The Besties - The Thanksgiving Buffet of Video Games

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

It's not the holiday yet, but we couldn't help ourselves from digging into a game that embodies a decadent feast. Echo Point Nova is a forgettable name for an excellent game. The open-world indie FPS piles on powers like a doting aunt slopping sides onto your Thanksgiving plate. First, we triple jump, hoverboard, and grappling hook our way through its adventure. Then, we react to the Game Award nominations. Is it time for the awards to add more nominees? Listen to find out! 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!

Okay, so we talked about how my son is afraid of Bowser last week. He's still afraid of Bowser. That hasn't changed. I did make a huge mistake, though, because I let him briefly play Zelda Echoes of Wisdom. And I think that was a mistake because now his expectation is that in every game he ever plays, he can summon every animal in the game whenever he wants. Oh, yeah, that's a huge problem. I bet he's just got tables everywhere, huh? Yeah, there's-

You gotta tell him he can't make his own tables. It's basically tables and jellyfish as far as the eye can see. And any other game that doesn't have tables and jellyfish seems like a real downgrade. I got into a lot of this when my kids are playing a lot of Minecraft, and they're just making anything they wanted to.

And I feel like maybe that's a pretty good standard. If you can't make any animal you want at any time, maybe the game's wasting your time. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, it knows how to do it. It's just ones and zeros. I had the exact same problem with my son.

He played Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and he can't have Sonic the Hedgehog in every video game, and he's been pissed about it every day since I mean That's how you raise a modder right there Sonic the Hedgehog in L.I. Noir it's gonna be awesome Oh, I thought you meant somebody who just would love to mod communities at Neo gaff and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best boom boom pow pow game of the week.

My name is Ross Froschek, and I know the best game of the week. My brother Griffin is out on assignment. And the three of us are here to talk about Echo Point Nova. Chris Plant, what's that? I'm just impressed that you remembered the title. OK, so actually, before Chris Plant describes the game- I got it. I have a post-it note right here under my camera. I wanna make a request for everyone on this podcast.

Okay. We've just said the name of the game that we're gonna be talking about. We will not say the name of the game we're talking about for the rest of the episode until the very, very end. And we're gonna see if the people at home remember the name of the game we're talking about. Somebody is driving right now, sweating, going,

Echo Point Nova, Echo Point Nova, Echo Point Nova. Don't say it. I'm not gonna say it anymore. That was the last time. Fully muted. Fully muted. We're gonna talk about that right after this. I didn't let Chris Plant describe the game because it's kind of all the games, huh? It is all the games. That's a great way of putting it, except for the ones where you have to care

about talking in words. They pretend that you do, which I admire. But this is not a game for words. This is a game for jumping around, grinding, snowboarding without snow, doing whatever the hell you want because you are a god of pain. That is...

This is a sci-fi... Okay, let me just stop you right there, Chris Plant. Every time, Rachel, our lovely editor, who's very, very talented, every single time you say the name, which is already multiple times since I said we weren't gonna say it, Rachel's gonna have to go in there

and put a bleep over the name. Maybe that's a sign, Russ, that this bit is not meant for us. Maybe it's a sign that the universe wants us to say the name of the video game. We're doing it for fresh. I got it. Anyway, it is a-

Here's what I would say. If I made an independent video game and the people doing the podcast about it said, now the one thing we're not gonna do is repeat the name of the game, okay? I think it's good marketing. I would think I'm gonna find where they repeat the name of the game, okay? I think it's good marketing. I would think I'm gonna find where they live and burn their houses to the ground.

I think it's good marketing because people are gonna focus. It's like trying to work your name into your standup set, but like making a big deal of it, I think it's gonna make people think about it even harder. It's just like that extremely relatable example. Exactly. This is a sci-fi fantasy-esque game that is a massive open world where you are hopping from kind of islands in the sky.

And at first you hop in and you got like a gun and there are things to shoot. You're like, oh yeah, I'm kind of familiar with this. Indie shooter, I get it and I can move kind of fast. And then it's like, yeah, but what if you had a snowboard that could zip you around at almost light speed and grind straight up the edges of mountains and you're like great I love it and it's like what if you have a pickaxe and you can terraform the environment and carve holes into areas to sneak up on enemies. And you're like, great, I love that too.

And by the end it's like, what if you have a grappling hook, multiple jumps, you can basically fly. Your grappling hook now works on clouds, and you are literally just hopping across entire chasms, miles of open air from island to island, collecting unbelievably powerful weapons that just happen to lock right onto enemies in that oh-so-delicious way. If suddenly the environment of this game would melt away and it would be a carpet store, and your main character would suddenly become

an Iron Man action figure. And you could just see the kid like jumping him around, flipping him, you know, like, and then I shoot my grappling hook and then like, oh, I have my hoverboard. And this is purely, this feels 100% like a kid playing with a toy and you're like, well, you can't do that in a video game.

