The Besties - Tomodatchi Life and the Magic and Wonder of Super Nintendo World

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

This week we're diving into Nintendo's bizarre life sim, Tomodatchi Life: Living the Dream, which allows a bunch of Miis to eat cigarettes for breakfast. Griffin also regales us on his experience visiting Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios, and we explore the total nonsense going on with handhelds these days. 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!

Guys, I don't do well in the sun. Did you know that? Can you imagine me in the sun? No, I can only imagine you dancing in the moonlight. And that's my own sort of stuff that I'm on. Prolicking. Yeah. I took my family to Puerto Rico over spring break when I was out from the besties.

And I had a lovely time. It was fantastic. Yeah. But I think they might have called me the chupacro when I was there because my skin did not look like a human being's skin after about a day. What did it? I mean, what happened to it? Because usually it just turns red for me if I get too much on it, but does yours do sort of something different? I mean, there's redness. It starts with red.

Okay. Did you take proper precautions? That's my first question. So it turns out 30 SPF was not enough. Oh my God. For your alabaster porcelain skin? No way, dude. I had 30 lying around. I don't even know how you convert SPF to RPF. First of all, there's like, there's another chart that you got to do. The numbers don't even work the same way. Celsius.

I will say on the third day, it looked more like a plaid than anything. Okay. Which is not good. And now I'm just shedding into my new evolution. Who knows what I'm going to be next? That's cool. It's like species. Dude, what if a different rush shows up next week, choose?

And it's like, and his name will be like Rustar. And they'll be like bigger and stronger and cooler. Sunglasses? Sunglasses, stronger. hotter, cooler. 30 SPF, you thought 30. It was folly on a level that I cannot even mention. You've met you.

Yes. The problem is I don't go outside, so I was like, eh, I'll be fine. I've been saving it up. Been a while. Yeah. Yeah. Well, from now, I bet that's a mistake you won't make again, right?

Never, ever, ever. You've been taking care of that skin from now on. Good. Yes. Great. I'm glad to hear of rest. Got to. It's your biggest door.

Morgan. Biggest organ. Maybe for you guys. Second biggest for me. My name is Justin McRoy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McRoy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Fraschik. I know the best game of the week.

Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a video game club, I guess you'd say. And just by listening, you've become a member. We're so happy to have you here to talk about Tomidachi Life, Go, Live in the Dream. Maybe? Yeah, no, you got it. You crushed it. No shit.

Yeah, dude. You got it in one. You did amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Tomodachi Life, Living the Dream. Griffin, what is that? Tomodachi Life, Living the Dream is a sequel to a 13-year-old Nintendo 3DS game,

simply called Tomidachi Life. And it's a game where you create MES that can look like people. or characters or really whatever the fuck you want, and they live on an island, and you can watch them and lightly interact with them as they get into all kinds of crazy hijinks. And Tomidachi means friend. That's good.

Thank you. Friend life, yeah. You're already learning something. We'll be back right after this break with a lot more informative content. I want to clarify something, Griffin, because you said that ewes are in the game. Yeah.

You can make a U. You can make these, yeah. But Me's are not I feel like Mees haven't been Kind of part of the vocabulary for a little while Is that fair to say? So you can make Me's on the Nintendo Switch And I assume the Switch too

But it's... Please, what's a me? Can you give the old man Context real quick? A me is a little avatar that I believe originated on the 3DS Or perhaps the Wii I think the Wii. Yeah, I think the we came first A and you created a little avatar

And it was a simple little cartoony guy Back, you know, original wee days, your options were super duper limited, some hairstyles, some face stuff, you could move around. And then as sort of new hardware came out and more games sort of featuring these came out, they added sort of more vectors of customization so that here in Tomodachi Life Living the Dream, you could really make them look like whatever the fuck you want to. It's not just sort of like hair and face options. You can just fully paint over their face with like a paint brush. And And using that, you can make these guys look like whatever you want them to.

It is interesting, though, because, yeah, technically you can make me's on the system, but, like, there was no utility for that. Right. You just, like, it was for Yolo. It's not like the 3DS where there's, like, a button that you press to go to street pass. Right. There's not a special light that flashes on the switch too when you get a street pass from, you know, Reggie Fisema or whatever. So, yeah, it's like, it's a weird holdover of systems gone by. but Tomadachi Life is, I don't know, such a celebration of those guys.

And the last one that I can really think of, I mean, Smash Brothers lets you play with the Me characters. Then there was the re-release of Meetopia, which is an interesting kind of comparison point because it handles like that user-generated content in a completely different way from Tomadachi Life Living the Dream. Do you want me to set up sort of more of what you are actually doing in this game? Because it is quite unique from a, I don't know, life sim perspective. Yeah, it's, it is not, don't think of it as the Sims, although I think that's the way in for a lot of people. Yeah, for sure. It's much more focused on the just talking, like having relationships, right? The me is having relationships with one another and like having conversations and that resulting in like funny scenes playing.

