Revisiting our "Most Anticipated Games" of 2024

I was making myself a deli sandwich for lunch today.

Oh, and I didn't have any tomatoes, I didn't have any lettuce, but I did have

some coleslaw from like four days ago.

Can I just slop that on there?

Yeah, man.

Four days.

That's when it starts to get good.

Do I need to like,

is there a presentation or do I just like spoon it on?

Nah, nah, nah.

I ain't no laws when you're slopping slaws.

That's what I said.

Yeah, I've heard that.

That's my thing.

You just put them on there however you like.

And I phrased it as a question, but this is already something that has happened.

I just went ahead and like ice cream scooped out some slaw and plopped it on the sandwich.

I tell you what my issue is, is four days is a little too late to be fresh slaw and a lot too early to be fresh kimchi.

I think if you would just put it in a jar underground for a few months, then we have some.

Now we can come back and got a holiday pud.

You got a holiday put of kimchi.

Um, you kind of hit no man's and no man's land lasts for several months.

It's basically anything after, uh, I mean, if you don't eat slaw more than once, it's like that thing with meat where nobody quite understands this, even if they pretend they do.

But if you got a big hunk of meat, it gets old, and then that's not good.

But then if you wait a long time, come back around coming back around, everybody's like, This is okay.

Well, because all the bacteria of old age, they've died, so they're dead now.

Fuck, Russ, you're God, man.

Yeah.

Of course.

I know, Russ.

It was just a joke for the podcast.

Hold on.

I don't think Russ is right.

I actually don't think that's an advertisement.

Russ is saying exactly how it works.

That's 100%.

It gets old.

Yeah, but when the bacteria dies, I bet.

It all dies.

That's how it happens.

Wouldn't there be new bacteria to be like, yo, this is some jerky?

Sterile.

Eat this jerky.

That's exactly how it goes, Russ.

That's the process, 100% scientifically.

Arid, sterile beef.

Well, I'm glad you ate four-day-old egg juice.

That'll go over well with me.

Egg juice, it's coleslaw.

It's mayonnaise.

There ain't much in this life I hate more than slaw, guys.

There's not much in this.

I mean, a real mayonnaise-y slaw.

If you get me a nice, real hearty, heavy on the cabbage.

Take a ratio.

Lightly sauced slaw, heavy on the red cabbage.

Yeah.

Delicious.

I mean, let's call it what it is.

Small wet salad is what slaw is.

It's a little, little, wet, very wet salad.

salad.

When it's more of a, sometimes the salad part gets perverted to mean like mayonnaise, a lot of it.

Too much.

I don't like that.

Yeah.

How do you all feel when I start talking about poopy and stuff?

Oh, yeah, man.

Absolutely.

We've been meaning to stage an interview.

You like slaughter?

It sounds like I don't like slaws.

This is the opposite.

This is great.

This is, you're destroying me right now.

It feels like my skin is like chafing off of my body.

Carrots and lettuce and no, not just like eating salt, but just talking about salt.

You know what?

I can eat it, put it next to some like fried chicken, and like, you know, I'm at KFC.

But you want me to think, you want me to think about you?

Here's what you're trying to make me think about.

Yeah.

Here's the image that you're putting into the eyes of all of our listeners.

They're trying to make it a lot more.

And no, and no video game stuff this week, gang.

No, no, we're not getting into it.

They're speeding down the speedway.

And they are now picturing a bucket,

a giant bucket, like a pool cleaning tab full of water.

It's a pint.

To be be fair okay okay a pint of of of rotten

mayo

on on on in in like almost creamed vegetables that you are plopping down onto two slices of white bread with nothing else your slaw sandwich no that's what you're trying to make people think about there's salami on there oh well that's fine yeah yeah we're good to listen okay let's talk about the show

My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best gifts of the year.

My name is Christian McElroy and I would kill for some fucking slal right about it.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best things of the week.

My name is Russ Rush and I know the best game of the week.

Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and the greatest in home interactive entertainment this is a video game club and just by listening my young friend you have become a member and i think we need to tell the people yeah that we're recording this a little early yeah it is november 2022 so if anything has happened since then we don't know about it so that's true yeah So you're saying we were recording this two years ago.

I mean, we knew we would need an episode for this day.

You said said 2022.

You said 2022.

That's not this year, you know.

Correct.

Yeah, it's two years ago.

A year?

I mean, no, no, no, sorry.

It's two years.

It's today.

Two years in the future, this episode is going to be published.

There's a lot of lore.

There's a lot of lore.

There's a lot more lore to drop in the show.

This feels more cold open, but we whizzed past cold open station many years ago.

You confused the word months with years, and now you're just kind of stubbornly sticking to your guns.

Not since from has this much intrigue.

I don't know what from is.

Is that a television show that'll lock?

Oh, wow, that's cool.

No, actually, you do know what from is and you think it is wild.

And it's also great you're doing this on an episode where we are talking about something that happened earlier in the year 2024.

We are returning to events discussed in this crew.

It is an early episode, okay?

We're recording it before you're hearing it, which is the way always.

So it doesn't even really bear hanging a lantern on, okay?

It doesn't.

Too late.

Wait, should I tell people?

Yeah.

This week, we are doing two things for you.

One, we're looking back at the predictions that we made at the beginning of 2024 and reflecting on, how did we get them right?

Do we nail them?

Or were we way off base yet again?

Because I believe last year we like whiffed hard.

This year, we'll see.

Then in the back half of the episode, we are going to be your

holiday helpers.

We are going to help you pick the perfect treats for the gamers in your life, whether that is parents, friends, kids, the secret Santa at your office, whoever it is, we have them covered and yeah, we'll talk about it when we talk about it.

Later.

Okay, how do we think we did?

Before we look at the list of like, how do we think we did this year in terms of guessing

the games that we would really be impressed by?

Sure, sure.

I'm going to go ahead and admit this because I'm I'm a big enough man to admit when I put up some real stinky bricks.