There's just too, you're giving him too many powers. It's like, oh yeah, well, you can't do that in a video game. There's just two you're giving him too many powers It's like oh, yeah. Well, I don't know. I've let in minecraft stuff. I just did it I just said he could now, you know because he said that he gets an extra gun Exactly. I'm gonna give him now his pistol is a machine gun, too Let me talk about we've talked about waiting for the lightsaber right you keep waiting for like You know like it's gonna come so we've talked to the lightsaber, right? You keep waiting for like, you know, like it's going to come. So we've talked a lot about, uh, sort of some of

the stuff you do structurally speaking. Um, you're really just jumping from island to island and you'll have like, um, kind of defend the point moments where you start a wave of enemies and you basically have to kill 25 enemies to progress and unlock a chest and you unlock things with it. But the minute to minute is really like the only thing that I think this game like, it just that's what I think clicks for me is the fact that you have that level of freedom

and it's such an extreme representation of a power fantasy that it's like when people talk about why a Superman game is impossible to do, I think this is checking that box of like having that infinite power. The defend the point, I get that comparison because yes, you go to an island, you find a kind of start button, you press it and enemies start spotting and they'll say that, hey, you need to kill like 25 of these things and then we'll give you whatever the reward for the island is. I get the kind of comparison to defend the point. But for me, what it felt like was almost like a multiplayer map that I would find and I would trigger the multiplayer map. And it was like, okay, just just completely dominate this map. Because it's not really about defending anything. It's just about using the map as your little skate park in whichever way you want.

And if you are the sort of person who like wants to do a lot of shotgun stuff, you could go down underground into like a chamber and kind of wait for things to come for you there. If you want to be like balancing hundreds of feet in the air, you can use the little bounce platforms. You, if you want wanna use your skateboard, there's like little ramps for that. It really wants you to use each island as a play space

for whatever your style is. And as it goes on, you end up fighting against like 50 foot tall mechs and like giant other things. And those enemies will then have like explosives that carve away into the maps, like using the same destructible terrain stuff that you were using with your pickaxe, such that at the end of one of those encounters,

the entire map is like totally bombed out and destroyed. So I didn't start liking this until I got to those bigger encounters, when you started taking on bigger enemies. And this is kind of my problem with the thing overall, and why it didn't necessarily, I think, click for me. I really feel like it is tuned to such power, like, for you to be so powerful and fast, right?

Fast moving. That when you have to slow the scale enough to do things like shoot one enemy in front of you or get one orb that you see in one place, I feel like it, I'm over compensating constantly because I'm not at a scale where I'm taking on like one-on-one enemies. Like there's a lot of like, I would, I would grappling hook and I would be like right underneath the platform and just want to go up a little bit more and can't quite do it.

It just feels like- It is almost the Sonic the Hedgehog problem where you're so tuned to like, I'm zipping through the world so quickly and then suddenly you have to make a careful platforming move and it's not really designed to do that. Right, when you're taking on those big, when the battles get big enough

that you're not even really aiming at specific enemies, you're like popping a headshot as you're flying through the air. Or when you're shooting like a rocket launcher at these gigantic tank-like guys. And even if you fly across the whole island, you can continue to clock that dude. That scale started to feel like enjoyable to me.

But I think I was, it requires a little too much fidelity, I think early on for taking on those one-on-one enemies. It feels too fast to just slow down and shoot dudes one-on-one. I think that's totally fair. I will say a few things that it does to try to accommodate for that, which it has a lock-on system.

So when you do aim, if you're like zipping through the sky, if you can vaguely aim at a character, it will magnetize onto them. And it's a hard lock. It's not like a auto aim. It's like a... Are some guns better at that or is that in my head? It might be a range. Okay.

Yeah. It might be affected by range. Once you do that, it does, I love the aiming system, which it locks, but it doesn't guarantee it hits. So if the character is running left, you then have to kind of steer, once you're locked, steer the thumb stick a little bit to the left to kind of guide the bullets. So if you're locked, you will be able to shoot them, but you have to still add this little extra touch to kind of get ahead of where a character is going. And it makes you feel like what watching somebody on Twitch playing Call of Duty with a sniper rifle does where they're like, Oh wow, they shot, you know, three feet ahead of the character and somehow got a head shot.

Even though the truth is again, you're locked on, like it's pretty easy. So a point of clarification, if you're playing on a mouse and keyboard, by default, there is no lock on, which honestly I would not recommend because I think it makes the game much harder. I think-

You gotta understand how little of your screen the enemies are usually taking out. Like you're regularly like a hundred feet in the air, like looking down at them. It's not like you're a noob. It's like, I need a magnifying glass to hit this guy. Yeah, and it also like, I think where this game succeeds is when you're, I'm doing a wall run with my fucking snowboard and looking behind me

and getting two headshots in a row in slow motion, and that's stuff that realistically, I know I could certainly not do without the generous auto-aim that this game provides. So I think if you're looking for the power fantasy, the best way to play it is on a controller. There might be a way to activate mouse keyboard auto-aim or lock-on, but I know for sure it is on a controller. There might be a way to activate mouse keyboard auto-aim or lock-on, but I know for sure it works on a controller. Did y'all play on a TV or on Steam Deck? I played on Steam Deck.

