Metroid Prime 4 vs. Ooo: Showdown of the Search Action Games

Chris, do you want to talk about how good cold open material here? Do you want to talk about how it took you two tries to count the six?

No, I don't know if that's wait, yes, and

yes, and I would also like to talk about something else. Something else.

Yes, and another topic that it's not that.

The problem is

I don't have any good stuff. I'm freezing cold out here in California.
It feels like it's like 65 degrees in my office. And I'm sure y'all can't.
Do you still have the New York?

Are you just like completely,

have you become completely acclimatized to California now? Are you now, because you used to live in a real place, like real places, you know, with the weather?

Yeah. No, big time, dude.
I'm one of those people now who I'm always carrying around the sweater. People looked at me.
I went down to San Diego

this weekend. Was walking on the beach wearing jeans and a sweater.
Felt like I needed a coat. Checked my phone.
75 degrees. What the hell is wrong? Unbelievable.
How'd this happen? Unbelievable.

California turns everyone into my wife. What is it about the sun out there?

So have you ever noticed how wives

talk about the weather like this?

I'm told. But husbands, they talk about the weather like this.
I'm a hot.

War of the roses, more like war of the thermostat. Remember right?

Hey guys, it's me, Griffin. I just got here.
I just sat down and just got here. I haven't been here before this.
Hey, it's me, New York Giraffe.

I've been here the whole time doing a Justin impression. Hey!

Hey, guys, it's me, Justin. I just got here.
Bradley, a character that was never supposed to come back. Okay, I'm gonna walk away now.
You let me know when old MB is punched out.

My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy.
I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week.

Yeah, Russ isn't here, but the point is, it's still the besties. It's a video game club, and just by listening, you, my friend, have become a member.

This week, we are talking about, they said it would never happen, but it is. We are talking about Metroid Prime 4 beyond.
Chris, what is so beyond about Metroid Prime 4?

Beyond my expectations that we would ever get to play this. Metroid Prime 4 brings back the

mostly beloved Metroid Prime series.

It's been in development for what feels like, I think, 500 years,

but it's actually here. Does it feel like a new game or does it feel like a game that has been made piecemail for 500 years? You're going to have to stick around to find out.

It's the latter.

It's the ladder. I didn't want to.
Yeah, it's the.

Can I set up Metroid Prime for Beyond? Because I suspect I had the most, I had the warmest response to the game of the three of us.

I know Russ was looking forward to it as well, but he is traveling today and could not be here. So we'll ask him about it next week.

It is the Metroid Prime series has a very distinct kind of vibe.

It has a distinct kind of thing going on that was divisive when it first came out, even though I think the original Metroid Prime was pretty beloved.

Metroid Prime 2 and 3, kind of like a little bit more middling, but still has its niche audience.

And then that was 18 years ago that the last Metroid Prime game came out in 2007.

And this game was announced E3 2017.

It was originally

being developed by Namco Bandai, I believe, before like three years later they announced that they were scrapping it, starting over with Retro Studios, the traditional developer of the series at the helm.

And then that was fucking, what, four years ago that that happened, and now it's here. That's a little, that's a little history for folks who did not sort of follow the

journey, the lore. Yes, the journey that got us here.

I like the Metroid Prime series.

I usually don't find it especially helpful when people try to hypothesize about what happened behind the scenes.

But my main sort of takeaway playing this game is that it very much feels like a game that went through a couple different iterations and cycles and developers with support from different,

it feels disjointed in a way that

I don't know, you can't help but think about how the development cycle of this game impacted the final result. Yeah.
That is, that, that, is that the most positive thing we're going to get talking?

No, I, you know, it's just, oh man, okay.

So I struggled with this. At first, I was looking forward to checking this out mainly because I wanted to try the sort of like mouse functionality of the thing of the switch too.

So I printed out like a holder for the for the mouse. It's very slight.

put the mouse in there. And

it, it, the, the moving around, the motion feels fine. I don't really like using the buttons as much as you have to.
That doesn't feel very good to use the buttons on the mouse.

Even though the mouse movement is good, the action, the shooting and stuff feels bad.

It doesn't feel good.

But

I feel like I spent so much time fiddling with that and not knowing if I was having, I wanted to have like the ideal experience, right? And I was thinking about that with this Switch 2 specifically.

I feel like it's kind of a good snapshot of where the Switch 2 is at, right? Because I don't know what the ideal experience is for Metroid Prime 4.

And I was trying to figure that out while I was playing it. And I feel like the Switch 2 is kind of in that same position, right? Is this a game?

And this, is this a world that is designed to be like put up on a big screen and immerse yourself in and really like get lost in the world?

Or is this a game that is intended to be played on, you know, the Switch screen? you know is it intended to be played with a mouse and a and a and a controller is it intended to be played

it feels

it feels like that it feels very much like I don't know you can kind of do whatever because we didn't have a lot of real concrete ideas about what this what this should be

I think it hews pretty close to the format right I think

and that's that's you can take that either way right I have noticed I would say a trend among people who have really really liked the game that they really also really liked the other Metroid Prime games.

I think it sticks pretty close to the formula with some variances that are kind of strange.

