The Thanksgiving Buffet of Video Games

Okay, so we talked about how my son is afraid of Bowser last week.

He's still afraid of Bowser.

That hasn't changed.

I did make a huge mistake, though, because I let him briefly play Zelda Echoes of Wisdom.

And I think that was a mistake because now his expectation is that in every game he ever plays, he can summon every animal in the game whenever he wants.

Oh, yeah, that's a huge problem.

I bet he's just got tables everywhere, huh?

Yeah,

you got to tell him he can't make his own tables.

it's basically tables and jellyfish as far as the eye can see and any other game that doesn't have tables and jellyfish seems like a real downgrade yeah i i got into a lot of this when like my kids are playing a lot of minecraft they were just making anything they wanted to and i feel like maybe that's a pretty good standard if you can't make it any animal you want at any time Maybe the game's wasting your time.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Like, it knows how to do it.

It's just ones and zeros.

I had the exact same problem with my son.

He played Sonic the Hedgehog too, and he can't have Sonic the Hedgehog in every video game, and he's been pissed about it every day since.

I mean, that's how you raise a modder right there.

Sonic the Hedgehog in L.I.

Noir.

It's going to be awesome.

Oh, I thought you meant somebody who just would love to mod communities at NeoGAF.

And I was like, yeah, that sounds about right.

My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best boom, boom, pow pow game of the week.

My name is Ross Frost, and I know the best game of the week.

My brother Griffin is out on assignment, and the three of us are here to talk about Echo Point Nova.

Chris Plant, what's that?

I'm just impressed that you remembered the title.

Okay, so actually, before Chris Plant describes it, I have a post-it note right here under my camera.

I want to make a request for everyone on this podcast.

Okay, we've just said the name of the game that we're going to be talking about.

We will not say the name of the game we're talking about for the rest of the episode until the very, very end.

And we're going to see if the people at home remember the name of the game we're talking about.

Somebody is driving right now, sweating, going, Echo Point Nova, Echo Point Nova, Echo Point Nova.

Don't say it.

I'm not gonna say it anymore.

That was

fully muted.

Fully muted.

We're gonna talk about that right after this.

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I didn't let Chris Plant describe the game because it's kind of all the games, huh?

It is all the games.

That's a great way of putting it, except for the ones where you have to care about talking in words.

They pretend that you do, which I admire.

But this is not a game for words.

This is a game for jumping around,

grinding,

snowboarding without snow, doing whatever the hell you want because you are a god of pain.

That is

this is a

sci-fi.

Let me just stop you right there, Chris Plant.

Every time, Rachel, our lovely editor, who's very, very talented, every single time you say the name, which is already multiple times since I said we weren't going to say it, Rachel's going to have to go in there and put a bleep over the name.

Maybe that's a sign, Russ, that this bit is not meant for us.

Maybe this, it's a, it's a sign that the universe wants us to say the name of this.

We're doing it for fresh.

I got it.

Anyway.

It is what I would say.

If I made an independent video game and the people doing the podcast about it said, now the one thing we're not going to do is repeat the name of the game, okay?

I think it's good.

I would think I'm going to find where they live and burn their houses to the ground.

I think it's good marketing because people are going to focus.

It's like trying to work your name into your stand-up set, but like making a big deal of it, I think it's going to make people think about it even harder.

It's just like that extremely relatable example.

Exactly.

This is a sci-fi fantasy-esque game that is a massive open world where you are hopping from kind of islands in the sky.

And at first you hop in and you got like a gun and there are things to shoot.

And you're like, oh yeah, I'm kind of familiar with this.

Indie shooter, I get it and I can move kind of fast.

And then it's like, yeah, but what if you had a snowboard that could zip you around at almost light speed and grind straight up the edges of mountains?

And you're like, Great, I love it.

And it's like, what if you have a pickaxe and you can terraform the environment and carve holes into areas to sneak up on enemies and you're like great i love that too and by the end it's like what if you have a grappling hook multiple jumps you can basically fly uh your grappling hook now works on clouds and you are literally just hopping across entire chasms miles of open air from island to island collecting uh unbelievably powerful weapons that just happen to lock right onto enemies in that oh so delicious way.

You, if

this game, if suddenly the environment of this game would melt away and it would be a carpet store, and your main character would suddenly become an Iron Man action figure, and you could just see the kid like jumping him around,

flipping him, you know, like, and then I shoot my grappling hook, and then like, oh, I have my hoverboard.

And this is purely, this feels 100%

like

a kid playing with a toy, and you're like, well, you can't do that in a video game.

There's just too, you're giving him too many powers.

It's like, oh, yeah, well, I don't know.

I let him Minecraft stuff.

I just did it.

I just said he could.

You know what?

Because he said that, he gets an extra gun.

Right, exactly.

I'm going to give him, now his pistol is a machine gun, too.

Let me talk about.

You keep waiting for the lightsaber, right?

You keep waiting for like

you know, like it's going to come.

So we've talked a lot about sort of some of the stuff you do.

Structurally speaking,

um

you're really just jumping from island to island and you'll have like

um kind of defend the point moments where you start a wave of enemies and you basically have to kill 25 enemies to progress and it'll unlock a chest and you unlock things with it but the minute to minute is really like the only thing that i think this game like

It just, that's what I think clicks for me is the fact that you have that level of freedom and it's such an extreme representation of a power fantasy that it's like when people talk about why a Superman game is impossible to do, I think this is checking that box of like having that infinite power.

