Terminator Time Travels to Save '90s Garbage Games

Big confession time, guys. And it is embarrassing. We've been doing this for so long. I never talked about this with you guys, but I am a Terminator 1000, and I was sent from the future because if this podcast doesn't exist, it's going to be bad for humanity. I shouldn't spoil too much, but it's going to be bad for humanity if this podcast ever stops. So I am a liquid metal cyber guy, and I'm from the future, sent back to make besties. when you say bad what do you possibly mean yeah um corpo like technology goes like crazy oh man that sounds terrible yeah on the knife hands front because I know you have knife hands and I figured it was just like a thing that you had I told you guys that was my yeah I told you guys that was my rheumatoid arthritis That's actually from being a liquid metal sort of cyber guy. Right. So is that everyone in the future has knife hands or is it just you? No, just us liquid metal cyber guys. I'm usually a bad dude. Like they usually use me for killing men who are in the laser war against us. But I have, I learned how to love the child. I mean, I like, I adopted as my son. Okay. Gotcha. so then he sent me back in time to make this kick-ass video game podcast now don't get me wrong do i know why this podcast existing prevents the laser war and the corpo takeover and all that i do not okay i don't know i do not know why these two things are connected i have one follow-up question if liquid metal why not abs yeah i mean that's a good question russ i could i could have abs i could make them up here right now i could fold it all in fold it in fold my metal here here's the problem it changes your timbre can you give yourself abs see if it changes your tone it will it'll it will definitely i mean my diaphragm i mean i'll try it okay here let me try it if it's funny it'll be the end of the thing yeah yeah let me try it oh guys okay what's up you want to talk about donkey kong yeah that's pretty funny i think that can be the end of the thing holy moly Did you say swolly molly? You fucking stinker Look at that face Fucking stinker 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 Chris Bott, and I know game. Whoa. Wow. Wow. My name is Ross Froschstick, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties. We're talking about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a video game club. And just by listening, you've become a member. This week, we're going to be talking about a new game that feels old. It's Terminator 2D. No fake. Chris Plant. What's that? Chris Bott. excuse me. Do you think it was maybe a hat on the hat to have another robot show up? You gave that up so fucking quick, dude. You bailed so fast. Yeah, I kind of realized. You bailed so fast. I try to serve it up to you fresh. You just bailed. I'm sorry. Terminator 2D No Fate is a new video game movie tie-in of Terminator 2 Judgment Day. One of these came out back in the day on the Super Nintendo, but this one looks and feels like how you would want it. It's pixel heaven. and we'll be talking about it more after this break. I don't remember playing the original Terminator game. Do you remember? Does anyone? It's like I don't remember not playing it. It's one of those where like it seems like such a fixed quantity. Terminator, but probably not. Terminator 2 was the first R-rated movie I ever saw. Nice. So like I'm sure I probably couldn't ask for the game because I didn't want to let on that I had seen the movie because I told my parents I was going to go see The American President. Yeah. You went to the theater, walked towards The American President, and then took a beeline over to Terminator? I told my parents, Tommy and I told his mom that we're going to go see Terminator, but I told my parents we're going to go see The American President starring Michael Douglas and Annette Bening. And then after we got our tickets and we walked in, we just went over to Terminator. You also are a good boy. so if you had asked for the video game you would have been like can I have Terminator 2 based on the movie I already saw I'm sorry sorry sorry so no I do remember actually we did have developed also by LJN the American President SNES game which LJN's LBJ yeah I'm an Annette Bening main a lot of people like Douglas but I main Bening so hey this game i right before we started uh chris did send us some footage of the original terminator 2 game made by ljn uh and released probably what 30 years ago or so it's so cool seeing that after having played terminator 2d no fate because while i played terminator 2d no fate i was like this is just like a super nintendo game from 1993 and then i looked at the exact same video game made in 1993 by the LJN Toy Company. And I was like, never mind. This is 100 million times better. This is 100 trillion billion times better. Should have stuck to toys. It's crazy how much this game captures a vibe and a genre that really went out of fashion with the kind of arrival of three-dimensional graphics and polygons and what have you. The people who are still making 2D games at that point And we're like, that's cool, but we're not going to do any more of these kind of like run and gun licensed heavy shooters. Obviously, you have your mercenary kings and your metal slugs and all that jazz. But this is like a different thing. This is a different thing. The best version of this is probably or at least like the gold standard for this kind of game, I think, is Blackthorn on the Genesis. Like