The most interesting stuff this game does, it does without your input. really like it takes a while but you you know make a whole cast of me's I think you even have up to like 70 living on the same island which is fucking bonkers uh and people for what it's worth the community I looked on the Reddit were like only 70 yeah like what the fuck are you are you building America like real America in Mitovia in Tomasachi life I forget what the limit was on the on the 3DS original but 70s just seems like a lot to me seems like a lot um and then you And it's not just like the me's you can customize. You can also like create, we'll catch phrases for them. Or you can straight up design using a sort of like Animal Crossing pattern designer style UI. Like, I don't know, man, fucking anything. Food. I made, I thought it would be very funny if everyone on my island, their favorite food was

Giarum Blacks, just like the clove cigarettes. And I made a, like a photo realistic one-to-one box of Diarum. blacks and people are just wild about these things. They're always talking about it. And they eat them, right? They eat them. They eat them up good. And to me, that's very, very, very fucking funny. And so, like, you'll make something, you'll make a joke and then you'll forget about it. And then, like, you know, a few days later, fucking Chewbacama mom will be talking to me and will be like, hey, have you heard about these yarn blacks? It's like, oh, shit, I forgot I made those. That's sort of the main crux. Is it, does it hit different, though? Like, the,

idea of seeing your personal stuff remixed through like an algorithmic lens and then regurgitated back to you. I feel like that was really novel back when this first happened. And I feel like these days, that's a lot more commonplace. Does it hit different at all to see like the AI like coming to you with your quotes like, hey, is this, do you like this? Is this anything? I was into it. I think a lot of it has to do with hitting a critical mass of that stuff. So once you've entered like 30 prompts or whatever of things they like or things they eat or designs or whatever it is and you sort of start forgetting some of that stuff and then they start like interacting with one another mentioning one versus the other. I think that's when it starts getting pretty fun. I agree with you.

It's not like a magic trick. Like I know how they're doing it. Right. In the way that it was incredibly novel before. But there's no real one to one for this game. Yeah. That's what I was going to say. I don't think there's really much of an analog because I don't know.

The original Tomodachi life was even more limited than what this game can do. But even then, like, there wasn't so much of a sort of ant farm style life sim that was so comedy focused out there. I cannot think of a single one. And this one just kind of like escalates things dramatically by, to me, like the big talking point, the big sort of like, I don't know. The thing that is interesting about this game from Nintendo is that there is no filter. There are no profanity filters.

There is no filter for if you want to draw a magazine and have it be, you know, smut featuring Star Fox characters. Like you can fully, fully, fully drew it. You can draw that and you can call it Star Fox smut and people will be all about it. You can even make that a dessert and people eat the book. And it's like you can do whatever. You can make them say literally whatever. There is no filter on it whatsoever.

And there is a voice translation for the text. So you will actually hear them say Star Fox Smut. Do you want to talk about Star Fox Mutt? So like that's insane. That's crazy coming from Nintendo. There is a tradeoff that has happened that is, I think, a pretty unsophisticated solution for, well, how do you make sure that like kids aren't finding the Star- Firefox smut and, you know, that not being stored on Nintendo's servers for the, you know,

Federal Bureau of Investigation to find, like, that is a great question. The answer that they came up with is there is no online sharing of any of this stuff at all. To a degree where I don't know if you guys noticed this, you can't sort of send screenshots and videos that you capture through the switch to, like, capture thing to your phone. It is locked. Like this game is locked so that you can not do that. There's ways of doing it, obviously. You can pull them off the SD card or whatever.

But like they have built such a wall around this thing, which compared to a Meetopia, which is a turn-based RPG featuring me characters where it will say like, okay, here's this. You found a new party member. Go ahead and design him. Or here's a big list of some of the most popular characters that other people have made. If you do not want to spend 15, 20 minutes, like making a guy. of a sudden you scroll through this list and you're like, yeah, I'll take, you know, I'll take

Jackson Galaxy, the Cat Whisperer on a journey. And I won't have to like draw that stuff. There's none of that here. There's none of that. And that sucks so bad because there's so many different things you can customize. There's so many different things you can draw and you can get so detailed with it. And I see other people sort of like super hyper detailed drawings of, you know, characters using the me face paint or or uh you know different items that then they will sell in the store or whatever and there's there's just kind of no way to get at them except for doing local multiplayer when you do local multiplayer you can share sort of locally but or the alternative which i tried to do was like there's websites like there's something called tomadachi share where like

people post their creations and you just sort of like eyeball it and it might have some like slider settings to try to get it close yeah but obviously anything that involves like actual drawing or painting, probably not going to happen. Yeah. Tomadachi Life, I don't remember if it, I think it did have more of filter on it. And yes, the original Tomadachi Life. It had a sharing system that was pretty also a little bit clumsy where you would generate a QR code for your MES. And then people could use the 3DS camera to scan that QR code and then Bing, bang, boom, you got, you know, the guy imported into your thing, right?

I don't, I don't understand why that wasn't an option here, right? Like obviously the switch doesn't have a camera, but like if you can make a, a platform where these things can be hosted and curated, I thought about like Super Mario Maker. There's like a whole system for moderating that. Like you can. I mean, Animal Crossing too has QR codes for creations and sure. I'm more speaking about like Nintendo having an active hand and like, oh, your Mario Maker level has, you know, you drew a weaner with question mark blocks. Like that one's, that one's obviously blocked out. I think it would be a full time.

It would be many, many, many, many, full-time jobs to, like, do that here. But, like, why can't I do online sharing of this stuff with people on my friends list? That, to me, seems like, pretty ironclad. And it's just kind of not an option. I think maybe in other countries you have to let everybody be on your friends list. Maybe it would be rude to let other people join your friends. Sure. Like, it is what I'm saying.

Maybe in Japan, where the corporate. is different than it is here in America. Maybe your boss, it's like known that you have to give your boss your friend code. Like you have to go. Right. It's on the business card. It's on the business card. It's like a professional thing.

So like the idea that you would want all of your friends to see everything you do online would be very hard to understand because it's like, well, no, my aunt, my great aunt, my business partner, everybody and my insurance agent, we are all. friends, you know, through our Switch. Right. I understand. The trade-off here is that this game's unhinged. This game is absolutely, you can do anything you want in this game. Did you play

with your kids, Griffin? I did. So Henry actually got way into it. So much so that this is the first game in a while where like, I, we were kind of wrestling for the Switch 2. Like, because he got really, really into it. Because he is young enough that he never played like The Sims, right?