And I think that my hit rate was low and my miss rate was incredibly high.

I think a lot of my favorite games of the year, I did not clock.

When did we record this?

Was this at the beginning?

Was this like January?

January, the first episode of the year, usually.

So it's possible some of my highlights were not announced yet, I guess.

That is entirely possible.

Yeah,

I feel like I might have gotten some things right.

I think what's working against this here is it's a year where there have been a lot of games that didn't have any exposure really until launch.

Bellatro is a good example.

That we never ever would have been like, oh, we got to watch out for that game.

So a lot of the games on this list are like bigger games.

And it wasn't necessarily, I mean, there's some good ones, but it wasn't necessarily the best year for big, big games.

It's gotten increasingly difficult, I think, also to know what is a big game.

Like increasingly, it feels like without the big marketing push

gigs I'm talking gigs leading up to it

gigs for a hundred gigs or less that's a big game I don't get out of bed for less than a hundred gigs

I think we I bet we did pretty okay can we address I guess we're gonna go line item right and talk about the before we do that can we talk about the games that are missing off of here that you feel like uh I obviously I don't think any of us would have said Bellatro just because we didn't know what that word was or what it meant.

Yep.

But it has certainly, since it came out, it's doing this brutal thing to me that I feel like has only happened a couple of times in the past where a game comes out on one platform and I play it a lot.

And then later in that same year, it comes out on another platform.

And I'm like, oh, I guess I'll refresh my.

memory of how much I really enjoy this game.

It's really bookended the year quite

savagely for me.

Yeah, I haven't tried it on mobile specifically for that reason, but I hear it's spectacular so good

we didn't have metaphor on here and I'm a little surprised by that I know we couldn't remember the name of it yeah that's entirely popping

no none of us want to admit it when was it announced

was it announced this year was that is that but okay let's start let's start going through the list because

Yeah, I thought that we probably did well, and looking at it, we did do pretty well because the year was front-loaded.

so when

i i will just start from the top dragon's dogma 2

has that one gotten any look it has for one person it has for me no from cap from capcom i mean has they have my position on dragon's dogma 2 is there's a lot of stuff i really really like in here and then some stuff that makes me want to pull my fucking hair out and it seems like the stuff that makes me want to pull my fucking hair out could be addressed it's stuff that chris plant loves so well no i'm talking about like technical like if I could play this thing on Steam Deck reliably like I would give it yeah I don't know if they fixed that or ever will but I it does sound like they've done

quite a bit of patches and even added some quality life improvements.

Still a lot of ladders.

There's still

a whole lot of ladders but like

I feel good about that.

As a person who was looking forward to that game I

am really happy with what I got.

My take is you can't say it didn't deliver on what you wanted Dragon Zogma 2 to have.

Yep.

Had that.

It's so true.

If you wanted more Dragon's Dogma, they made that

for you.

I changed.

Dragon Zogma didn't.

I did.

I like this guy a little bit better than I used to, it seems.

I didn't expect it either.

But Dragon's Dogma is Dragon's Dogma.

As Dragon's Dogma game, no question.

Games can teach you that about it.

The games can teach you that.

They help you learn.

Thank you.

And not just Mavis Beacon.

Lots of games.

Lots of games.

Yeah, I know my other other big one was Unicorn Overlord, which

was made by the people who made 13 Sentinels and other games that I adore.

I should have known that it wouldn't be my sort of game because it is a hardcore tactics game, and that ultimately was a huge barrier for me.

I mean, as a lover of hardcore tactics games, I found this game to be not fun.

personally.

I know that people who got in deep got in, but Griffin, did you dive into it?

I think, no, not beyond, you know, when we talked about it on the show.

There's a lot of, again, like, there's a lot of stuff I really like about this game, but the core kind of moving your troops around the map in real-time mechanic didn't really grab me.

And I also didn't feel like that.

I feel like for a tactics game to really grab me, I have to feel like I am doing stuff to customize or improve my units just like constantly.

And there are systems to do that in Unicorn Overlord, but it's not like a fire emblem where it's like you level up this one guy to this ranking.

You know, once you get him there, he gets to be a dragon rider or some shit.

Like,

yeah,

but at the same time, like, I don't think it's a bad game.

I think it's just on a of a genre that I think only caters to a specific type of person.

None of whom are on this.

None of whom are on the show, which like if Chris Plant isn't that type of person, it is, I would say, a quite limited subset.

Yeah.

I'll tell you what, we freaking crushed, though.

I don't remember if this was one I brought or what, but like a dragon, infinite wealth.

Still so still, it delights me to no end that I think this one hit for everyone on the call.

I think this one hit for everyone here.

And that was genuinely a surprise to me.

Russ didn't play it.

No, I played it.

I didn't play 40 hours of it, but I played probably like eight hours, seven or eight hours.

I liked it a lot.

I was totally into it.

Juice, you finished it, right?

No, but it no, but like it didn't get Russ in the way that it got the rest of us, right?

Do you think it has by this point, though?

Yeah, it didn't get me in the way that like Animal Well got me.

I'll tell you, I think it came out, it came out at a really good time.

It came out at a time where there wasn't a ton of stuff like vying for my attention.

It worked great on Steam Deck.

I wasn't like traveling around a whole bunch yet.

It was the type of game where I was like, okay, I had an entire Animal Crossing mini-game in it just waiting for you.

Yeah, dude.

Gosh, dang.

It's great if just like Januaries are for like a dragon.

Just like every January, there's a new like a dragon.

Well, there is one coming out in what is that, February?

The Pirate Company.

Well, it's a

beat-em-up pirate game, right?

Yeah, but just like every January, there's a new Like a Dragon game.

It doesn't have to be a certain kind.

Just, you know, Sega will try to accommodate.

Yeah, that I'm getting.

I feel I've loved a lot of the

Yakuza games, and I feel like this is the one that does all the stuff I love about this series the best in like the most sort of, I don't know, man, like user-friendly way.

It just immediately starts dishing out like really good shit.