it's a deliberately paced side scrolling action game that is not. it's like defined by the fact that it's not a metroidvania type thing you know what i mean like you're not trying to it looks like a game like that but you're not trying to like find better keys to unlock secret doors that is not the vibe if you went to like a three-star michelin restaurant and you got a tasty menu and you're like i want it all based on my favorite food from my childhood it would be this in video game form in that yeah each level is kind of a different style of a different game but it's itty bitty it's like maybe a third as long as it would have been in a previous game and has none of the annoying bits the visuals are upgraded to heaven the sound and the music is incredible and the second you've had your fill you got that taste in your gut boom you're moving on to the next section there is there is no wasted time in it because what they get is these games can be so tedious because they are very thin mechanically. So once you've gotten a taste of that mechanic, you are done. I will say maybe that works to its detriment some of the time because it jumps between genres as you move between sections of the movie. It is a very faithful retelling of Terminator 2 Judgment Day with a little bit of the original Terminator kind of thrown in at the beginning, a scene setting. But it's moving between like Battletoads style kind of hell hallways and uh you know uh the more metal slug slow heavy kind of uh platformy shooter and also there's like a beat-em-up section yeah but that never really comes back it really is just that one sort of section where you're doing a beat-em-up as a nude arnold uh and i don't know some of this stuff worked really well i thought and i wanted there to be kind of more of it but it's really sticks to the plot of the movie so hardcore that it it's not just going to add more sections where Arnold is beating the shit out of people. It really does leave you wanting more which is rare, yeah. Let's talk about it from the beginning and just go through a few of these sections to give people an idea of how it works. Your first thing is like you are Sarah Connor and I think it's like pre before the birth of your son? It's like kind of a flashback if I remember. Or like you have your son and you're trying to get to him. Oh, they've kidnapped him! Your son's been kidnapped by punks and you gotta fight your way, kill your way through a bunch of punks to get to him. But you're just Sarah Connor so you don't have any like special magical abilities you walk from left to right with a gun uh and if you get close enough to an enemy you can tap Y to do a uh sort of like close up maneuver which even that is a small thing but it's really smart actually because in a lot of side scrolling shoot games like this you get really close to someone and suddenly you feel ineffectual so having like a close not having to like shoot people at point blank range in a way that feels kind of immersion breaking is actually a really smart little thing. So you have that option of like running up on somebody and just meleeing them rather than shooting. Yeah. Yeah. Shortly after that, it jumps to the future where you're playing as an aged John Connor's Connor. Connor. And he's got like fucking futuristic laser guns and shit like that. Contra. Like it's full Contra. Very Contra. Yeah. Full on Contra. And then it jumps- Just for that one level. Well, we'll talk about that because there is elements of that that come back later. and then it jumps back to Sarah Connor and you have like a stealth sequence where you're escaping from the mental hospital no no no before that is naked Terminator at the bar which changes here because not only is it a beat em up but there are small but important changes like you can't be killed as the Terminator so what they do instead is the clock just ticks down extra time when you take damage it's all these little tweaks to make it feel just a little different yeah Arnold is on a schedule and that's really all that matters one of the um maybe all-time best needle drops in a video game by the way so section that I don't want to I don't want to do too many more of these because like that is the for me true joy of this game mechanically it's like pretty straightforward it feels great but like none of these sections are like uh really reinventing the wheel or doing anything like particularly uh surprising mechanically the surprise is that like and now it's this type of game for a little bit and now it's this type of game for a little bit and now it's done now the game's over because we did the whole movie and there isn't any more to do so i hope you enjoyed the game it's it's short and sweet and tight and really really changes its uh its whole vibe every like 20 minutes or so yeah the thing that i keep coming back to is it's very confident in what it does and i think it does it very well i also wonder how it exists within this world of like the modern version of this right which is like has more meta hooks has more upgrades which aren necessarily like i think for this game for what it is it good but i also there is a limit to like how much I think this game would keep my attention I beat the game I played on the easier difficulty and it took me about two hours-ish to finish it, like totally finish it. But when you beat it, you can then go back and like change the events of the movie. So instead of convincing what's his name at Cyberdyne to like go and go