The Besties - The First Great Game of 2026

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

MIO: Memories in Orbit is competing in one of the most crowded genres in video games: the Metroidvania. Sorry, "Search Action Game."  But trust us, this one's worth pulling from the pack. It blends the aesthetics of Nier, Citizen Sleeper, and oil paintings into something surprising and beautiful. Plus, the boys return to their Animal Crossing islands for the big Switch 2 update. 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!

Oh, time to be real. Too late. I already was. Shit. Shit, it meant for the app. I got too real with you guys. Got anything real you want to say? Yeah, I got something real to say.

I know we went through a time, and certainly that's still the case that Good Russ makes very good handheld gaming content, things like that. But I found a new source. The fact that you're calling him Good Russ now makes me very happy. A new source for content,

and it's a guy on YouTube who just tells me how my bidet seat works and man, this guy knows his stuff. Yeah? We will drop a link in the newsletter post. We will. But if you're looking for chief pro

bidet content. Because this is in the cult, like we're not, this isn't in the show, so I don't know who you're talking to. Is this not the cold open? This is the cold open, but it's not the show.

Let me just say. The cold open is just stuff we recorded randomly before the show started. Yeah, I understand. I do want to say it's actually not a cold open. It's a very warm and misting open. Yeah.

Sometimes my little son makes us unplug the beday seat on our toilet downstairs because it makes a noise that freaks him out a little bit sometimes. And then I'll forget to plug it back in and I'll come in, you know, for a middle of the night sash and I'll sit down and the seat is icy cold instead of wonderful warm because I forgot to plug it in. It gives me a jump scare every time. And it's like you're a caveman at that point. It is like, yeah, on a cold seat.

It's like you're traveling back. That's really the reason never to travel back in time. I know people are worried about changing history, but really... Got to have a warm seat. You would not have a warm seat. I wanted to feel like a big guy was just on there. That's how I like it. Thank you.

Yeah. You would have to sit on top of a fireplace in the past to have that experience. Not a good pooping spot. Justin, it's too blue in your room. That's not for them. It's for us. Justin made it very blue. I stole that magical gum.

It's his blue period and now he's turning to a blueberry. I'm turning violet, violet. Is that better? So nice. Right now we can do a show. 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 Ross Frasic. I know the best game of the week. This week we were talking about Mio or memories in orbit. If you prefer, Russ. What's that? I was about to have Chris. Did she throw in here? Russ.

Oh, no. I don't know if I can deal with this. Memories in Orbit is a search action game from a French developer that is very, I would say, minimalist and vibey and pretty to look at and also challenging. Well, we'll hear about a lot more of that right after this. Mio, Memories in Orbit from Douz-Diziam. He practiced so much. before we started recording. I did.

I wanted to do a good job. Not one that was on my radar. I don't think it was on either of your guys. Well, maybe Russ, because you're sort of a subjection pervert. I heard about it like three weeks ago just from, you know, through the grapevine, but that was it. Yeah. Just as sort of like a jumping off point, the feeling it gave me the comparison I think is sort of most apt is ori. Yes.

The first or, it was the first orie Blind Forest? Blind Forest was the first one. The second was Will of the Whisp. It is extraordinarily lovely the game is. You are, you're a little guy, Mio, who is a tiny autonomous unit in a big space arc that has started to fall apart. And you go all around this sort of like space arc that was transporting humans to a new habitable planet. but really you're just kind of seeing the computer robot parts of the ship. And meeting AI who have really gone mad in the time that the ship has been falling apart,

you're going around and you're seeing this kind of ship where everything has lost his purpose. And the robots are all dying and pretty sad. And it hits that hard with the visuals and the music. But I think you could- Why are broken out robots so sad? They're so sad. What purpose do they have? That's it.

I don't like robots, really. Like, I think they're kind of like, you know what I mean? Like, in principle, fuck robots, but on the other spectrum of that, the broken ones are so sad. I wish they didn't make a break. They were made to pick apples and now they can't pick apples. But who meets apples? No one. Nobody's.

No one is. Not in this game. It really doesn't give you a lot. It gives you nothing. Yeah, I'm actually impressed that you were able to glean that much from what you played because I was like, there's robots here. I've played a lot. I think I'm getting close to finishing

memories in orbit. It has really sort of captured my attention and pretty much all the kind of like gaming free time I have. I've been pouring into this one because it's really gotten its hooks in me. The reason I think the Ori comparison is apt is one, just vibe.