So to him, the novelty of I have this island where me and my aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins live and also like some characters from the amazing digital circus and also Steve Harvey. Like that is that is so novel to him. And it doesn't matter so much that like unlike the Sims, these guys don't have like a bunch of stats or a bunch of like huge points of interactivity. Right, exactly.

It's basically like you make them, you pick their stats and then like from time to time, they'll have a little speech bubble over their head, which means like, hey, they either need something, like, food or, uh, you know, new decorations or, uh, you know, they have a question about, like, your personal sort of stuff that will then kind of turn into a topic of conversation around the island. And sometimes it's like a little mini game that they have, uh, that that you get to play for like little prizes and stuff like that. But like, you're really not, you're not having so firm a hand on, on the rudder. It is very, it is very ant farmy. And that is very much how the original. Tomodachi life was and I know there's a lot of people who are like well why isn't it more like animal crossing or more like this is totally a different thing and I think this skews younger than a lot of those titles in so far as like I when I played it I played with my four year old who was home sick and I was like well this is a good use of our time so I created him he was the first me that we created and then proceeded to make just any human character in the Pokemon anime

which he's watched quite a bit of. Great. And that was so easy to grok for him, the idea that, like, oh, Brock is there and Misty's there in Ash and Professor Oak and fucking Gary. And, like, they all have their kind of baked in personalities that you can set when you make those characters. So it starts just kind of playing out like an episode of the anime to some extent where Brock's a fucking horn dog and trying to get with Nurse Joy and whatever. Yeah. And Ash is like a little sassy asshole.

Right. And he was, like, super into it. I don't know that he wanted to go back to it after we had that session of whatever it was, two hours. But it does seem like just as like a cool activity to do with a kid that involves a lot of back and forth of like, oh, what personality should we give Misty or oh, what, you know, character traits or do those eyes look right? Things like that. It was like a really fun activity with him. It's also as a sort of like visual arts kind of exercise. Like Henry loves doing like pixel art stuff.

He's got like a couple apps on his iPad that he uses to make stuff. He's been doing that for a while. And so like having this, he did it. He got really, when he got into Animal Crossing, he did the same thing where he was like using the pattern editor to like make, make lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of designs. And this is, this game lets you do that more than any game. Like from a UGC perspective, like it's insane how much is. available to you just in the game without you having to like download some third party app that you like make the stuff on your computer and import like the game that you make anything just the

me creator alone the idea that i could make misty's hair and they had the ponytail and you could decide which side of her head the ponytail was on is like a representative of just how fucking in-depth you can get with this if you really want to yeah which is great it's great if you like doing that. If you like making characters in The Sims, if you like making, if you like having sort of that creative exercise of like, how can I take this real world person or this character from a movie or a game or whatever and using this tool set, like, realize them in the game. Because I have yet to have an idea that I haven't been able to at least like roughly get in there. I got Schemble Shanks the Railway Cat. And he looks like really, really good. He looks amazing.

He's got a tiger onesie that he wears. He looks perfect. He looks so good. So, like, that challenge to me is really compelling. It's really great. And you are also, there's, like, progression hooks in the game of, like, as you help people out, you get this, like, energy that you used to charge up this fountain at the center of your town.

And as that fountain levels up, it gives you more options of, like, okay, now you can do that sort of painting and you can make your own clothes now. Or, okay, now you've unlocked this suite of, like, weird perks. that you can give your me's like different walking styles or, you know, stuff like that. They get new catchphrases, things like that. And so, like, the progression hooks in the game are all kind of tied back into, like, it's pretty fun to make these guys. And then on top of that, the cut scenes and, like, random shit that they will get into is,

is just, it's really hysterical. It's really, really, truly funny. The only thing that's been missing is the 3DS version sort of, like, highlight. was a concert hall where you could go and you could write the lyrics to a song and then the Mies would sing the song to like a pre-made melody and like I feel like 99 out of 100

sort of clips that ever came out from that game where people sort of sharing their songs. I haven't found that yet. Maybe he's in the game? I don't know. You see a lot of repeated scenes. I kind of skip now whenever like two MES meet each other and they have like a conversation topic

that they come out and discuss like those kind of always play out the same or like oh one of these M's fell down and I'm going to drag, you know, skimble shanks over there to help them out, and I can pretty safely skip that cutscene because it's always the same. But sometimes it'll be like a little sitcom cutscene of them sitting at a diner and, you know, talking about just random bullshit. And I don't know, it's really, really funny. This game is truly true. Or just having, like, weird fucking dreams. Or having weird dreams that you have to go in and kind of like witness,

and then you get a prize from their dream. Like... Such a fucking weird game. It's such a weird, unique, amazing sort of, thing and I truly think if it had more kind of community connection, you know, not even just baked in, like even if there was a website, a little big planet had like a website that you could go to to like save levels on the website and then they would be like in your game next time you put like something, man, something. So I can share like the crazy stuff I've made and find like infinite pools. I feel like this game would be monstrous.

This game would be enormous. Yeah. If it wasn't Nintendo, I think you'd be seeing clips fucking nonstop. The fact that Nintendo put all these barriers up for I kind of guess obvious reasons because it is Nintendo. But if it was literally any other company, you'd be seeing just like fucking buck wild clips of people doing crazy as shit. I don't think it's the game that in the way that Animal Crossing people play for 200 hours. No. Which I think is fine.

I think there are some people who will play. There are people who are still playing the original 3Ds Tomidachi. Like there are people, this game has a huge dedicated fan base and I, I get that. But I do think it's not going to have the sort of broader appeal that Animal Crossing had. I like having an alternative. Like it's nice to have something that's very, very different. It also, it did not come out during a global pandemic. So it does have that kind of like working against it.

