself is a bit of a mess. Driving is heavy, I think is the word I would use for it. But it is very fun to effectively break it by uh saying oh you know what i'm gonna do in this chase mission instead of uh chasing them i'm just

gonna move a mile ahead of me i'm going to take over a semi i'm just going to block off the road and wait for whoever i'm chasing to careen into it completing the mission yeah what's funny is that like they could have had that mechanic and not explained it like not had a weird mythos about a coma and just been like yeah you can switch to whatever car you want but no they had to justify it and give you coma powers this was the also the game that sort of made ubisoft reflections ubisoft's like car makers right they were the one they made driver san francisco and then i remember like every game ubisoft like hey we got watchdogs um reflections this one's got cars in it can you do them too so i'll make this very quick but that

brings me to the modern day ubisoft where a little i don't know maybe like three years ago they did round two of this and they're like i don't know let's just do weird stuff again and we'll just keep sinking money into these things even if they're not immediately hits worked out for rainbow six siege so they made two games with nearly identical mechanics one is reflections came back and they made the crew two where you can fly or drive or boat at any time, anywhere, in a weird version of the United States, including being a plane and then just transforming into a boat,

mid-flight, falling out of the sky. Why you need to do this? Not really part of the game, but it's super fun to do. And then Steep, which is, I think, fantastic, but a lot of people dislike, which lets you pick your spot anywhere on a giant map of a mountain and then decide if you want to ski or snowboard or sled or jetpack or parasail yeah they just keep adding stuff to this game and i'm convinced yeah

so i'm convinced that they keep adding stuff but I am the only person playing because I've actually had to restart it a few times because I moved platforms. And every time I restart, I will literally complete the first hour and it will give me, like on Xbox, the diamond achievement and it'll be like 0.2% of people have completed it. It's like, whoa, rough.

I feel like we should skip Russ because he did r2 to pick up things in ghost of tsushima that's reasonable now go ahead so call of duty goes uh not a very good game but it did start with a mission in space now one of the things that i think is generally missing from call of duty games it's fine to have them be serious, but a lot of the times it can be a little intense and a lot to deal with. I kind of wanted just like a goofy, over-the-top, outrageous Call of Duty game that didn't really worry too much about

being like super serious or dark. And when Call of Duty Ghosts started in space with you as an astronaut in a full astronaut suit i was like man this is like going for it this is going to be like a wild call of duty game and then a minute later you're in trenches and running through yeah empty buildings and it was like the most boring thing ever but it should be noted that the space returns if you slog your way through the totally awful, boring campaign.

I think last mission or second to last mission actually takes place back in space. Not only that, not only are you an astronaut again, you've got a motherfucking assault rifle in space shooting other astronauts who are also in space against your plan in space. So everyone is rifle in space shooting other astronauts who are also in space against your plan in space so everyone is fighting in space and it was like a genuinely ridiculous outrageous moment that actually is really well rendered like it looks very authentic and cool

and um made me really wish that they were more call of duty games that were like that ridiculous outrageous in space honestly in space now i know they made one in space it should be Made me really wish that they were more Call of Duty games that were like that ridiculous and outrageous. In space. Honestly, in space. Now, I know they made one in space. It should be noted. They made, what is it, Infinite Warfare? And you love it. And it's also a very good game.

So maybe I just like Call of Duty space games. What's up? Before we, I'm going to do a very quick rapid fire round before we go to the break. But also before that, I need to point out the entire time that Fresh was telling this, something, I don't know what, has been dangling over the tip of his head like the sword of Damocles. Oh God, it's his clicker. It's his dog clicker.