And yeah, I've really enjoyed it.

I think the conversation between this and

Metaphor are interesting because they're both really great RPGs that handle all of this shit like a completely, wildly different ways.

I can't wait for that four-hour block of the Game of the Year episode between Just Griffin and I trying to parse.

Yeah, my mind can't work through how these two great games that are the opposite game are both

such standouts.

I am curious, though, to hear everyone's thoughts now.

Or a few months after, I think, actually, quite a few months after the release of Elden Ring, the DLC show

tree.

Joe finished that?

Yes.

Jelly finished that.

I did too.

Yeah, I remember us did because we were talking about like, this was pre-Nerf Redon,

consort, just like whipping our asses.

And so the two of us were like back channeling, like, I found this poison thorns build.

You have to go here and max out this one stat.

And then once you do that you can fuck up yeah consort renewal which which I don't necessarily like I think it was there was two mistakes that they made and we called it out the one of them at least in the first episode which was they made the like shadow seed yeah hunting stuff way too much of a requirement I believe it means Skadu tree fragments no it's pronounced shadow tree I think it's skadu tree according to Gaelic Skadu tree anyway

they made that requirement much more tame so you don't need as many of them to like feel like you have that power yeah and if you kind of overcome that aspect of it you're really just left with like a lot more pretty fucking good elden ring sure and i i absorbed the hell out of that game i loved my time with it i am realizing now with this and there's been a couple others like these where the difficulty is a big part of the point if it's a real mechanically deep game like this i just don't think i'm going to be able to get back into it i've tried so many times i'll have one big push

and then i just and you're not it's not just Elden Ring.

I would say this about like, I have this with Horizon, right?

Where like, sure, I'm just not going to relearn all those mechanics.

Like, I don't, I don't think it's going to happen.

I remember before

Shadow of the Earth Tree came out, I spent like an hour or two just like fucking around in base Elden Ring, vanilla Elden Ring, and that helped a lot.

Yeah.

But to do that again in the middle of the DLC, I could see that being like very flummoxing.

Yeah, I did about the best I could do.

I started a new character and did a whole playthrough of Elden Ring, and I managed to finish it like a few days before Shadow of the Archery came out.

So I feel like I was able to keep that momentum, which I really powered through

that stuff.

That's pretty impressive.

Another issue that I feel like we talked about on the episode about it is like it adds a lot of new stuff.

It adds a lot of new weapons and new build, you know, types and whatever.

But I didn't feel like fucking around with any of that stuff because there was something of a barrier of entry of like, well, if I go, if I found this cool new claw, if I want to use it, I'm going to have to go like respec.

I'm going to have to go like grab some more fragments or whatever to upgrade it.

Like, I don't know.

I used some new stuff.

I wasn't, I wasn't too

thrown by that.

I mean, some of the stuff you're right, like it would have been overwhelming.

And then at a certain point, people just sort of start looking online and like, what would be a fun build.

Right.

And I kind of did that at the end of my run.

Like, I'd finished it and be like, oh, if I'm going to, you know, look at all the dungeons and shit, I want to see what else I can do.

Yeah.

And then I'm glad that stuff was there.

I thought it was great.

It did not rekindle my like

ferocious love for Elden Ring the way Elden Ring did.

I just wanted to call that, Justin, what you said about the not being able to reacquire those skills.

I'm experiencing that more and more and more.

And I'm curious for you, do you think it's an age thing, like that it's harder for us as we get older to pull that back?

Or do you think that it really is just a, I guess, a time thing?

Like, no matter what your age is, the annoying part is having to like relearn it and now relearn it without the tutorialization that you had the first time around?

I think that's what it is, is that the

arc on games like that is usually so well built and so like satisfyingly built that like to try to hop back into it, I always feel like I'm trying to,

you know, uh

reinvent the wheel, like learn it backwards or something,

like reverse engineer that, that learning.

You mentioned the Horizon one.

I remember

the DLC for the first game where you went to

the snow land

and it

I feel like you like are unlocking the third eye for me here of like, oh, they're adding an extra act to a movie that was already a good movie.

Right.

And when I get that extra act, it's like, well, now the pacing is entirely off.

It actually breaks the movie that came before it.

And you know, it wasn't, I don't even think that's the most apt comparison because it would be more like if they put a little movie in the middle of the movie.

Because it's not like a bigger, it's not like a thing that contributes to the rest of it.

Yeah, it's true.

It's like its own kind of deal.

I'm also realizing we didn't have

just a quick shout out to the Destiny 2 Final Shape DLC.

Oh, yeah.

That is one of my highlights of the year, and I'm surprised at myself for not calling it out in our presentation.

That was very good.

I enjoyed that.

Kind of lumped together these two that are

two that don't seem like they're going to make it.

Are you kidding?

They're not going to come out.

Which are you talking about?

There's a few in the list of things that we're looking forward to in 2024.

And I was thinking rather than just like hit them in order, we could just say all together the ones that were.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

I thought you were lumping Animal Well in there.

And I was like, no, no, no.

The next one is Baby Steps, which is not.

I don't know what that is.

It didn't come out.

That's the FODI 3D.

Oh, that's right.

And then the developer of Ape Escape.

Oh, God.

Right.

I just think it's interesting to hit these, that too.

Did Alone in the Dark come out?

Alone in the Dark?

No.

I think it did come out.

There's no way.

You're kidding.

It did.

And I can't believe you didn't play it.

That feels like.

Holy shit.

It did.

It did come out.

March 20th.

What?

I hope it didn't.

It did.

March 20th.

Listen.

No.

Dude, I think that was your game.

I think you brought Alone in the Dark.

David Harper is crying in his apartment right now.

I have one of these two on my bag.

I'm so looking forward to

this.

Seems like a dereliction of duty on my part.

It is a huge one.

Huge.

Huge, huge dereliction of duty.

It's got a couple of great actors.

And I don't know why I didn't play this.

I'm going to buy this joy right now.