Well, you know, the globe's not doing great now either. That's a good point, Russ. Thank you so much for the week's update on global affairs. Happy to bring it up. Yeah, weird fucking game. but I am delighted by it, and it has been a smash hit in this house. Yep. So, surprisingly great kids game if you have a sort of, like, I don't know,

artistically inclined gamer kiddo in your house. Awesome. Well, that sounds like a lot of fun, guys. Give it a world. I happy to see a little bit more of a steady flow of releases on the Switch, too. Yeah, weird ones, but, like, it's nice. Something to play. They should be doing something weird.

It's Nintendo, right? They're not doing weird stuff. Who is? Yeah. True. Nice if they got the internet. We'll be cool. It'll be cool.

Got on to it. There's a world of information and connection out there just waiting for you, Nintendo. Connect with the World Wide Web today. Let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and talk about the amazing adventures of Griffin McElroy. Griffin, you went to my Shangri-La. I have not been there yet. You have not. Wow.

Okay. Yeah, I think I'm the only one of the three of us who has been to Super Nintendo World in Orlando, Florida, part of the epic universe. I don't like that. You don't like it's part of epic. Just the branding epic, I don't know. They have, this is a, I feel like this is a problem that Universal has always struggled with. They have three different parks there, but they don't have the guts to theme any of them. So it's all epic, wonderful universe of adventure of islands of yada, yada.

Yeah, might as well be nothing. Pick a lane. It's also strange that when you go to Universal Studios or you go to Islands of Adventure, those have basically the same entrance right off the city walk, right? And it splits off. And it's like, well, today I'm doing this one or I'm doing this one. And there's like the Hogwarts train connects like the two different like Harry Potter parts of those two parts. Like those two parks are very much a set. And there are like bundled tickets of like, okay, I'm going to do both of these today.

And then Epic Universe is like way far away. Oh, okay. It's like way, it's, I think, four miles away. Like longer than a, you know, a train could sort of run, I think, between them. It's like a pretty big gap. So it's not like you have that bundled sort of prospect when you go to Epic Universe. It's sort of on its own. Epic Universe includes, in addition to the Nintendo thing, what else?

Yes. So it has a few main, I think, five islands. the middle one that kind of is the hub world, is celestial something, and it's like, I forget the name of it. It's not great branding, but it's sort of like a sort of spacey, lightly spacey kind of vibe that they're going for. A lot of big Bellagio fountains and a huge hotel that you can stay on, like right on the park, like right on the premises. And so off of that, you have a sort of like spoken hub system where that's the main part of the park. And it has a few

rides. Crazy fucking coaster in that one, the Stardust Racers which there was like no line for and absolutely rocked my shit. Absolutely crazy. So a revival of the dueling dragons from Islands of Adventure that they shut down. That had the two trains that would go at the same time.

So you're like going through a tunnel and like you'll be lagging behind the other train and then you'll fucking boost forward to like shoot. It's tight. It's good as hell that ride. Cool. So then there's a Super Nintendo World, which I'll break down more of. There is a dark universe, which is like classic monster movie. Frankenstein and mummy and stuff.

I got enough, sorry, I got enough of the dark universe over here, thanks. What do you mean? Oh, another global up. Yeah, cool. Yeah, for sure. So there's like a coaster there and there's like an immersive cinematic ride there. There is a Harry Potter battle of the ministry, like a ministry of math. And it's set in like old France.

These are three different parks that just all happen to have a Harry Potter area that makes sense thematically because they're all distinct lands that, you know, that are very distinct parks. Right, exactly. And then there is a how to train your dragon land. We did not, we spent almost our whole time in Super Nintendo World. We didn't do a ton of other stuff in the other parts of the park. And that is because Super Nintendo World beats ass.

It's so cool. It's pretty tight, pretty small. They have done a really good job of kind of walling it off. You go up in a big green warp pipe escalator and then you let out and you're inside Peach's Castle and then you step out and it's just like everything you can see is Nintendo shit. Everything you can see is mostly Mario stuff. And then there's like a path that you follow and now you're in Donkey Kong country. Those are the two kind of main parts of the Super Nintendo world. And it's amazing. It's incredibly, it's incredibly immersive. It's so, so cool. I talked about this a little bit, I think, on Wonderful of, like, I've been going to parks for a while. We go to Disney, you know, fairly routinely for, like, the kids' spring break. They love it.

And I enjoy Disney World a lot. Like, I think it is from an infrastructural, like, design perspective, like, just cool to be in a place that is so immersed, so, like, intentional, where so many different things have been kind of decided and optimized and all that. But I don't, like, have a ton of affection for a lot of the stuff. there. Sure. Super Nintendo World.

Like, I have a ton of affection for everything there, and so does Henry. Even Rachel, just the three of us went because there wasn't a ton of like little kids rides at Epic Universe. So Gus stayed behind with some friends to do like an extra Epcot Day. But like there's so much stuff there that. A man of taste and distinction. Yeah, of course. There's so much stuff there that is like really exciting because like I've been playing

these games my whole life and I have a ton of affection for them. And that is like, I don't know, it adds a certain something. It makes me jealous of people who are like wicked into Disney movies and characters and all that. Because I imagine that brings a whole other heat to the equation because I was definitely sort of feeling it. That sort of how I've always felt about Disney is like, yeah, good job. Like they did a good job. But like, I don't give a fuck about making it. It's a cool part.

He can live or die. I really don't care. Yeah, right. I don't. We're changing this ride and now it's not this character anymore. It's this character. Okay. Does it still go up and down?

Like, okay. make it harder for me to make fun of Disney adults because I sense that I would have that same. Over. Listen, we can all make fun of Disney adults. So Super Nintendo World, like you walk in and you're like in the Mushroom Kingdom and just everywhere you look, there's fucking thwamps and yokesies and pipes and just like it's, it's really, really, really immersive. That's really cool.