Like one big element is that Samus has psychic powers, but the psychic powers, there's like one that you kind of use to drag around little symbols along tracks to like unlock certain doors or they're kind of just psychic puzzle power.

Little psychic puzzle powers, but then also it'll be like, you got psychic boost ball. And it's like, that's boost ball.
Like you, that's boost ball. you got psychic

psychic beam psychic double jump it's like okay that's just double jump um

this this the franchise i think is at its best when it's like being very atmospheric and transportive and i think this game does that pretty well the individual like dungeons that you go off into the game has kind of like a spoke and uh hub format where you're going out into these different dungeons to collect keys that you need to you know beat the game uh which i really appreciate how how video game as game that is as an objective, to have the ancient alien species appear before me and say, these five keys hidden in our five wonderful dungeons for you to explore.

That stuff is great. I genuinely think the dungeon exploration and puzzles and all that stuff is really, really great.

Really great. I mean, I think that, yeah, the atmosphere is.
Really, really great.

I'm asking you to clarify if you think the exploration and stuff in Metroid Prime 4 Beyond is really, as you just said, really, really great. Because that's what you said.

And I want to make sure that you're in the middle of the day. I think you're in the dungeons.
Yeah, I really like

the design of the dungeons, I think, is very, very good. I think that you're going through it.

I found myself enjoying it

more than I thought I would. And because I don't really enjoy, like, I haven't, I don't, I didn't remember myself enjoying the Metroid Prime series.
It has been 17 years.

Like, it has been so long since the last one of those. And I, to me, playing this, it feels like it's basically successful in what it is trying to do.
But what it is trying to do feels so

out of step with where everything else in video games is at.

It really.

It, to me, feels like a fan project.

And I don't even mean that in a demeaning way. There's a lot of really incredible fan work that happens, but it feels like a tribute.
It feels like

a make-good, a send-off, a contractual obligation, whatever you want to say. But like, it is, it feels like, even though it is on modern hardware with

the newest console that exists,

it feels like you are playing something that has been like, or at least to me, it felt like I was playing something that had been emulated to like upscale on the platform I was playing it on.

It did not feel like a 2025 experience in any meaningful way. The fan project comparison is so rich because I think it goes a step further than an aesthetic level or like a parody of the story.

I think the actual feel of fan projects, which are often developed over the course of like a decade or longer, and it's a whole bunch of random people at different levels of talent.

And it ends up feeling like a piece together. Even the best fan projects can often feel like a whole bunch of great pieces, but not necessarily a whole, right?

The way that a traditional video game does. And what's so strange about this game is

it feels like it has been made over the course of years, quite literally, in that there are entire sections that just feel different

than other things.

That's the point I'm... Yeah, that was the point I was trying to make.
There was a core.

If you look at this thing kind of piecemeal, I think when you're in a dungeon that is telling you sort of an atmospheric story and you're going through and there's a cool boss fight at the end and you get a power-up and it's hitting like the loops that you expect and that you want from this type of game, like I think it's pretty great.

And then you will go out into a

desert that and on your motorcycle and you will just kind of like explore this pretty barren wasteland,

running into crystals, fighting the same like two enemies over and over again.

Some parts are sick. Like to get to Hickrovin's earlier point, some parts start to kick ass.
Like, the music will actually be better than you think it's going to be.

And it's kind of like, it feels pretty when you're going. The second dungeon is like this factory, this manufacturing plant.

And when you're like working your way through the assembly line and like learn, like seeing like this bike that you're about to unlock get put together, like that shit's really cool.

But then like there's a loading screen and then you're in like a kind of a different

momentum on it. Like it can't get ahead of steam going.
Like it it you're you're it feels constantly so aware of the mechanics um and and so like

i think that i think there is one cohesive thing

that is very metroid that this game gets and just i'm just gonna repeat back to something that you said before we recorded which is

the that feeling of going to an alien planet and like actually discovering it that it's not just wallpaper. It's almost closer to like a museum or something.

And it wants you to go there and feel like you are in a place that is not Earth or not just another sci-fi place. So, I mean, I was hoping you could expand on that a little bit of

why that

works for you.

So, like at first, and again, like, this has been so, so long since I played one of these. Like, I had forgotten how little of it is like shooting.
Yeah.

Like, first-person shooter is not even accurate. Like, you can like lock right on.
It's like not really the focus.

And the mouse, I think, makes that confusing because it does feel like something something you're going to be like fine targeting, but that's not really what the game is.

Yeah, I had to kind of remember, and especially if you're here, like it's a game about scanning the environment and like understanding the environment better and like what you unlock narrative and puzzle-wise through like that exploration and

that

aspect of it. And I think that like

when you remove the combat, the shooting, and you just leave the exploration part,

that could be effective if it feels like an exploration. Like some of the nature of like walking around and scanning something and it's interesting, and it has like an actual like zoological

explanation for like why it is the way it is. And then it's not just a cool animation.
Every time you see it pop up, you understand, like, oh, that's why it popped up like that. Yeah.

