The Besties - We Have a PS5, It's Big

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

Huge news! Russ previews the new sizable PS5 including demonstrating its eject. Then the gang reviews the visual novel real-time strategy game 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. 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!

I had a question for the group. Yep. When is it okay to get into a fight with your ophthalmologist? Go on. Self-defense? Like if they pull a knife on you? Interesting, interesting, interesting. Okay.

I'm going to paint a scenario. And let me just say, I have an enormous amount of respect for our frontline workers. But I'm going to paint a scenario where I think by the end of it, you will agree that maybe I had some justification. God, this is like, if you, if you typed into like a machine learning AI computer, create a Russ Frustik led intro into the besties.

It feels like this is what. Yeah. You've gotten predictable in your old age. Okay. So, so let me set the stage. It is my birthday. On my birthday, I thought it'd be a good idea to go to the ophthalmologist.

Okay, happy birthday. I get it. We didn't all say it on the episode last week. That's the whole point of this bit. I thought it'd be a good idea to go because I needed a refill on some eye drops, like a prescription eye drops thing. And my ophthalmologist previously had retired, so I needed a new one. And I really wanted... We've all been there.

We've all been there. And I wanted one that was close by. So I found one on ZocDoc that was super close by and maybe didn't have the best rating, but whatever. I just needed a prescription. I would show up for 10 minutes. I need to know the rating. I need to know what is the acceptable rating for an eye toucher in the time of COVID. Good question. 3.6 was the rating. Unacceptable. Absolutely not.

But I was like, whatever. I'm just going to show up. She'll give me the prescription, whatever. It's fine. So I show up. I showed up at 10.45. The appointment was for 11. So I was going to fill out all the forms and everything.

11.45, the technician sees me. They're like, she'll be right in. She had a medical emergency, whatever. She'll be right in. 1215. Now, 1215 comes by. She still hasn't showed up. 1230 still hasn't showed up.

But they have brought me into the room. So they've dilated my eyes to the point where I can't leave. Great. It's worth noting that while I was waiting in the waiting room, I was reading all the ZocDoc reviews and every single one was like, never shows up on time. You'll be waiting here for hours. Don't bother. Waste of time, waste of time, waste of time. Fine. So it's at this point, my eyes are dilated. I can't see anything. She comes in an hour and a half after my appointment was supposed to start. I'm wearing a mask. I am really not one

to like go at someone. I get it. Things happen. I'm wearing a mask. I am really not one to like go at someone. I get it. Things happen. I'm wearing a mask. I'm not really emoting, but maybe my eyes were showing some tension. That's hard to tell, right? Yeah.

They were dilated. That's true. And she's saying all this, I'm sorry, crazy stuff that has since been reaffirmed by another ophthalmologist that I have mask-related conjunctivitis and all sorts of like ridiculous things that no one of no other doctors have ever said. And at the end of it, she's like, okay, so I want you to come back in two weeks. And I said, uh, maybe not. And she's

like, why will you not come back in two weeks? I said, well, to be honest, this has not been a great experience. And she's like, why do you think that? And I was like, well, to be honest, this has not been a great experience. And she's like, why do you think that? And I was like, well, you didn't show up on time and you didn't call ahead to say that you're going to be 90 minutes late. What's the story? And she's like, well, you know, all X, Y, and Z. I know you had this thing because of stress. You were saying that you had this thing because of stress. And I said, yeah, I had this thing because of stress. And she's like, no, you didn't. That's not what caused it. And I'm like, oh, yeah, it is. And she's like, how do you know it was stress? And I said, well, it happened the day after, I'm sorry to get political, Donald Trump got elected. I started

feeling sick. And at this moment, the technician is in the back of the room and goes, whoop, and walks out of the room. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best box of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I'm not 100% sure what we're talking about today. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the 13 Sentinels of the week. My name is Ross Froschdick, and I don't know what 13 Sentinels is. Welcome to what has to be the most confusing episode of the besties we have ever done. But we don't know what's happening, but it's going to be an exciting one.

We're going to be talking about the PlayStation 5. We're going to be talking a little bit about Dark Pictures Little Hope. We're going to be talking about 13 Sentinels. Now, Chris Plant, I assume, I understand it's a special treat to us. You played the game that we're talking about this Sentinels. Now, Chris, playing, I assume, I understand it's a special treat to us. You played the game that we're talking about this week? Wow. Not only did I play the game that we're talking about this week,

I played both games that we were supposed to be talking about this week. Whoa, that's 100%. And somebody didn't play the other game. Well, we all get to cash in. I feel like you set a precedent. Yeah, of not playing the games for two weeks straight. You said this week, Griffin we all get to cash in i feel like you set a precedent of not playing the games for two weeks straight yeah you said this week griffin you get to have you said a cool one

which i assume meant that i could just kind of chill on it justin mackray though always putting in the work always putting in the effort i don't even need chris plant to describe these things we're going to be talking about because this is such a jam-packed show we're going to take a break and then we're going to get right back into it. Wow. One of our best commercial breaks that I've ever listened to. I fully support everything that you just heard, unless it was something I don't, you know, personally can't support.