The Defend the Point,

I get that comparison because yes, you go to an island, you find a kind of start button, you press it and enemies start spawning and it'll say that, hey, you need to kill like 25 of these things and then we'll give you whatever the reward for the island is.

I get the kind of comparison to defend the point.

But for me, what it felt like was almost like a multiplayer map that I would find and I would trigger the multiplayer map and it was like, okay, just completely dominate this map.

Because it's not really about defending anything.

It's just about using the map as your little skate park in whichever way you want.

And if you are the sort of person who like wants to do a lot of shotgun stuff, you could go down underground into like a chamber and kind of wait for things to come for you there.

If you want to be like bouncing hundreds of feet in the air, you can use little bounce platforms if you want to use your skateboard there's like little ramps for that it it really wants you to use each island as a play space for whatever your style is and as it goes on you end up fighting against like 50 foot tall mechs and like giant other things and those enemies will then have like explosives that carve away into the maps like using the same destructible terrain stuff that you were using with your pickaxe such that at the end of one of those encounters, the entire map is like totally bombed out and destroyed.

So, I didn't start liking this until I got to those bigger encounters when you started taking on bigger enemies.

And this is kind of my problem with the thing overall and why it didn't necessarily, I think, click for me.

I really feel like it is tuned

to such power, like for you to be so powerful and fast, right?

Fast moving that when you have to slow the scale enough to do things like shoot one enemy in front of you or get one orb that you see in one place, I feel like it, I'm

overcompensating constantly because I'm not at a scale where I'm taking on like one-on-one enemies.

Like there's a lot of like, I would, I would grappling hook and I would be like right underneath the platform and just want to go up a little bit more and can't quite do it.

It is almost

It is almost the Sonic the Hedgehog problem, where you're so tuned to, like, I'm zipping through the world so quickly, and then suddenly you have to make a careful platforming move, and it's not really designed to do that.

Right.

When you're taking on those big, when the battles get big enough that you're not even really aiming at specific enemies, you're like popping a headshot as you're flying through the air, or when you're shooting like a rocket launcher at these gigantic tank-like guys, and even if you fly across the whole island, you can continue to clock that dude.

That scale started to feel like enjoyable to me.

But I think I was,

it requires a little too much fidelity, I think, early on for taking on those like one-on-one enemies.

It feels too fast to just like slow down and shoot dudes one-on-one.

I think that's totally fair.

I will say a few things that it does to try to accommodate for that, which it has a lock-on system.

So when you do aim, if you're like zipping through the sky, if you can vaguely aim at a character, it will magnetize onto them.

And it's a hard lock.

It's not like a auto aim.

It's like a range.

Are some guns better at that?

Or is that

it might be a range?

Okay.

It might be by range.

And once you do that, it does.

I love the aiming system, which it locks, but it doesn't guarantee it hits.

So if the character is running left, you then have to kind of steer with, once you're locked, steer the thumbstick a little bit to the left to kind of guide the bullets.

So if you're locked, you will be able to shoot them, but you have to still add this little extra touch to kind of

get ahead of where a character is going.

And it makes you feel like what watching somebody on Twitch playing Call of Duty with a sniper rifle does, where they're like, oh, wow, they shot, you know, three feet ahead of the character and somehow got a headshot.

Even though the truth is, again, you're locked on, like, it's pretty easy.

So a point of clarification.

If you're playing on a mouse and keyboard, by default, there is no lock-on, which honestly, I would not recommend because

I think it makes the game much harder.

I think.

You got to understand how little of your screen the enemies are usually taking out.

Like you're regularly like 100 feet in the air, like looking down at them.

It's not like

you're a noob.

It's like, I can't, I need a magnifying glass to get it.

Yeah, and it also, like, I think the way this game succeeds is when you're, I'm doing a wall run with my fucking snowboard and looking behind me and getting two headshots in a row in slow motion.

And that's stuff that realistically, I know I could certainly not do without the generous auto aim that this game provides.

So I think if you're looking for the power fantasy, the best way to play it is on a controller.

There might be a way to activate mouse keyboard auto aim or lock on, but I know for sure it works on a controller.

Did y'all play on a TV or on Steam Deck?

I played on Steam Deck.

ran great on steam deck for what it's worth who thought about you i i did both i will say that some of the things i'm talking about were somewhat alleviated being on a larger screen really i was even though the performance was fine on steam deck uh i i felt like i was able to i don't know like take in more of the environment at once you know what i mean that's only 800p so that alone is gonna like limit visibility that that's interesting because i expected the same but i played it on steam deck while i was traveling and was really locked in and once I played it on a TV it was so big and overwhelming that I was kind of getting like almost motion sickness because things were moving so fast which I think is just a personal preference

it is

I mean Let's talk a bit about the ambition of the game and like all the things that you can do in it and how weird it is that it does run on a Steam Deck when so many games that do, that look maybe nicer but do less can't run on a steam deck like we said it is a game that has full huge open world it has tons of fully streaming like there's no like load times once you're in it it's like the whole world is streaming through yes you can see long distance you have these massively destructible environments you can again

skateboard up hundreds of feet of terrain.