But

you're also being led through this game by someone who is like telling you what to do next and where it is on the map and asking if you understand the instructions that you were just given because they will happily repeat them for you yeah and that if you have someone doing that if then they're leading you through the exploration and if there's not exploration and there's not combat i'm not sure where the game right is you know what i mean the the the dungeons are pretty linear uh

the

i don't know like upgrade economy is not so exciting that it feels great to go back through an area you've been.

And sometimes you go back through an area you've been, and you have a new thing, and that means that you have a new key to unlock this door.

And there's like a whole nother chunk of dungeon with like different stuff waiting behind it.

That's cool, but like going back to get five additional missiles or 10 additional missile upgrade is like uh, I don't know, not super

super thrilling so much anymore. Um,

and it just it really feels like

this genre, the search action genre, has has

uh evolved a lot in a way that is not really recognized in this game. Like using upgrades, upgrades being meaningful in a bunch of different ways, right?

In this is a super unfair comparison, but in Silk Song, when you get an upgrade, you can use it in combat, you can use it in traversal, you can use it in like all of these different ways.

And in this game, it's like, well, now I have the fire beam, which means I can unlock the fire beam doors and I can burn down the things that are fire. Yeah, I can't wait to talk about

the tiny, tiny indie game. Oh, sorry, go ahead.
Before you had a fire beam, you scanned them and they said, hey, later on, you'll need something with the fire beam. Hot wink

to open this one up.

Yeah, the very tiny indie game that we're going to talk about in the B segment does so much more with

basically a single mechanic than what this is thinking of, the Metroidvania.

This is probably a bullshit theory,

but the addition of all of this help and all the support,

it reminds me of when like famous movies like Blade Runner, when the studio loses confidence in it and it gets too messy in the edit and they've trimmed it down and trimmed it down and they're not really even sure what it is anymore.

And they're like, you know what, you need to add? Voiceover. People aren't going to be able to follow any of this.

And it's just, it's gone through so many notes and so many revisions that it needs that kind of superficial, we'll just tell you what's happening.

We can't trust our own game anymore. And that

feels like so much of this game, sadly. It also feels, um,

and again, I'm this is editorializing, but uh, I don't think it's I'm stretching too much to say that Nintendo of Japan isn't necessarily like obsessed with Metroid.

Like, I think that like you could see the passion for the project and the fact that it took them 17 years to do another one. Um, but this to me feels like also really a bad,

this is separate from the, I'm not criticizing the game now specifically here, but this feels like a really bad

showpiece for the Switch 2, right? It is, it feel, it looks like, it does not look like a game that was like, it does not look

on par with other games released in 2025. It is just not a you're saying like

visually. I mean, especially playing it on a big screen when you look at some of the the textures and stuff like that.
It's like,

it's not.

I think it looks. I think surge against

certain parts of it.

I played it on handheld in Switch 2. I didn't play it on a big TV.
Yeah. So

yeah, I mean,

I didn't really notice it until I saw it on a big screen. It's like, oh, yikes, like, not, not great.

This is again a weird.

Yeah, right?

That is the only way that I do sort of play. I haven't docked my Switch to play games on it in quite some time.
It's not just the aesthetics.

It looks old. It feels outdated.
The ideas feel old. It's not capitalizing on anything that makes the Switch 2 interesting, whatever that unique selling point is.

I'm not sure Nintendo has told that story, but like Metroid is not, is muddying the waters.

To me, at least, Plant,

you follow industry stuff as well.

Do you feel like that's a fair representation?

In terms of this not being the thing that you want to release in December for your brand new console?

Yeah.

I almost feel like an entire B segment

on the first year of Nintendo or of Nintendo Switch 2, right?

I think it is of a piece with a lot of very strange decisions that I think reflect the need to continue bumping the system back and back and back. And I think each game tells a different story.

What would have been sick is Prime 4 launch, Banana Nanza in December. Then you got, now that's an exciting holiday season.

Oh, Prime Nana Zana. Or just two banana.

Why not two bonanzas? Why not just double banana nanzas? Many banana nanzas. I will say the things that feel like the things that there's I will

to be fair, and this is like, again, if you're younger than me, you're, you, you may not have like the, the, the, the same sort of like feelings because it has been so long since the last one of these came out.

Even though there's Metroids in between there, but like there are some. And the remastered, when did the remaster of

a couple years ago? Yeah. One.
Yeah. There are some actions that just feel good to do in Metroid games, like hitting a bomb and then bouncing up on the bomb and then putting the bomb in a thing.

That always feels nice. Turning into a Morphball in general in Metroid Prime, I think feels pretty funny.
The way the field of view changes when you go from Morphball, like it's good.

That stuff feels good. Like, I will say also, tell me if this, if you agree with this,

it felt sluggish.

Like, getting around the world, it felt slow to me and i didn't get the i have before you unlocked the bicep the bike suit or whatever but like just running around and even being the ball it did not feel very fast no i would fully fully agree with that i found myself praying to find some sort of you know

spot a shine spark or whatever it was called from uh yeah no i i i definitely feel the same way especially once you start backtracking and and this is where like

we haven't even talked about like the side characters which like plenty of people have certainly talked about the side characters and the way that they are written and the fact that they are talking to a voiceless

golem in the form of Samus Aaron, the whole game, which is like very weird. I think like

criticisms about the writing and performance aside,

it really

detracts from the atmosphere of exploring this strange alien planet to have a team of plucky side characters who either tell you what to do or you will find an upgrade out in the world.