Let's get into it, because we've got a jam-packed show. Russ Freshstick dick now you've lied here on the sheet and you said you had a playstation 5 which that's not that's not that's one higher than it is yeah that'll be next month that that's coming out so unless you've got a uncle at sony i think you're lying it says right it says actually right here in the rundown russ it says kaz and the boys have done it again so do you want to go ahead and tell us what that means? Oh, boy, have they? Yeah, so I have a PlayStation 5, which is the newest one,

the follow-up to the PlayStation 4. It's sad that you have to lay that out because, like, you think, oh, of course that's what it is. But meanwhile, fucking Xbox is over there doing God knows what. It's technically not even the follow-up because there was the playstation 4 pro pro oh god if we want to get technical um but yeah we we uh i i have one in my house and it should be said i'm going to talk quite a bit about the playstation 5 in a second and you guys can ask me questions but it should be said uh what I'm allowed to say at this very moment in time is weirdly limited because of embargo limitations.

So if I blanch at certain questions, that is why. But I can talk about the actual physical box to start off with if we want to do that. Chris, do you also have one? Or are you just an expo? No, no. You think I'm a real big shot who gets the things he wants? No.

This may not be appropriate for the show, but I saw on various social medias that there are folks that have PlayStation 5s that I would not have expected to have PlayStation 5s. What are you trying to say, Griffin? No, no, no. Not you. People who have not been in the industry for a bit. Like, here's my PlayStation 5.

It's like, whoa, okay, wow. I thought they would have, you know, fucking only Kaz Harai shows up at your house with this handcuffed to him. Like I figured that that's where we were at. Kaz Harai does not work at Sony anymore, does he? I don't think so, bud. Well, I think he's at Sony, but I think he's high up.

Yeah, he's higher up. He's higher up. He runs the whole. So he's not the, he wouldn't a briefcase, briefcase handcuff man. Y'all, this is very important. This thing is fucking enormous. You know,

photos cannot do it justice at how big the actual box is. And it's not a box. It's like a wavy, an ovaloid, ovaloid inverted ice cream sandwich. Yeah. It, an ovaloid ovaloid inverted ice cream sandwich yeah um it it towers above everything on my console it is like two times the size of a normal router standing up vertically compared to the uh the playstation 4 size how big is it in comparison yeah i would say if they were both horizontal

which i'll talk about in a second if they were both horizontal it's probably like a third wider and two times as thick holy fuck yeah he's really do you have it can you just show us uh it's not i mean it's just go unplug it and bring in here i can't believe you have a playstation 5 and you won't show us it's it's now i'm starting to get honestly very suspicious oh you don't think i have one i'm sure you don't i mean this entire thing is suspect i've given you all the information it's not like among us parlance like sus sus fresh dick sus fresh dick sus stick i should really mention that like if you're expecting this to fit into your um current media setup your table maybe you got a nice i don't know thing from ikea or west elm with like nice wood paneling and it's like really fits into your living room ties the room together do not expect

this to fit into that or anywhere near the design scheme of that because it will absolutely not it will stand out intentionally i think like a giant fucking playstation 5 it is uh it is very extreme looking uh i think is it the biggest console like mainstream console in in living in memory i think it is it's got to be right because the original ps3 was fucking huge, that would have been the competitor. I think this is definitely longer than the original PS3. It might not be as wide in the middle part, but a lot of that had to do with the awesome Spider-Man font, so it's hard to say. Can we agree that if the size is in service of keeping it cool and quiet,

we feel okay about it, right? Get large with it. We'll figure that part out. that out here's what i would say about the size i would actually be totally fine with the size if it was not if it didn't commit so hard in terms of the like design aesthetic like if it wasn't this like wavy wild looking you know frank eerie thing as someone said on twitter that's what it looks like and just have something that large that is also making such an extreme statement is like a lot to ask i'd much prefer if it was just a fucking rectangle that was large i'd be better with it because i could just i want what what

do you want i'm actually not embarrassed to be a gamer so i don't actually feel the same way uh have you started what about sound sound and heat have you started ripping up any polygons okay so the so the other issue i should mention and i'm not a really i think i can say this part there there are very few games that i actually have that are designed for the playstation 5 um you know i did you meet i saw your skype cut out when you said that i actually have and it sounded just like there are very few games for the PlayStation 5. Fair. That's more than none, though.

That is more than none. The only games that I played right now are Spider-Man and Astro Bot, which comes as a pack-in. And those are the only, like, PlayStation games. Welcome back, pack-in games, though. How exciting, right? Yeah. That makes me nostalgic a little bit. Yeah, I got gotta be real.