And again, like you said, no load or anything like that.

the destruction is fantastic as you mentioned fresh that after a battle the entire area can basically bombarded but the other thing is you can use that destruction in creative ways so i actually ended up beating an island that was all about going deep down into the island because i saw it had lava at the bottom and lava is destructible so i bombed out the lava part of the bottom of the island and then carved up into it and finished it in like a few seconds.

Yeah, that's great.

That's like that it gives you that creative freedom is exceptional.

The closest comparison for me is,

and I know you all don't love these, but the Earth Defense Force games.

I was thinking the same thing.

This is like Earth Defense Force, but fun is my.

Not

entirely unfair.

It feels like this will be more fun with EDF's levels of enemy density, I think.

Like having that kind of like wave-bait, like that would be a lot of fun, actually.

Yes.

And it feels like if I think about how this game can be upgraded over the years, because I really hope we get another one of these.

Well, yeah, I'll say at the, they, they, this is their second game, the studio's second game.

The studio is called Greylock Studio, and they made a game called

Severed Steel,

which came out in 2000, uh, 2021, um, which was a basically the similar in terms of like gun shooting mechanics, but much more linear.

Like it wasn't an open world, it was more like straight levels.

So I think the studio itself has had like a lot of support.

And you look at the Steam reviews on this, it's like 99% with 2,000 reviews.

Like clearly, they've found their audience.

And I know they are planning on future updates for this as well.

Sorry, you were saying, I interrupted.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I was saying that I hope that they go the EDF direction, which is worry less about ultimate polish

and just continue to climb and peck at the ambition and the scale.

And yes, like larger hordes of enemies.

The EDF route, I think, is such a healthy route for this sort of game.

Because once you start getting too focused on polish, you end up killing all the things that are special about it.

And we've seen that happen to so many games.

I mean, nothing about this game tells me that they prioritize polish.

Listen, I'm sorry.

I try to be a respectful co-host, but hearing Plant say that he wants anything to ever follow the EDF path and just like kind of sitting back and letting it happen.

I think, what if they made just like a real video game would be cool too, is what I would love.

I'm kidding, of course.

This is a, but it is a case where like, I think for me personally,

I need a little more romance.

Yeah.

I need a little more myth.

I mean, I'm going to sit here trying to think of a less gross way of putting it, but the the fact is I need to be wind and die.

No!

Like, I love it that you let me triple jump.

That's perverse.

I love it.

But at least give me, like,

a dad that I hate.

You know what I mean?

Like, I just need a little kiss on the cheek.

Did any of you all attempt to consume the story?

I mean, I read

it.

It seems maniacal.

It seems like there are several games happening at once.

Like, it is impossible.

Yeah, so the story is delivered.

You'll get to a point and there's just like text boxes that are floating at a specific point.

And you just read the text boxes.

And then at the end, in the last one, it'll be like, we got to check out this facility.

And then you just get a new waypoint.

You go there.

But realistically, like...

All you're doing when you go to these points is just like progressing whatever the next waypoint is.

I will say, speaking of progressing, and I will say this is something you told me.

And I feel like pretty

the game really, I think, could do a better job of communicating this.

When I first started playing,

it feels like

someone has the field of view turned up too high or something.

And like the sensitivity is like off the charts, you know, that feeling of like, oh my God, I can barely control it.

And when you first start playing, you're like, why is it like that?

Like, why is it tuned like this?

Like, this is a first-person shooter.

Why do they have it?

Why do they make it feel like this?

And it wasn't for me until I got like the grappling hook and the the board and the double jump and those like basic maneuverability and then you're like oh okay like that it but you have to just keep pushing for it because it is going to seem insane it takes about 40 minutes to get all the tools that's that's a great point in that you expect it to feel like cod early on

right exactly you press left and it's like oh wow i'm looking behind me it feels like you have cheats on right it's that feeling of like i somebody turned on no clip and I'm just like falling around this world.

Yeah, no, that's that is a really good note.

It is, it is really funny.

I think this is a funny

video game joke that this game has the ability to

you can fall for so long that it pulls up a prompt that's like, do you want to push a button to restart?

And then you land on the ground?

It's like, no, I was just falling that entire time.

I'm okay.

I know it seems like I was going to fall forever, but no, it was actually just 30 seconds of straight falling.

Did you guys get to any of the boss fights by any chance?

You would know.

I guess not.

Okay, so I'll just share the first one.

This happens a few hours into the game.

You get to a large desert area.

It's just like a bunch of dunes.

And then suddenly a fucking sandworm the size of...

Bigger than anything you've seen in the game.

It's fucking enormous.

It's as big as a sandworm from Dune shows up and you have to glide into the sandworm's mouth.

And inside, there are like turrets and enemies and like weak points that you're destroying.

They call them colossi in the game.

And effectively, it feels kind of similar to Shadow of the Colossus, where you're destroying these giant things, which is wild when you think about your mobility speed and also being on something that is actively moving at that time is nuts.

Like very, very cool.

The second one is even more involved than that.

So that is worth checking out.

Maybe this is the broken part of me that as we were talking about,

you know, needing a bit more romance, but it did occur to me that

is a really good reminder that the fact that we don't have more good superhero games is not due to the fact that superheroes are inherently impossible to do.

It's just a lack of creativity and a lack of like, I think we could have superhero games that just don't feel like Call of Duty, right?