I found the fire chip. I found the ice chip.
Cool. Now I can do these elemental shots.

Once I return to base camp, which was in the first area that I explored, there's not like a teleport fast travel thing. I'm going to have to hop on the bike, tool on back there.

I can skip some of this area to get back to the middle. Talk to Miles.
He's like, cool. Now you can do fire shot.
Get back out there, Bronco. It's like, That's nothing, guys.

That's absolutely nothing.

And from what I understand about how sort of the desert exploration becomes a mandatory element to finish the game, like that, that is a problem that is only intensified as it goes on.

And it just, it's a game that feels like there's just a few really, really bad ideas behind it, which is rare that that is like the thing that is holding it up.

Like, I think from a performance standpoint, it's good and competent and everything. It's just, there's some ideas in this thing that are perplexingly bad.

How about this? How about we take a break? And then, when we come back, I want to tell y'all about Ooh, a game that I think is pairing with this better than I ever could have imagined.

And also, I want to use that time to dig into Justin's question about

what is the Nintendo Switch 2 after its first year? Because I think there's a lot of meat on that bone, too. All right.
Yeah, for sure. Well, let's talk about that right after this.

Okay, so I I want to get into the Nintendo Switch 2 stuff, but I do want to tell y'all a little bit about Ooh because you have set me up so nicely. How am I spelling this? O-O-O.

That's bad S-E-O right there. But it's how you're going to feel when you're playing it.
There's an oom loud over the first O. That's so important.
That is. That's so true.

So what if I told you you could now just go play Metroid, 2D Classic, Beautiful Metroid, Metroid, and you are in the ball form dropping bombs the whole time.

You like dropping bombs, popping yourself in the air, and dropping more bombs? Well, don't worry.

That's the whole game, because you are a little dot, a little caterpillar of bombs. And

it is being compared to Metroid Vanias for that reason, but the game isn't really like anything else I've played. The other comparison I've heard is Animal Animal Well,

kind of. It is a game in theory about discovering secrets, but really I think it is a game about having a conversation with a video game developer because

it is all about learning exactly what they want you to discover at the pace that they want you to discover it.

So you are in a little screen of a little puzzle and you need to go from left to right and there is a little wall. Well, you can't jump.

Well, you realize that you can place a bomb and you can stand on it and it will fire you up. Congrats, you've learned how to effectively jump.
You have hit another wall. Where do you go?

You place a bomb and you realize that you can destroy invisible walls. Congratulations, you may now progress.
It is...

three hours of these incremental discoveries over and over and over again. There will come points where you get into a room and you simply cannot go any further.

So you decide that you're going to to take a fork in the road because there's no way to solve the room that you're in after you've bashed your head against it for 15 minutes.

And you will go down this different path and you will learn effectively the answer to that room that once seemed impossible.

It is going to gradually teach you piece by piece how to actually go back to that room and solve it. So it is...
just literally, I don't know how to say this, like a story game.

It is telling you the answers to all of its puzzles bit by bit by bit and then sending you backwards to places where you simply could not go through now with this new information so that you can know how to open a new path so i guess i'm saying it out loud that's very metroidvania super

except it's so linear because again it is

it is like reading a book you are being told the the story of this game in a very linear fashion from beginning beginning to end there is not like a scenario where you're going to diverge from that path the playthrough is the playthrough is the playthrough unless you're you already know everything and then you're speed running it um and looking at the game i bet the speedruns of this one are going to be pretty pretty zany and and the other thing that makes it not feel very metrovania is you get another bomb so you end up having two bombs and that's pretty much it.

It is not about getting a whole bunch of different powers. It is about manipulating those powers to the furthest extent.

To the point that you are discovering things that you would assume don't work in a game that looks this retro actually do work.

For example, one of the things that you discover relatively early on is you can leave the bomb in one screen and then go to another screen.

So if you leave it in one room and you go to another room, the bomb will stay there.

Well, there might be a switch that you need to use in one room and then you'll travel all the way across the world and then that will open a door in a room far, far away. Or you might need to.

Describing is describing puzzles. It's tedious.
Right. But discovering it for yourself is

really phenomenal.

I am utterly charmed by it. It looks very cute.
Griffin, can you describe what it looks like if you're looking at it right now?

I mean, simple kind of graphics. I would say animal well, or what it's really giving me is VVVVVVVVVV.
I don't know how we how did we

back when that game I think it was one less VVV VVV V V. Was it one less?

Yeah,

that kind of art style.

Very, very charming.

Yeah, almost Atari-esque in its simplicity. But what, yeah, it just feels nice, especially at the end of the year, to play something that is a bit short.

Oh, Baba is you, maybe? Baba is you? Yeah. A little more colorful, but yeah.
No, that's you had color. That's not the one I'm thinking though.
Yeah.

But that feeling of just like talking with a game developer through the game where you constantly, it almost feels like they're like playing jokes on you when you can't hear something out.