I said this in the Polygon article, but I'm gonna reiterate it. I think this is the best pack-in game since Wii Sports. I do not know what other pack-in games have come since Wii Sports. I think Sunset Overdrive, I believe, was a pack-in with the Xbox One for a long time. Wasn't it?

Yeah, but not at launch. I'm talking about launch pack-in games. Because obviously they do special bundles. I've heard really good things about astro bot which is like it's fucking dope uh i don't know if you guys remember the vr game that this team made sure uh very few people played it because it was on playstation vr i think we talked about it yeah i think we did last year maybe sounds like us and it was a great platforming game uh this game controls exactly the same way it's a platform great platforming game uh this game controls exactly the same way it's a platform three platforming game in the style of like mario odyssey um but

what's cool about it is that it fully integrates the dual sense into the gameplay so you really get to try out all of the features of the new controller within the game and the fact that it's not like couched in like bullshit mini games. Like with the PlayStation 4 they had the playroom. And it was like oh there's like a dumb shoot targets mini game and stuff like that. This is like a legit actual platformer. It's got a platinum trophy for people get excited about that. But it is like you know probably three to four hour like worth of gameplay in there.

Which is pretty decent for a packing game um and um it's really pretty spectacular which is kind of a good segue to talk about the controller which i actually think is something that we haven't spent a lot of time talking about and is the biggest differentiator between the two consoles that i know of right now now i gotta say i where's everybody at real quick just round the horn before he spills the beans on this xbox versus uh playstation 5 because i currently i have the elite the and i think that is the best controller i've ever used but uh i really still love dualshock 4 yeah dualshock 4 is a great controller but i don't know there's something

about the this is my machine like the elite the elite sort of elicits this feeling of like this is there are many controllers this one is but this one is mine like because of the way that you can tune it and like tune the sticks and the triggers and the back paddles like i am a it's not fair comparison though i mean we're talking about the base pack in that's fair yeah yeah i i prefer the elite is like my main controller i i know what fresh is going to tell us about the ps5 is i don't want to spoil that maybe the gimmicks are very cool but i have long been a fan of the xbox controller over the dual shock the dual shock i don't know something about the angles and everything it does not work for me but this looks very different than the dual shock so christmas is the duke with his big paws okay here's what i'm gonna start off by

saying this unquestionably better than the dual shock 4 like and i and i'm not even talking about the features i'm just talking about the design of it i like much more than the dual shock 4 uh part of that has to do with, and you could kind of look at a photo and get a sense of this, but I didn't really know until I picked it up. The handles of the controller are skinnier, like markedly skinnier than the DualShock 4, which actually makes it a lot more comfortable for me to hold and gives me more of like, I feel like I have more of a handle on it, literally. And that makes a pretty major difference in terms of comfort. I feel like it's something that I could hold a lot longer than the DualShock 4 and not like feel strain or anything like that.

So that's not really like a special feature. That's just like a design thing, which I think they really nailed. The sticks are basically the same. I didn't notice. I had slippery sticks with the PlayStation 4. I get special therapeutic dry caps from the slippery sticks you got to i my biggest issue with the playstation 4 controllers i've gone through the rubber on the sticks it's so shitty maybe it's just on the older controllers but like i've had to replace the sticks on two different

dualshock 4 i've actually had a really bad failure rate with playstation 4 controller like dualshock 4 is like button sticking and yeah i have one that's not charging yeah it's yeah a lot of it from is from chucking them across the room during dark souls yeah don't do that um i yeah the sticks seem essentially the same i can't speak to whether they get all slimy and gross but uh effectively they feel pretty much the same the the where things differentiate and and will differentiate pretty majorly from um the xbox controller although i haven't used it yet the new one um a few things so so one and probably the most noteworthy thing is the resistance triggers uh i think they call them adaptive triggers in the game and the idea is basically uh that you will feel pushback when you're pulling a trigger

if you're doing something that like takes effort the the most obvious example of this in um astrobot is there's a moment where you like jump into like a spring suit and your legs turn into like a giant like slinky like spring and to do jumps you have to hold down the triggers and every little millimeter of the trigger that you pull down you can feel that pressure of the string getting pushed in ordinarily if you're not doing that you don't feel it at all but if you're in a moment where it's relevant it it like adds this level of tension while that's happening you can also hear in the speaker of the controller which is definitely like a better speaker than was in the dual shock controller you can hear like the spring pressing down and that illusion i was not expecting to dig as much as i do and i think it actually is like incredibly

incredibly cool in ways that it's difficult to kind of convey i don't know if you guys can sort of like understand why it is good. Does it like make sense? Yeah, sure. Of course. Yeah. So I don't know. I think it adds a level of immersion.