I'll report back.

No problem.

Sorry,

sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

No, no worries.

On a similar note, I brought Visions of Mana as one of my predictions.

The first mana game to be released in like 12 years, something wild like that.

I was like, hell yeah, baby, we're back.

About to go and, you know, ride on the flammy and just like do all my shit.

And I just completely, it was one of those where like a month later, I was like, oh, shit, that's out.

And

I have not gone to grab it.

So, yes, we've all made, we all made mistakes.

We also screwed up on Light No Fire, which didn't happen.

That was, again, a Griffin, I think, prediction.

Oh, but there is no way you thought that was that hello game.

I will say this.

I got into No Man's Sky more this year than I ever had.

Doing just like the expeditions and playing the game sort of the way it was meant to be played.

It was real fucking fun.

I am so excited for that game.

I don't even know if it's coming out next year, to be honest.

Yeah, not at all.

And I guess

Skin Deep, the new Blendo games game,

did not make it out.

Nor did.

Get this.

Hollow Knight Silk Song.

Believe it or not.

Skin Deep is one I've been looking for for years.

I just, I want to put that.

It's funny, we we didn't even put UFO 50 on this list.

And had we known UFO 50 was coming out this year, it would have probably been at the top of it.

But yeah, it's a sneaky surprise.

For me, Skin Deep is kind of that.

It's been a few years of just like watching that listing.

Did anyone play the remake of Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons?

Because that's on here, too.

I should have.

I really love that first one.

But once you know the gimmick, I feel like maybe it wouldn't be as.

It is so narrative-driven that it's just like...

Yeah.

Am I going to have to,

there's like one good gag in it, like

legitimately that makes the whole game worth playing.

But like, if you've already played it, then

you don't know that there's much else there for you.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Uh, let's get into though, Animal Well.

That's a bit late.

Oh, he's in the animal well.

I beat this one, so

did you find all the bunnies?

Did you get the secret developer ending?

Can I just say

four things and then it's

not really easy when you watch it on YouTube, but go ahead.

Yeah, it's the easiest.

I just want to say I'm a fucking genius for calling this out so early.

Yeah, yeah.

And I knew how great it was, and I know myself, and I know how great my taste is in video games.

And I didn't need guides.

And I didn't need guides to tell me that this was going to be a great game.

It turned out to be a great game.

You didn't need guides to tell you this was going to be a great game.

You're so brave.

You didn't need guides.

So brave.

The experience

that we had in the,

there was like a Discord for people like reviewing the game was truly cool.

Was truly, truly cool.

And when we talk about this game and like the goatee stuff, it's going to be hard for me to separate my experience of doing that because when everybody had finished the game and then it was just full fucking scavenger hunt mode to see like what other deep, deep, deep coded secrets we could find.

Anytime I was able to like push that forward a little bit, it was so gratifying and so cool.

Like the social experience of

reviewing that game was really, really neat.

And as designed, like they made the game with that in mind.

So I think that is part of it.

I do think it's hysterical that we bashed our heads against that for like a month.

And then literally 36 hours later, the community playing the game had like torn it asunder.

It's a fucking planet of people.

12 of us dorks cannot compete with everybody and their brain power.

That's true.

That's true.

But we did okay.

I'm proud of this.

Let's talk about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Oh, wow.

This is this is maybe the biggest whiff of the year, huh?

I mean, not through any fault of ours, obviously.

We're not mind readers.

Well, some people did like it, but I certainly didn't.

I think there's a real chance that this game it will at least get nominated for the Game Awards game of the year.

It could win.

I think we'll be definitely on the, on the,

I think we'll be on the wrong side of history on this one, and that breaks my heart because Final Fantasy VII is one of my like favorite games ever made.

I just, I, I, there's too much bullshit in this game, gang.

There's too much baloney happening.

Just re do me a favor and remake Final Fantasy VII.

That would be cool.

Don't rebirth it.

If what's happening here is a rebirthing of Final Fantasy VII, put that outside.

Remake it is what I would like it to do.

And don't add a bunch of multiverse fucking garbo bullshit.

Okay, so let me ask you,

let me ask you, Griffin.

Yeah.

If they narratively speaking if they were very consistent with the original game yeah but gameplay wise they did all the stuff they did in this one no because the open world stuff was also not great for right yeah i thought the open world stuff was the worst part about this game and then the next worst part about this game is that in adhering to this like multiverse anything can happen

anything can happen and everything has happened so it doesn't matter this big question you've had about aerith this whole time ooh what if it changes but doesn't change like it's so fucking infuriating.

And I learned.

Love a thousand lighthouses and Eric dies and some of them, but not the other ones.

And it's like, I really liked Remake.

I really liked the first part of this.

I think

it was different in a way that took me a while to kind of get used to, but the way that it, you know, adapted the story of the first part of Final Fantasy VII was really cool.

And then the open world stuff is just so...

paper thin it felt like and and the story

stealth games with moogles and jesus christ man man.

It really, really

didn't do it for me.

And it makes me so angry because there are sequences in this game that are goddamn golden.

When you show up to the Golden Saucer, that first scene that shows when you show up to the Golden Saucer, it's my favorite cutscene of any video game this year.

Doing a sort of triple triad or whatever it's called battle on a ship with like Red 13 walking around in a human suit.

That was very funny.

There's so much good, good stuff in here, and they worked so hard on it.

But man,

some of the stuff just makes me so, so bummed out.

Yeah.

There have not been a dearth of great JRPGs this year, fortunately, which sort of,

I don't know,

soothes the soul a little bit.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, that gets to the other one, Persona 3.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I brought this one.

I love Persona.

Persona 3 Portable was the one that I played originally, and so I was excited for the idea of like a remake that is fully 3D and more kind of like Persona 5 inspired.

I just had a hard time

clicking with this one.

Especially with Metaphor coming out in the same year.

Oh, dude, it gets,

yeah, especially in the long, long shadow that Metaphor casts over it.