Ran great on Steam Deck for Wardsworth. Who's side about you? I did both. I will say that some of the things I'm talking about were somewhat alleviated being on a larger screen. Really? Even though the performance was fine on Steam Deck, I felt like I was able to, I don't know,

like take in more of the environment at once. You know what I mean? I mean, like, able to track. I mean, the Steam Deck's only 800p, so that alone is gonna limit visibility. That's interesting because I expected the same, but I played it on Steam Deck while I was traveling it, and it was really locked in,

and once I played it on a TV while I was traveling it and it was really locked in. And once I played it on a TV, it was so big and overwhelming that I was kind of getting like almost motion sickness because things were moving so fast, which I think is just a personal preference. It is, I mean, let's talk a bit about the ambition of the game and like all the things that you can do in it and how weird it is that you can do in it and how weird

it is that it does run on a steam deck when so many games that do that look maybe nicer but do less can't run on a steam deck. Like we said, it is a game that has full huge open world it has fully streaming like there's no like load times once you're in it. It's like the whole world is streaming through. Yes. You can see long distance. You have these massively destructible environments. You can again, skateboard up hundreds of feet of terrain. And again, like you said, no load or anything like that. The destruction is fantastic, as you mentioned, fresh that after a battle, the entire area can basically bombarded. But the other thing is you can

use that destruction in creative ways. So I actually ended up beating an island that was all about going deep down into the island because I saw it had lava at the bottom and lava is destructible. So I bombed out the lava part of the bottom of the island and then carved up into it and finished it in like a few seconds. And that's great. That's like that it gives you that creative freedom is exceptional. The closest comparison for me is I know you all don't love these but the Earth Defense Force games. I was thinking the same thing. This is like Earth Defense Force, but fun is my. Not entirely unfair.

It feels like- This would be more fun with EDF levels of enemy density, I think. Yeah. Like having that kind of like wave bait, like that would be a lot of fun actually. Yes, and it feels like if I think about how this game can be upgraded over the years,

because I really hope we get another one of these. Well, yeah, I'll say, this is their second game, the studio's second game, the studio is called Greylock Studio, and they made a game called studio and they made a game called... Severed Steel, which came out in 2021, which was basically the similar in terms of like gun shooting mechanics, but much more linear. Like it wasn't an open world.

It was more like straight levels. So I think the studio itself has had like a lot of support. And you look at the steam reviews on this, it's like 99% with 2000 reviews, like clearly they've found their audience and I know they are planning on future updates for this as well. Sorry, you were saying, I interrupt. Yeah, I was saying that I hope that they go

the EDF direction, which is worry less about ultimate polish and just continue to climb climb and pick up the ambition and the scale. And yes, like larger hordes of enemies, the EDF route, I think is such a healthy route for this sort of game, because once you start getting too focused on polish, you end up killing all the things that are special about it. And I've seen that happen to so many games.

Um, I mean, nothing about this game tells me that they prioritize polish. Listen, I'm sorry. I try to be respectful because, but hearing plants say that he wants anything to ever follow the EDF path and just like kind of sitting back and letting it happen. I think what if they made just like a real video game would be cool too. Is what I would love

I I'm kidding of course this is a but it is a case where like I think for me personally I Need a little more romance I mean, I'm in city or trying to think of a less gross way of putting it But the fact is I need to be wine and die way of putting it, but the fact is I need to be wine and dine. I love it that you let me triple jump. That's perverse. I love it. But at least give me like a dad that I hate. You know what I mean? Like I just need a little kiss on the cheek. Did any of you all attempt to consume the story?

I mean I read the instructions. It seems maniacal. It seems like there are several games happening at once. It's impossible. Yeah, so the story is delivered. You'll get to a point, and there's just text boxes that are floating at a specific point. And you just read the text boxes.

And then at the end, in the last one, it'll be like, we've got to check out this facility. And then you just get a new waypoint, and you just read the text boxes, and then at the end, in the last one, it'll be like, we gotta check out this facility. And then you just get a new waypoint and you go there. But realistically, like, all you're doing when you go to these points is just like progressing whatever the next waypoint is. I will say, speaking of progressing, and I will say this is something you told me,

and I feel like pretty, the game really, I think, could do a better job of communicating this. When I first like pretty, the game really, I think, could do a better job of communicating this. When I first started playing, it feels like, like someone has the field of view turned up too high or something, and like the sensitivity is like off the charts, you know, that feeling of like, oh my God, I can barely control it.

And when you first start playing, you're like, why is it like this? Like, why is it tuned like this? Like, this is a first person shooter. Why did they have it? Why do they make it feel like this? And it wasn't for me until I got like the grappling hook and the board and the double jump

and those like basic maneuverability. And then you're like, oh, okay. But you have to just keep pushing for it because it is going to seem insane. It takes about 40 minutes to get all the tools. That's a great point in that you expect it to feel like cod early on. Right, exactly.

You press left and it's like, oh wow, I'm looking behind the scenes. It feels like you have cheats on, right? It's that feeling of like, somebody turned on no clip and I'm just like falling around this world. Yeah, no, that is a really good note. It is really funny. I think this is a funny video game joke

that this game has the ability to, you can fall for so long that it pulls up a prompt that's like, do you wanna push a button to restart? And then you land on the ground, that's like, no, I was just falling that entire time. I'm okay. I know it seems like I was gonna fall forever, but no, it was actually just 30 seconds of straight falling.

Did you guys get to any of the boss fights by any chance? You would know. No, I guess not. Okay, so I'll just share the first one. This happens a few hours into the game. You get to a large desert area. It's just like a bunch of dunes. And then suddenly, a fucking sandworm the size of...

bigger than anything you've seen in the game. It's fucking enormous. It's as big as a sandworm from Dune. Shows up and you have to glide into the sandworm's mouth and inside there are like turrets and enemies and like weak points that you're destroying. They call them colossi in the game. Inside there are like turrets and enemies and like weak points that you're destroying. They call them colossi in the game and effectively it feels kind of similar to Shadow of the Colossus where you're destroying these giant things, which is wild when you think about

your mobility speed and also being on something that is actively moving at that time is nuts. Like very, very cool. The second one is even more involved than that. So that is worth checking out May maybe this is the broken part of me that as we were talking about You know needing a bit more romance, but it did occur to me that There's a really good reminder that the fact that we don't have more good superhero games is not Due to the fact that superheroes don't have more good superhero games is not due to the fact that superheroes are inherently impossible to do.