It'll be interesting to see whether that's something that other companies like bother to put into their games like third party games. Absolutely not. Yeah, I kind of am very suspicious of that. It obviously depends on the level of effort. But I do imagine like, for example, Horizon Zero Dawn, probably when you pull the bow or something like that, I would imagine that sort of functionality to appear. If you find it annoying, you can turn it off.

But I found it to be like really, really cool. You just brought something to mind, which was whenever third-party companies would make use of the DualShock 4's touchpad stuff, it was almost never good in my mind. It was almost never a thing where it was like, okay, well, you touch the touchpad to open up the map, and then you navigate it by moving your finger across the touchpad. It felt like shit 100% of the time yeah for sure so like there's a there's a i would say worrying precedent of companies like oh yeah we'll use sony's exciting new technology but not really think about whether or not it will be good

or not yeah uh i agree with that i i think it'll be hard to uh hard to imagine a lot of companies spending a ton of time on this stuff yeah um but i think you can again unquestionably expect it to see in first party stuff and and they do have a lot of first party titles so that's not you know kind of cool uh the last thing i want to talk about real quick on the controller is haptics um the they obviously improve the vibration to be like much more specific to the events that's going on on screen i think it's a lot closer to like how the switch does vibration that like 3d vibration stuff that a lot of first party nintendo games have um and maybe even more specific because you have that plus the speaker and the controller

that again really sells this idea that you're like things are going on within the controller uh again i haven't used the xbox controller but just in reading the spec sheet on the new xbox controller while it does have improved vibration it doesn't sound like there's quite as many bells and whistles on that front um so i don't know i found it really fucking cool can we ask certain questions yeah ask whatever you want and it'll be like a fun game to see if you can legally answer it. I saw on social media that the PS5 has a physical clicky eject button. Can you confirm or deny?

Sony has not made a console with it. I know this sounds ridiculous, but they have not made a console with like a good eject button since like the original PlayStation 2. All the rest are like, even on my ps4 like i have the ps4 pro and when i press the eject button it's like i think it i think it's coming out i think something's in there that's gonna come out i don't know you want to like press the button and spring loaded it like shoots halfway across the room yeah i mean nothing's gonna beat the playstation 1 where

you press the eject button and a giant maw opens up and is like, you can now receive Tomba. So I should mention... Done watching this Beakman's World DVD? Let me blaze it across the room for you.

I should mention I have not used the eject button even once because I haven't put a disc in there, but I can at this very, very moment. If you want me to,

I will run and try it yeah russ go press the button yeah make lots of noises with your mouth yeah it's a playstation 5 just be like oh yeah here it is it's coming out disc has been ejected what disc do you guys think he's gonna put in what disc do you think he's gonna in? Because I think the games he has for it are digital. I just saw a phantom just walked past whatever closet he records in. He's probably going to put it in a Symphony of the Night disc so you can hear that fun hidden track.

I can't believe there's ghosts at Russ's house. I can't believe I've never seen his wife when recording this show ever. Except for right now. Except for right this exact second. Are you telling me that Russ is not one of the more hauntable people that you know? Oh, dude.

Oh, without a doubt. Nothing. No. If he's not busy being turned into the incredible Mr. Limpet, he is being haunted by increasingly spooky ghosts. I would give anything to watch Russ be haunted. Yeah.

It has to be like a bodega owner who never gives him the bagel that he wants. Oh, here comes the verdict. I'm back. Yes. What's the good word? Okay, so first of all, it was surprisingly difficult to find a disc because I haven't used a video game disc in a very long time. What did you end up putting in?

We had bets. Yeah. So I found Shadow of the Colossus, the PS4 remake, and that's what I put in. So I can confirm in terms of eject, un-eject, I guess install uh basically the same as the ps4 just the experience of putting the disc in it coming out um the button itself i can confirm quite clicky yes okay good nice good hand feel i should also mention it is once again difficult to remember which is the eject and which is the power button. Not great. They are both next to each other. One is slightly smaller than the other one, but they are not labeled.

So good luck. Does it play PS4 discs? Maybe. For fuck's sake. You could have stood there for 10 more seconds to figure that out. I was focused on the eject button. I think they do. Maybe.

I'm not sure, actually. You keep just saying the same thing and then adding maybe. Any other questions? No, I think we're going to have to talk again once you know you're just let loose. Once you have it. We get the real Russ Frush dick. It is dawning on me that that thing we're talking about is in two weeks. Yeah.

That is fucking bananas. It's bananas. It's crazy. Right? The 13th? Is that when it drops? The 12th? I think it's the 12th.

That is in two weeks and one day from when we are recording this. That is profoundly buck wild to me. I'm either gonna be very excited to play it or not able to work up a lot of excitement to play it for some reason. I'm gonna set a prediction time, you ready? I think all of you are gonna come in and be like, Astro Bot fucking rocks.