Yeah.

Like, this is a really good example of this game with a couple of little tweaks could have been a killer silver surfer game.

Totally.

Right.

If you imagine these as like asteroids in space, you're black, you know, whatever.

But like this scale is what superhero games need to be.

It needs to feel this level of like going wherever you want, doing whatever you want.

And it's just not going to feel like, you know, the traditional, you know, eight hour, 10 level, you know, triple.

Yeah, I mean, this is like, you can see pieces of Spider-Man, the newer Spider-Man games in this.

You can definitely see, obviously, this is a very more, a much more raw experience than that, but the, like, the feeling of swooping through the world in Spider-Man 2 does not feel that different than it does in this game.

As a connoisseur of these sorts of physics, I have to say that like, I don't think

as much as I love, Spider-Man's been perfected in my, for my, for me, I think, but the feeling that this gives you of you can grapple clouds

and then just tug yourself through the sky.

And the, the tugs of the grapple are impossibly strong.

So you're like really just soaring through it feels incredible if the grapple is almost more like a bungee cord yeah and that like what yeah you're like stretched out bungee cord that so you can feel it pulling you and you're almost gaining momentum

you guys feel a little bit like arkum arkham yeah you guys also haven't gotten any of the powers after you beat some of those bosses you unlock powers the first power you get you can drop basically springboards on the ground wherever you want.

So as you're gliding, you drop a springboard right in front of you and you go go fucking launching into the air.

So that, I mean, they, I think, had a lot of ideas that they executed on really well in terms of how do we expand this very goofy ass idea into something that feels much more like a video.

Would this, would this work as a like eight on eight capture the flag?

I mean, could they, could they turn this into a multiplayer experience?

I don't fucking

play.

So multiplayer.

There is multiplayer in this game.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So there's co-op.

I played it.

A good friend of the show, Kirk Hamilton, and I played co-op in this game.

When was this?

This was yesterday.

Okay.

I tried inviting you.

I have a text.

I have a text.

No, I wouldn't have joined.

I wouldn't have joined because I have a text where I recommended a song to Kirk that I thought he should do an episode of his podcast on, and he did not respond to it.

So

that's been before you played.

So I know he has had free time.

I've assumed he had had a terrible, terrible calamity in his life, some sort of death in the family, very close family that would prevent him from responding to my text for multiple days.

And was the song Hey Jealousy by the Jim Bossoms?

Absolutely not.

Okay.

But that is a bubble.

It was a good tune.

It is.

Anyway, I played co-op with Kirk.

The crazy thing about the co-op is, okay, first of all,

there's no it deletes all your messages on your phone and you can't respond to any important texts.

There's no unique progression.

So when I joined his game, my progression stayed the same, both in terms of my character, like I had all my upgrades, but also in terms of my quest.

So I could go and do my quest while he was doing his quest in the same world at the same time, and we would both progress.

Why?

I don't know why you would do that.

But you could also do that in your own game.

That's true.

But there was one other feature I wanted to call out.

If you're together and you decide to take on one of those defend the point spots, whatever they're called,

and and one of you dies, the only way to revive the other person is, and this will sound familiar if you played Windblown, by getting a certain number of kills and the other person will get revived again.

So clearly this is becoming your trend and it feels great.

Kirk is in Portland.

I'm in New York.

And we had no lag, no issues whatsoever.

It was completely smooth.

This legit, I think someone would have a really good time just playing through the campaign with someone else.

It's very goofy and silly and whatever, but

I think they did a really great job on the net code as well.

This is,

if we ever have a bracket for most video game, ass video game, well, let's remember to include

really sets a new standard, I feel like, for

if this feels like if you come into your kids' room and you knew your kid was playing video games and you saw them playing,

it might be a real come to Jesus moment.

We're like, this has gone far enough.

This is, I didn't realize you were onto the hard stuff, kid.

This isn't,

this this isn't, uh,

there's no romance here.

Let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about other stuff.

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Okay,

so we thought we'd take a look at the game award nominations, which got announced earlier this week.

Where do we want to start?

Do we want to start with the big one?

Yeah, we got it.

We got to start with the biggie, which is

the game of the year.

The nominees are Astrobot, Bellatro, Black Myth Wukong, Elden Ring, Shadow of the Erd Tree, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and Metaphor Refantasio.

There is plenty of drama for us to discuss here in terms of what was even allowed to be nominated

and what's like missing.

So, I mean,

let's start with the Elden Ring of it all.

How do you feel about DLC being a game of the year contender?

And that is not a a loaded question.

I actually don't have a lot of skin in the context.

Yeah, I have no problem with it.

I don't personally think that this DLC deserved to be in the list of game of the year.

Like, it wouldn't necessarily make my top five if I needed to come up with a top five, but it doesn't holistically seem off-based.

Like, there have been plenty of DLCs over the years that are, like, feel like their own game.

Yeah, it's, it's, you know, I, I don't, I think eventually you get into like just marketing, right?

I mean, if this is the year and everyone was talking about this game in this year because of the power of this DLC, like

then it should absolutely be in the conversation.

They easily could have just released this as a standalone, you start your character from scratch.

Sure, yeah.

And then you're like, what's even the difference at that point, right?

Like instead, they made it so that you had to have a far-ahead advanced character.

Yeah.

Probably would have been.