It's a bunch of shops that are all kind of selling sort of the same stuff. How much of it is like you can only. get this here stuff versus like stuff you could just buy online. Uh, I don't know. I haven't really done a ton of, uh, shopping around for, for this stuff. So, so I'm not sure where else it is available. Obviously, like, they don't have the equivalent of like the Star Wars, make your own

lightsaber thing. No, no, not, nothing, nothing like that that I saw. There is a, uh, I mean, the food, I think is where you kind of get a lot of that. Um, there was, the big thing is in Donkey Kong country world, you can get this insane, like, banana ice cream float with like, a, uh, I mean, a huge waffle bowl kind of like emerging from it. It looks insane. And I thought about getting it. You can get it with like a special barrel mug that is like commemorative, but it was also like $17. Yeah. I'm not going to. It's, I don't want ice cream. It's 10 in the morning. So like, I don't know,

the immersion is great. The food I didn't really dip into, but the rides. So there's three rides in the Super Nintendo world. And again, it's like compact. It's tiny. This is one part of Epic Universe. And it is layered. There's like a lot of stairs. There's like a lot of, there's elevators for, you know, accessibility purposes. But like, it's really dense. And we got there basically right at opening and it wasn't too crazy. But I imagine like it gets really, really wild.

When you were leaving, was it like a fucking zoo? It was getting worse. Yeah. We left after a few hours in there. And it was becoming a bit uncomfortable. Yeah. They have a system that is basically like magic bands. There's like eight or nine different designs.

and they have sort of Mario iconography on them. Tell people what a magic band is. Yeah, so it's a bracelet that you wear that has like an NFC chip, I'm assuming, in it that you can use to interact with things. In Disney World, you use it to, like, get on rides or open up your hotel room. Here, it is like, oh, there's a bunch of music blocks. One of them's lit up. I'm going to punch it, and then the band will, like, detect that and set it off. And then, oh, the next music block is lit up.

And then, oh, it's doing like a little pattern. And then you finish it. And it was like, oh, that pattern was the Mario theme song. and it plays and you get on the app, there's like an app and it'll be like, you solved the, you know, piano block puzzle and here you got 50 coins for that.

Like there's some pretty cool integration. And then you go to the store to try to trade in the coins and they're like, go fuck yourself. I don't know that there's any sort of real life implications for the coins. But like, again, Henry wanted to do all that stuff. Yeah, no. That's great.

That's also the kind of stuff that I do feel like Disney has not done as much of lately is having like areas that are interactive. Like you look at Pandora as a good example. There's like stuff to do there that isn't just getting on a ride and going to do things. More and more I think they've tried to funnel people

into activities that make profits versus like just kind of experiences. Yeah, or in app sort of focused things or some integration of that. Like Disney came out with a new magic band that has like Bluetooth functionality so can connect with these different kind of like app mini games and stuff and then hasn't done a ton

with it, like, since then. So this was cool. It only works in the Mario Park. These things are not in any of the other things. I have heard that if you have multiple kids, it's not a good idea to only get one band. Well, yeah, of course not. It's insane. So, like, that stuff is very neat.

And then there is, like, a little mini game on the phone that Henry got into. There's three rides, okay? Because it's small. It's not a huge footprint this place has. Three rides. One, Yoshi's Adventure. It's a little baby Yoshis, they go real, real slow through a little thing. And it's, you have to climb up a tree to get up to these guys.

And it's, you're hearing the Yoshis that, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. The whole, like, it's great. It's for the little kids. It's for the little guys. And me. And Russ. There's a little interactivity where, like, as you go through the course or whatever, there's tiny multicolored eggs and you have buttons on the inside of your Yoshi cart that you can press when you see one of them.

And then at the end, like, Captain Toad comes out. And he's like, you got the golden egg because you found all the little. It's a little, it's an easy game for babies, but like, sure, it's cool, it's great. The other two rides are Mario Kart, which was sort of one of the, like the flagship ride when it first, when the park opened. And this is a, what's the word for like a,

you're in a car that's like being controlled by a computer through a course a la Mickey Minnie's Runaway Railway or whatever. Justin, this is why we keep you here. Ratatoui is one of these. It's like a car with a brain and it follows the same. What's it? An Omni mover? Omni mover.

Thank you. You're in an Omni mover and you're going through like all these sort of like iconic Mario Kart tracks. But you are also wearing a, when you walk in, you get a Mario Kart sort of visor that has a magnetic strip on it. And then when you get in your cart, there's like a lens that pops in and covers like your whole face that like attaches to that magnet. And now it's an AR ride, right? Crazy. So on the steering wheel. you'll see like as you're going through the track flashes of like arrows pointing left or right and it's sort of quick time event of like if you steer in that direction quick enough you get some coins for your score for that ride but the other thing is you'll see other racers through the lens uh and if you look at a bad guy racer you don't want to shoot the good guy racers but if you hit you know Iggy or whatever uh you look at them you press the triggers on the wheel and a shell shoots out uh in the direction that you're looking and if you hit them you get you get you

coins. And so also, like, elements of the ride are constantly, like, appearing on the visor in the AR space with some sort of, like, integration in the real world sort of track that you're on. For instance, at one point, Bowser shows up and he uses the Squid ink, you know, power-up, which in the game, you know, covers your screen and black ink and you can't see for a second. On the ride, that happens, and your screen starts to get covered with black ink as all the lights in the track around you go completely pitch black. So it's stuff like that that is constant. When you do Rainbow Road, they turn on a huge fan

that's like blowing against you. And you see the Rainbow Road track in AR space going by really, really, really fast. And like, yeah, it feels pretty fucking cool. I thought it was the coolest shit ever. I thought it was the coolest sort of like interactive game ride, which is sort of a burgeoning genre that I'd ever been on. I think I've only done the Toy Story one.