into the lab and like help you out, you actually kill him right then. And then that in turn unlocks like what if late game levels where you'll have more of the futuristic stuff going on. So that is like an interesting approach to it. I just didn't necessarily feel like, oh, this is a game I'm going to keep coming back to. It was the only thing. Which I don't think it's trying to be that. I think it's trying to be similar to like a movie. You know, you're going to come back to it every three years and do a playthrough and and that's it but you're right it is of a different era in that way i like that i do i i don't know like what the hell netflix is up to but if there was a game that like i would want on a streaming service that i could just play with my family without having to set anything up this would be it like this is the sort of game that would be great for that um i and i do think it is largely about being able to see this game in 2d pixel form that was a big chunk of the appeal back in the day right was like oh it's the thing i love but in the medium that i love and it relishes the here is the iconic shots recreated in little pixel animations um yeah it's really rad i i want to go back to talking about like sort of modern takes on kind of classic stuff like this not that i think that there's like a ton of stuff like this because i was thinking about the um like the beat them up section doesn't feel particularly good and uh we have so many examples uh from uh dot emu and what's the oh yeah of of like here's a classic konami style beat them up right or the Scott Pilgrim sort of beat him up which adds like leveling mechanics and sort of extra stuff like that loosely sort of River City Rampage inspired but like definitely more changes incorporating sort of like modern advancements this game doesn't do that really I don't think at all and it kind of gets away with it by being a holistic Terminator 2 experience which is so cool like it's really I don't even I don't love the Terminator franchise that I don't have like a lot of fondness for the for Terminator 2. But just like seeing a developer say like, this is our perfect version of if they had made like a flawless video game adaptation in 1993 of of Terminator 2 Judgment Day. I don't know. It's like a very much an art project of like, wow, you guys really set a mission for yourselves there and absolutely crushed it. I also like the fact that like they don't hide from the fact like, yes, we're a video game so we can break the realities of things where when Sarah Connor is breaking out of the hospital, she fucking kills like 50 guys, like shoots everyone dead, which there might be what a body count of like two people in the movie. So they're fine with that, which I think is fine. Like we don't need to stress about ludonarrative dissonance in the fucking Terminator game. Yeah, no, I would rather not. Um, there is an interesting quirk about this game that is more of a buyer beware thing. The normal digital release of the game is $30, like at base price. The physical copy of the game, which is more or less the same thing, is $60. Wow. Yeah, I don't know about that. $60 is wild. so i think my guess is that there's probably a licensing requirement that any terminator game that you release also needs to be a physical release and they were like okay but no one's gonna buy it so just a heads up if you're i wonder if that could have been like a long maybe that was like god appended to a contract at some point they could just never shake it yeah yeah i think that's what any video game cartridges featuring the likeness of the t800 robot right i also wonder does like robert patrick get money for this probably man he's in it i mean i'm sure all of course nigger gets money for this there's one thing i know i don't think arnold is it no that his likeness is not in this game whenever it would be arnold it would be like the pixelated version that could be like but it's definitely robert patrick it's fully robert patrick when he not a question when he in the fucking attract screen of this video game that i played on my gaming pc which that alone kicks ass when he just kind of morphs up and gives you the no-no finger and he's like full-blown uh sega genesis glory god did they teach them that in the future before they go back yes it's been a while since i've seen the flick actually i don't movie's so good man um should we should we take a break and then we can come back and talk about the entire world of these like ip tie-in games yes yes we are back i want to talk about licensed games from the past and the present i want to start with the 90s stuff because that's what this game is riffing on and as griffin mentioned earlier you go back and you look at the original terminator 2 video game and like in theory it looks very similar to no fate in practice it looks miserable to play this was like a cash grab at the moment to be able to do these sorts of things and hoops you played a lot of these games right yeah i mean when we when we were children uh this was uh i feel like we were joking about ljn but i feel like this is like the sub genre of look at their logo dude it really sent me on a trip This to me is like this period of licensed games in the 90s is like the – I think it is a factor of rental. Yeah. Which is no longer a thing to think about and wasn't really a thing before this. But there was like this period in like the 80s and 90s where a game didn't have to – there was like definitely games cost