I think it kicks its ass virtually every

teeth get straight knocked in.

Yeah, I just didn't really have a lot of fun with it.

Persona 3 is an important game in how it like establishes basically the formula that the rest of the series would then go on to follow and metaphor would go on to follow.

And so, like, from a historical aspect, it's cool.

And they made some changes that, like, quality of life changes are really great, but

there's just something about the setting and characters and plot that don't really hook me in the same way that the other persona games

do.

So, but it's okay.

We got there.

We got our stuff.

We got like a dragon.

We're good over here.

We're eating.

We're eating.

We're eating.

Hey, John.

We did a good job here, right?

Wait, we're not done yet.

We're not done.

There's one more more game that somebody was very right about.

That's being it's Hades 2, and Hades 2 is exactly as good as you thought Hades 2 would be.

How do we know how good it is if we haven't been updated on the latest updates for Hades 2?

Oh, yeah.

It's been slow going.

I'll admit,

I think the last date was July at this point.

And that was in reference to...

Now, see, this may be outdated by the time that you're hearing this.

So it's tough to be the

up-to-the-minute voice on

this.

The last we have is early access patch four.

Yeah, I'm not behind.

There just hasn't been any.

Oh, okay.

You've been on the pulse.

I apologize.

All new stuff.

I'll listen, bud.

I check constantly.

I play this thing.

And there's, I will say this, Greg,

from me to you.

Greg, Gregory, what have you?

Many,

many are coming for the throne currently, Greg.

There's a lot of games that are looking at your lunch.

Yeah.

The plate that says, Greg, they're trying to eat it.

And you should work.

You should act fast

with the speed of Hermes.

I am ready for this game to fall off the radar and then come back like a triumphant Phoenix next year

when we're not expecting it and we're just hungry.

I'll gladly go back first.

No.

Brush them right into my mouth.

How about these honorable mentions, though?

We hit most of them.

There are a couple that we didn't, but I'm very happy we called it out.

Prince of Persia, The Lost Crown was.

Fucking rips.

Slaps ass.

Great.

Yeah.

I wrote Prince of Persia we didn't know about, but it was good too.

Yeah, that was all right.

Ubisoft didn't seem to know about it either.

So that was.

Mon Dieu.

Look, they sprouted his couch.

I hope by the time this episode comes out, Ubisoft is still a company.

There's no guarantee.

We've got a little bit of time.

Yeah, who knows?

I also want to say I really enjoyed Paper Mario, The Thousand Year Door.

It was one that had been on my regret list for having not played it.

I didn't finish it, but I got to like the sixth sort of world before I think another game came along and ate its lunch.

I think maybe Destiny 2, the DLC.

But I really enjoyed my time with it.

That game's really cute and very novel, and I think it really stands in stark contrast to, I don't know, how the Mario RPG lineage kind of changed after this one in a way that is almost universally not as good.

Here's the crazy thing.

When we picked this game, we had no idea that the Mario and Luigi franchise would be rebirthed in a new game that is coming out

very soon to when you're listening to this episode.

Yep.

Mario and Luigi Brothership.

And that very much is like in the spirit of these games.

So

hopefully this is like a revival of that genre.

Okay.

I think we did it on predictions.

Let's take a break, I guess.

All right, let's do that.

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Hey everybody, we are back and we are here to make your holiday shopping so simple.

We can get you ahead of schedule.

You don't need to wait till Black Friday.

You don't need to wait till the last minute.

You just need to get your gamers all the cool stuff.

So I thought the way that we could do this

cleanly, without everyone sending us like a description of their parent, we could just do kind of categories, right?

A parent, a kid, a teenager.

What would you get them, right?

I think that that's probably the safest way to do it.

So to kick things off with this, well, let's start with the parent.

What would you get a parent that you know is they're they're into gaming?

Maybe this is

maybe this is Papa McElroy.

Maybe this is, you know, just, I don't know, some other parent in our life.

Who would you get?

What would you get?

I put on here the

Great Decu Tree Lego set.

I didn't even know this existed.

Yeah, they announced it with very little fanfare a long time ago.

I want to say in the summer.

Jesus Christ, Griffin, this is $300.

Yeah, so I have gotten very much into that.

Lego sets are crazy, man.

Lego sets are crazy.

I have gotten very much into adult Lego sets this year.

I have also been prescribed Adderall this year, so maybe there's a fucking thread between those two things.

But I did the D set that dropped earlier this year.

It was just big fucking like adventure castle thing.

And then they released this great Deku Tree

Adult Lake.

That's sick.

It looks fucking rad.

I'm halfway through it right now.

And you can build it to either look like the Great Deku Tree in Breath of the Wild or the Great Deku Tree in Ocarina of Time.

What?

So it's like whichever version of it you want.

The book kind of like splits.

I don't think I know that they look different.

I thought they were just like a tree man.

No, I mean, I mean, yeah, dude.

Look at these fucking trees.

One of them has a little hotel inside.

The other one has like sculptures and shit.

I love that Griffin talks for this about two minutes on the podcast.

Now he can write it off on his taxes as a business.

Is this the first time Link is in Lego form?

Yeah, I mean, I feel like...

Nintendo has really opened up the floodgate on doing stuff with Lego.

Obviously, they had the big Mario sets that are very cool.

And then they had a bunch of Animal Crossing sets that came out this year that me and Henry put together a bunch of.

If you haven't seen the console ones, the console ones are

my dream gift.

My dream is that someday someone will buy me the NAS set, so I will feel guilty about not putting it together.

Instead of right now, I would feel guilty about doing it.

But if someone I care bought it for me,

I'd be like, well, I've got to, or their feelings would be hurt.

So that was, that's my dream.

My dream gift.

The Pac-Man stand-up arcade is also cool.

Also, very cool.

Yeah.