And they're like, oh, don't worry, we're going to explain it to you. Again, that's where it's different from the animal well, where it's so dense are the blueprints.

This, you're going to find it out in 10 minutes if you just give it a moment.

So I want people to check it out. But now I want to get into this question about the Switch 2 in this year because it's a strange one.

What do you all think of the Switch 2 after

what? Hey, Hey, I'll say this. It's the most time I've spent holding it since July, and I still don't like holding it.
It's quite big. It's quite big and flat.

I don't find it to be a comfortable experience.

Once I switched over to the pro controller, I was a lot happier.

Oh, man.

It's really weird. I play it a lot, but that's mostly playing older stuff with Henry on it that now looks and runs better, right? I think all of the

majority of the new releases that came out this year, apart from

Donkey Kong, have not hit in the way that I was sort of expecting them to in this house.

Pokemon Legends ZA,

we dropped fairly quickly. This one was never really

Henry's jam, but

all of the stuff that we have been playing has been stuff like the Switch 2 edition of Tears of the Kingdom. Hell yeah, it's great.
It's amazing. It's really good.

Castle Crashers. Yeah, sure.
Like, yeah, we'll play that old jam.

But in terms of sort of killer, at first-party killer apps, I don't know that there is one yet.

Well, but

Ben and Anza is a high-quality product, I'd say.

Yeah, absolutely. I would say it's probably the best of the original stuff.
And I bet the Animal Crossing will be a big deal. Yes.
People seem to be pretty buckwild for that guy

when he arrives next month.

Yeah,

I'm so torn because so much of it...

Everything feels like it has a caveat. Like, Mario Kart World is an excellent game that happens to be the sequel to maybe the best kart racing game ever.

And it's hard not to constantly compare it to it because when you turn on your Switch, you get to choose which one you're going to play.

And the further we get get away from mario kart world the more often i kind of would rather just play mario kart 8 especially after all that dlc there's so much good stuff in it and then bonanza i really really enjoy but it it is the weird thing of it constantly reminds you of the mario game that you're not playing whenever i boot it up i i don't know it everything feels like it is

Nintendo has an ability often to nail it.

That it is, it's, wow, this is not only what I expected it to be it surpassed it that's the zelda thing right that's super mario galaxy and it's weird that there is not a game this year that feels like that despite it being the launch year and if anything there are games like metroid prime 4 which feel like they had been on the shelf for a long time and it is filling a release calendar need rather than like

actually

serving an audience. Yeah.
Yeah.

Yeah. I think the most the disappointing thing for me is like, I don't know what the fuck is next.
Like, I don't know what's next.

Is there, usually they have the, the, the lineup at least far enough out that you have an idea of like

what's what's next year going to bring

of the stuff that's clubs termed right you got animal crossing will be January and then you got it looks like Mario tennis fever on February 12th

I mean there's a bunch of other like third-party stuff but then there's and and there's a bunch of uh um

Resident Evil stuff out that month, uh,

like expanded yeah, um, and then I guess I'm thinking like

pond after that, but yeah, I mean

not a lot, yeah. I I think it's tough because uh they

that isn't so unusual in that they kind of like announce a lot and then they empty the bag and then once the bag is pretty much empty they announce the next bag full of stuff.

But it feels more

frustrating when there hasn't been like a good thing

in a while. Well, and also, I'll say, like, Metroid Prime 4 was the thing in the back of the bag for a while, right?

Like, it was the, if you were to say, what's what's the what's the big game that's going to come out for the Switch next year?

I would have said, like, well, Metroid Prime 4 is still coming, but now it's out. And, like, I don't know what,

I don't know what the sort of shadow lineup

behind the scenes is going to be. Yeah.

Yeah, it's very, it's very strange. Well,

that can actually toss us in. We have a few questions from the mailbag that relate to this.
Should I go into those? Yeah, please. Okay, so the first one, this one is from Wiley.

I'm still mixed on how to feel about the new Animal Crossing update coming out at the end of the month slash early January.

I love the franchise, but we were already told there wasn't going to be any more free updates.

I was hoping that at least they stopped supporting Animal Crossing New Horizons to release a new one within the first year of the launch of the Switch 2, which is now clear isn't the case.

And this goes on.

What's the logic going on with this? I'm grateful and excited, but I can't get myself even as a super fan to launch the game to prep for this.

What did happen? Because I kind of assumed that there would be a new Animal Crossing too.

Yeah, I mean, you would think, man,

it was the biggest shit ever

and a cultural sort of moment that is sort of unreproducible. It would seem like you'd want to strike while the iron was pretty hot.

And I'm sure that they will get some new eyes on it when they launch the Switch 2 version and they put all this DLC in the game. But like,

at this point, hasn't everyone kind of played it? That's going to play it, maybe? I don't know. It seems like it.
The comparison is Mario Kart, right?

Because this is kind of what they did with Mario Kart before Mario Kart World, where everybody expected Mario Kart, the new Mario Kart, Mario Kart 9, to come out, and then they just released level pack after level pack after level pack after seemingly being done with it.