If they wanted to sell a bunch of them, they could have made it standalone.

Yeah,

I tend to agree that I don't mind it being here or DLC being here.

I personally think there are too many other games.

How do you all feel about the kind of snubs?

Well,

the snubs are not that surprising to me because of the way that I know that when you have nominees that are being done by large groups of people, I think that

you have a tendency to have games that are sort of like b broad more broadly appealing maybe, but some of those like smaller things get like lost in the shuffle when it's a big group voting.

Does it are we at the point where the game awards need to follow the footsteps of the Oscars and have more nominees for Game of the Year?

I don't think so.

I think actually this Game of the Year list kind of shows that it's maybe the right amount

because

I don't think that there is

let me be clear there are games that my my game of the year nominations would look very different than this yeah but in terms of like what i think is like the conversation i think this is a pretty reasonable top six list right um and it's what the other categories are for too like it makes sense that you know you have best rpg and there are a lot of games that i think could be in a top list but i think they're also fine in their own category i think what's interesting in terms of snubs is like

Dragon Age not, not only not being nominated for Game of the Year, but not being nominated for best role-playing game, despite like the last one winning Game of the Year at the very first.

That's really, to me, that really feels like a timing issue.

Like I really, it's hard to, it feels like there was a lot of things and it didn't come out that long ago.

And honestly, I feel like was it marketed super aggressively?

I don't consume a lot of marketing, but I don't feel like there was a huge

interest.

I don't know.

We'll look back at this as like one of the best years maybe ever for role-playing games.

The nominees for that category is Dragons Dogma 2, Elden Ring, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Like a Dragon, Infinite Wealth, and Metaphor Refantasio.

Any of those things could win Game of the Year, and I would be like, Yeah, that seems fine.

But like, what a,

I mean, at this point, what a meaningless genre distinction.

That's true.

I mean, if you're comparing Dragon's Dogma 2 and Metaphor Refontasio,

what are you comparing?

Like human shapes?

Like,

what are you comparing?

And of course, that's always the easy thing to do with these.

They're meaningless.

Yeah, no, they're video game awards.

Like, what do you want?

Here's a little secret.

All award shows, to some extent, are pretty meaningless.

I mean, because it's...

Well,

it's not subjective, right?

It's all based on human ways of celebrating stuff.

Right.

The one that I think is puzzling, and I don't want to get negative.

I want to have a positive discussion about why Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is in this list.

Why you guys think

because I didn't, I guess I haven't consumed enough popular opinion about it, but it just seems like it landed with such a thud.

Okay.

I think there's a relatively simple answer here.

We did not get many, if any, other big AAA releases.

The true AAA, wow, this is the visual future.

This is the first-party mega game.

We just didn't have many.

And totally understandable, that appeals to a lot of people.

There are a lot of people who only, you know, have time to play two or three games a year.

And they want one of them to feel special.

They want it to feel even bigger and better than the last thing they played.

And I think for that sort of person, there's a lot to love in this game.

I also think that game in general, I've been trying to figure out why it didn't click for us, but it clicked with a lot of our listeners.

Yeah.

Well, and you also have to remember, the metacritic on that game is fucking 92.

Yeah.

So it was critically acclaimed, maybe higher than any other game that came out this year.

Yeah, I'm in the besties bubble, I fear, guys.

I really, this is my bulk of video game journalism, I consume.

I think it is a pretty classic example of we've been drinking so many different delicious wines that when we have the wine we have to be like oh it needs to have like this earthy thing it needs that like all of this is so familiar where I think if you only play it again a few games a year and you play Final Fantasy VII Rebirth a lot of the stuff that I think feels overly familiar to us or repetitive or old hat I think to many people is like

yeah I don't play this every week like like we do I actually enjoy this stuff maybe this is the first time in a long time that I am, you know, tooling around an open world doing these sorts of things.

And there's just the fact that, like, people love Final Fantasy VII.

They have like deep personal affections for it.

So it's been any of that.

It's just such an odd.

There's so many.

It's the things that are not there.

It doesn't feel like a snub because no one's like snubbing anything, but it's like the new Zelda, like

the Astrobot and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth would be on the list and not like infinite wealth or the new zelda or like let's take a minute let me let me stop you right there and say maybe the only installment this and probably bellatro astrobot 150 deserves to be on this list could win and could win could win but won't but could win but shouldn't astrobot it's not that fun astrobot is definitely on my top five listen marketing of the of the decade like Marketing of the year, marketing of the decade.

I'm not talking about marketing.

Not since Yo Noyd.

Not since 7 Ups the Cool Spot on the NES have I been so jazzed about being a bad guy.

I'm talking about Russ Fruschik's favorite.

The funnest commercial of the year.

The best platformer ever made.

Yeah.

Funnest commercial of the year goes to Astrobot.

And it was also that, too.

It can be both things.

I agree.

I know what you mean, Hoops, but I think think the

incomplete list to me.

And that to me, it's not my award show, it's Jeff's.

But it does feel like it doesn't feel like anybody's consensus, right?

It just feels like so uneven that I don't know if I'm trying to imagine who this person is in my head that crafted this list as an organization, right?

It feels very scattered.

And why would more nominees hurt that?

Like, I kind of think that more nominees would be more representative of the audience as a whole, for game of the year at least.

For me, I think

you can go either way.