Like it really, really is. In the same way that Ori would just kind of like periodically just knock your socks off like you would come across some new thing, some new set piece, some like cutscene that would just be like, that would just punctuate like these challenging platforming sequences with like a nice beautiful moment of repose. Like this game does that constantly and very, very, very effectively. But also it handles, you know, traversal in a way that is pretty unorthodox, I'd say. Just as like a, this is always kind of like a, a, a, good binary, I feel like when talking about search action games is in memories in orbit, you start with the double jump. That's great. I love that shit. I don't have to go hunting for the double jump. I know where that it is. I've had it in every game. Instead, like, the abilities you get are like, you can climb wall, like you form these tendrils that come out of your back,

and now you can climb on any surface and you can go on ceilings and walls, but only for like a limited amount of time. Or you get like a hover ability that lets you sort of get across long gaps. but the feel of it is just like really physical and tangible and it's not like now you have the high jump power instead you're thinking about like how to get around the ship by like using the the architecture itself and trying to find like lines that you can get through with the power that you have it's physics based in the way that even like silk song is not yes absolutely ori is very apt because you're flinging yourself using momentum to like get across gaps in ways that like most search action games do not do. One of the first areas you come to in memories of orbit is frozen. And when you walk on the ice, you pick up speed and momentum. And it really drives at home pretty much right away. Like you feel like your sequence breaking all the time.

Like I felt like constantly I'm getting to a place I should not be able to get to because I ran across this ice, got so fast, jumped across the whole room, did like an attack animation in the air that suspended me just enough so I can make it on this platform that I bet I'm not supposed to be at yet. It lets you do that kind of stuff a lot because it is not so. so, I don't know, analog with the movement. It seems to really, it takes the search part of search action. And I think it gamifies it more than a lot of games do, right?

So it's not merely a mechanical sort of like following the map. You kind of have to, I don't know if this was your guys' experience, but I felt like I had to keep challenging the geometry or like fighting against the design. And when I would do that, fight against that flow, then I would find things. Like it really was more of like a search. Yeah. Having to like think outside the box a little bit and trying to. Like hidden caves and things like that.

Yeah, hidden caves or things that aren't very clearly part of the architecture that you can like make your way through that I thought that was kind of cool. Like it really forced you to, I think, slow down and really look at the environments. It also does a great job of not locking you into like one area and now you're going through there until you get the power and you beat the boss and now you're done. Once you get fast travel, this becomes a whole bunch easier. There's like a central nexus where you go and you can spend your currencies to like buy some new stuff for your character. But like you will go down an area and you'll find some like crazy traversal power and then say like, oh wait, I needed that for the other area. Obviously that's like not necessarily reinventing the wheel for search action games. But like I feel like I didn't have the moment that does happen in the genre a lot where I would see the door that I can't get to because I don't have the right power yet.

I would see that door and I would think like, how am I supposed to get up there? But if I spend enough time kind of thinking about it, almost always there's some way to do it. There's some way to like chain an attack in the air to like pause yourself just enough. Like there's so much tech to this game that is really, really rewarding and probably I think probably it's most exciting feature is that I don't feel stuck ever. I just feel like it's all discovery pretty much all the time. It definitely has the, like, thing that Silk Song did, which was an introduction that I think is pretty punishing. Like, not super welcoming as an introduction. The first boss you face pretty fucking hard.

You basically have no upgrades. Yeah. And they do give you some, like, shortcuts that make the run back a little bit better. But it's still, I think, pretty harsh. Yeah. And they also don't give you, like, if you're not looking things up for this game, which you can do. The game wasn't out yet,

so it's not like we even had the opportunity, but like the map, for example. So, yeah, you don't start with a map, and that's cool. Love that. And then eventually, I mean, I think this is like a good, this is a thing that will help you enjoy the game.

Yeah. This game does not have a souls like recovery mechanic for the currencies that you possess when you die. When you die, the Naker, which is the currency, in the game that you have on you at the time just immediately disappears. It goes into a pond, a magic spring right at the center of the world. And when you have done that enough times, you'll start to unlock some of the like story

of the game and the map. And that is not really communicated to you at all. Are there other unlocks that happen from just fine? I've lost quite a bit of Naker to the magic spring and I have not gotten any other sort of boosts from them. I also say that happened to me not through dying, but through making my way back there and just handing my naker. Yeah, you do have that option. Eventually, there's some signposts that lead to it, but like, I don't know.

Playing the game without a map sucks. By the way, what you just said took forever. Probably the biggest reason I didn't make more progress in this game was because I was playing really carefully and not dying much. Yeah. And I wasn't going back to give my, it doesn't make it clear you're supposed to take your Naker back to that thing. and I don't know, man. It's such a weird sort of stylistic choice, and it feels a bit half-baked.

There is a lot of ways people can spend their time. And I feel like if you are, there's ways you can build difficulty that make it intentionally frustrating, and then there's ways you can build difficulty where the player is engaged in the process. Yes. And I feel like trying to punish people early on

before they have understood the basic building blocks of the world. Because so many of these games, like these search action games, are like the different mechanics on them, much like a soul, are like variations on a theme, right? So like in this one, the currency you can use to refill your armor. So that's like one option. You can use the Naker for that,

or you can go back to the guy and just give it to them, or you can die enough and it gets lost. None of this is clearly communicated in a way that you like understand. And I think that, it's very convenient if you're designing a game to hide behind sort of like a false obfuscation

as a way of building difficulty when you could signpost mechanics well and then build your difficulty in more humane ways because for me these things are happening I don't know the ramifications of them I don't it's not made clear and I understand that can be like part of the mystery but there's a lot of fun

mysteries but I don't think that like deciding what bullshit you call Estes flasks is like one way of spending my time. Yeah, I think, that is, I think, the reason they made the choice, right, is like, the ship is offline. Everything's going wrong. You don't know what the fuck's going on.