So this isn't completely unusual, how effective it is, and especially what we just said about Mario Kart, which is like

that kind of

cut some of the enthusiasm I had going into world.

You know, you're giving people a taste of the thing, but not the thing.

Yeah, it's a strange choice.

I also feel like,

and we touched on this a bit before, but I feel like Nintendo is really struggling to tell a story of what the Nintendo Switch 2 is and why it is.

And I feel like things like this, this Metroid Prime thing, just kind of complicate that more. I mean, you think about the things that were supposed to be distinguishing factors, like...

I bought the camera. You know what I mean? I bought the camera and there's a chat button on the controller.
Like, none of that has even been.

I mean, the one new,

they charged for the thing that had the new stuff on it. It's like every decision about it is like so not seeming to care if people, not not care, because obviously that's wild, but like

not seeming to be able to put together a story as to why you would want to buy it, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know that I need that.
story anymore just because i i feel like with

between like uh you know putting bad side on the rog ally X and like playing around with all these retro Android handhelds like I feel like I just want to play the the games any game on the machine that I kind of want to play it on and I think that sales pitch isn't bad for Nintendo because the Switch 2 is a pretty capable like gaming rig, right?

And it's, it is of a, uh, of a good size for the power that it brings. And it has all the first-party Nintendo stuff on it anyways.

I think that the pitch that they have have kind of shoehorned themselves into giving is like, this is going to change the way you play games forever.

Or this is, this is, we've entered a new era of gaming. And I don't think it has, I don't think it has that, certainly.

It does all the cool stuff that the Switch did, and it runs games pretty fucking well. But that's, I don't know, I guess it's harder to put a story together.
That's just sort of that.

Which is industry-wide, right? You know, that's the Xbox wondering what it is that is PlayStation 5 selling a gajillion units, but then also

seemingly having zero enthusiasm around it. You know, it's just a machine.
And now this, it is, I think maybe that's why it is a bummer as Nintendo has always been the last hope of, well, they get it.

They get that the thing is as much a toy. as much of a novelty as it is a video game console.
And so far, this just feels like another thing to play slightly better looking.

And also with the size, like as somebody who fools around with a lot of handheld consoles with the size of this thing it there are so many devices out right now that are that feel

more fun and are more pleasant to use and look at and feel like

uh more exciting and and and pocketable like than the nintendo switch 2 you know what i mean like nintendo doesn't have an offering that feels like

you know i was looking there they are i i went digging for mario paint because i wanted to show my kids Mario Paint. I didn't realize it was on the Nintendo Classics.
I went looking.

There's a bunch of stuff on there. It's like

100

NES games, like 100 SNES games, a bunch of stuff on there. It's like it's in the virtual boy in February.
Yeah, dropping that.

That could be a compelling little thing. You know what I mean? Like, you could still make a small device that there's a store, like, there's a reason for it to be.
You know, like,

this still feels like a weird half-measure. Like, Like, you have a library, like, you could make a fun way of, of experiencing it, but it's, it's just not this.
I don't know.

Um, how much of this, I feel like we are still definitely in the window

where you can uh attribute some of this to like COVID

shutdown sort of impacting the entire, bottlenecking sort of, an entire sort of generation for a couple of years there.

I wonder how much of this, specifically like the weird launch lineup of the Switch 2

is sort of because of this.

I think some of it's got to be. They've always been a conservative company and there were a lot of question marks between this and the tariffs, between COVID and the tariffs.

I think where they had a lot of reasons to play it safe. But as a consumer, that's not really your problem.

No, sure.

Yeah,

the other, if we were giving excuses, is the reality of most consoles don't have great first years.

But Nintendo. Which one did?

But Nintendo is the exception. Yes.
Like Nintendo almost always has a game that is an all-timer in its first year. I have one more Nintendo related question.

This one is from Patrick. Question, I held off on playing Metroid Dread until I had my Switch 2 because of the performance issues.

Now I have time to dive into one of two Metroids, Switch 2s, Dread or Prime 4. What would you recommend for someone who hasn't played either? I think I know the answer to this.

I think Dread might be my favorite Metroid. That or Super Metroid, obviously, is the other big contender, but I think Dread kicks ass.

I think Dread is a great fucking game that does the Metroid-y stuff so well that the sort of antiquated parts of

its formula,

I feel like, aren't as big of an issue because it feels so good to explore that world and find cool power-ups and parry. evil robots and shit.
Yeah. I like that stuff a lot.

Hoops, I have a final question here that I was like, oh, it's perfect. This one's for you.

It is from JM.

So I need you to be honest with me if you wrote this question for me. I guarantee before I even hear it, that I don't think it was me.
Looking forward to the holidays.

One type of game I know I'll be checking in on are Idol Incremental games in between holiday events and various family activities.

Would love to hear any recommendations from you, Besties, about idol games that have kept your interest.

For me, Revolution Idol and Cells Idol Factory Incremental have both stayed on my phone for a while. So for sure.
From one JM to the other. What idol games should people be keeping their eye out on?

I mean,

there's Wizard Tower.

Wizard Tower, I think that came out this year. That's

one of my favorites.