More nominees means more opportunities for especially smaller games to get a shout-out.

Yeah, and like if they don't, we saw that pop-off.

Like, when Bellatro got nominated for this, the audience of people who wanted to read about Bellatro on Polygon, people who are googling what is Bellatro, it increases.

So, that that is great marketing.

And I don't want to discount that.

I do think when you start to get to 10 or even 12 nominees,

it

I

it's wild to say this about the Game of the Awards.

And I take it less seriously because it does start to feel like, okay, we're just like throwing in as much as humanly possible.

And I think if I look at the Oscars as a comparison, I think the Oscars' trajectory over the last 20 years has been like a lot of that.

Like, what even is the Oscars at this point?

Like, it has completely lost its identity as an awards show in trying to chase relevance.

Yeah, Oscars was like, Oscars was a different problem because the Oscars increased their number of nominees because all the nominees were like the English patient and snobby shit like that that no one wanted to watch.

So they wanted to make sure the dark night wasn't.

I feel like they'd be going the opposite direction here, right?

This is what I'm saying, though.

Like, I feel like this was not a list.

I want the snobby people to come back in a little bit and be like, this list is crazy.

Like, I don't want to be snobby about it, but like, it's just uneven.

Like, it just doesn't feel good, right?

Like, if it was a five, they could maybe get to five where I'd be like, yeah, maybe, but it just feels uneven.

Like, the list doesn't feel cogent to me.

Like, that, that is what I would say.

It doesn't, there's so many like weird omissions like that.

I'm like, why this and not that?

It just bothers us as a whole because we know, given doing this show day in and day out, how much indies are like sustaining this industry right interest in this industry and to have most of them relegated to categories it's is a bummer it's really hard and i don't again this is maybe not even fair for me to say because i'm so ignorant of it but It is hard to kind of feel like you know how big of a deal game premieres and trailers are in the game awards.

It's hard to feel like whatever the selection process is is not weighted towards those games that are going to have a big ad spend

in the upcoming years.

Like, I don't have visibility into the voting process, like how the tabulations are made, but you do obviously you see an emphasis on the AAA titles.

And again, a lot of that is probably just popularity because those titles get played by a lot of people.

Yeah, I think that's the reality of it: this is an international pool of voters.

It's a humongous pool of voters.

And just inherently, you're going to favor whatever most people play because not everybody is playing everything.

So, if everybody plays, you know, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the odds are just higher that some of them will vote for it, or at least put it on their nominations list, and then it climbs the ranks.

That is a good example of

the last game was, I think, really, really great.

And I think a lot of people who enjoyed the last one would at least be on board enough to tune in for, like, check this one out, like, seek it out.

Yes, which also we see in like other stuff, too, right?

Like, where a book book that comes out after the one that became popular, suddenly people are like, oh yeah, I missed giving it the praise and the flowers last time.

So I'll do it now.

I think that the omission of Echoes of Wisdom is sexist.

I think you're revealing an inherent sexism.

I'm serious.

If the game started linked, it would be on the list.

100%.

100%.

Especially when you're talking about an international pool.

Come on.

I will say this as the biggest fucking Zelda stand in the planet.

This is kind of a mid-Zelda game.

And the fact that it's Zelda has literally, if we're being serious, has no impact on my opinion.

I think design-wise, it's like a fine

Zelda game.

Rebirth, though.

I mean, I mean, I agree that Rebirth was also bad.

If they made a game where Link could make all the beds he wanted to, it would be on this list.

You guys can tell yourself that's not true, but it is true.

I'm sorry.

I don't know, man.

Well, tell me why Samus wears.

Hey, listen.

Samus keeps wearing the helmet.

I can't even tell if you're joking or not.

Are you joking?

Samus keeps wearing the helmet, Russ.

You tell me.

Okay, was Link's Awakening nominated the year it came out?

Link's Awakening is when he saw that his best friend Zelda didn't get put on this list and he awakened to his privilege.

And he was like, I,

wow.

Wow, that was the awakening Link needed.

You know what I mean?

I'm wrapping up this section.

And we're going to be doing an episode where we talk more about all of the

predictions.

And in the meantime, this is a reminder for everyone, including the people on this podcast, to play 1000X Resist, the game of the year 2024.

Yeah, I'm not going to do that.

It's not.

I actually told Fracho, I was like, don't even bother.

I love you too much.

I know what you like.

It's a great game, though.

Hey, do we got anything else to talk about?

We have a couple letters wrote very quickly.

We have one from Josh.

This is from last week.

Haven't listened to the episode yet, but didn't see it in the games list.

Are you guys going to do an episode on Rise of the Golden Idol?

Just came out last week, and it's a fantastic sequel.

Did Griffin talk about this at all during Honorable Night?

I don't think he did.

I think it came out in between.

Okay.

My thinking is we've talked a little bit about it off the podcast and

the general consensus, and I'm sure Griffin will talk about it the game next week,

but we probably won't do a dedicated episode on it, mostly because

we all agree that Rise of the Golden Idol and the Golden Idol franchise is fucking excellent.

But I think from a structural standpoint, there's not a lot to say because we're not going to be able to talk about the narrative.

And really, you're just left with the gameplay, which hasn't dramatically changed.

Yeah.

I mean, in terms of like, if you have not played any of these games.