It's just a lack of creativity and a lack of like, I think we could have superhero games that just don't feel like Call of Duty, right? Like this is a really good example of this game with a couple of little tweaks could have been a killer Silver Surfer game. Totally. Right, if you imagine these as like asteroids in space,

you're black, you know, whatever. would have been a killer Silver Surfer game. Totally. Right, if you imagine these as like asteroids in space, you're black, you know, whatever. But like this scale is what superhero games need to be. It needs to feel this level of like going wherever you want, doing whatever you want. And it's just not gonna feel like, you know, the traditional, you know, eight hour, 10 level, you know, triple experience.

Yeah, I mean, this is like, you can see pieces of Spider-Man, the newer Spider-Man games in this. You can definitely see, obviously, this is a very more, much more raw experience than that. But the like, the feeling of swooping through the world in Spider-Man 2 does not feel that different than it does in this game.

As a connoisseur of these sorts of physics, I have to say that like, I don't think as much as I, Spider-Man's been perfected in my, for me, I think, but the feeling that this gives you of, you can grapple clouds and then just tug yourself through the sky and the tugs of the grapple are impossibly strong. So you're like really just soaring through,

it feels incredible. It feels incredible. It feels so good. The grapple is almost more like a bungee cord. Yeah. In that like, it's like a stretch out bungee cord that so you can feel pulling you and you're almost gaining momentum. It's a little Batman-y, a little bit like Arkham.

Yeah, you guys also haven't gotten any of the powers. After you beat some of those bosses, you unlock powers. The first power you get, you can drop basically springboards on the ground wherever you want. So as you're gliding, you drop a springboard right in front of you and you go fucking launching into the air. So that, I mean, they, I think had a lot of ideas

that they executed on really well in terms of how do we expand this very goofy ass idea into something that feels much more like a video game. Would this work as a like eight on eight capture the flag? I mean, could they could they turn this into a multiplayer experience? I don't fucking... Well, I played it. So multiplayer. There is multiplayer in this game. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

So there's co-op. I played it. A good friend of the show Kirk Hamilton, and I played co-op in this game. When was this? This was yesterday. Okay. I tried inviting you- See, I have a text. I have a text. No, I wouldn't have joined.

I wouldn't have joined because I have a text where I recommended a song to Kirk that I thought he should do an episode of his podcast on, and he did not respond to it. So that's been before you played. So I know he has had free time. I assumed he had had a terrible, terrible calamity in his life, some sort of death in the family,

very close family that would prevent him from responding to my texts for multiple days. And was the song, Hey Jealousy, by the Jim Bossoms? Absolutely not. But that is a good tune, it is. Anyway, I played co-op with Kirk. The crazy is a good tune. It is. Anyway, I played co-op with Kirk. The crazy thing about the co-op is, okay,

first of all, there's no- It deletes all your messages on your phone and you can't respond to any important texts. There's no unique progression. So when I joined his game, my progression stayed the same, both in terms of my character, like I had all my upgrades, but also in terms of my quest. So I could go and do my quest while he was doing his quest

in the same world at the same time, and we would both progress. But why? I don't know why you would do that. You can also do that in your own game. That's true, but there was one other feature I wanted to call out. If you're together and you decide to take on one of those

defend the point spots, whatever they're called, and one of you dies, the only way to revive the other person is, and this will sound familiar if you played Windblown, by getting a certain number of kills, and the other person will get revived again. So, clearly this is becoming a trend, and it feels great. Kirk is in Portland, I'm in New York, and we had no lag, no issues whatsoever. It was completely smooth. So, this legit, I think someone would have a really good time

just playing through the campaign with someone else. It's very goofy and silly and whatever. But I think they did a really great job on the netcode as well. This is, if we ever have a bracket for most video game ass video game, well, let's remember to include, really sets a new standard, I feel like. Agreed.

This feels like if you come into your kid's room and you knew your kid was playing video games and you saw them playing, it might be a real come to Jesus moment. We're like, this has gone far enough. I didn't realize you were onto the hard stuff, kid. This isn't... There's no romance here.

Let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about other stuff. Okay. So we thought we'd take a look at the Game Award nominations, which got announced earlier this week Where do we want to start? Do we want to start with the big one? And our thoughts on it? We gotta start with the biggie, which is The game of the year the nominees are Astro Bot, Bellatro, Black Myth Wukong, Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erd Tree

Black Myth Wukong, Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erd Tree, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and Metaphor Re-Fantazio. There is plenty of drama for us to discuss here in terms of what was even allowed to be nominated and what's missing. So I mean, let's start with the Elden Ring of it all. How do you feel about DLC being a game of the year contender? That is not a loaded question. I actually don't have a lot of skin in the game. Yeah, I have no problem with it. I don't personally think that this DLC

deserved to be in the list of game of the year. Like, it wouldn't necessarily make my top five if I needed to come up with a top five, but it doesn't holistically seem off-base. Like, there have been plenty of DLCs over the years that are like, feel like their own game. Yeah, it's, you know, I don't, I think eventually you get into like, just marketing, right? I mean, if this is the year, and everyone was talking about this game in this year

because of the power of this DLC, like, then it should absolutely be in the conversation. They easily could have just released this as a standalone character from scratch. Sure, yeah, and then you're like, what's even the difference at that point, right? Instead they made it so that you had to have a far ahead advanced character.