It's my dog clicker. It was menacing. It did kind of look like the best boy key grip on the besties had lowered the boom accidentally into the shot. Okay, let's do a quick one because I feel like my second one is very, very similar to my first one in a kind of weird way. Because the first E3 I went to, the game that had made like a huge splash and came out of nowhere was Scribblenauts. The very first Scribblenauts. I remember like coming back to the joystick war room and being like, I've seen the future. Because Scribblenauts was a, I think a Nintendo DS game at first. And the whole premise is that you could write any word and it would

create the object in game. I had just learned the word plumbob from the Sims, like some Sims thing that I went to at E3 and they were like challenging me like can you think of a word that's not in the game and i said plum bob and they're like oh that one's not in there and so they added it it's like what is the name of a a plum bob's the name of the shape over the sims head but it's also a dangly bit on a chandelier oh i know right uh so i was like so bowled over by this game uh and like couldn't stop playing it every time i like was at the show floor uh at e3 and then it came out and i played it just as everybody else did for about 20 minutes or i was like a big butt okay that's it the end uh that that game i think it was fixed uh in some

part by scribble knots unlimited i believe was the the one that came out on Wii U and a couple other ones because it mixed up sort of the variety of the challenges because in the original Scribblenauts, you could pretty much write, I remember there was like a secret catchphrase and it was like, invincible, deadly angel wings. If you just wrote that every time, it would help you beat like every single challenge.

Which is true in real life as well, for what it worth uh the game like i don't know the the controls felt like terrible like it was ostensibly a platformer puzzly game and the platforming felt like so bad uh it was like paper dolls kind of just flailing all around the place i played the the wii u game with uh my wife rachel it was like one of the first games we played together and it was it is a fun game to show to people and show them like hey this game has like an infinite dictionary that you can generate stuff out of and that's a really special cool and i imagine really difficult thing to to get right and they got that right but i there may not even be a fix for this right like how do you have a user-generated thing like that and also provide any kind of coherent challenge or game behind it?

And Unlimited did a better job of that, but I never thought that it lived up to the premise. Here's my quick one. Earth Defense Force, one of the greatest games of all time, one of the greatest series, let me shoot every building and then make it go boom,

and then it breaks down in an open world. Why is everybody not done this yet? Crackdown is supposed to do this. You know what Crackdown didn't do? It didn't do this. It didn't do this. That's true. Everybody is missing the obvious.

I guess there's been a few examples, like Just Cause kind of, not every building once you blow up explosive stuff. Like the pandemic games kind of did this. Red Faction Guerrilla. Kind of did it red faction gorilla okay well spoilers i'm going to talk about that later but red faction gorilla is also a masterpiece but also that's just a good game earth defense force i recognize is not a traditionally good game it's extremely repetitive um and getting to the point where you have fun weapons can take hours.

But look, it's such a cool mechanic. Just somebody who has a budget, please put it in your games. I'm begging you. Oh no, giant ants from Rift of Insmores have taken me away, and I won't see you until after the commercial break. Now the audience is going to be scared that you're going to be hurt by big ants all right we got more back oh fuck we need justin we do need just i think i don't know so let's do our third i want russ to justify i'm gonna highlight on the google doc i can't wait to hear you talk about why this is a good thing that i have highlighted here So let's do our third. I want Russ to justify. I'm going to highlight on the Google Doc.

I can't wait to hear you talk about why this is a good thing that I have highlighted here. Okay. So Griffin has gone ahead and highlighted Brutal Legend. And in parenthesis, I wrote the aesthetic. There's good things in Brutal. Brutal Legend is a bad game with good things in it. Do not know that the aesthetic is it. I think the aesthetic is one of the good things in it.