I think that's gonna happen. I think it's- Or I'll just be moaning, lying on the floor. It's one of the two things will be happening at that to me in that point of my life probably more likely uh none of our consoles are actually going to arrive on time that seems i'm still like 90 sure amazon's not going to get that that bad boy to me in any sort of reasonable time um let's take a break we're going to talk about uh some more video games because what else would we do? Honestly, we'll be right back.

We're doing things a bit backwards this week. I mean, we're doing a lot of things strangely this week because I think last episode we announced we were going to talk about Little Hope, the new Dark Pictures game, but we got the release date, I guess, on that wrong because it's not out until tomorrow or two days from now, rather. little hope of us getting an episode together yes but

we uh chris swooped in like a like a masked avenger uh and suggested a uh frankly and this is me saying this really wild visual novel real-time strategy game it's the best did you play it griff i did it would be up your up your alley. It is a bit up my alley. I'll let Chris talk about it, because I feel like Chris is the most outspoken champion in this game. Okay, so here's the only thing that long-time listeners need to know.

This is my near-automata of 2020. Oh, God. Jesus Christ. By far. So, for better and worse, that's what you need to know. The game is 13 Sentinels. Is it pronounced Aegis Rim?

That's how you pronounce that? I think it's actually Regis' Rim. It's about Regis. It's about a futuristic, well, a time-traveling sort of Regis film. It could be. And his, and I guess his rim? Okay, moving. Can we just?

Let's just keep going. Okay, so it's a very Evangelion anime. It's made by Vanillaware, the people who made Odin's Fear and Dragon's Crown. And the game is about a group of high school teenagers- Oh, boy. Who pilot mechs, and they have to get nude when they do it. And then they fight alien machines in Japan japan also it's built around time travel so the story without i'm going to only talk about things that happen in the prologue

and a little bit a little bit past that uh takes place all the way back as world war ii and all the way forward as pretty distant future what i would say 1985 being the kind of like centerpiece timeline of all this okay so there are actually three games in this and the game is actually broken up that way after you do the prologue there's one game which is the visual novel okay there's another game that's not i said visual novel earlier no i know i know we're gonna explain each of them okay i'm just trying to lay down the foundation okay the visual novel there is the rts and then there is analysis which is just a giant ass timeline of all the cut scenes that you accumulate over the time because you're going to need to be able to go to that that timeline every now and

then to be like hey what the hell is going on? Very zero, the latter two zero escape games. If you need the Virtue's Last Reward and I forget the name of the third. Where you need a timeline. The timeline is gamified in a way. Like you need it to understand what the fuck is going on in this game. So we'll get to the rts at the end of this because it's we can talk through it in like two seconds but i want to focus on the visual novel i don't like visual novels i also don't like rts games i love this

game um griffin can you walk through how this compares to other visual novels and why it might interest people like me? I mentioned Zero Escape and that's like an example of, I think, a visual novel with like some puzzle-solvey stuff in it. If you need a more like... Steins Gate is, I think, the go-to probably most popular

visual novel. This is like Phoenix Wright. Yeah, I mean, something like Steins's gate it's more of an adventure it's more interactive right like stein's visual novel i think like reading yeah basically you could say the same about like danganronpa like danganronpa has like these courtroom scenes and then you read but like stein's gate is just a book with pictures uh this this i would say that the story in this game for sure has the tone of a

visual novel and some of the storytelling conceits of a visual novel but you are a character uh in sort of vanilla wares uh iconic kind of uh lovingly illustrated 2d art style that can like walk around scenes and talk to people you will get certain code words or keywords uh throughout those those scenes that you can then uh like ruminate on yourself or use topics of conversation with other people similar to a point and click adventure like it's like it's like monkey island type of thing like you're walking around the space and you're collecting information and and griffin mentioned ruminating you have a word cloud in your head. So you'll learn a thing, and somebody will mention some word,

and it'll be like, hamburger. And then if you click a menu, it'll be a word cloud of all these words that you've learned, and then hamburger will be one of them. And then you can ruminate on hamburger, or you can take the word hamburger to somebody else and be like, what do you think about hamburger? Hamburger is a pivotal word in this game.

And each of the 13 characters also their story is broken up over a series of chapters um that are told non-sequentially and you can hop between the characters at will hence the analysis timeline part of the things but you you can learn a keyword in like the first scene and then a dozen hours down the road be like, by the way, hamburger. Like it stays in your- The cloud. It's like hard to picture. So I was trying to think of like a really simple ground comparison.

And like what comes to mind actually isn't all these anime shows. It's Lost. It's like literally the story structure of Lost across all of its seasons, which is there's this main group storyline that everybody is a part of, right? Like like on lost they're all on the island together and like how are they going to get off the island and that is the kind of like mech battle through line of the

game sure but then also on lost there's all these time jumping individual stories where it's like okay now we're going to learn about jack in the past or in the future. And in this game, it's the exact same way. So you'll pick one of the 13 characters and you'll get an episode of their life. And that episode could be in the past. It could be in the future. It could star some characters who are, you know, from other parts of the game. And what's amazing about it is, like Griffin said, you can do it in any order. So right away, I was like, oh, I really want to know everything about the World War II character.