You manage a little Wizard Tower as it grows and you

build different rooms that increase certain currencies and eventually you fight the gods of the sky with your wizard magic.

It's a good one. The Norp Analog, I believe it's called.
That's a good.

I don't know if you count that as an idol game. That's like right on the line, and that's like kind of a really interesting idle game because it does

start to border on requiring something of you. Like it requires something approaching like thought and strategy and that kind of thing.

Norp Analog is one that's actually, I think, worth worth checking out.

I'm sorry, the game is called Tower Wizard, not Wizard Tower. Universal Paperclips is an idol game where you learn something.

Yeah, for sure. We liked Cauldron.
Does that count? Cauldron, I think.

No, I mean, Cauldron has a lot of interactivity. There is like different modes

that

sort of more focus on the idle stuff going on in the game. But regardless, you're going to have to play like the five different mini-games in order to

get yourself to the point where you can sustain yourself that way.

I mean, I like Melvoor Idol. I'll return to that one from time to time.

That's the Runescape based one that was then purchased by the, I believe it was acquired by the developer of Runescape because it was just so RuneScape-y.

I feel like a lot of the things that made Idol games hooky have been like adopted into real games. So like there's been a lot of that has been like brought into the mainstream.
Yeah, for sure.

Cool. Well, that's that's pretty much it.
Uh,

whoops, are you y'all got any um

other stuff you've been enjoying? Some honorable mentions, even some honorable mentions

might say,

Don't be afraid to say it. Uh, I really have enjoyed Pluribus.
Uh, I know that it's gotten plenty of people uh pushing it, but uh, it is I read about Pluribus on my ghosters.

What

Wow, talking about Flurivus, huh? I'm about anything. What are you doing?

What are you doing?

I want to know more about this. Yeah,

Griffin just seems really angry lately. I don't know.
I really,

it's a show.

Anything you learn about it makes it less enjoyable. I think that it's much better to go in without knowing the details.
But it is a sort of post-apocalyptic story about

one woman who finds herself kind of left behind in a sense, but rather than physically being gone, people are sort of mentally joined together. And she finds herself on the outside.

And how she processes that and what it means and the mystery of how that all happens is what the show kind of delves into. It is created by Vince Gillian, who did Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

And while it is not connected to

those stories yet, no, it's not.

It does have a similar setting and it looks,

I would say, similar, if more cinematic.

If you like the vibe and the tone and the pacing of those shows, I think this is another one that you will very much enjoy.

I've been playing Rhythm Doctor,

which just came out, I believe, in early access. Gosh, just a couple of days ago, actually, December 6th.

And it is a

one-button

Rhythm Heaven-inspired rhythm game that a studio called Seventh Beat Games has been making for a really, really, really long time.

I think this game was first launched as like a Flash game back in 2012. And they've just kind of been like iterating on it and adding to it for a long time.

There's like a community of people who are just crazy about this game

because it is very faithful to the Rhythm Heaven formula.

And and

it's made by people who kind of like know how to make a good version of that. You play as an intern at sort of like a

sort of a hospital and you run a remote defibrillation device, which is the sort of

story reason for why you are hitting your space bar in time with the music.

But the music is really fucking great.

And the way that they kind of like task you with uh keeping up with different rhythms like it starts out with you have to hit it on every seventh beat uh and then it'll switch to like okay now it's gonna do sort of a swing thing uh it introduces those ideas in a way that feels really good uh and then sometimes just goes absolutely insane there's boss fights in the game where it will start to do weird shit with the screen or like it'll switch it to windowed mode and then move your window around your desktop monitor uh if you're playing that way uh

it's it's i don't know i never really stuck stuck with the rhythm heaven game that much because it was, I don't know, I found them sort of too punishing, even though I like hard rhythm games.

Uh, and this seems more accessible, very like lovingly crafted, charming story and writing, and the music's great.

And uh, it's it's it's a great, it's a perfect little bite-sized game that you can just kind of pick up and play a couple songs of. And uh, I've really been liking it a lot.

Uh, I'm perpetually interested by the year of too many games and what that causes to happen. Example of the year of too many games, two games inspired by Rhythm Heaven came out just yesterday.
Crazy.

Rhythm Doctor and also Bits and Bops, a game by Tempo Lab Games that is

also more Rhythm Heaven. And it's beautifully animated.
It is a full, rich, cool game. And I don't know how we got two Rhythm Heaven inspired games on the exact same damn day.

Day. Yeah.
I will also just second that Pleuribus is absolutely fantastic. I do not watch much TV and I

fucking obsessed with it.

I love the little TV you watch. That's what I want to hear more about.
Come on.

I'm sorry. I do other things like the podcast,

which you should do. And if you're selling movies to keep up with TV,

if that lobster guy, if that Yorgos Lanthemos, would have stopped making so many damn movies, Chris Plant might be able to watch Better Call Saw. You know what I mean? No, thank you.

I don't need any more of his stuff. I'm good.

Did you hear Chris Flurry talk about Chris Lemming's been about?

Do you think he's trying to help Emma Stem discover her clown?

Oh, man. That's really good shit.

Can we do a quick check-in on our

sort of goatee backlog playing?