Obviously, Jack Black's performance is also very good uh for those that don't remember brutal legend was a game made by ea and um uh tim schafer and his team at what's the studio called double fine double fine thank you and um it had a lot of uh interesting ideas regarding like bringing classic heavy metal albums to life in a video game. It also had a really bad RTS combat system that I really just shudder to think about. But we're going to focus on the other part of it. So that one of the big like art challenges is basically recreating all these classic album cover type things in a video game in 3d space which is something that like people hadn't really done ever that i can think of um so you have these like kind of epic outrageous uh not realistic certainly but like spires and mountains and castles and dragons

with flames coming out of them in but like in that sort of heavy metal like that comic book style um that drew me in i mean that honestly was like what i was really interested in was just like that the look of it as well as the jack black performance so i thought all that was good it was just super super hindered by the core gameplay of the like rts combat stuff which was like bad um yeah i don't know why are you a big fan of heavy metal russ no but i'd like that i like games that look different and when this game came out i thought this game looked very different like it wasn't just like traditional you know fantasy tropes like castles and dragons which i've mentioned but also just like they were very

playful with like how they integrated stuff like speakers and music notes and other elements into the art design it really stood out to me and it was also colorful in a time when yeah particularly colorful was it 2008 2009 yeah around 2007 maybe earlier or somewhere around there but yeah this was a time of like browns and greens and dark drab colors and this was like very bright and silly and funny and yeah so it was just like a nice tonal change i honestly kind of remember it was 2009 that it came out i think the reason the aesthetic like is not something i look back on fondly is like this is when i feel like i experienced tenacious d kind of burnout i like i loved tenacious d like growing up and in high school and and the movie came out and i remember being like okay okay like i i kind of get it and

i feel like that that like heavy metal sort of like dio drenched shit was was a little over now they're back and you know they're they're doing their thing again yeah this is not a game in particular i guess it kind of it is used for games i want to talk about the vmu the virtual memory unit for the dreamcast uh which was incredible i remember very very fondly my brother got the Dreamcast at like a midnight launch and like fell asleep. And I stayed up literally all night holding all nighter playing Sonic Adventure. And he like woke up

and I was just like not playing anymore. I was just fucking around with the Kaos, the little blobs that you could collect animals from the like levels, bring them back and like feed the animals to the chaos that can't possibly be right you like rub the animals up against the chaos and they transform into like different shapes or whatever it was like a tamagotchi situation it was yes so you could save them to the vmu if you'd never played a dreamcast the vmu

the dreamcast controller had a cutout in the center of it with a little window and you would slot the vmu right into that cutout so that the window would be cutout in the center of it with a little window and you would slot the VMU right into that cutout so that the window would be basically now in the center of your controller they would use it I would argue extremely poorly for most games for Shenmue they would do for Shenmue was whoever designed the Shenmue use of the VMU was like out of their fucking gourd because instead of looking at the the quick time event like button prompts that appear on the television screen that you're playing shimmy on they would also appear on the vmu on the controller if you want to look down at your controller like a like a complete uh

lunatic it was great for football games because on football games you can see the plays on the vmu if you're playing multiplayer and people can see see what plays you're picking yeah there was certainly yes and in sonic adventure you could pop the vmu out and you could take your ko with you on the road which i did i took the vmu to like my middle school where i nurtured it tenderly all day and then i got home justin was super fucking angry because i had taken this necessary component out of the machine. I really liked it. PlayStation had one too, right? The Pocket Station, I want to say.

There was also something fairly similar to it in my favorite Pokemon game of all time, which is HeartGold, SoulSilver for the DS, which had the Pokeball that was also a pedometer. So you could walk around with it and level up your Pokemon and find items as you were going around i think i really i just really like that idea of uh oh shit look at look at chris playing what you got there oh yeah pokemon pikachu that's pretty right yeah i thought you had a vmu sitting there no it's not a so i like the idea of a second screen experience i remember when that was like a buzzword it was like you're gonna use your phone and you can do whatever blah blah blah i think that's because i like i hearken back to the halcyon days of

you know four swords adventures and crystal chronicle that you play with the gameboy advanced plugged into the gamecube um but the joy of this was it wasn't your phone right like no that was the pleasure of it at the same time uh looking back on it what a wild idea to have you take your save files on the go with you. Like before cloud saves. I had never thought about how strange that is until literally just this moment. What a horrible idea. Well, but I mean, every cartridge worked like that too. Yeah, but you would keep your cartridge.