It's up to you to start kind of like patching this thing together. And so part of that is we're not going to tell you what is happening to this currency when you die or how you're supposed to be using it or how you're supposed to be getting your map or any of that. But when you die and you lose your Naker after you've, like, revived the spring and you've gotten your map, that mechanic I don't think has any impact at all. you just lose it. It's not like, it is like, I was thinking like, oh, they've done a new thing here.

We're, you know, imagine in Dark Souls when you died, instead of your souls disappearing, they went into like a big meter. And when it hits certain break points, you would get, oh, here's a benefit. So it's like, yeah, you died and you lost some stuff. But here's a little something for your effort. But that mechanic doesn't really come back. It's just weird. And it is a really rough start to the game.

They do have, for what it's worth, if that sounds too punishing to you, there are mechanics. similar to Silk Song, actually, where you can bank your Naker so that you can basically you crystallize it and there's no cost to that. So if you're able to go to this MPC, they'll turn it into a rock,

and then when you die, you just lose none of it. You'll always have it. See, that's to me, that once I found that guy, it's like, okay, so should I just hang around this guy? I live here now. I'll live here and just keep collecting it.

When do I have enough? I don't know. I don't know what I spend it on except refilling my arm. I'm also at a point where I have more of that stuff than I know what to do with. And there's other currencies that I'm a bit more deficient in. But I think in general, the currency loop, the itemization of the game struggles a bit. For me, that's its biggest flaw is there's like a system where you are equipping these upgrades and you have a certain capacity.

Very near automata-esque. I know plan is not here. Yes. I mean, there's a lot about this game that is very near automata-esque in a great way. soundtrack fucking bangs constantly. It's crazy. The animations on all the enemies are amazing. They look like robots that are teaching themselves how to walk with like whatever

garbage parts that fell on around. It's really, really spectacular. But like, I didn't feel the carrot very often. For me, the carrots were like, oh shit, this new traversal ability is going to like really open things up for me. It was less so for like, here's an upgrade that whenever you use your zip line attack, your next attack is going to do a little bit of bonus damage and that's going to cost you 20 upgrade points.

And it's like, I don't feel like that's like, oh, boy, that's really going to get me to the, that's really going to get me where I need to go. Right. It didn't have the synergy that, again, like a silk song where you can clearly see how the items are interacting with one another, whereas here is just like a little bit of a stat boost. I agree with you. I think the, why I was digging this and why my immediate thought was like a Justin or

a plant would not be into this is because it does the like little person, big world, we're not going to give you any guidance, have quote unquote fun. And that's my, like, my jam. Like, that clicks in a big way for me. But I know for people that aren't necessarily going to want to throw themselves at it, which I think is most people, or at least a lot of people, it can be frustrating. But I feel like, just the, you know, you talked about what's rewarding about exploring the world. Like not only getting those upgrade mobility things, but just like walking into a new

area. They did such a good job of differentiating the different biomes to really feel like this is vastly different from anything you've seen before. And suddenly like a new track kicks up of like lo-fi beats to study to. And I'm like, I'm fucking in. Like this is my fucking jam. Despite some of the quirks, which I agree, aren't exclusively like this doesn't feel the best. It's a shame because like I think the game is fantastic. I think it's really, really great. And I think you are, you are engaging in an exercise of trust with a game like this when you start playing it, especially when it doesn't tell you fuck all about it, of like, it's going to be worth it for me to figure out what's going on here. And I think it is. But I think also the, if they had tightened up the

gameplay on level seven, I think that it would have been, I think it would be a fucking masterpiece. I think it can hang because it delivers constantly sort of aesthetically and emotionally and, you know, those moments of surprise and discovery where like you see a wall. on the like far end of the ship and you think I wonder if I can actually climb around that and go outside the boundaries of it and you do and there's a thing out there just for super people in the super duper smart club like you like that moment happens a lot there's a lot it's doing like so so so so so well I also it does something in combat that I've never seen before which is it uses grapple points as like instead of a dodge instead of like a you do get a dodge later but instead of like a typical dodge as a way to in it enhance your mobility, you'll, like, constantly be, like, latching on to dodge attacks of, like, giant bosses, which I thought was, like, a neat thing that I hadn't seen a lot. Great assist options, too. Really, really great ways of sort of tempering the difficulty.

You didn't fuck with those. Did you, Justin? Any of the excessive body stuff? I have fucked with those. There's three options you can choose from to sort of, like, make the game easier to play. One is decaying bosses. So it's just, like, kind of the opposite of Hades II, where every time you die on a boss, the boss will be a little bit weaker.

next time you fight it. One is pacifist mode, which makes it so that enemies won't attack you unless you attack them. I haven't messed around with that one. But the other one I think is really great is called ground healing. You have like a certain amount of like pips of health. And you know, when you lose those, you die and go back to the last respawn point. But what that one does is if you stand on the ground, if you're on the ground without jumping, you can be running around, walking around. As long as you're on the ground, you will regenerate one extra sort of like health point.