a certain amount of money. but there were games where you could get like a solid day or two out of them. They were like perfect for the Cummings Rent-A-Center. You go there, you pay $3.99, you take it home for a weekend, you do the entire thing. So the game didn't have to be, you know, it didn't have to rewrite your entire summer. You know, it could just be a weekend and then you take it back. And I think there was also the element of gift giving where like, oh, mom knows what you like. You like that movie, so I'm just going to buy the game without thinking about it. You liked The Mask. Well, Black Pearl Software asked, what if you could do it on your Super Nintendo home console? All those shitty Simpsons games, especially. Yeah, I mean, not so unlike toys, right? Like, it's the same premise. It's just now the toy happens to be the video game. I mean... There were a few that, like, broke out, though. Anything that Capcom made, right? Like, there's a huge difference between... Capcom was the gold standard. ...Flying Edge and GAVC and Capcom. And yeah, Capcom made the Disney games, which I think are probably the most iconic. That's Lion King, Aladdin, and... Lion King was... Was Lion King? Oh, acclaimed? Virgin Interactive Entertainment. They did... Aladdin was the big sort of like Capcom. And Capcom also did the Mickey Mouse platformers, Magical Quest, and all those. Who did the Super Star Wars, that series? that was i mean lucas lucas arts right those are really good and jbc i think so yeah it does feel like especially when there wasn't a direct movie tie-in like they need to hit a date for a movie release yeah it seemed like they had the potential to be a little bit better although a lot of them were still shit uh the second you were like trying to hit a fucking december 12th released for a movie invariably those games would be dog shit and yeah those would evolve into like mobile games later on i do think part of the appeal going back to these games is how little respect they have for their source material super star wars i think we all remember more fondly now because it is nothing like star wars like in one of them you fight like a robot spider darth vader or something yeah and there's like uh when you're going to the sarlacc pit there's like 12 sarlaccs that are jumping out at you as you're shooting lasers and stuff like that uh it definitely had a lot of range in terms of what you were doing but i think again that's why i think we like this terminator game is because it also was like fuck it we also need to make this game fun we don't need to make it authentic to the movie uh the events need to be the same but otherwise like go ham i wanted to highlight uh one example of the game coming out at the same time of the movie which was the mighty morphin power rangers the movie game from 1995 which is a kick-ass beat-em-up where you get to be whatever ranger you want and get to live out your Power Rangers fantasy. It came out the same time as the flick, which also kicked ass. What a unique cultural zeitgeist that was. There's also, there's a factor here that I want to touch on. This game is also, I think, highlighting and it's a phenomenon that I know no longer exists today. but games that were in this era for the NES, SNES, Genesis, or whatever, games that are definitely for kids because at this time, every game is for kids. Like, this is not – if adults are playing a game, it's an adult playing a kid's game. Games are not for adults. But games based on R-rated movies. So you had, like – I'm looking at a list. Total Recall. This is just NES. Total Recall, Robocop 1 and 2, Rambo, Predator, terminator 1 and 2 friday the 13th nightmare on elm street there's all these games jaws is these games based on movies that you weren't supposed to see as a kid and probably weren't allowed to see for a lot of kids so it's like i'm gonna have the terminator experience and this is how i'm going to ingest this like buying the novelization yes exactly russ that's exactly it You could get toys back then for R-rated movies, which now, I don't know if you've been to a Target lately. They have a separate toys section for adults that is concealed by the video games. Adult toys? You're just now finding out about this? You want the R-rated toys? Yeah. Oh, R-rated. Okay. I'm sorry. I was confused because I was going to say. I want to do a quick midstream correction here and say that the original Jaws was rated PG. that's what I thought that fact kicks ass it was not an R-rated film it was parental guidance maybe if you if your kids are better about having turned it to mosey this is good yeah I'm not a bad parent but but but but the principle is exact I mean ratings aside like the principle of that is a hundred percent the same like I should not have had to try to conceptualize what Friday the 13th is is about based on an ill far more rental from our mom You know what I mean Like that should not be how the tale of Jason Voorhees unspools for me for the first time Those games are legit fucking, like, terrified me because I never watched the movies. But, like, those horror games or even the Jaws game scared the fuck out of me. That's the other thing about it that I think is actually really interesting is that this this is a time period where the games, like a lot of these games weren't a natural fit or the movies weren't a natural fit for a game adaptation, right? Terminator 2 is pretty clean. You're a dude with a gun, but like, how do you make a game out of