You had no reason to. You weren't incentivized. Like, okay, I'm going to take my cartridge to school. Everybody, look at my Final Fantasy guys. I leveled them up really good. That's just the cartridge. I played with, I had my KO in the one shop class I took. And I remember repeatedly being told I was going to have it taken away.

And what I did not process. A fate worse than death. Yeah. Was that, yeah, that that would be all of my saves for a Dreamcast. That would have been horrible. Also, you brought it into Woodshop, which seems also very risky.

I love that. I mean, it was a really boring class. Chris, you want... I feel like you burned through a lot of years already. Yeah, don't worry about me. Let's talk about... Keep right out.

Let's talk about the Potion Door. Okay, let's talk about the Potion Door. Okay, let's talk about the Potion Door. There's a little game called Super Mario Bros. 2, which we all know was not really a Mario game, and they kind of converted it into one. And it's, I would say, not a bad game, but one of the worst Mario games. Anyone disagree with that?

I do not agree with the first part, because it is a bad game. I think it's like a B minus game. It's an okay game. It's one of the better NES platformers. It's still playable and it was an NES game. That's kind of a mirror. That's fair.

It's not an amazing game. Certainly not one of the better Mario Brothers games, but it did have one mechanic that I was really impressed by. And that was the potion door now as you'd go through the levels obviously mario is used to uh hitting question mark blocks and mushrooms popping out and all sorts of exciting things like that one of the things that would pop out was a potion now when you think about a potion and you drop it on a grant on the ground maybe a plant's gonna grow but a door all right that's where we're

gonna stop i was waiting for some sort of reaction so yes the door shows up and when you go in the door it does the basically it inverts the world exactly where you were standing but the world is now like with darker colors and like it's nighttime, I guess. And in that inverted version, there might be like bonus coins or something like that. What blew my mind as a kid was just the idea that there was like the normal level. And then there was this like sub level behind every single normal level where they didn't know where you're going to drop the potion.

Like you could drop it anywhere. And the fact that you could drop it anywhere and like create this sub-level that most people maybe haven't seen before was always very cool to me. Now, obviously the end result of that generally was pretty boring. Oh, there's some coins here, big whoop.

But just the concept of it, I thought was very cool. And Justin and I have a video about Super Mario Brothers 2 history if you're interested in learning more on YouTube. Now I feel like it's an annoyance more than anything because I know there are certain spots in each subspace where you can get the mushroom that increases your hearts, but if you don't drop the potion in the right place,

you can't get to it. So playing Super Mario Bros. 2 now is kind of a game of just like, ah, fuck, I think it's on this hill. No, God. Potion wasted. Potion wasted. Griffin, what do you got? to now is kind of a game of just like ah fuck i think it's on this hill no god potion wasted potion wasted griffin what do you got uh my my last one is i went on a trip for this one uh monster rancher uh which was the man if you were in the mainstream and you wanted to play a monster catching game you would play pokemon if you were kind of a hipster about it you would play digimon or neo pets um if you were me you played jade cocoon and you were the only one who ever played that video game and people think you're dreaming when you talk about it and then if you're nobody

you played monster rancher which was a i mean it is what it says on the tin you're a rancher you raise monsters they compete in fights. They can level up and learn new abilities, and there's a ton of different monsters. It's less about the exploration, and it's not like an open-world game. You have your ranching screen and your battle screen, and that's it.