Going back and listening to the original episodes and conversations we had about it, that would be the choice because, yeah, I think we would end up saying pretty much word for word what we said last time.

Yeah.

And then, yeah, just really actively trying not to spoil it because to talk about the game story is to not just spoil the events of the game, but to spoil the game itself.

The puzzles will be given up.

Yep.

So that's that background.

We had one more letter real quick, and then we can move to honorable mentions.

This one comes from Jared.

Justin needs to try out Night Manor from the UFO 50 collection based on Justin's Next Fest, Rex.

This is a bit of an older letter.

It's a point-and-click horror game that absolutely nails the vibe and mechanics.

As a big scaredy cat myself, I enjoyed every minute of it.

Thank you, my friend.

I always remind people that using the besties email to directly contact me is a misuse of that conduit of communication.

This is a public forum.

And if you need to reach me directly, please just call my cell phone.

This is inappropriate.

Did you play that?

This This is a show forever.

Did you play UFO 50?

I did not, but I will.

I've kept UFO 50.

I keep seeing Griffin playing it, and it makes me think like, ah, maybe I'll just go hop in UFO 50 a little bit, and then I'll play

the garden

game for an hour and get so mad that I want to cry, and then I'll throw it away.

Just my advice is...

Ignore the fact that there are 49 other games and just play this game.

That's the best way to experience UFO 50.

Pick the one game and stick with it.

Be diligent, which I know you can be.

Stay strong.

Honorable mentions.

Anything people want to talk about?

Y'all, I have a movie to recommend to you.

It's called Cutter's Way.

It stars John Hurd and Jeff Bridges.

John Hurd, the dad from Home Alone.

Yeah, sure.

And let me tell you, this movie, Lost Time, is a masterpiece.

Released in 1981, it is a 1970s-ass neo-noir set in Los Angeles.

You can't say it was released in 1981.

Then say it's the next one.

I know.

That's so confusing.

When you're so close, it kind of started to form you in the 70s.

I know what you mean here.

It is John Hurd plays a Vietnam vet.

He's lost an arm and a leg and an eye, and he is a cantankerous, offensive man who's just here to cause trouble and and drink he must be so young he's so young jeff bridges plays quite possibly the sexiest person to ever be put on film there is a shot of jeff bridges in this movie that you will watch and you'll be like you know what they probably should have cut it because it is too distracting from the rest of the movie too sexy

he plays kind of a loaf who did not go to the war and they are uh oddball friends and one night on the way to get some drinks Jeff Bridges pulls into an alley it's raining his car is busted and he sees what he thinks is a man putting a dead woman into a trash can and he goes and gets the drinks and he's like surely that wasn't it the next morning he gets the

gas the door

they're like bang bang hey we found your car here there was a murder there and then he's trying to remember who was the person he saw that night what actually happened oh wow and him and john heard have to solve the mystery It also stars an actress named Elisa Ikhorn, who I'm sure most people do not know.

And let me tell you, just a

fucking unbelievable performance.

Truly one of those, you see it and you're like, how is this person not the biggest actress of all time?

It is on Canopy.

So if you want to watch it, you're going to need to get a library card.

But the good news is if you have a library card, it's free.

You literally just download Canopy, enter your library card number, and you can watch this plus like every A24 movie.

Like

it's great service.

So something crazy about this movie, it came out in 1981.

Another movie came out in 1981 with a character that looks exactly like John Hurd in this movie, Snake Pliskin, who escaped from New York.

They've got the same eye patch, the same hairstyle.

It is like uncanny.

It must have been that time.

That sounds great.

Must have been that moment.

Yeah, just a sexy time.

Hey, uh, I have a recommendation, yeah, if I may uh be so bold.

And uh, I'll be honest with the listener during the section initially, I had issues with my audio, and I'm having to re-record this without the other guys talking.

I want to tell you about Murderbot Chronicles, which is a series of novellas and one novel.

Uh,

and they are a really fantastic, really like easy to read, fun series of books about an android.

And

it is a security robot, which is all about protecting people,

that somehow overrides its governorship.

and starts working for itself, basically, while still trying to blend in with its

bosses, taking on different clients, providing security, and trying not to let on that it's actually operating under its own auspices.

When it's left to its own free time, all it usually really wants to do is watch like soap operas and reality TV that it has downloaded.

And when it starts interacting with people, a lot of those interactions are based off of

the soaps and the reality shows that Murderbot has watched.

It's a really, it's like a fun, like funny sci-fi series, but it's also like a really interesting meditation on

neurodivergence, I think, and how it feels to be a neurodivergent person

around neurotypical people.

I think

in the first book, to give you a really good example,

Murderbot has, which is its name for itself, not, you know, it calls itself Murderbot, but Murderbot has a mask that's part of its helmet.

And it's really uncomfortable when it doesn't have its helmet because it doesn't like people looking at its face and how it's reacting.

It makes it really uncomfortable.

So

it's a really cool series.

I really enjoy it.

The first one is called All Systems Red,

and I think it's well worth checking out.

So do that.

Do that for yourself and for me, I guess, but mainly for you

and for yourself.

I mean, it's for all of us.

Nice.

Cool.

I'm going to definitely check this out.

Real quick, I played the Grand Theft Auto trilogy, which came out like three years ago.

Yeah.