Yeah, right. Probably would have been better. If they wanted to sell a bunch of them, they could have made it standalone. Yeah, I tend to agree that I don't mind it being here or DLC being here. I just personally think there are too many other games. How do y'all feel about the kind of snubs?

Well, the snubs are not that surprising to me because of the way that I know that when you have nominees that are being done by large groups of people, I think that you have a tendency to have games that are sort of like brought more broadly appealing maybe, but some of those like smaller things get like lost in the shuffle when it's a big group voting. Does it, are we at the point where the Game Awards need to follow the footsteps of the Oscars and have more nominees for Game of the Year?

I don't think so. I think actually this Game of the Year list kind of shows that it's maybe the right amount. Because I don't think that there's, let me be clear. There are games that my, my game of the year nominations would look very different than this. Yeah. But in terms of like, what I think is like the conversation, I think this is a pretty reasonable top six list.

Right. Um, and it's what the other categories are for too. Like it makes sense that you have best RPG and there are a lot of games that I think could be in a top list, but I think are also fine in their own category. I think what's interesting in terms of snubs is like Dragon Age not only not being nominated for game of the year, but not being nominated for best role playing game, despite like the last one winning game of the year at the very first.

That's really, to me, that really feels like a timing issue. Like I really, it's hard to, it feels like there was a lot of things and it didn't come out that long ago. And honestly, I feel like, was it marketed super aggressively? I don't consume a lot of marketing, but I don't feel like there was a huge

up-flow in interest, I don't know. We'll look back at this as like one of the best years maybe ever for role-playing games. The nominees for that category is Dragon's Dogma 2, Elden Ring, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Like a Dragon, Infinite Wealth, and Metaphor Re-Fantazio. Any of those things could win Game of the Year, and I would be like, yeah, that seems fine.

But like, what a, I mean, at this point, what a meaningless genre distinction. That's true. I mean, if you're comparing Dragon's Dogma II and Metaphor Re-Fantazio, what are you comparing? Like, human shapes? Like, what are you comparing? Like human shapes? Like what are you comparing? I, and of course that's always the easy thing to do

with these like, they're meaningless. Yeah, I know they're video game awards. Like what do you want? And here's a little secret. All award shows to some extent are pretty meaningless. I think. Well, there's not, it's not subjective, right? It's all based on human ways of celebrating stuff.

Right. I, the one that I think is puzzling and I don't wanna get negative. I wanna have a positive discussion about why Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is in this list. Why you guys think, because I didn't, I guess I haven't consumed enough popular opinion about it, but it just seems like

it landed with such a thud. Okay, I think there's a relatively simple answer here. We did not get many, if any other, big AAA releases. The true AAA, wow, this is the visual future, this is the first party mega game. We just didn't have many and totally understandable that appeals to a lot of people. There are a lot of people who only, you know, have time to play two or three games a year, and they want one of them to feel special. They want to feel even bigger and better than the last thing they played. And I think for that sort of person, there's a lot to love in this game.

I also think that game in general, I've been trying to figure out why it didn't click for us, but it clicked with a lot of our listeners. Yeah, well, and you also have to remember, the Metacritic on that game is fucking 92. Yeah, very high. So it was critically acclaimed, maybe higher than any other game that came out this year. Yeah, I'm in the besties bubble, I fear, guys.

I really, this is my bulk of video game journalism I consume. I think it is a pretty classic example of, we've been drinking so many different delicious wines that when we have the wine, we have to be like, oh, it needs to have this earthy thing, it needs that. Like, all of this is so familiar. Where I think if you only play it, again, a few games a year and you play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth,

a lot of the stuff that I think feels overly familiar to us or repetitive or old hat, I think to many people it was like, yeah, I don't play this every week like we do. I actually enjoy this stuff. Maybe this is the first time in a long time that I am, you know, tooling around an open world doing these sorts of things. And there's just the fact that like people love Final Fantasy 7.

They have like deep personal affections for it. So it's just such an odd. There's so many. It's the things that are not there it doesn't feel like a snub because no one's like snubbing anything, but it's like the new Zelda like the astrobot and Final Fantasy 7 rebirth would be on the list and not like infinite wealth or the new Zelda or like let's take a minute other. Let's take a minute. Let me stop you right there and say,

maybe the only installment, this and probably Bellatro, Astrobot 150% deserves to be on this list. Could win. And could win, could win, but won't. But could win. But shouldn't. Astrobot is- Like it's not that fun. Astrobot is definitely on my top five.

Listen, marketing of the decade, like marketing of the year, marketing of the decade. I'm not talking about marketing. Not since Yonoid. Not since 7-Up's The Cool Spot on the NES have I been so jazzed about being marketing too. You're talking about Ross Frushek's favorite platformer of all time. The funnest commercial ofuschick's favorite platformer of all time.