And for the first, I believe, four games in the series, the way that you got new monsters, Monster Rancher came out on the ps1 you would pop that disc tray open while the game was running and then put in any cd and it would generate a monster based on the you know random number values found on that cd right and it would create a monster out of that we do a monster he would climb out of a little piano and the piano had teeth and he would climb out and he would he would he would be called the piano the piano man and he had fire attacks and it was very very cool um no it was not related to the shit at all i think

actually in the later games there were certain like there were certain tie-ins i am wow i am blanking but it was like if you put in a game by the same publisher, like they had special exclusive monsters or something. The monsters also, they were pre-designed. Like they weren't like being generated, inspired by what was on this disc. Correct, yes. The coding in the disc would trigger

different monsters being unlocked. Right, there were different archetypes of monsters, but it would change like, I think certain features or the color of the monster and their stats and what attacks that they had and and so on and so forth uh and i just thought that was such a cool idea like i really liked i i really liked the idea of things in the real world being able to inform my video game long before Skylanders or Amiibos or anything like that. The idea that everybody had a CD binder at that time.

The idea that this CD binder contained the keys I would need to create certain monsters. Then I could tell my friends, yo, you gotta put Hoobastank in there. It's gonna give you a super strong like fire horse and they'll be like what the fuck are you talking about uh one thing i want to clarify for everybody because you hear the word it's monster rancher and you think like oh this is like a calm pastoral game of just ranching monsters uh the the box art for the PlayStation 1 edition first has the words virtual monster breeder and giant print on the top left.

And then it has what I guess is just a giant yellow one-eyed ball with a long snake-like tail, which I think is the main character. I think it's the main character, and it is so big and so intense and so radical that it appears to be breaking the case in which the game is contained. The fake glass is shattered. Also, there's a translucent CD for whatever reason. It looks like his name should be Ike Wazowski. He was, if memory serves, the mascot for the entire Monster Rancher franchise, and I'm so glad you pointed out the box art to monster rancher one because this is the box art for monster rancher four it is the same uh yellow uh mono-eyed creature but he literally is just taking up the entirety of the box and he is just barreling down the camera like i'm gonna fucking hurt everyone you care about with my weird little noodle and there's nothing you can do about

it you're the one who put huba stank in the playstation you made me what happens next is because of you and huba stank y'all i got one one more game it's a game called guilty party it was out on the nintendo wii and it was made by Disney Interactive back when that was a thing. And the campaign was like, I don't know, four or five hours. It was preset Clue, basically. But the multiplayer mode was randomly generated Clue. So it would have these randomized cases, and you would play as detectives,

and you would have all these different Clues and minigames, and there would be all these different clues and mini games and there would be all the different you know potential suspects who have uh done who knows what um and you have to solve it with family and friends and it looked cool it was cool it has been erased from time again because i think it was like going to be tied to a cartoon show i don't know if that even ever came out and the campaign as i said was relatively forgettable um but if you have a wii that is still plugged in i would absolutely recommend finding this i've never heard of this game nine hundred dollars on ebay i'm sure it's like three bucks i think

it's one of those games that people are just like i'm sure they dizzy made a ton of copies that never sold um okay is it reader mail time yes let's dive in there's some interesting there's some there's some spicy takes in here i'm excited to read these uh uh you want to kick it off griffin yeah jeremy uh says i liked that the character height and girth had a mechanical impact on how the player moved in the world of dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen I think Dragon's Dogma Dark Arisen you can make a case for being like the pinnacle of the exact topic that we are discussing today I've given that game a lot of fair shakes I played a lot of it when it came out on Switch and it's not a terrible game like you can play it is not a bad game but i think it has way more mechanics than it like justifies and a lot of those mechanics are really really cool ideas the idea of like

climbing around a monster and stabbing its butt or whatever until it falls over the way that it handles like classes and character generation and sharing those characters like it has so many cool ideas for what is essentially like kind of a okay video game. If Justin was here, he would be a staunch defender. Justin loves, loves Dragon Dogma. I can't, it is somewhat heartbreaking that we are doing this segment without Justin because Justin's favorite type of games are,

if I don't mention Dark Sector, that was like the glaive throwing game that was like incredibly violent. You had this like boom boomerang bladed boomerang that you could throw through enemies but you could change the element by like throwing it through electricity and then hitting somebody justin like adores that terrible video game yeah uh speaking of games justin does not adore uh this is from uh kapakui? Maybe that's the right way to pronounce it. I'm sorry if I got your Twitter name wrong.