And then if you get hit and it goes away, as long as you stay on the ground for a little while, you can get that back. So, like, it's not overpowered. If you're in a boss fight, odds are you're not going to be able to sort of stay put in that way. It's just a way to kind of, like, make the more punishing exploration sequences a lot more, you know, bearable. So I've found those to be, like, really smart ways of kind of, like, making the game a bit, a bit less punishing without really, like, throwing the difficulty curve, like, completely out the window. It does seem like the kind of game that people who aren't necessarily like, hardcore massacore people

would enjoy. So it's really terrific that they put that stuff in there. Much easier than silks. Yeah, I think that I actually started, if I could give one piece of advice to people that do want to play it. Like, I started enjoying it a lot more. I think when I started meeting it on its own

level, rather than trying to like extrapolate mechanics and assumptions that I would make from other search action games like this. Like, trying to sort of take it one screen at a time really. and like thinking about it, because it is like a lot of it is different,

structured differently from a lot of games like this, especially the momentum stuff. I feel like it does feel like a secret that you will forget constantly. And then it's like, oh, that's right. Yes, okay, thank you, right, momentum. Yes, let me try. You really can.

That's my advice is, I mean, first of all, just die a bunch and get the map. Like, don't fuck around. Get the map. Then you can really play the game and enjoy it. But also like just doing things like jumping and attacking, doing a combo in the air on nothing. but like getting that extra inch and a half of like height

is enough to get you in a lot of places that. Just if they were like, hey, if you donate slash die and give me 200 acre, something cool will happen. That's really all it needed at the beginning. Like just give us some side-thouse. Should we take a quick break? Yeah. Let's.

We were going to discuss Pathologic 3. That is what we decided at the end of the last episode. But Chris was sort of our man in the field on that title and was not able to make it to the recording today. Yeah, I tried playing a little bit, but I got motion sick from the first person sequences. I think it might just be the FOV or something, but it was weird.

I'd like to circle back to it because it does look cool, but I think we're going to talk about the new Animal Crossing stuff instead, right? Yeah, you guys... The newest horizons. I haven't tried it yet, but Animal Crossing was updated for Switch 2, but a lot of the features I know came to the original Switch as well. Yes.

Yeah, so it's a 3.4. update came out at the same time as the Nintendo Switch 2 edition of Animal Crossing, which you can upgrade to if you have the original for $5, which seems so weird. Like, some kind of consistency on this thing would be great, because sometimes it's a $10 thing. Sometimes if you have a Nintendo Switch online account, it just gives you the upgrade for free. And then this one is just going to slide a fiver. But the Switch 2 edition stuff is like mouse controls. I think 12 player multiplayer, obviously some performance enhancements.

Game chat, like being able to see your... Did you have your... Mouse controls? I didn't know that was part of it. No, because I was mostly playing the Switch 1 edition for the streams because I couldn't do the Switch 2 without destroying my son's island. But it makes... You know, you're just using it, I think, mostly for designing pixel art and shit like that. Yeah, I think that's mostly...

That's cool. Yeah. But I would say the exciting stuff, the cool stuff, is all in the 3.0 update, which is free. There's a hotel. Yeah, it adds a hotel to the island. It seems sort of redundant with the Happy Home designer. That was my immediate thought as well. Was it Happy Home?

The island thing, right, where you were designing? Happy Home Designer was a standalone 3DS game that took away the life sim parts of Animal Crossing, and instead was just like, you're just designing houses for people. But that was also the DLC for Animal Crossing. It was also the DLC for Animal Crossing New Horizons, which I realized I had not played when I installed it and got a letter like, hey, are you ready to become a happy home designer? And I was like, uh-oh, nope. But this is like that, but you're decorating hotel rooms to match certain themes, and then,

you know, new visitors will come and stay on your island. You'll see villagers who are like not at the campsite, not one of your permanent residents, just like roll up and you can pick their outfits for them, which is a cool thing to do at a resort. And it's neat. It's cute. the biggest thing that Juse and I did together with Travis on a stream just the other day is the slumber island. That is, I think, the most sort of exciting part of the update.

Are you familiar with that at all, Russell? Is that the like create your own, do over the fuck you want? There's like no real impact. Yes. Yeah, it's a creative mode, right? So it's like if Minecraft, you know, like where you can pull out whatever and lay down whatever. There's not an economy to worry about it. Does it only pull from the recipes or items that you have?