And pretty much instantly, that story went in some very unexpected places and featured some other characters that I thought had nothing to do with him. And I was like, okay, now I have to know what their deal is. So then I would load a character who is this, she's kind of like a detective um and i started her story and then instantly on that like other people got involved

and i needed to go learn more about them and it has this thing where no matter where you hop in it's constantly piquing your curiosity of well this really makes sense but for me to get the whole picture i i need to know what that one person with that one line, what their backstory is. So it basically would be like if you're playing Undertale and then Sans shows up and you're like, I just want to know more about Sans, and then you go into Sans' world.

You have picked a really strange example to compare that to, but yes. Yeah, and then the other wild thing about this, because it is just one of those games that like layers upon layers each of the stories is kind of playing with its own genre fiction so one story borrows really heavily from et and one is like kind of influenced by looper and one is influenced by groundhog's day and there's that detective story that i mentioned and on top of these all just being like fun compelling gimmicks the actual story of the game is about how the fiction that we consume influences our memories and our dreams and how

like our memory can kind of blur with the things that we use to entertain ourselves oh no it's making me think things so good it shouldn't work like every ounce of it i'm like this is too much i should not be clicking with this so much but it just works can i just ask so like in the actual stories because this like actually has my interest peak quite a bit so while you're learning these backstories do you have any control of like a how they play out or b what you're like yeah so they're branches a lot of text and this is where griffin can answer speak more into this because again i'm not super familiar with this because i bounce off visual novels so quickly but you the choices you make will branch out in different directions and then you can go back and experience other branches

so you're you're motivated still to go and see like every branch of the story but yeah that whether you stay in if you if you decide not to leave class and then you stay in class and then you listen in on uh these uh three kids gossiping that is one branch or you can stay in class and just stay hanging out with your friend and not not listening on gossip that is a branch or you could leave class and go uh downstairs to the courtyard and like that would start a different branch um and that's just all with one character this is uh this is explicitly what the zero escape games do and chris if you haven't played them i would highly recommend you check them out because if this is your shit if this is your shit then those games are going to

be your shit because in the same way that you make a decision and it branches off and creates a new stem on this timeline flow chart. I still get excited thinking about the Nonary game. They're fucking great. They're really, really great. If I hear somebody talk about the Nonary game,

even now, years after I've played them, I still am like, oh yeah, let's fucking play the Nonary game. Let's go. The only thing though that, I'm not as interested in the actual Excel spreadsheet-iness of the game i'm more into one the story it's telling but two to go very quickly on the rts the rts is takes place wait don't go to the rts yeah i gotta talk

about the visual novel i gotta get in here i probably like i don't know five or six hours this game and i i kind of dig it. I have two giganto problems. One's giganto, one may not be as giganto. One, I do not understand why they have so many characters and they're introducing them to you at such an accelerated clip.

It is baffling to me that all of their character designs have to be so similar. It is you are sometimes looking at a screen of four different dudes that have the exact same anime haircut and it's black and white and I have no idea who any of these fools are.

It doesn't help that, of course, I'm not a native Japanese speaker, so it's harder for me to remember their names, but also they all look like the same members of a boy band and it's so, a couple stand out. Like, thank fuck for glasses guy there's glasses guys like uh is helpful yeah there's the nurse uh who has comically oversized breasts i can keep track of her pretty easily um but i don't know why all the characters have to

look the same it is a absolutely wild so i i this is me encouraging you to push through, even though I am a firm believer of like, if you hit a barrier, it is the game's fault, not the player's. No, just they should have done it different. Well, no.

So, once you get past, the prologue is about three hours, and then you get into the part where you can start picking your own characters, right? And the deeper you go into that, the more it differentiates the characters

by a lot. I think, and this is pretty forgiving, so maybe I'm wrong here. I think there's a certain level of intentionality there where all these kids are very generic, and then what happens to them warps them into very different looking characters. But I agree agree especially the men look pretty similar if i could ask you about one other thing that sort of i i encountered in the prologue and i and i i don't want to put you in a position where you have to like pass judgment on this but i am i was cautious about it there is a character and i'm trying to be speak very literally

because it's not handled. In a very explicit way. In the parts of the game that I've played. But there is a character who was. As near as we can tell. A signed male at birth. Who has lived some part of their life. As a woman.