They updated that, by the way. It just opened a couple of things. weeks ago and it's way better. You can take the guns out of the thing and it's oh fuck yeah it works way way better but this is still way cooler than that because it's like blending all this different really bleeding edge tech and I thought it worked really really well it's also Mario who is better than Buzz Light here right exactly it's Mario it's like are you and they're both better than Paul Patrol like I don't even need to hearing the Mario cart music also like while you're doing this shit like it's it works really well for what it is worth Rachel did not care for that ride because

it was extremely overwhelmed. Like you're having to... Yeah, that's what it sounded like to me. I was like, my son would be in a heart... It's like the fucking ride in Charlie the Chalka Factory. It would be really, really tough. I got super competitive about it. I was like paying attention to like the tutorial.

Like, yes, yes. And I thought it was the coolest shit ever. Are you sitting next to your compatrious? Yeah, so a cart has four sort of people in it. Because again, when you turn the wheel, you're not controlling how the car moves. You have no control. It's like, are you matching which way it's going, you know, hitting these problems? And everyone has.

has a wheel. Yes, but you're scored individually. It's not like a per cart score. That ride rules. The other one is a coaster and it's D.K.'s Mind Cart Madness, which is modeled after a mind cart level in Donkey Kong country. One of the GoFuck Yourself levels. One of the mini go fuck

yourself levels. And it is set in this sort of like, I don't know, Aztec ruin type place with a mind cart running through it. The big thing with this ride, it's not too crazy. It's not doing inversions or loops or anything like that. It does go fairly fast.

But the big thing with the ride is that there's, you know, a thick rail that the cart that you are in is attached to. But that is descended. It is lower than a mine cart track that looks like what your mind cart is on because it's higher up. They have hidden the actual rail that the ride takes you on and put this mind cart track on top of that. So the effect of which is that they can make the mind cart track look like it's

broken and arcing upward and then when you hit that it takes you upward and then lands you with like a rattle so that it's very very very cool uh it broke down a couple times while we were waiting in line for what i've heard not narratively or no not narratively like no it just maybe they there is if you're on it they're like oh you died you press the brawn button and you hit a b and you died um but waiting in line it was like those lousy apes have stolen the golden banana or some bullshit. And do you just leave in that scenario? No, you stick around and wait. From what I understand it breaks frequently because this like dual track sort of thing is

a bit temperamental because the cart is on a long arm connecting it to that bottom track. But we stuck around for it and I'm glad we did because it was like a highlight of the day. And it's also like hits that sweet spot for, you know, my kids where like it's not too scary. It's not too crazy. It's not Star Dast Racers. It's not separating your soul from your body. It's just like a fun fast coaster with like a gimmick that is like really, really neat. I would go to a whole park that is just this.

I would go to a whole park that is just this. And it's wild to me that there is, I don't know, not that. I mean, they just started, right? Like, what is it, four years in at this point? Something like that. Yes, that's true. But also the Mario movies are going to make a trillion billion, zillion dollars. So like it seems to me like the, it is always the busiest part of the park from what I understand, generally speaking.

The other big attractions can, you know, rack up some monster lines. but um is that the dark universe uh i think like yeah the how to train your dragon stuff has a has a couple like coasters that that get pretty popular throughout the day um but if there was like a place that had like a star fox space island and uh like an animal crossing island and like it just seems like it would be such a huge smash hit so like i it feels pretty certain they're going to keep doing stuff like this i don't know how epic universe is doing in general and to be fair Some of the other stuff we did at Epic Universe was like, eh, kind of so-so. And so, like, I spent most of the day wishing, like, I just wish the Nintendo part was bigger

because they've really, really done something very cool here. What's the waiting like for the line, for their rides? It was not too bad. Are you doing the, like, scheduled waiting thing? We got their ride it open. So, like, we did the Donkey Kong ride, and it was, that was probably the longest way. I think they rope drop? Is that what they call it, Justin?

Nope drop, yeah, but except they let people who stay in that hotel in, like, an hour earlier. So, like, already there was quite a wait for the Donkey Kong ride. But the walkups are, like, next level cool, like really, really, really cool. So it didn't seem to, you know, bother us too much. Sounds like a wasted day overall, girl. I'm sorry you didn't head over to the Magic Kingdom. We did all that shit, too. We did all that shit, too.

But it's, I don't know. What was the best merch you bought at the Nintendo World? Yeah, they have any cool snacks. I got a heat-activated Donkey Kong country tank top that when you get it in direct sunlight, bananas appear on it, and it makes my guns look fucking huge. Nice. That's cool. So that's cool.

Yeah. So yeah, it's great. I don't know that Epic Universe is worth the price of admission the whole way, but I think they're going to keep adding to Nintendo World stuff. Do we know if the California one is just like the exact same thing? I don't know. I don't know. I'm sure playing

not sure expert that he is cool that's exciting it is extremely on my list I'm gonna have to wait until my son's a bit older yeah most of that sounds like

it would be really bad for him but it would be great for me so I'll just stick him on a pipe or something and then Henry's nine and it really split the upright it was like that was perfect yeah cool any honorable mentions you guys wanted to talk about

I mean I've been watching Survivor 50 I don't know about you guys yeah that's good if he fiery Survivor 50 is like the most sort of like recursive recommendation you could make because if you know Survivor 50 is on, you probably are watching Survivor 50. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's something like that's pretty.

I mean, I don't know. I don't part. Some of this is like they're referencing shit that happened 25 years ago and I have no, I mean, I might have watched those seasons, but I have no recollection. Yeah. So even like five seasons ago, I don't recognize these people. They go out of my brain the second the season ends. So the fact that I don't necessarily know their relationships, it hasn't. been a huge problem because it's really just a lot of...