I really enjoyed, personally, how profoundly the gameplay story interwove with itself in Nier Gestalt, and how some sidequests forced you to examine your expectations of helping others, and how the whole story wrapped up in the end with spoilers. I mean, this is

an old game. Del deleting your save file which is actually something tied to other near games uh wait hey this is near gestalt the first near game well uh do you really want me to go down that hole i mean was it the first it was near game released named near game released in america named near um right yes and it was the one that had the fishing mini game right infamously um uh new york assault is a very difficult play game to play it is not as somebody who loves the series it is a challenge they're making a remaster of it so hopefully that'll make it more accessible to a lot more people because this person is right. Like it's has so many good ideas that largely are done again and better and near on him on a fresh.

You have one from here you want to pull. Yeah, this is one from Cody M. Thompson. It's a fairly obvious one, but the movement and Iron Man like abilities in Anthem were great. I just wish there was a good game that was wrapped around it totally 100 agree uh yeah movement and like iron man abilities do feel awesome the problem is once you're up in the air with a jet pack shooting guys with like a machine gun feels stupid i mean there's a lot of problems with anthem but that's just one of them is like you spend a lot of time just sort of hovering and shooting guys with machine gun which is problematic but man the

movement feels amazing in this i don't think that's an inherently like not viable thing like using there might be a way around i think the rule is if you're gonna give me that option then i need to be able to swoop down pick people up fly very high and then drop them yeah that's the mechanic i don't know i would rather shoot a very small gun at a big robot monster for 10 straight minutes i think sounds like a cooler thing to me but that's yeah that sounds that's my that's my power fantasy and you don't get to you don't get to pick that uh should we uh talk about other stuff that we've been playing? Wait, there's one more quick one I wanted to call out.

Oh, yeah, please. This is from McGMariah. I think that's how you say that. Sure. And basically, a lot of the motion-specific puzzles and tools in Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword were great ways to innovate on the usual puzzles in the series, but damn, the Wii motion plus was bad Skyward Sword really is the Mario 2 of the Zelda series it's really not good it's really good actually it's weirdly it's weird that you say that because of how good it is it's a

really good game wow do you really think that's a great game okay the motion controls aren't aren't awesome and there's a couple of huge stinkers of ideas namely the like swimming segments are like not great but that game was huge and had rad ideas and is like long overdue for a uh a switch port interesting okay stuff it i would give the mario 2 award to uh twilight princess if we're gonna give it whoa yeah i disagree but interesting wow okay to each their own um what else have we been playing i see russ oh russ i can talk a little bit about this as well yeah i have i have joined you on the strange personal journey you've been going on okay so the last two weeks i've spent 52 hours

playing terraria a game that came out 10 years ago it's on switch now it has been on switch for a year um i originally played the game on vita many many many years ago but's on switch now it has been on switch for a year um i originally played the game on vita many many many years ago but they've basically the gist of terraria is that it's it's 2d minecraft when you glance at it like that's what it looks like oh it's just 2d minecraft but what's what it's actually hiding is like a surprisingly deep open world RPG with like Metroidvania elements and really intricate village building system and NPC upgrade system and all sorts of systems that kind of happen when you build a game and keep updating it for 10 years straight, which they're still doing. The latest update just came out like two or three months ago. So they're still adding stuff to this game and it is incredibly hard to

get into as griffin can speak to but it is really excellent yeah i never got i i have tried terraria so many fucking times and it never i never got past like the first sort of conceptual like yeah you build a house and you go underground and look for iron but there's like and i would see that and i would do it i'd be like this doesn't feel very good but once you start like unlocking i unlock like the grappling hook and the double jump and like a super powerful godly yo-yo and now i can kind of like hold my own and explore underground without getting murdered every 15 seconds and you know moving around isn't like a complete hassle but like i don't know i i i'm enjoying it and i'm just now it is just now getting its hooks into me but uh it is not a fun game for the first good chunk of it uh and it's weird i really did either of you ever play starbound a little bit