Oh, man. I've been playing some of that road trip.
It's fucking intense, guys. I've been playing a lot of Indiana Jones Great Circle.

Yeah, that's a good one. We got to go.
That's a good one. You know what? That one's kind of like

what?

It's kind of like watching a football game with your dad. When it starts, you're like, Frick, this is freaking awesome, man.
I'm going to do this forever.

And then after three hours, you're like, yeah, I get it.

You know?

Oh, boy. Oh, boy.
This is going to be a good conversation. I've done that three times at this game where I'm like, hell yeah.
Why didn't I play? Oh.

Yeah,

I remember. Yeah, I have just gone back to it, and I think I might be in a very similar journey.
It was wet. For me, this time it was wet skill.
It was when I started slugging through snow.

I said, good day, Dr. Jones.
That'll do it to you.

Tip my hat. Thank you, good sir.
Farewell on your adventures. I will be cutting my own path through the snow here.

By sector.

I'm ashamed that I took so long to really dig deep into Root Trees Are Dead. A game that is so clearly my shit.
And people would recommend it to me.

And I think I had even said, like, I'm going to get around to it. I'll get around to it.
I'll get around to it. Well, I finally did.

And

I'm so excited to talk about it during the show because it is, it's just journalism, the video game. And by journalism, I mean

not sure exactly what you're looking for. So just googling random ass people's names and praying that it gets you at least some thread to pull on.

Root Trees are dead is exactly how I do tech support for my in-laws. It is literally just like, what is the error code? Dook, dook, dook, dook, doot.
Okay, here's the best I got.

It's really,

kudos to them for like coming up with a new form of that type of

game. Yeah.

Because I think that that's obviously. I remember there was this beautiful period in the early web when games would do this like on the actual internet.

Things like Missing Since January and Evidence Last Ritual, where they would like all the inner webs, the inner,

what's the word? I'm like, right, like the intranet of the game would be uploaded onto the actual internet. So like the answers would be searchable

on your real web browser.

But now it's a hell. The whole thing is there's no B's to search.

Anything else?

I finished Dispatch. Okay.
Yeah.

Which I really fucked.

Laundry Game of the Year. I have really been pacing it too long.

Interesting. Oh, it's perfect, dude.
It's perfect. You're enjoying it every once in a while.
You set down the shirts, you beep, boop, beep, back to folding. It's amazing.

Where have you gotten? Can I ask?

Yesterday, I finished episode

six, I think. Okay.
Two or three episodes left. Five.

The bar fight is in five, right?

That might be the hardest, I think, a game has made me laugh

in a sort of solid two-minute long chuckle,

chuckle party. It's really fucking funny.

I've just finished episode three, so I'm slowly catching up.

I've also been playing some more Death Stranding 2, which has been tough to get back into,

but

I think would also be a great laundry game just for some of the cutscenes but it's it's it is stuck on my PS5 is he's right he's right lodged in there and they won't let him go they won't let Norman go

but I I do like that game quite a lot

I also played baby steps more because Russ is so wild about it. And I had to replay stuff that the three of us played while we were streaming.
And so I like got caught back up.

Yeah, me and Justin Travis. I got caught back up to that point.

And now i took a little break because that was a that was sort of spiritually exhausting but now i've gotten to some of the news yeah i don't know that me going back and

i don't know if me going back and playing more baby steps by myself is giving baby steps a fair shake or not i really don't know what is the fairer thing to get to baby steps like i i don't know what will because we played it in such a wrong way

i don't know but i also With the game itself, I don't know if it's the kind of thing where the more you play of it, the more you're like, I am loving this more and more. I don't know.

I really don't know what the, not just the game of the year, but like the top five is going to look like for us because I think we're all spreading out.

It's all over the fucking map, yo. All over the place in terms of like,

I don't know. I put together my top 10.
I was like, I don't think

half these games y'all like.

Which is like, good. I think that makes for a good conversation.
Yeah. But I don't know how we're going to pull it together.

It almost feels like we're going to need like a

bracket rubric in the way that we do for our bonus episodes on the Patreon feed, but have it like boil down to like arbitrary tiebreakers, like which one has the most letters in the title of the game.

Yeah. Yeah.
Which one can you throw the farthest?

So next week will be our game of the year. That'll be kicking off next week.
That's true. Crazy.

Is there anything you want to try to spend time with before the next time? More Death Stranding.

More. Oh, Citizen Sleeper 2 made the.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I need to play more of that. I ducked back into that.
I really, really like that one.

I bounced to play something else, and it's a good candidate to return to. I also think that they might have balanced it a little bit more.

I think that was an issue for us when we played at the beginning, is it was maybe a little too unforgiving. So I'm one of those games I'm glad that we're revisiting late in the year.

What were the other audience picks for the four

Indiana Jones? Root Trees. Indiana Jones, Root Trees, Citizen Sleeper 2.
And then, of course, Dispatch.

Hey, should we wrap things up? Yeah, thank you so much. We've got to get back to playing video games.
Yeah, we've got a lot more games to play. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast.

Be sure to join us again next time, Dusty, because shouldn't the world's best friend pick the world's best games?

Besties