Yes, it only pulls from things that are in your catalogs. So things you have picked up before or crafted before. But it also lets you like, the creative mode comparison is super apt because like you can also just put down a tree. You can just like a tree and spot. And you can pick it back up. And the same, like you don't have to get an axe or a shovel or whatever. Like you just pick it up like an item. Yeah, everything's pretty pretty.

easy in that regard. I do wish. Moving around still sucks. Moving around sucks. Turning stuff. Turning the items and replacing the items. It's like it's not a fun way of doing it. And there's got to be a better way because it's like it is not enjoyable to do like this. There is a better way. And it's whenever you are decorating your house, you can get an upgrade with your, with your nook miles from like the terminal at City Hall. You can get an upgrade that gives you access to like a decorator mode.

And what that does is like gives you a grid, lets you drag and drop stuff around, turn. it around like with UI, not with like your guy. And it's amazing. It's great. Why is that not the default in this mode? Well, for whatever reason, when you're outside. Yeah. I think it's probably designed for indoors and the engine, whatever the fuck.

I think it would have been great if they could make that work because what is so cool about slumber islands is that it removes all the restrictions of things you're not allowed to do when you have someone over on your island. When you're playing Animal Crossing New Horizons, you have someone over on your island, you cannot put a new piece of furniture down. You cannot move a piece of furniture. You can't add, you know, water features or, you know, land parcels or you like really can't touch your island at all. And I think the idea there is like, well, it'd be too easy to grief someone or trap them in a thing or whatever. Having access to all of those tools, being able to like put down furniture, move stuff around, instantly build bridges and incline.

pick up trees, put down trees, all of that stuff simultaneously with other players is fucking fun. It is madcap as hell. What did you guys focus on doing? We split the island. We watch our stream folks if you want, but I'll say that what we did is we had a little island that we split into four quadrants

and there was like a shared area in the southeast and then we each took one of the other three quadrants and just kind of did whatever we felt. like, for example, I made a toilet museum, so I took out everything I had that could be a toilet and made a little toilet museum. And then the boys came and visited it. And then we took another 10 minutes. You can set a timer in the game. Like, you set a timer in game. And then they came and, like, worked on the toilet museum for a while. And we, is, I mean, that, that, that, I mean, like, that. And it was, it was really great. Same shit you do in Minecraft. You know, like, I'm going to

build a house and burn it down. I mean, that kind of nonsense. The thing, there's other stuff that, like, the update adds, like some quality of life stuff that it's like frankly bonkers that it, they needed to add. Yeah, you can craft multiple items at the same time and you can automatically craft with materials in your home storage without having to like pull it out every time you. So fucking ridiculous. That's so ridiculous, right? But like they fix that.

That's better now. But like the biggest thing is I feel like this is showing a version of this game that I adore that is like where. it should be, like where it, when you leave your slumber island, it's like you can save it and you have three save slots that you can pull from. But like then next time we want to play it, I have to go and get in bed and go to my slumber island and start the room and then open up the gates and then they can join me in the gates and then I can save. And it's like its own self-contained thing, right? It's not like the island we share. It's not like whereas, you know,

get me a dedicated server for in shrouded or Minecraft or like any of these other open world survival craft games, which obviously Animal Crossing is not that genre, but there are definitely cozy games like that that are doing exactly this. Yeah. Where it's like you have the keys to the kingdom. You can do what you want in this game

and it won't be so like so tightly controlled so as to squeeze some of the fun out of it. It really makes me very, very curious about what this Nintendo MMO is going to be like

that they've been basically testing for the last, I mean, I'm sure they've been making it for years, but last two or so years, we've been hearing rumblings of beta tests and things like that that are under NDA

about like Nintendo first party MMO with like no franchise attached to it and like what that means, I mean, I'm sure it's their answer to Roblox, but what that means with the context of knowing Nintendo is like so rigid with what they allow people to do

versus not. Yeah. I also, at this point, I tend to wonder if Nintendo is like holding stuff back because their schedule has become so iterative. Like it almost makes you wonder like, well, we got to hold something back for the next Animal Crossing on the next platform and the next time we re-release it. Like where a lot of these games that are released by Indies, I think, want to be platforms. You know, the game itself is like you're just building onto it forever. I think Nintendo is still in that iterative mindset where like, well, when Animal Crossing 10 comes out. We've got to be able to have some of those features.

They were doing that. I mean, they had the online game. I mean, I guess they still do. I haven't touched it forever. But they have the online Animal Crossing, which obviously doesn't die per se. But you're right. I think with the console release. There's an online, sorry, the mobile animal crossing.

Oh, pocket cam. No, they did shut that down. Oh, it's down. Yeah, that only exists as a offline. No, they released an offline version of the game that you can buy. And it's like full price game, but it won't go away. I guess. Yeah.