I've watched every season save for like a handful in like the 30s era. Yeah. And even I am like, I don't remember who I don't, they were not in one of the seasons we skipped and I do not remember who that is. It's just a lot of people that are very plugged into strategy. And that's kind of why I think it's very entertaining is because normally there's always like three or four assholes that have no fucking idea what they're doing. Yeah.

And they're just sort of like bumbling along until the end. I bristle at the hands of the fans concede of the entire season where they did these votes like should there be idols, should there be X, Y, RZ? And now you'll be watching an episode and be like, guess what?

Motherfuckers, we're voting three people off this time because the fans wanted a twist and it's like, did the fans want that? Did the fans want you to? Did the fans want you to rap? Jeff? I was not consulted on these.

I don't know when the fans were asked about some of this. Yeah, it needs to be a bigger twist than more people getting voted off. Jeff needs to be in the game. Like that's what I was waiting for. But it's been fun to watch, certainly. My other, first of all, one quick note.

Last episode, Sidney did use the phrase cultural appropriation, which is extremely powerful. That's really, really powerful. Secondly, I love and celebrate the idea of the Billy Irish boomerang idol. It's fun to say and fun to hear. They had to have some other celebrities making idols. It's crazy.

I bet Billy Elish is furious. Like I, she probably thought there was like 20 celebrities who are all doing their unique spin. Instead, it's just a whole season of people saying Billy Elish boomerang idol. They have to say all four words constantly. I was wondering if the other players, when Zach Brown came into Spearfish for 30 uninterrupted minutes. Crazy. I never fast forward in survival in my life. I did for that.

I'm not going to watch Zach Brown fucking Spearfish while Zach Brown music plays. I'm not going to watch him. perform two entire songs to an ambivalent Mike White. Are you out of your mind? No fucking way. But you know they were scouring that beach, you know, after Zach Brown left, like, you know, he hid the Zach Brown, you know, Zoom necklace. It's the Zach Brown community idol. It's called it.

Everybody works together. It's beautiful. Beautiful. It's outrageous TV. I wanted to give a very quick update on the handheld. retro gaming market because it is truly buck wild. I'm not following it as closely as I did when I had two functioning hands. But it is just a quick update.

Because of the shifting prices of the supply chain and RAM and what have you, it's very much a moving target right now for these devices. To wit, there are a lot of devices that, the way these were set up for a while is that they're moving so fast is you would pre-order them, like, before they were even manufactured, and then as soon as they were made, they would ship them to you. We're now in this window where a lot of these devices were pre-orders at a certain price. Ram absolutely shit the bed, and now nobody knows quite what to do, because it's like, well, we're definitely not going to eat, you know, we're not going to pay this expensive price for RAM, but you still want this thing. You already gave us your pre-order money,

so we need some more money It was happening So it'll be like $200 You come in You pre-order for $200 Oh it'll be out in six months Or whatever it is And then they have to email you again

And be like actually it's $300 And if you say you don't want that What happens? Here is a Here's a quick example Of how things are going over here From last month So I and EO is one of the big players in the space

They made this thing called The Pocket S Mini it's another small handheld had a snap dragon gen 2 in it whatever and the important thing here is it was advertised with a 600,000

milli-a-a-amp battery and then it shipped with a 4,700 million-a-battery that they said was an error in the manufacturing process they meant to put a different battery in and they put this battery in. Hey as somebody was, first of all

let me just say this. as somebody who's seen a lot of videos of batteries exploding in devices, let's all be real careful about batteries. That would be my first request. Good tip. If you are affected by this, they are going to send you another handheld,

the Pocket Air Mini, which is a $90 Android handheld that's less powerful. And to say they're sorry, they're going to send you another hand. Another quick example for you is the pocket vert That is a handheld that has no thumbstick Except the thumbstick is an imaginary It's like a tactile thumbstick hidden within the face of the device

Got it So you have four face buttons, a D-pad and like a analog Touch pad basically on the front It was revealed in July 2025 And then pre-orders started in December of 2025 Okay I pre-ordered one it showed up

and within a week of it showing up it has now been discontinued and so the VIR is no longer available for sale they're selling the rest of it and it's gone there's another one the Pocket S Mini that device from another in that same

line from I&O also similarly discontinued before it started shipping like oh my God yeah because of how because all these companies just can't afford to make these things anymore it's like whatever money we got

so far. They are that not only can they not afford to make these things. I think the bigger problem is they can't plan. Yeah. Because they don't know. So it's, the whole thing is kind of in a weird, uh,

standstill right now. Everyone's having problems with fulfillment. Like, IMEO has a pretty bad reputation for just not shipping their pre-order, like taking forever to actually fulfill these things. Uh, but even like I had pre-ordered a retrooid pocket six, which is usually pretty ironclad.

Like, you get those out pretty quick. I was part of the second batch of pre-orders, which were supposed to start beginning of March, and I have not gotten a single goddamn email that's like, we're working on it. Like, nothing. Yikes. Complete radio silence. So it's really, really widespread.

And it's really just kind of crashed to the market. It feels like a lot of the people who are most enthusiastic about this stuff are starting to be like, well, if we can't fucking get it, like, if we can't guarantee we'll get the thing, what are we doing here? You're also seeing, like, the big handhelds, like the Logitech, whatever it is, the, like, big, basically Windows machine handhelds dramatically increasing prices by, like, $500. Yeah. Like, I think one of them went up to $2,200 for a PC handle. Like, just tell people you don't want, you don't want to sell this thing anymore. That's all you need to do.

You just tell people. This is my last little anecdote about this space and why I'm a lot more skittish about it. and I wanted to bring this up mainly because I was such a big cheerleader for this stuff, and I'm trying to pledge a little caution here. There's a guy on YouTube. I watch his videos about this space, and his name's Zoo Reviews. And he had one about how he got a pocket fit in the mail, and he, for the life of him, could not remember pre-ordering a pocket fit, and it just kind of showed up.