The funnest commercial of the year. The best platformer ever made. Yeah, you are. Funnest commercial of the year goes to Azure One. And it was also that too. It can be both things. I agree. I know what you mean, Hoops, but I think the other thing- It just feels like an incomplete list to me, and that to me- It's not my award show, it's Jeff's.

But it does feel like- it doesn't feel like anybody's consensus, right? It just feels like so uneven that I don't know, if I'm trying to imagine who this person is in my head that crafted this list as an organization, right? It feels very scattered. And why would more nominees hurt that? Like, I kind of think that more nominees would be more representative of the audience as a whole,

for Game of the Year at least. For me, I think you can go either way. More nominees means more opportunities for especially smaller games to get a shout out. Yeah, even if they don't win. And we saw that pop off. When Bellatro got nominated for this, the audience of people who wanted to read about Bellatro on polygon, people are Googling what is Bellatro. It increases.

So that is great marketing. I don't want to discount that. I do think when you start to get to 10 or even 12 nominees, it, I, it's wild to say this about the Game of the Awards and I take it less seriously because it does start to feel like, okay, we're just like throwing in as much as humanly possible. And I think if I look at the Oscars as a comparison, I think the Oscars trajectory over the last 20 years has been like a lot of that. Like what even is the Oscars at this point?

Like it has completely lost its identity as an awards show in trying to chase relevance. Yeah, Oscars was a different problem because the Oscars increased their number of nominees because all the nominees were like the English patient and snobby shit like that, that no one wanted to watch. They wanted to make sure the Dark Knight was included. I feel like they're going

in the opposite direction here, right? This is what I'm saying though, I feel like this was not a list, I want the snobby people to come back in a little bit and be like, this list is crazy. I don't wanna be snobby about it, but it's just uneven. It just doesn't feel good, right?

If it was a five, they could maybe get to five where I'd be like, yeah, maybe, but it just feels uneven. Like the list doesn't feel cogent to me. Like that is what I would say. There's so many like weird omissions like that. I'm like, why this and not that? Like if you're-

And I think it just bothers us as a whole because we know doing this show day in and day out, how much Indies are like sustaining this industry and the interest in this industry. And to have most of them relegated to categories is a bummer. It's really hard. And I don't, again, this is maybe not even fair for me

to say, cause I'm so ignorant of it, but it is hard to kind of feel like, you know how big of a deal game premieres and trailers are in the game awards, it's hard to feel like whatever the selection process is, is not weighted towards those games that are going to have a big ad spend in the upcoming years. Like, whatever the-

I don't have visibility into the voting process, like how the tabulations are made But you do obviously you see an emphasis on the triple-a titles And again, a lot of that is probably just popularity because those titles get played by a lot of people Yeah, I I think that's the reality of it is this is an international pool of voters It's a humongous pool of voters and just inherently you're gonna favor Whatever most people play. Because not everybody is playing everything. So if everybody plays, you know,

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the odds are just higher that some of them will vote for it. Or at least put it on their nominations list, and then it climbs the ranks. Whether or not- That is a good example of the last game was, I think, really, really great. And I think a lot of people who enjoyed the last one

would at least be on board enough to tune in, like check this one out, like seek it out. Yes, which also we see in like other stuff too, right? Like we're a book that comes out after the one that became popular, suddenly people are like, oh yeah, I missed giving it the praise and the flowers last time, so I'll do it now. I think that the omission of Echoes of Wisdom is sexist.

I think you're revealing an inherent sexism. I'm serious. If the game started linked, it would be on the list. 100%, 100%. Especially when you're talking about an international pool. Come on. I will say this as the biggest fucking Zelda stand in the planet.

This is kind of a mid Zelda game. And the fact that it's Zelda has literally, if we're being serious, has no impact on my opinion. I think design wise, it's a fine Zelda game. Rebirth though. I mean, I agree that rebirth was also bad. If they made a game where Link could make all the beds he wanted to, it would be on this list.

You guys can tell yourself that's not true, but it is true. I'm sorry. I don't know, man. Well, what's... Tell me why Samus wear... Hey, listen, Samus keeps wearing the helmet. I can't even tell if you're joking or not.

Are you joking? Samus keeps wearing the helmet, Russ, you tell me. Okay, was Link's Awakening nominated the year it came out? Link's Awakening is when he saw that his best friend, Zelda, didn't get put on this list, and he awakened to his privilege. He was like, wow, wow, that was the awakening Link needed. Oh, boy.

You know what I mean? I'm wrapping up this section, and we're gonna be doing an episode where we talk more about all of the nummies. We'll make predictions on who's going to win. We'll make some predictions. And in the meantime, this is a reminder for everyone, including the people on this podcast, to play 1000X Resist, the game of the year in 2024. Yeah, I'm not going to do that. It's not. I actually told Frosha, I was like, don't even bother. I love you too much. I know what you like.

It's a great game though. Hey, do we got anything else to talk about? We have a couple letters real very quickly. We have one from Josh. This is from last week. Haven't listened to the episode yet, but didn't see it in the games list. Are you guys going to do an episode on Rise of the Golden Idol? Just came out last week and it's a fantastic sequel. Did Griffin talk about this at all during honorable mentions?

I don't think he did. I think it came out in between. Okay. My thinking is we've talked a little bit about it off the podcast and the general consensus, and I'm sure Griffin will talk about it at the game next Um, but we probably won't do a dedicated episode on it mostly because, uh, we all agree that Rise of the Golden Idol and the Golden Idol franchise is fucking excellent. But I think from a structural standpoint, there's not a lot to say because we're not gonna be able to talk about the narrative.