What about you, Russell Chris?

uh i had a suggestion for a zen grip ronin i mentioned this ages ago but i wanted to call it out again this has been on my switch since i started using it probably over a year ago at this point and it's the only grip that i've used that actually allows you to still put it in the dock so you don't have to like de-grip it yeah and it makes the switch like actually okay to hold yes while also maintaining all the like rumble and motion sensor shit that you have in the handhelds i review everything with this Whenever we talk about games that are on the Switch, I'm holding this thing.

And this is where the parent.

I put this onto mine and this is just where, this is what I have now.

I don't even know where the other ones are.

Yep.

It's great.

This is highly recommended.

Next category, we got teenager.

I think Safebet is a gift card because nobody knows what a teenager wants better than themselves.

And while a gift card isn't perfect in everybody, a Steam gift card goes a long way with a teenager.

But if you must pick something, Undertale Kitchen Collection on Fangamer is sick.

And I think we have now reached the generation of teens that grew up on Undertale, which is a wild thing to say, but it's true.

So this is a literal like plates and cups and shit.

It's a full kitchen set.

Yeah.

Wow.

So if you're like getting into cooking and you just want something adorable, I think this is this is your best bet.

I'm going to add something to the list here.

I'm going to say the D Voom Deto Pro Retro Pixel Art

little device.

I don't know if you guys have ever seen this.

Traditional spelling.

It's D-I-V-O-O-M.

If you just type that in, you'll find it.

It's like a little, it looks like an old tiny computer.

It's only got six keys on it, but it connects to

the app, the Divum app, and it's a pixel art thing.

And you can make pixel art.

You can make pixel art animations or download other people's, and then it shows up on this tiny little screen.

Henry has gotten super fucking into it, super, super into it, and like making his own pixel art.

That is really good.

It's really cool.

So, I don't know if you are a if you have a teen in your life who is into art and games, this is this has been a absolute slam dunk.

I also want to just say, just fucking ask their parents what game they want and then get and then gift it to them on Steam or something.

Like, you don't need to guess, like, just get them the thing they want because game buying is so tough that, like, just go for it.

Sure.

These are all great.

Yeah,

I would also say, surprisingly, I got

this past New Year's Eve, we had a bunch of teenagers and I threw them a Sega Genesis mini and they ended up playing the entirety of Splatterhouse.

It was crazy.

I've never seen anything like it.

A room full of eight kids just like pounding through the entirety of Splatterhouse.

It was astounding.

This is my recommendation for pretty much any category is buy an emulator handheld.

Yeah.

Cheapest one you can get.

You can get them for like 30 or 40 bucks now.

But don't get a get a night.

Get an Get an okay.

Yeah, but like, but you get a

good one.

Preload it with everything for them.

And when I say preload, I obviously mean all the free games that are not official IP that are available on the internet.

And that's all.

Don't put anything else on it.

Don't put anything else on it.

I didn't say a damn thing

about putting any other games on it.

Just freeware that were designed to run on those machines.

Just Pico 8 stuff.

Just pico8 stuff.

For kids.

I got a good one.

I'm excited.

Let's talk about this one.

Earlier this year, the weather was shitty.

We were trying to find a way to wear out our then-two-year-old.

And I bought myself because of like a Facebook ad, which I never do.

The Nex Playground, NEX.

And it is, check this out, a self-contained Kinect.

That's it.

And it has lots of games on it, like Fruit Ninja and Doodleheads.

This thing is great, by the way.

It's fucking rad.

It's so, so good.

It's the games are free, I guess.

There's a subscription in your subscribe, yeah.

But the games are included.

You see the games that are coming out the next month, and the games are good.

Like they, and the thing works.

Like, that's the other crazy thing about it.

Like, they have a, I'll give you an example.

There's an Elmo Simon says.

It's so fucking good.

It's really good.

It's all well implemented.

He knows when you're putting your head on the thing, and it doesn't like glitch out constantly and make the kids scream and cry.

Yeah.

they have a lot of really interesting games there's a hungry hungry hippos game that's fun uh they have a mini game collection called party foul that is really fun and then they added a this like bullet hell shoot-abup called uh i think doodleheads is that right juice yeah i forget exactly what it's called but it like takes a picture of your face and it becomes the shit that you anyway it's a kinect that works and has great games on it and it wears out kids like

straight up does it have a han solo doing a funny dance though no it has good shit on it rust that is great for kids the console by the way, is the camera.

It's one cube like this.

Yeah, this

is awesome.

It's so good.

It has genuinely been clutch for us this year.

If we do not wear out our three-year-old, he will not sleep.

And so, when it's like rainy and shitty outside, this thing is.

They used to make, they used to, I've been at Griffith's house when they made an obstacle course to try to train the wildness out of their child before Benzon.

A series of obstacles that he had to go.

Bidson's cool.

He's over in the corner doing pixel art.

Three-year-old,

you have to exhaust him.

Yeah, this thing's great and i really i took a flyer on it um and i've now bought like three as gifts they're fantastic they're great it's awesome uh i hope by the way if they're listening please do like an adult there is a there is a version of this there's a branch of the subscription maybe or a different box entirely that is adult themed that would work not adult

but like for parties and for parties and stuff that would be fantastic i just i there is a selfish part of me that hopes this thing actually does really well because I really like it and I would like new games to continue coming out that I could explain.

By the way, huge fan of this model, similar to the

Playdate thing of like, you just get the games.

It's good.

That's it.

Like it.

Yeah.

And if you don't subscribe, do you lose access to the games?

I don't know how it works.

I don't know if you can buy them piecemeal or not.

The subscription is not crazy.

I don't know.

I can't imagine doing it any other way because my kids feel very comfortable going through the UI and stuff of the thing would see a game and be like why can't i play that yeah that sounds like the best part like the apple arcade experience i wish apple arcade was better about blocking off the rest yeah of uh the apple store anyway other categories uh indie gamer who has everything

somebody like uh uh storks um have y'all played the crimson diamond no no hoops I have it.

It's on my wish list.

I know of it, but I haven't.

I should.

Oh, yeah.

It looks like a hoops game.

I wanted to get a hoops game.