Jaws? How do you make a game? Like, I think there's some interesting stuff that people had to come up with to like, you know, rationalize some of this. You see some like non-traditional game design that may not work great, but at least it's like kind of interesting. Yeah. No, I think they did a really interesting job. It's strange because I wanted to say like, oh, well, this kind of faded. Like we had GoldenEye and then there was a bunch of bad tie-in games on the Nintendo 64. And maybe this went away for a while. But really every era has its handful of great or at least good movie tie-in games. We have Spider-Man 2, right? We have, take it or leave it, the Matrix video games, which I personally think. Oh, take it. Solid. Yeah, I like them. Yeah, the Matrix rules. Yeah, there's that Hulk video game. There's a Wolverine game that's pretty good. Like, we get these now and then. I don't think there's a good Hulk movie game, is there? I thought there was. Ultimate Destruction for the PS2 and GameCube. Not tied to the movie. Oh, there's that Lord of the Rings video game. You know, there's stuff now and then that we get. But most of it is utter garbage. Fresh, you were talking about before this how we do seem to see less of it all around, good or bad. Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember the last movie license thing. So much of it is just the expense of game development is at a point where like, it no longer makes financial sense to do this. If you're going to do like a full on 3D open world, whatever to tie it with a movie release, the math does not work. That being said, they still do, you know, there's a stranger things game. They still do like these indie approaches to these releases as another marketing leg, but you're not going to see a full release for a movie. Yeah, I think the exception is, and it's not literally this movie, The Game, but is Disney's approach of RIP is worth so much. It has so much inherent value. We can shop around to all the different developers, have no overhead, and get them to take the risk on making video game versions of Star Wars or Avatar or whatever. Or not even that. You look at Fortnite, or you look at Call of Duty. Like Call of Duty just did a Fallout collab, which obviously it's the same company. Microsoft owns both of them, but still they just, and then Fortnite does collabs all the time, Adventure Time and you name it. It's much cheaper and easier to release a skin of a character that acts as a marketing tool for the thing you're releasing than it is to make a whole fucking game. So isn't it interesting also that like you look at just this year, you've got a new silent hill mortal combat 2 street fighter resident evil like the pipeline is moving the other the other way you know it's going the opposite direction the games are being developed into into films yeah sonic you know what i mean like it's it's i was looking for for examples of movies being adapted into games and i can't like it's been years since i can find one that isn't like a that's like a real actual like triple a video game whatever that means anymore you know released on a disc i got my mind we i don't know if we've talked about this on the show cannot is incapable of conceiving what the zach crager led resident evil film is going to look i like love the work of zach crager uh just seems like such an odd pairing we got paul walter hauser and zach cherry my boys like i i need the two of them to be the ones that save the world like my guys my guys i'm very excited i think it's uh people are starting to really dial it in i think fallout's a good example of this the show is just like you could you can lean into the ridiculousness of the video game aspects while also like appreciating the source material and showing it respect such that fans and other people can get into it hey i want i want i want your suggestions what what movie what classic film would you like to see get this treatment if you could have the the same team same people they got to do a follow-up right was there a demolition man game is what i want to know because that seems absolutely several demolition i know sega cd uh check me but i'm pretty sure there was a i know there was a sega cd i want to say it was a 32x demolition man oh yeah there was indeed yeah with clips from the film um there's a correct answer to this and it is the fifth element um would be very very good well see the problem is ubisoft has been trying to make that for a long time and beyond good and evil 2 is never coming out but like i feel like the the uh would that be the right fit for this kind of thing though you know what i mean like can you boil that down to because I feel like Fifth Element has to be if you were to do a Fifth Element game I think that has to be sprawling and open yeah it couldn't be very faithful and be this type of game I guess like John Wick would be like yeah that would be such I know that's not an older but like that would be so great I would love to see this team try a predator that has like a little bit more like organic elements that would be really cool yeah and there is a John Wick I think John Wick Hex came out for what it's worth but not it wasn't like not the recreate the movie in the game sort of thing yeah yeah yeah that'd be tough was that good tanic there was a vr uh john wick thing too right man you could see a super hot uh vr collab for john wick would be fucking damn that would be good they did something like it there was a vr john wick thing it