And really, you're just left with the gameplay, which hasn't dramatically changed. Yeah. I mean, in terms of like, if you have not played any of these games, going back and listening to the original episodes and conversations we had about it, that would be the choice because yeah, I think we would end up saying pretty much word for word what we said last time. Yeah. Um, and then yeah, just really actively trying not to spoil it. Because to talk about the game's story is to not just spoil the events of the game, but to spoil the game itself.

The puzzles will be given up. Yep. So that's that background. We have one more letter real quick and then we can move to honorable mentions. This one comes from Jared. Justin needs to try out Night Manor from the UFO 50 collection based on Justin's Next Fest Rex. This is a bit of a older letter. It's a point and click horror game that absolutely nails the vibe and mechanics. As a big scaredy cat myself, I enjoyed every minute of it.

Thank you, my friend. I always remind people that using the besties email to directly contact me is a misuse of that conduit of communication. This is a public forum. And if you need to reach me directly, please just call my cell phone. This is inappropriate.

Did you play that? This is a show for everybody. Did you play that the first time you played UFO 50? I did not, but I will. I've kept UFO 50 out. I keep seeing Griffin playing it, and it makes me think like, ah, maybe I'll just go hop in UFO 50 a little bit.

And then I'll play the garden game for an hour and get so mad that I wanna cry, and then I'll throw it away. Just my advice is ignore the fact that there are 49 other games and just play this game. That's the best way to experience you have a 50. Pick the one game and stick with it. Be diligent, which I know you can be.

Stay strong. Honorable mentions, anything people wanna talk about. Y'all, I have a movie to recommend to you. It's called Cutter's Way. It stars John Heard and Jeff Bridges. John Heard, the dad from Home Alone. Yeah, sure. And let me tell you, this movie, Lost to Time, is a masterpiece released in 1981. It is a 1970s ass neo-noir set in Los Angeles

You can't say it was released in 1981 and then say it's the 90s. I know. That's so confusing. It's so close. That kind of started filming in the 70s. When you watch it you'll be like, oh I know what you mean here.

It is John Heard plays a Vietnam vet. He's lost an arm and a leg and an eye and he is a cantankerous offensive man who's just here to cause trouble and drink. He must be so young. He's so young. Jeff Bridges plays quite possibly the sexiest person to ever be put on film.

There is a shot of Jeff Bridges in this movie that you will watch, and you'll be like, you know what, they probably should have cut it because it is too distracting from the rest of the movie to sexy. He plays kind of a loaf who did not go to the war and they are oddball friends. And one night on the way to get some drinks, Jeff Bridges pulls into an alley. It's raining.

His car is busted and he sees what he thinks is a man putting a dead woman into a trash can. And he goes and gets the drinks and he's like, surely that wasn't it. The next morning he gets the police at the door. They're like, bang, bang. Hey, we found your car here. There was a murder there. And then he's trying to remember who was the person he saw that night. What actually happened. Oh, wow. Sounds good. And him and John heard after solve the mystery. It also stars an actress named Lisa Eichhorn, who I'm sure most people do not know. And let me tell you just a fucking unbelievable performance.

Truly one of those, you see it and you're like, how was this person? Not the biggest actress of all time it is on Canopy so if you want to watch it you're gonna need to get a library card But the good news is if you have a library card, it's free You literally just download canopy enter your library card number and you can watch this plus like every a 24 movie like Wow it's great service so it's something crazy about this movie it came out in 1981 another movie came out in 1981 with a character that looks exactly like John heard in this movie snake plissken yeah escape from New York they've got the same eye patch the same hairstyle it is like uncanny.

It must have been that time. It's great. Must have been that moment. It's a sexy time. Hey, I have a recommendation, if I may be so bold. And I'll be honest with the listener, during the section initially, I had issues with my audio and I'm having to re-record this without the other guys talking.

I wanna tell you about Murderbot Chronicles, which is a series of novellas and one novel, uh, and they are a really fantastic, really like easy to read, fun series of books about an Android and it is a security robot, uh, which is all about like protecting people, um, that somehow overrides and it is a security robot, which is all about like protecting people, that somehow overrides its governor chip and starts working for itself basically, while still trying to blend in with its bosses,

taking on different clients, providing security, and trying not to let on that it's actually operating under its own auspices. When it's left to its own free time, all it usually really wants to do is watch like soap operas and reality TV that it has downloaded. And when it starts interacting with people, a lot of those interactions are based off of the soaps

and the reality shows that Murderbot has watched. It's a really, it's like a fun, like funny sci-fi series, but it's also like a really interesting meditation on neurodivergence, I think, and how it feels to be a neurodivergent person in around neurotypical people. I think in the first book, to give you a really good example, Murderbot has, which is its name for itself, not, you know, it calls itself Murderbot, but Murderbot has a mask that's part of its helmet. And it's really uncomfortable when it

doesn't have its helmet because it doesn't like people looking at its face and how it's reacting. It makes it really uncomfortable. So it's a really cool series. I really enjoy it. The first one is called All Systems Red. And I think it's well worth checking out. So do that, do that for yourself and for me, I guess, but mainly for you and for yourself. I mean, it's for all of us.