It was the re-release of the PlayStation 2 era grand theft auto games three vice city and san andreas okay yeah um the games if you'll recall came out and they were like a total disaster technologically speaking um

the the yeah

it was a thing uh

the switch version i think was running at like 330p or something like that and at about 15 frames a second um

And weren't they like, were they the ones that were like adaptations of the Android version?

Well, the developer, right, that worked on the Android version and they like poured it over a bunch of stuff well and they had like an AI tool so like the a giant donut looked like a screw I think or something yeah oh no no the joke is it was supposed to look like a screw but it looked like a donut

right and they used like um a generative text so the text was like all gibberish and anyway uh everyone sort of had written it off as like this is a total disaster and now we're stuck with it because rockstar doesn't sell the original versions of those games anymore.

A new patch came out very recently that did a bunch of things,

most notably removed the title of the developer from the title page of these remakes,

which the developer took offense to because they probably did a lot of the work that is in these new patches.

Anyway, I put it on Switch.

It runs dramatically better.

It looks dramatically better.

And they changed the lighting so that the lighting better matches the original games.

They also added like cloud effects, which was very important because in the original release, when you flew up in the air in San Andreas, you could see like the two other cities that are in San Andreas because there were no clouds.

It was just the distance was like a million miles, which seems like it'd be pretty good.

But then all it does is just highlight how small the map actually is, even though they spent a lot of time to make it feel like much bigger.

So if you could have wrote it off, but you did

buy the re-release, it's worth booting it back up again because it looks like they addressed a lot of the issues that people had for context around the developer part i believe that another developer was brought in to do a lot of this yes and that other developer had worked on a separate version of this that maybe was like yeah there was like a big dramatic thing where the original developer's ceo went online was like hey we made a lot of the fixes that are in this new patch and then but presumably there are a lot of fixes that they didn't make and yeah anyway i'm not i'm not trying to apologize for removing it but just so people know it's not like um they literally were the only person working on it and then they inexplicitly had their name removed there's right correct uh they they brought in a different studios anyway hey i real quick uh because i i realized that i did not say the name of the murderbock chronicles oh yeah martha wells i i should have mentioned or which makes it sound like a grand reveal and it's not martha wells also uh has some some fantasy work some sci-fi work some ya work she's all over the place so uh check it totally out all systems red speaking of grand reveals

what was the name of the game that we talked about in the egg segment of this episode

what

anyone at home shout it out if you remember it

say it

oh we heard you it is echo point

nova yay

I will I will say this.

I try to be supportive of our indies, but I know of three things that these cats have named so far.

Two games in a studio, and I'm going to say they are not allowed to name things anymore.

Please reach out.

Y'all, like, you have a lot of really good skills.

This naming things is a wonderful job.

Silver surfer.

Just call it that.

Who cares?

What are they going to do?

Sue you?

Silver surfer?

It's a TC mod.

I've made forever.

Wow.

Hold on.

Wait.

It'll come to me.

Hold on.

It's a Echo Point

Echo Blast.

Next week, we haven't discussed it, but how do you all feel about doing a Half-Life 2 episode?

Hadn't we done this before?

We did Half-Life 1 on Rusty.

And then we could talk about the documentary, too.

Yes.

So there's a new documentary that came out.

They just updated Half-Life 2 to have full workshop support on Steam, and it has controller support.

And it was free for like a week for people because it was the 20th anniversary.

You know what?

Let's do it, but I'm going to see if I can bring something new for the.

I mean, Griffin can talk about Pokemon card game if he wants to.

Yeah, we have there's enough new stuff out that I want to make sure we're giving that audience a little, you know,

a little bit of taste.

But if you want to prepare for it, watch the uh, and you are a fan of Half-Life, I wouldn't put this on someone who isn't a fan of Half-Life, watch the documentary on Valve's YouTube channel.

Uh, it's a new two-hour documentary about the making of Half-Life 2 that has a lot of different things.

I give us a look at Half-Life 2 episode 3.

Yeah, you actually get to see some gameplay footage from episode 3 that never came out.

Yeah.

The dock was made by Danny O'Dwyer's team.

I believe, what are they called?

Secret Level?

Secret something?

Secret Base?

Nope.

No, it was a different name.

Anyway, the dock was made by Danny O'Dwyer and his team who did the Half-Life 1 dock.

And I know they've also worked on NoClip.

as well.

So it's high-quality work.

And I would strongly recommend you go check that out.

It's on YouTube, and it'll be a good primer for the episode next week.

One last thing, uh, thank you to the patrons at patreon.com/slash the besties.

We have a new resties coming out uh this coming Tuesday.

We also have a racket episode coming out in early December to get excited about.

Uh, I wanted to thank the following people who are patrons: we have Mon Kush, we have James Gandal Phoenix, we have Plain Celery, and we have

okay, so this person broke the Patreon page that I used to actually look at the list.

Their name is, I wanted to see how many characters you could put in here.

And oh my God, this is insane.

Why would any person need this many characters?

I'm only going to call this out once.

If anyone else puts a really long name as their Patreon name, I'm not going to call it out because it has genuinely made my job harder to pull these names because it screwed up the entire table on Patreon.

They clearly cannot support any name that has this many characters.

Don't do this again, but it was pretty funny the first time.

Okay, that's gonna do it.

All right, that's gonna do it.

Make sure to join us again next time for the besties, because should the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Besties.