of starbound yeah that was chucklefish's um basically outer space take on terraria yeah uh where you had like a spaceship and you could fly to like randomly generated planets and literally do the exact same shit like look for resources and find upgrades and do all this stuff i was really into starbound but terraria never clicked for me uh because i think you know for all the stuff they've added it is a huge game with like a ton of shit to do and that is what excites me about it now especially that it's on switch it does its first impression is pretty lousy yeah i think it it really doesn't start opening up and getting interesting as you said griffin until you start getting those upgrades for movement and stuff like that yeah let's play multiplayer today i want to see what that's like

i got two things with uh bad first impressions but are very good games uh very quickly one horizon zero dawn it is on pc now and it looks gorgeous on pc i really think that this engine which also is used to power death stranding was built with pc in mind um and i guess the ps5 because wow these games just naturally not naturally i'm sure there's lots of hard work but they port well to the pc that said the first two hours of that game are a grind oh my gosh does it take a long time before you actually get to the fun in that game um and i get it because there's a lot of story that they want to set up but uh revisiting the game you have to muscle through it uh so it gets it gets great again but um the other thing i want

to talk about is the game of the year the game of the decade the game of millennia blaze ball blaze ball blase ball what do we want it's probably blaze ball is it probably blaze ball but it is a fine wine uh hard to get into because there's not much of a game there and it doesn't make any sense there are no graphics it is a baseball league simulator uh it is on your browser and you uh have the opportunity to bet on games uh and then as you win money you are able to get peanuts and you can use peanuts to do all sorts of things uh basically voting on on changes to the league uh things that have happened in baseball so far uh a team has fallen into the pits of hell becoming the hades's team uh umpires have have i believe uh have been incinerated um uh pictures just give up effectively uh it's truly wild and the really cool thing about it and you should follow it on discord because the discord

is where all this is happening or it's wiki um fans are creating the backstory that fills in the gaps when all this stuff happens so there is this giant fan fiction story of each season of blazeball um that is like effectively canon created by fans in tandem with the uh the developers of the game who are making these decisions how do you spell blazeball for the people listening at home it's baseball with the l in there yeah yeah b-l-a-s-e-b-a-l-l i just wanted to hear plant spell something no thank you um great if i whiffed i have i have also been playing the game we're going to be talking about next week so we can sit on that uh is uh fall guys check it out it is fun it is a a sort of wacky platformer battle royale uh that is i would

say very easy to get into it's like 20 bucks on steam and ps4 it's it's uh included in playstation plus if you have playstation oh really yeah that's what i get this is also one of those games that we can tell you hey even before next week i i think we all like this game quite a bit. Some of us love it. So like, this is a good game. You don't have to worry about hopping on early because there's a lot of good stuff here. It's hard to like boil down our audience into like a single sort of taste or preference.

But I feel like this is a game that if you listen to our show, you would like it. And yeah, so that's next week thank you for listening and follow and listen for free on spotify you're already doing that so i don't know know why we say that at the end of the show but tell a friend that would be maybe you haven't it's it's worth noting maybe you haven't clicked the follow button on spotify which actually is helpful because it'll notify you when new episodes happen oh do that now do that this week so that like when spotify looks at the the heuristics or whatever they'll be like the one episode justin wasn't on like

people went wild for what does that mean that'd be like and we could do like a funny prank on justin yeah that'd be funny that'd be like hysterical you can also follow us on twitter at the bestiespod. And hey, that's a great way to share it with a friend. Also, if you want to share it with a friend, it's so easy. Besties.fan. That's the entire link.

That's it. Boom. It just takes you right there. Yeah, so we'll be back next week for the besties. Until then, until then, shouldn't the world's best friends play the film's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media.

The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!