Nice, cool. I'm gonna definitely check this out. Real quick, I played the Grand Theft Auto trilogy, which came out like three years ago. It was the re-release of the PlayStation 2 era Grand Theft Auto games, three Vice City and San Andreas. The games, if you'll recall, came out and they were like a total disaster,

technologically speaking. Yeah, it was a thing. The Switch version, I think, was running at like 330p or something like that, and at about 15 frames a second. And weren't they like, were they the ones that were like adaptations of the Android version of the game? Yeah, well the developer, right, that worked on the Android version and they like poured it over a bunch of stuff. And they had like AI tools, so like a giant donut looked like a screw, I think or something. Oh no, no, the joke is it was supposed to look like a screw, but it looked like a donut.

Right, and they used like generative text, so the text was like all gibberish and anyway uh everyone sort of had written it off as like this is a total disaster now we're stuck with it because rockstar doesn't sell the original versions of those games anymore um a new patch came out very recently that did a bunch of things uh most notably removed the title of the developer from the title page removed the title of the developer from the title page of these remakes, which the developer took offense to because they probably did a lot of the work that is in these new patches. Anyway, I put it on Switch. It runs dramatically better. It looks dramatically better. And they changed the lighting so that the lighting better matches the original games. They also added like cloud effects,

which was very important, because in the original release, when you flew up in the air in San Andreas, you could see like the two other cities that are in San Andreas, because there were no clouds. It was just the distance was like a million miles, which seems like it'd be pretty good,

but then all it does is just highlight how small the map actually is, even though they spent a lot of time to make it feel much bigger. So if you kind of wrote it off, but you did buy the re-release, it's worth booting it back up again, because it looks like they addressed a lot of the issues that people had. Also, for context around the developer part, I believe that another developer was brought in to do a lot of this. Yes.

And that other developer had worked on a separate version of this that maybe was like... Yeah, there was like a big dramatic thing where the original developer's CEO went online and was like, hey, we made a lot of the fixes that are in this new patch, but presumably there are a lot of fixes that they didn't make and anyway. I'm not trying to apologize for removing it, but just so people know, it's not like they literally were the only person working on it and then they explicitly had their name removed. Right, correct.

They brought in different studios. Anyway. Hey, real quick, because I realized that I did not say the name of the Murderbot Chronicles. Oh, the author. Martha Wells, I should have mentioned her, which makes it sound like a grand reveal. And it's not, Martha Wells also has some fantasy work,

some sci-fi work, some YA work. She's all over the place. So check it totally out. Also some threats. Speaking of grand reveals, what was the name of the game that we talked about in the egg segment of this episode? What?

Anyone at home? Shout it out if you remember it. Say it. Oh, we heard you. It is Echo Point Nova. Yay. I will say this. I try to be supportive of our indies,

but I know of three things that these cats have named so far. Two games in a studio, and I'm gonna say they are not allowed to name things anymore. Please reach out, y'all, like you have a lot of really good skills, this naming things is a wonderful. Silver Surfer, just call it that, who cares? What are they gonna do, sue you? Silver Surfer, it's a TC mod I made for...

Wow. Hold on, wait, it'll come to me. Hold on, it's a... Echo Point Nova. Echo Blast. Next week, we haven't discussed it, but how do you all feel about doing a Half-Life 2 episode? Hadn't we done this before?

We did Half-Life 1 on Resty. And then we could talk about the documentary too. Yes, so there's a new documentary that came out. They just updated Half-Life 2 to have like full workshop support on Steam and it has controller support. And it was free for like a week for people because it was the 20th anniversary.

You know what, let's do it, but I'm gonna see if I can bring something new to for the- I mean, Griffin can talk about Pokemon Card Game if he wants to. Yeah, there's enough new stuff out there. I wanna make sure we're giving that audience a little, you know, a little bit of a taste. But if you wanna prepare for it, watch the,

and you are a fan of Half-Life, I wouldn't put this on someone who isn't a fan of Half-Life, watch the documentary on Valve's YouTube channel. It's a new two-hour documentary about the making of Half-Life 2. That has some like... It gives you a look at Half-Life 2 episode three. Yeah, you actually get to see some gameplay footage from episode three that never came out.

Yeah, it looked neat. The dock was made by Danny O'Dwyer's team. I believe... What are they called? Secret level, secret something, secret base. Nope. No, it was a different name. Anyway, the doc was made by, uh, Danny O'Dwyer and his team, uh, who did the half-life one doc. And, uh, I know they've also worked on no clip, uh, as well. as well. So it's high quality work. And I would strongly recommend you go check that out. It's on YouTube.

And it'll be a good primer for the episode next week. One last thing, thank you to the patrons at patreon.com slash the besties. We have a new Resties coming out this coming Tuesday. We also have a racket episode coming out in early December to get excited about. I want to thank the following people who are patrons. We have Mon Couch, we have James Gandalf Phoenix. We have Plain Celery and we have, uh, okay.

So this person broke the Patreon page that I used to actually look at the list. Their name is, I wanted to see how many characters you could put in here and oh my god this is insane, why would any person need this many characters? I'm only going to call this out once. If anyone else puts a really long name as their Patreon name, I'm not going to call it out because it has genuinely made my job harder to pull these names because it screwed up the entire table on Patreon. They clearly cannot support any name that has this many characters. Don't do this again. But it was pretty funny the first time.

Okay, that's gonna do it. All right, that's gonna do it. Make sure to join us again next time for the besties. Because should the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Games. Besties!