I was like, what would I get hoops if I were going to get him?

What to get for the hoops?

It has everything.

And then

this game, it looks like a Sierra Online Adventure game, but made today.

Is it Text Cursor?

I believe so, yeah.

It is.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

Wild.

And it is sick.

And I tried to get something for each of y'all.

Griffin, the one that I would have gotten for you is Kentucky Zero, the vinyl.

It's back in print and it is absolutely fantastic.

I bet that looks cool.

And then Frush, for you, I went with the Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe, the Collector's Edition, which comes with a little, one of those figurines that you could find in the new version of the game.

It looks like a

amiibo.

It looks like an amiibo.

Yeah.

Somewhere between an amiibo and a bobblehead.

I kind of don't like the fact that they manifested Stanley, like what Stanley actually looks like, because he's he's just like a sad little man which i guess i should have assumed right but

um yeah i kind of that's interesting i do like jokes so i get it that's a good thing

what about for the old school pc gamer in your life

i'm asking because i don't really i don't know any old school pc gamers in my life this for me is like older uh aunts and uncles I had both aunts and uncles who were like really into this space.

I feel like I would always try to find.

It's just the people that like would spend a ton ton of money on like a fight stick basically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean for them that's basically what I wrote down with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 accessories.

Is that the game for uncles?

Are a bunch of uncles?

I don't know.

Yeah.

That's when you're really treating your uncle well.

Okay, cool.

We have a couple more old school console gamer, which I think is like most of our listeners.

Well, one of these I don't think is on consoles yet.

As far as I'm aware, UFO 50 has not dropped on console.

Grand Irony, yeah oh wow yeah that's a good point i didn't even think about that make him get a pc that's the nicest thing you can ever work for

people are working to get that uh working on portmaster at the moment so it might actually work on one of those handhelds if you buy a copy of it um have y'all seen the

great i don't know if that counts we count want to count that maybe

have you seen the sega dreamcast training cards no they are like classic 90s training card packs uh all dedicated to the sega dreamcast and they come out from limited run games i think like in the next couple months.

They come out in March, dude.

This is a Christmas shopping list.

Um, you know what you can do?

You can get them like a little piece of paper that's like IIU, one rain check, yeah,

one Shen Mew, gold, gold edition, limited chase.

I just don't, like, what I don't know.

What do you do with them?

Look at them, Ross.

You look at them, you have bought them.

You have bought them.

That's what you do with them.

Okay, and you've got them, and you can.

And you get to see them and say, I have bought these.

Here is Samba Diamigo.

He's looking at me.

Exactly.

Did you add the flannel sheets?

Is $119 a lot to pay for a set of sheets?

Yes.

Why is this?

Now, Juice, why is this for the old school comic?

Because they are old.

The ultra soft comfort flannel sheet set from LL Bean.

If you want to go flannel, it is worth paying, I think, for high-quality bedding.

We're really

long fibers on this thing.

You're going to absolutely lose it.

The brush softness is off the charts.

I don't think I've ever slept on flannel sheets before.

Russ, Russ, it's a lot to pay for sheets, but it's a gift, isn't it?

I believe in spending for beds.

Bedding is

bedding and footwear.

I think that's both worth spending on.

That's where I think

what would you get for a secret Santa right now?

Oh, like a little gift, you're talking.

Yeah, I think it's a little gift or

like something that's going to be kind of sweet and fun, but not too, it can't be too sentimental, but needs to be like, you know, touching.

I think someone put this on this list before, but I will tell you, as someone who has gifted Bellatro to a person that hadn't played a game in years, it is the perfect gateway game for anyone like that.

It's $15.

There's no commitment.

Try like every single person.

We've talked about this repeatedly.

Every single person who plays it is on board

and it's dynamite.

It seems that someone else is putting a retread of the LLB flat.

Oh, sorry, this is the pillowcase.

Well, it's a secret Santa, isn't it?

You're not going to spend $120 on a Secret Santa.

So just the pillowcase, so they're just getting a taste of it.

For $35, they can get a kiss of the good life with two ultra-soft comfort flannel pillowcases.

Let them see what they're busy.

Incredible.

My go-to Secret Santa trick is...

figure out what their favorite game is, go on Etsy, and get any sort of handmade trinket.

Oh, that's a good idea.

I like that.

It's a really nice way to treat them right.

I have a surprise,

one that I should have mentioned for a teenager, but I think there's a lot of different people in your life.

I had a surprisingly good time

screwing around with like hue bulbs and other Wi-Fi lighting this year.

I started playing with them for like

theatrical stuff, but you can do so many neat things with like very pretty inexpensive light curtains and rope lights and stuff, especially if you've got younger kids.

It's really a lot of fun.

And I will say that I have I think I have probably improved the overall quality of my life being able to keep lights as dim as I like them all the time at a moment's notice.

It's funny you mention that because last last night

Much of New York had lost internet and my entire house is Hue lights and none of them were listening Which is a real problem because my entire bedtime routine with my son is like damn dim lights.

Yeah.

And I was fully fucked.

There was nothing I could do.

So that is the downside.

Maybe keep a candle light somewhere around.

Maybe we should take a second look at all this.

Maybe lights are bad.

Someone put the Dark Souls Siegmire plush, I guess this is also Fangamer, and makes me want to spend money immediately.

That is spectacular.

This is another one where I just kept finding stuff that I knew y'all would like.

Yeah.

Because there's a Zelda plush costume that you can get to put on your plushies.

And did y'all see the

talking conquer plush toy that they have?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really good.

It's really good, right?

It's conquer, but he gets talking.

Does he say bad words, though?

Yeah, better.

Baddie words.

Last category, a person who loves stuff that's books level boring, just books.

Kind of.

I added a thing that's not technically a book.

I will say this.

If I had to buy a book for someone who's a quote-unquote gamer right now, and if you say that label to them, they're not like, oh, I really would recommend Chang Gang All-Stars.