And I will say that. The part that I played. I don't have a lot of confidence. That that's going to be dealt with in a particularly thoughtful manner. There have been games that have tried to address trans people that have not handled it particularly well. So I am cautious about that. So, yes, I had the exact same pit in my stomach when i saw that at the beginning of the game and concerns i have not finished the game and i don't know where that story goes in fact

that story is not brought back up for at least the first third of it but this is tricky because i i you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna to put a spoiler here for 30 seconds. Because I do think it's important for people, if this is a concern for them, to know what the game is doing. So they can decide whether or not they want to play it. So right now, starting in, and when I say go, I'm going to do 30 seconds of spoilers. And you can skip ahead if you want. Okay, go. So the game actually takes place on multiple timelines and uh people

have different bodies as far as i can tell like a character who is a teenage girl and one is the mother of a friend and another and i think that that character might have been just a different person like might have been a man or a woman in one timeline and then a man or a woman in one timeline, and then a man or a woman in a different timeline. So it's not actually the same person. It's an identity from a different timeline. I think, I suspect that's what's happening. But again, I haven't finished it yet, but I think that is what's happening

based off of other characters. Can we talk about the RTS real quick? Yes. It's very strange because it is presented on a map you do not actually really see the big robots or kaiju that are fighting you control uh what is it up to six i think uh six you don't have to use all six which is a thing right you like to discover it's a sort of tower defense style thing where you are trying to protect this conduit in the middle of this in the middle of japan in the middle of this city and uh you have to defend it for a certain amount of time until

it can basically lock itself down and you do so by controlling these mechs you can move them around streets like on a grid in this city to fend off the kaiju as they encroach down down this grid but you can fire and attack anywhere which took me a while to figure out like i felt guilty just carpet bombing uh this city block with a bunch of monsters on it but then i realized like there's virtually no penalty that i can tell for doing that not at the beginning yeah okay yeah uh and you there is some complexity you you can level up the the mechs and get like sort of passive bonuses for them and for the conduit. And there's different types of kaiju that have to be countered with different types of mechs.

But it's all presented in this very Geometry Wars-style heads-up display. Yeah, that's the perfect aesthetic touch. I love it so much. Yeah, but it's not what you'd... Vanillaware is known for their like really, really beautiful games, like all their games, regardless of how you feel about their art style,

and the way that they draw their characters, as Justin mentioned earlier, like they are really good at making very pretty looking games, and this is like a fucking wild, primitive, geometric like thing. Yeah, one of our listeners uh derisively and i think fairly compared it to uh a light bright where you are playing as the little lights

on on the light bright which is what it looks like like a light bright overlaid on a google map it did very it did very the rts segments don't do it i don't like rts and i i i just did not i was looking i blew through them as fast as i could as like inelegantly as i could to get back to the story have you gotten to the point where you can choose to play rts no okay so once you get past the prologue it will it will just let you choose all story or rts or those things and it it's better it way better. And you can start doing upgrades and the strategy gets like so much more enjoyable. Once you get into EMP stuff.

Okay, I can do a groove with it, right? It's a very weird, the back and forth, but like the way it's sort of, like you can get into a groove where you're like playing a bunch of the RTS at once. And I think you can, it feels better. Okay, I did get to that point, but I figured it was just the RTS shit was going to drop on me like a bomb at some point and i would have

to you know poop sock my way through all that stuff no the the the other thing uh is it took me a while to appreciate this the characters that you're not using for like the active fight surround this this portal that all the enemies are coming towards and they are ai controlled and just fire stuff off so you can load them up with weapons that favor that like i just like fill them with emps so the second anything gets near them they just fall from the sky there's also other elements like you choose who to bring into a fight and they have brain like basically like it strains them to use them in battle but if you keep a streak going without letting people rest then your the rewards increase so you're sort of incentivized yeah but there's a

meta element of like who do i bring into this fight who who is yeah but even beyond the mechanics the one thing i do want to say about the rts that i love and about how it looks that i love is it looks so dehumanized it looks like a computer idea of what is happening like you are just a commander who is moving dots around and you're not thinking about like oh like you said griffin these are buildings with people living in it and the more you play the more you will get cut-ins from people after the fights or they're like wait like this city's ruined and like there was an evacuation scheduled five minutes ago there's no way my parents got out of it and this specific area of the map that i destroyed is the neighborhood my parents lived in like what am i what's going on

here and a thing that i also really dig about the game as a whole how it uses the the story and the rts is it's talking about all of this violence without fetishizing the actual like action set pieces like avengers right like has the battle for new york and you have all the cool like glossy destruction of the city and then afterwards they're like but people died but it sure was fun watching that right here anytime you see the mechs in this game it is just after it has ruined people's lives you you do not actually see the mechs or the monsters except they're ghastly they're ghastly they're like not cool and from the human pov big engines of murder yeah it's always from the ground level so i i think like