So, like, that's their version of it. I do agree with you, Justin. Like, there's an element of that. There's also an element of, like, I think that for the next few years, they're going to fill the gaps in their release schedule with just like, here's Luigi's Mansion 3,

switch to addition. And maybe it adds one little mode and 60 frames a second, whatever it is. So you're going to see that level of iteration as well. What Griffin said, I think, and I'm thinking about it more as we say this, I think that what Griffin said about all that stuff being confusing and being kind of a moving target about like,

this cost $5 to, I think is largely because Nintendo thinks that this is the way forward for the future and they're trying to see how they make the most money off of it. Like, I think that every one of these is a test balloon. Like, the reason why it keeps changing is because I think they're trying to figure out the most profitable way of doing it. Because this kind of iteration makes sense for Nintendo, where, like, it may not for a lot of other companies.

but like you know you're going to buy the next animal crossing you know you're going to buy the switch thing you know you're going to buy the the constant you know like they feel like they have you pretty much you know the thing i would the thing i would push back though is that like almost all the stuff that is worth doing worth coming back and playing animal crossing for is in the free 3.0 update which they said after the 2.0 update like that's it and then they i guess changed their mind uh maybe they needed something to like a company this switch two addition uh to kind of like push push some more sales of that, but like, it's a ton of content for, for free for the game. But you're talking about all this ridiculous quality of life stuff that is included in there

that should have been for the, they're, it's Nintendo. They know what would make it better. Better. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. They know it would make it easier to play. It's, it's, I mean, this is the, this is the, I think, agony of being sort of like a fan of Nintendo's stuff. And I think Pokemon fans probably feel it most acutely of just like, we know what the fuck is up. Like, we know what would be good. We know you want to skip all the cutscenes and click through dialogue really fast. Well, I mean, and also like a million other sort of granular things or quality of life things that are just like not being prioritized because traditionally people have had the patience to stick it out.

And I don't know. I think that that is less true for Animal Crossing, but it is still like, I don't know, if you told me tomorrow, yeah, and they're making. the sequel and it's going to come out next year, I think anybody who is a fan of the first game would be like, okay, I could sit down and write a hundred things that they should do better or differently to get like on par with, you know, where the rest of the industry is at. But at least it's free. It is free.

And it's nice to go back to. I actually went back to playing Animal Crossing about a month ago, started playing with Henry. And it's been, it was very, very fun to go back and play a thing that to have nostalgia for something that is, six years old at this point and also a relic of a very challenging time for our planet is is is really a uh it's a sensory experience yeah we uh we went back and started playing it we don't want to play with my son anymore because it's by far the most exhausting game i play with him because he wants me to like verbally tell him every single piece of text that shows up on screen and there's so much fucking dialogue and menus and oving.

I want to teach my son everything. But I also have had a long day and I can't read for an hour and a half. Christ. You just want to take pictures of Pokemon. No words required. Yeah, no kidding. Mission accomplished. Okay, we have some reader mail. This letter comes from Sir Lester.

Sir Lester writes, I'm old and British, so when licensed movie games are mentioned, I immediately think of Ocean Software. Not a name I imagine means much to the rest of the world, It was huge in British gaming in the 80s. If a movie came out back then, it was almost certain that Ocean would have released the game license off of it.

They're usually very enjoyable. I have fondest memories firing up the ZX Spectrum. I'm playing the Robocop games, Batman, the movie, The Untouchables, Red Heat, Platoon, countless others. The fact that it was a Platoon game, I think is very funny. It was all right. We had that one. I've never seen the movie, but I definitely played Platoon on NES developed by Ocean Software. I'm sure it was very authentic to the movie.

Ocean Software. is one where like as soon as you said the name, my brain produced an ancient file of the logo of Ocean Software, because it is like peak 90s, like Microsoft Word ass preset. Yeah. Stuff.

Yeah, they had a lot of fucking games, man. Yeah. A weapon. Miami Vice. They had apparently Navy SEALs and Nightbreed got pretty good games. Oh, damn, they made Cool World. That game is truly awful.

Yeah. They had a lot of misses. You know, that actually is going to, can I do an honorable mention that ties into this? And I'll come and we can do the rest later. But I've been messing around this week with Amiga games because I never got into the Amiga. Never. A lot of those computer things other than if it wasn't on DOS, I didn't really mess with it. So C-S64, Amiga, the British stuff, obviously all missed me.

So I got into Amiga things. And there's this really cool project called AmigaVision. It's at Amiga. Dot Vision. And it is an emulator that has been like configured to have a really cool, well, stat, like well configured front end for browsing like the Amiga library. So this is a like standalone Amiga emulator that also has its own front end that organizes these games with recommendations and by year and by genre and by all, like with history.

and all this kind of developer. It has pre-configured settings for like how to scale the pixels and stuff, so it looks good on modern displays. You still have to find your own, like, wrongs. You know, but that's it. If you go to archive.org and look for them, I bet it's a huge repository. You'll find them.

You can figure it out, all right? Also, the conversation of emulation, I think, has got to get a little bit past legal and illegal. when most of these things are abandonware. Like you can't get them, you can't buy them, whatever. I think that these, like, this is like a purely kind of a conservation play, but it's a huge massive library stuff I've never checked out before. It's a really cool way of experiencing it.

I actually installed it on my mister because I got, my wife caught me a lovely little Sony Trinitron CRT for Christmas. So I hooked it up with that, and I've been messing around with that. It's a real fun. way I digging through an old catalog. I do want to check that out. I'll jump back to the reader mail real quick. We have one more license game that someone mentioned.