It's a real,

and I talked about it in a previous episode, but like the structure of that book, I think, would be very appealing to people that follow like modern television and video games and things like that.

There's a lot of that DNA in it, and it's saying some really interesting, cool stuff.

And I think it's so, I would recommend it to almost anybody.

It's fantastic.

I wanted to shout out Retro Gaming by Mike Diver.

This is just like an all-encompassing book about retro gaming from like 1980s to basically more or less modern day.

I liked like looking through it and learning facts about Yoshi and shit.

My son is obsessed with it.

If your kids like those like index books with a bunch of pictures in them, this one is great and it's pretty inexpensive and you get it in soft copy and it's been a big hit.

I have messed around with many a e-ink tablet, both for reading and note-taking purposes.

And a couple months ago, I got my hands on the SuperNote Nomad,

and it is my favorite of them.

It's a seven-inch, it's this little guy right here,

seven-inch little pad.

Feels really, really good to write on.

Feels more like writing on paper than I think any screen I've used.

And the pins are just these thick, heavy, juicy, juicy guys.

Feels really good.

All UI stuff is really cool.

Lots of like

taps.

Justin seems upset.

What's the matter, Justin?

Why are you?

Because I call it Jesse Diet.

It's just about pins.

It's just like, it's weird.

I mean, if you felt this pin, like you would get it.

Like, it feels so

good.

I have tried to set up several solutions like this, and I can't.

There always seems to be one too many hoops

that keep it from being as good as pen and paper.

And I know I don't mean to sound that Luddite.

There's a specific bar it has to clear to be as like good and satisfying and easy and cheap and quick quick and everything.

Cheap ain't it.

This ain't cheap, but it's really, really good.

It does a cool thing where if you like write a bunch of notes down,

you can set it to like convert it into like text, like plain, plain text, which you can then sort of like put wherever you want to put it.

I don't know.

I just love the size.

Love the feel of it.

Love the interface.

And I've been using it.

I mean, I've been using it as like a daily log journal every day.

I've been using it to like take notes on stuff.

And I haven't even read anything on it yet, but I'm pretty sure you can get like Kindle shit on there.

But yeah,

Super Note Nomad.

I have a book called How a Game Lives.

It's the annotated essays by Jake Geller for all of his YouTube videos, but they also include afterwards by a whole bunch of different authors, including me, the smallest fry of the bunch.

But there are a lot of cooler people, including the author of Chang All-Stars, who wrote the foreword for the book.

Cool.

So it's a great

chance to, like, one, read a bunch of great essays and to a whole bunch of different voices, many of whom don't often get to write about video games, talking about them.

And it's made by Lost in Colt, which is one of my favorite video game book publishers.

Their stuff is just...

absolutely gorgeous.

Yeah, we just shouted out their handheld book recently.

That stuff is great.

I got the first one of those.

Talk about books that kids enjoy looking through.

Cooper was having to spend a long time looking through the the first volume of that handheld.

Okay, I think we did it.

Yeah.

That was a lot of gifts.

You're going to be a big hit this holiday.

If you buy all of them, especially for one person, they'll be so surprised.

Yeah.

You'll be ruined financially.

I want to talk.

I think there's a small canonical issue because I plan on playing Alone in the Dark right now.

And so as you're hearing this, you probably heard me a couple of weeks ago rave about Alone in the Dark how much I loved it.

So I'm worried this is going to to be confusing or anticlavactic.

You can't just do the math and say, like, you're going to talk about it after this episode airs.

We don't know.

No, I will definitely forget about that.

No.

Also, once you played it, every fiber in your body will be screaming to talk about this game.

I mean, it could be a goatee contender.

We don't know.

It could.

Probably not, though, right?

Let's say this.

You guys better hope it's not because that will be

an itchy November for you boys trying to avoid playing it

uh cool let's i want we can't even say we're gonna do next week either no there's no telling uh i wanted to thank the following people for being patrons of the besties

uh we have ben jamin Caps, Tuxford, and Moss.

Thank you for being patrons of the besties.

Thank you to everyone else.

Live to hear that.

They probably posted those reviews years ago.

By this point.

I'm going to let you know, the people that are listening, that we have a new episode of our bracket battles episode that's up and live right now.

So you can believe that.

How can you say that?

What is it?

How do you know?

Just confidence, extreme confidence.

It is all about...

Well, you're going to hear this clip and you'll know instantly what it's about.

I thought you were going to talk about Cario Mart there for sure.

Please, please go down that road.

I don't know what it is.

You don't know what Cario Mart is?

Okay.

I think it was invented by,

I first heard about it from my Austin friends who were playing it before I moved there.

Traditionally, in Mario Kart 64, the only rule is you play a race in Mario Kart 64, but you cannot cross the finish line until you have finished the beer you opened right before starting the race.

There's lots of tactics that go into this.

Lots of people, my strategy is I don't, I like to drink beer sort of in general now that I'm 37 years old, but back when I was a young man with the liver of a young man, man, uh, I would just try to slam it right before

you know everybody else gets going.

You slam it, you start in fourth place, but then you get all those good items, you get all those good items, and you know that, or you wait, like you get run off the track, you splash down in the water.

That's enough time for you to blah, blah, blah.

You just can't be pressing buttons and drinking at the same time.

Fucking great, really, really fun.

We talked about playing it when we were on this dude's trip earlier this year, and all of us were like, no fucking way, man, am I going to drink all of that?

I'm so proud of all of us.

The restraint was

something.

We had a lot of,

what is it?

What are the non-alcoholic bevs, those new ones?

Man.

I think they're just called non-alcoholic bevs.

Yeah, there's like a short term for it, but man, that stuff, it's really

good.

What was it?

It was.

I mean, you know, you heard it.

Hilarious.

You heard what it was.

Sure, sure.

I was kissing myself.

I think we did it.

Yeah, let's just end the show.

Thanks.

Thank you for listening to it.

We're going to do another one next week, so just calm down.

Be sure to join us again next week to the besties.

Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Besties