it's very much a choice i get why people might not dig it but i think it serves the narrative in a way that i just think is amazing anyway that is what i wanted to say about this game i think it is wonderful i have no doubt that we will be talking about it uh at the end of the year because it will be near the top of my list um and and yeah do we have uh we have some questions i i think we can keep it short just want to do yours fresh yeah we did a we did get a bunch of questions about the ps5 but unfortunately a lot of them i can't answer because the embargo but there is one that i can answer which is specifically uh from blank scientist asking me to paint us a word picture of how the dual sense feels um every review out there says it's fantastic

or unbelievable tell us why it's apparently so good uh yeah i hopefully in the beginning segment i did a little bit of that but just again to like re-highlight the the resistance trigger thing imagine and i haven't played a god of war game obviously because there's no new god of war game but imagine there's a boulder in your controller and kratos is pushing the boulder and you feel the boulder as you push on the trigger and the controller like vibrates and maybe you hear some like rocks crumbling in the controller itself that is why it's so cool it just like further uh sort of enmeshes you in terms of what's going on on the screen itself so can i can i frame it in a different way and this is this is honestly if i think about it this is the big

determining factor of like what i'm gonna play in the next generation is uh is game games of service games uh specifically i'm thinking about like destiny 2 this is a game that i come back to a lot and i play a lot and it is a shooter and over the past few generations like i have favored different you know brands as as my games as service games like when back when i was like really into the call of duty games and playing those a lot i played them on 360 because i thought the uh six axis controller was dog shit for shooters and but when ps4 came out i used that uh because i really liked the dualshock 4 controller and i don't know like i feel like it's going to come

down to the controller for whether or not i play you know destiny 2 on on the xbox series x or on on on playstation 5 or if i just, I've been playing it on my PC, it looks fucking great there too. Like I feel like the controller is the big question mark for me right now. Do you have any thoughts on like what you are leaning towards? Again, I will say I prefer the DualSense to the DualShock 4.

In terms of overall layout, I'm still kind of back and forth on whether I prefer the DualSense over the Xbox One standard controller, which is really, I love that controller too. But I think it's, I think everyone's going to really, really like the DualSense and it will, again, make a big difference. It'll be hard to say how many of those features, again, will be supported by a game like uh destiny but i think just overall feel it feels great it's not an arbitrary thing because like that has determined i feel like this console generation is like what are people playing fortnite on what are people playing you know whatever games of service games uh where are my friends playing it because i want to play with

them and you know cross play has not been the the norm necessarily yeah i do think cross play in this generation will become much much much more frequent and common uh assassin's creed already announced that like cross progression is in um which i don't think they've ever supported before so i think you're going to see more and more of that and that's what worries me about the playstation 5 is that sony has a pretty fucking bad track record for for allowing crossplay on their stuff y'all what else are y'all playing um i wanted to call out a game called scourge bringer uh which came out on pc a while back and was in i think early access or beta and then just got finally released um as well as on switch it just came out on switch um so scourge bringer is

basically a 2d platforming um screen by screen roguelike kind of in the nature of Binding of Isaac or even Hades to some extent where, you know, randomly generated levels and you're trying to survive. The art style is like 2D pixel art. It looks a lot like Celeste. It looks a lot like Celeste. That's a very good comparison.

And platforming is a big part of it. There's a lot of like dashing and wall jumps and stuff like that so those sort of celeste movement mechanics reminds me kind of like uh kunai or other like sort of hyperactive action platformers like that it's very fluid and and you know you're you're the uh balletic yeah i think that's all very fair um i really like the feel of it but i did notice that i was like immediately outclassed and i think um over time you unlock like permanent abilities that make the game a little bit easier but actually what i took advantage of which i almost never do were the accessibility features uh and this game has a bunch of them but some of the cooler ones uh relate to game speed where you can literally by you know increments decrease the game speed to the point

where you can make like ninja like or balletic um jumps or dodges or reflects much easier just because you know maybe your reflexes aren't as good um i'm speaking for myself i i turned it down to 80 and it was a whole different like i then i was like really having a lot more fun with yeah and it didn't feel like an outright cheat it was like i'm reducing the literal run speed of the game including my character by 20 and it feels i just kind of bashed my head against it until i unlocked enough abilities to make it pleasant uh i didn't know about the the the slowing it down uh but now that i have juiced a lot of my abilities were like if i kill somebody with unlocked enough abilities to make it pleasant. I didn't know about the slowing it down. But now that I have juiced a lot of my abilities where like if I kill somebody with an air dash

I do a super long, super damaging air dash right after that. So I can like kind of chain together like just pinballing around the room murdering everybody. It's a good time. It's cool. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It's definitely worth checking out. That game is called Scourgebringer. Scourgebringer. Next week, we'll be talking about Watch Dogs Legion

if it comes out before we record our next episode. We'll also be talking about Little Hope a little bit. We promise. We'll talk about Little Hope. Freshick and I had some fun playing it this week. We did. You can follow and listen for free on Spotify and ask others to do the same.

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pick the world's best games The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!