James writes, my favorite license game as a kid was Dick Tracy on the NES. Yep. Not in its out-of-the-box form, but with a couple of game genie codes, it actually makes it playable. It was actually quite enjoyable when you weren't dying every 30 seconds.

Good music and surprisingly a large city who enjoy. I'd just drive around sometimes finding new locations that I'd visit later. I don't think people understand. I don't think kids who didn't grow up, or even like adults who didn't grow up playing a lot of games in the 80s, everyone was cheating all the time. You had to cheat.

The games were hard and bad. Like, when they were broken and you had to, like, Contra had a code that gave you 30 men. Everyone did that. Do you know why? Because you needed 30 guys to play Contra. It's hard as fuck. Yeah. We all cheated.

The game cheating was a, did people know with a game cheating? It was half of an NES cartridge And you jam your NES cartridge in it And then you jam the Game Genie in the NES And then you put in secret codes That would have your games. I don't know the science behind the game genie And I can't wrap my head around it

Because he's entered so wild I bet you if you learned the science behind the game genie You would be shocked at how kind of like Brutal and simple it is Where it's like we make the metal pins Touch other metal pins to make Mario jump higher Like it's pretty It's basically giving shock therapy to Mario.

We're just, like, touching different parts of Mario's brain to see what makes him insane. Yeah, it's not sophisticated. Forget that you can die. Okay, good, perfect. It's not counter-programming knuckles in real time. It's like it shunts a hot wire into the cartridge that makes it so that you have 99. It's malicious code. Yeah.

If someone in the comments wants to explain to me how to Game Genie works, that would be great. I'm looking forward to reading that. I think that's it for Reader Mail. I had an old honorable mention that I wanted to call out. The game is Illusion of Gaia. Yeah, baby!

Which I have never played before because I thought it was... I thought it was a turn-based game. What? Oh, you've got a... Griffin has a physical S&ES card. Yeah, when I play Illusion of Guy, it's legit. I do too, and that's why

I'm playing Illusion of Gaia. I'm fucking sure, dude. Yeah, it's neat and weird and interesting, and it does remind me, You made the comparison to Act Razor. I was talking about Act Razor last week. Yeah. In the way that, like, there's really two games, and they sort of bounce between each other.

Like, one game feels, like, kind of close to, like, a Final Fantasy-ish exploration-talk-to-people game. And then the other game is, like, a Zelda-style action game. Right. And they two, the two of them kind of bounce between, and suddenly I'm transforming into, like, a large man, and I don't know why. But really cool pixel art and great music. and just like the game feel. And the way that it, my favorite thing about Quintet games

is how they use almost all the same sound effects. So like you'll play Soulblazer and you'll hear like a sound effect from illusion of Gaia that was also an act razor. Yeah, the UI elements are also pretty consistent. You'll see a lot of that stuff as well. Yeah, it's a really weird game. It's so fucking weird.

It's like, what if there was a little boy who had telepathy and it was a fantasy world, but it was also real Earth and you were having to go collect crystals from the seven wonders of the world. I don't think I realize that's what was going on I mean I'm only probably six hours in So I don't think I mean it's it is

I mean But that makes sense They're talking about Inca ruins Yeah like you go to You know Angkor Watt And you go to the You know great pyramids and like Those are now Zelda dungeons basically

It's just a fucking rat idea for a game So ambitious Especially for back then running on the S&ES It was really wild Yeah You have anything Griffin you want to call it? I've been playing a lot of a game that we can't talk about yet that is that is embargoed.

Honestly, I've spent almost all my time playing Mio. So that has been the main thing I've been doing. In my very, very brief windows of leisure time, I did get on Apple Arcade a game that is called, I believe it's called Power Wash Simulator. And I did get it mostly because Justin went beast mode so hard, but also because I wanted to draw my own conclusions. And I will say, I don't think I would play it on my computer. I don't think I would play it on my Rog Ally X. But as a thing that I can turn on my phone when I'm sitting on a bench outside of Henry's school waiting for him to come outside with his teacher for five minutes and I can power wash a bungalow, that's all right. That feels pretty good to just kind of vibe out

with that. I have great memories of Henry's dad. Yeah, he would show up. early to pick his son up and he would actually power wash the school. I mean, it was only five minutes at a time, but like the gesture was really meaningful and he got a lot out of it and the building was cleaner as a result. I'm currently power washing a playground and you're not your podcasting. Don't get fucked. Well, in the game, the level I'm on is a playground. And there's a moment where I was climbing under a slimy, grimy slide and I was power blasting, you know, the underside of it and the nasty, gloopy drip drops were falling right on me. And I thought like, I'm glad I'm not doing this for real. I'm glad I'm doing this in again.

No, I get why people like it. It is not the progression hooks or if you want to call it that. Like there is a level of, it feels like almost irony to it, but it is very chill to start with a house that is covered in dirt. And then as you wipe your finger across it, the dirt magically disappears. Do you think, here's my approach on Power Wash and why usually after about five hours or so, I usually bounce off of them.