And I watched that video, I thought, dude, that is really, really embarrassing. And I go upstairs. Oh, no. I get an email that says the shipping status of my pocket fit has changed. This was on April 20th, guys. I apparently

pre-ordered this thing on October 29th of 2025. Oh, my God. Like when I was very much deep into this space and it was at a very, very low price. This is the Conquer, Conquer, right?

Yeah, it's a Conquer Pocket Fit. price conscious, like, yeah, pretty powerful. Yeah, that was the whole bit. It's like, wow, I can't believe they can afford to do this so cheaply. And then they didn't for a lot of months. They were like, yeah, us neither. I don't know, man. So I would be nervous about buying stuff that isn't physically extant.

Yeah, true. And like, you know, maybe within your hemisphere. You got to think this is going to slow down the space, like in terms of announcements, right? It is. right it's got to be slower like there's no they're not announcing nearly as much as they used to i don't know what this means for good rest but maybe it feels like the rg sort of series of uh you know handhelds has been slowing its role and they're not announcing a new one every four days well amernick did just announce some like goofy ass one-by-one flip-up screen nonsense so they are

still doing it uh yeah yeah but there was the abernick the vita was funny there was the Ambernick RG Vita that looks exactly like a Vita and it can't play Vita games. Awesome. So they, they, then literally the same month, they released the Amber NIC RG Vita Pro, that still doesn't play Vita games very well. Well, that's, well, part of that is video emulation sucks. It sucks. It sucks.

It's really hard and complicated and bad. I mean, people have figured it out, mainly by buying a Vita is usually like the best. solutions by idea. It's integrated into the live area sort of shit that was the core UI of the, so like there's all these insane licenses that you have to do and emulations of the, like, firmware. It's kind of like each game's its own pocket application. It's like its own instance. It's bizarre. It's not just like an image. I don't know. I don't understand this. I am, here's my, well, here's where I'm at in that space right now is I am fucking thrilled that I have devices, and you can buy these devices right now that are available. Sure.

I have devices that can very, very easily handle anything PS1 and earlier without even batting an eyelash. Sure. And they're tiny and they go in my pocket and when I want to play something, I can play something. I think the age of like, yeah, getting these devices and they can run GameCube and PS2 and blah, blah, blah, and it's a reasonable price. I don't know if it's permanently come to an end, but certainly for the foreseeable future it's come to an end. And I'm fine with that, but I realize a lot of people want to do a lot more with these devices. than I do. So I don't know. Yeah. It's a, it's a bummer. It's a huge bummer. Yeah. I will tell you what's not a huge bummer, though, and that's the new season of Taskmaster.

Oh, yes. I talked about it last week. We didn't actually. Oh, okay. New season of Taskmaster. Got some really, really funny folks on it. A couple of folks who were on Last One Laughing, UK, the past couple seasons of that. And Kumil Nanjiani is on it. And the other known person is, Armando Yanucci who did Veep and uh, yes, and,

uh, all sorts of stuff. Uh, really, it's a really, really funny cast and, uh, I don't know.

I, I, I sort of am spotty in, in, in watching that show, but if I get like into a season, I will, I will stick with it to the end.

And the first episode of this one is, is, is really, really hysterically funny. Uh, there's only two out. They release new ones, I think every Thursday.

Um, but it's a, if you've, if you've been lapsed, uh, like me for, you know, a little bit. It's a good time to hop back on because this season fucking rules so far.

I like the moment where the other two comedians first meet Camille. And they're like, he leaves the room and they're like, oh my God, he's so fucking famous. It's really hysterical. It's really, really funny. Yeah. I think this is only, they have not had a ton of,

you know, American comedians on the show. I don't know if it was last season or the season before last. they had Jason Mansuchus. Yeah. And now they got Camille. It does seem like it's going to continue as the show gets bigger and bigger, which it has been. Yeah.

You're going to see more, at least one pretty known name outside of the England. Yeah. You can watch it on YouTube. Just go to the Taskmaster YouTube channel. It's great. Nice. Okay. I think we did it.

I'm going to recap the stuff we talked about because Chris Plan is not here. We talked about Tomidachi Life, Living the Dream, which is on Nintendo Switch. actually it works on Switch 1 as well as Switch 2. We also talked about Nintendo World, Super Nintendo World, down in Florida. Griffin experienced that himself. We talked about Survivor Season 50. We talked about Taskmaster, the new season, which you can watch on YouTube. We talked about handheld craziness going on in Justin's neck of the world.

And I think that's what we talked about. I miss Chris. He'll be back. It wasn't very good. It was okay. You tried, but it was like I tried.

The reading. It's like you felt it though, right? It's a lot of reading. Miss Chris. By the way, we have a new new content,

new episode of Resties up. We have a new bracket battles up for the month. We have another one coming first week of May, so keep an eye out for that. Over at patreon.com slash the besties.

If you haven't joined yet, please join. You make this show possible. Literally, this show wouldn't exist without you. So thank you so much for supporting us. Here's some new members that have recently joined.

We have Brandon F. We have Brooks. We have Nick W. And we have Starfolk. Thank you so much for being Patreon members. Also, if you're just curious about it, you want to just make a free account. You can also do that and be a member. So that's a possibility as well.

You won't get the bonus concept. But that's okay. It's a way to dip a toe in. Next week, Vampire Crawlers, which I believe Justin was on your most anticipated list of 2026. I believe it was. It was the card-based. game using the franchise. Yeah, but I'm feeling pretty good about one-handed operation.

Yeah, I mean, at the very least, it definitely works with a mouse. So there's that, but we'll see. So big week, big stuff. It's all happening. I'm very excited about it. That's going to do it for us for this week on the Besties. Be sure to join us again next time for the Besties, because shouldn't the World's Best Friends pick the World's Best Games? Besties!