I know, acknowledging everything that Justin said last year about his disdain for Power Watch Demiliter, I think that the game, in my opinion, gets less fun, the more complexities they add to it. Absolutely. And they have no way to increase the difficulty over time apart from like, you have to move this fucking girder around

so you can walk on top of the roof. Yeah. And that shit does not appeal to me at all. So I kind of just want to stand and do easy mailboxes and stuff like that. Like that's my gem. Also want to shout out the boyfriend is back on Netflix season two. This is the extremely, I would say,

Terrace House-vibey Japanese dating show where I think seven gay men between the ages of like 20 and 40 live in a house together and have to run a coffee shop. The first season was at, I forget what city was in. It was like a beachy sort of destination. And now they're out in the snowy mountains having to run a coffee shop. coffee shop and and they're picking people to picking people to go work with and there has not been any kissing so far that I have seen but it is it is in so many ways this show is the heir apparent to the

the the terrace house kingdom also because it has one of the commentators from the original terrace house panel but it is it's just a a chill watch it's a pleasant wintertime watch so far. I do feel like I have to, I'm like three episodes in. I should have put this, you know, warning before any time I talked about Terrace House in the past, but maybe this season goes to some weird bad places. I don't know, man. But where I'm at now, it's nice to, nice to be back. There is something interesting that it didn't occur to me until just now. The, like, divide between commentator and not in reality TV. Like, obviously, Survivor doesn't really have a commentator, but a lot of a Japanese construction. It's really, yeah, a lot of the Korean and in Japanese

reality shows we watch have have that what's the other big brother doesn't that have commentators or no I've never watched you know no there is a host I think that like in I think we have seen more active narration in especially in like the Netflix reality shows but that idea of like checking back in with friends who are watching the same show as you it does not that feels like a very like non I think it would be totally pretty confusing to yeah audiences who have not, because it is like when we started watching Terrace House, when we were in the hospital after Henry was born, was when we started watching that show and, you know, they would cut to a panel. It was so, it was strange because we were not, we had not watched a show that had

that before, right? This idea of, we've got the after show, we've got the companion podcast where we talk about, right, like Bob the Drag Queen and Boston Rob have a Traders podcast that they do. Like, instead of that if they just like between every you know commercial break where a commercial break would go and cut to a studio audience where people would talk about what just happened people who are funny and charming uh that's also i mean but that's kind of a british construction too right that that divide of like a panel and like a in the field kind of thing like that's a very that's not a construction we have a lot over here it requires a certain there is genuinely a certain type of celebrity a certain type of performer entertainer like this uh you know talent in

in the Japanese sort of entertainment industry where it doesn't matter what discipline you're in. You could be a comedian, you could be like a fashion blogger, you could be a musician or an actor or whatever, and also have this other talent where like, you're just good on camera and quick on your feet and you can think of funny stuff to say when talking about a show.

And almost all the shows that we have watched and we've watched like a ton of Japanese and Korean reality programming at this point. Like they're all great. And so it's like, does that exist here? Like, how do you ensure that you are, like, hiring a team of people who are, I don't know, collaborative in that way? And it's genuinely invested in the thing that they are talking about. Like, you have to seem like you are a huge fan of the show that you're commenting.

Whenever they've attempted it, it's always felt very rigid or scripted. Yeah, right? Yeah. This is not, like, I hope this is not reading, like, Snooty. Well, I only watch, I watch subs, not dubs. Like, it's truly not that. It's an interesting sort of, like, I don't know, pop cultural divide of sort of what Western reality TV audiences are used to, you know, versus what... Or even, like, watching the, like, Western take on Taskmaster, which obviously, friend of the show Ron Funches was in that.

You can see that they're struggling to, like, jam what is really a feel good show into a 22-minute thing. Yeah. Yeah. So my hope is maybe Western audience. or Western producers will learn some lessons from that stuff because obviously so many shows. There's a blue million things that they could try doing differently. That may or may not be better, but, you know, would be worth a shot. For sure.

Juice, you got anything? Well, I mentioned an Amiga vision. Oh, I see. He jumped ahead. What's your favorite Amiga game? Give me a... I haven't liked any of them yet, but it's nice to play them. It's cool to...

Yeah, sure. Right. Well, someday. They're so old, Russ. They don't have, like, cool graphics. I was going to say, like, when you talked about me, I was like, I'm not playing that shit. Okay, I wanted to thank some patrons over at patreon.com slash the besties.

We have Maggie. We have Sean H. We have Justin C. And we have snacks. Hina. Thank you for being patrons. Y'all can be patrons over there. We appreciate everyone that's already a patron.

We have a new Resties coming at you in the coming week. New Bracket. battles coming first week of February, all sorts of fun stuff on there. So please join us for that party. Nice. Well, that's going to do it for us for this week. Oh, except what do we do next week? Well, Justin, we're playing a game called Cairn, which is a game about climbing. Sounds good. Well, we'll join us again next week for that, for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. Besties.