just wasn't i'm super hot i do want to point out before we get to the question hey hey let your kids play super hot if they never have i taught cooper to play super hot it's fucking sick it's like i'm training it looks like i'm training i want to open the door to her room like the scene in wayne's world where he opens the door the ninja's training like i wanted to open the door to cooper's bedroom like yeah she's been training in here since seven she's gonna be ready for anything the universe has i gotta charge my oculus quest now because i do want to play super hot right now it's too good it's really it's really really good uh sadly meta just shuttered a bunch of vr studios because uh that's the way things are going so yeah i'm i'm literally watching him plug it in why don't we talk about king kong the movie the game we made it all this time oh yeah king kong the movie the game super good and that was kind of the movie right king kong the movie the game what a game movie what a great game if that that is a game i wish more games had taken some learnings from it's got a really fun way like uh king kong the movie the game sorry peter jackson's king kong the movie the game you've never experienced it is a first person action adventure, but like more heavy on the adventure where like the presence of like fire, whether or not you have a torch is a very big thing. You're like, you get your weapons, not like in a classic way, but like you just find guns that someone else has and you can like borrow their guns. It's very narrative heavy. It's like got big cinematic moments. It's a very cool. I think that's one that he was- But you did play as Kong too. Yeah. You fucked shit up as Kong, right? Yeah. I think that's one he was very involved with. I feel like I remember Peter Jackson being very plugged into that, which is the same as Lord of the Rings things, right? He was very instrumental in those games. Just adding one other note here, there is one big movie tie-in game that has been tremendously successful in the last five years, and that is the Jurassic World Frontier Games. The Jurassic World Evolution Games. That's where you're building the park. Because they're smart enough to be like, yeah, let's pull it back. Let's just let you build a dinosaur-themed park. but even that is like you're not you're not recreating the movie which i think is what we're going for there is i think a new jurassic park game that is coming out in the future that will i think be a little bit closer to at least the vibes of the movies if not the recreation of the events um the thing video game also beat so much ass it beats so much ass that they remade it and released that i think a couple years ago i don't think i ever played that oh man it's so good it's a third-person shooter type game, but it is also a survival horror game, obviously, where you never know if the dude you're rolling with is about to turn into a big bloody octopus or whatever. Night Dive Studios did a remaster of it at the end of last year. It's pretty solid. Cool. Hey, any questions? We do, as a matter of fact. First, more statements. But a funny note from Michael. He said, he thought Justin was, we were talking about most anxious beta games. I thought Justin was saying the remake of the end of the greatest RPG of all time as the game description and not the name of the game. People were very upset that we weren't actually saying what game it was. Oh yeah, it's a secret. I'm not going to tell you what game I'm talking about. Jay McConaugh also wrote in saying, I am unbelievably happy that Griffin is playing Satisfactory. It's one of my favorite games in 2019. It remains my favorite of the genre. Griffin are you still I've I had to liberate myself good for you genuinely it's so rare the only other type thing I can remember is like the times I've had where I've been playing wow and not really enjoying it and being like what the fuck am I doing like satisfactory kicks ass and also I have like 45 minutes of gaming time per day and I cannot spend all of it playing satisfactory so I reached a nice sort of stopping point with it and and had to peel myself off that is a game that I think if i was playing a multiplayer and like a constant server it would be the only video game i've ever i ever play yeah but it is uh it is kick ass does it get to a point where if you like stand on a mountain looking down at your creation it looks like big ball factory like it looks that fucking cool where everything is kind of like going yeah man people have done some shit with this game that is like pretty staggering yeah um and i attempted to do that and i didn't do a great job and i was like instead of remaking this i think i'm just gonna yeah stop um but yeah it kicks ass i think it's like i think it's a really interesting genre that is doing a lot of stuff uh from other genres i really like uh so i i i do love satisfactory a lot and i'm sure i will come back to it someday but i i had to had to quit because this terminator 2d no fate was the game that got me off of it and it was a perfect kind of that's like a band-aid yeah a little bit of a palate cleansers may be offensive because it makes it sound like good. It's just really nice to play a game because it's fun. I mean, really, genuinely. Like, it shouldn't be as much of a commodity as it is, but it's just like, it's fun to play. Yeah. We have any honorable mentions? I am reading a book that you guys really like called There Is No Anti-Memetics Division. It's a, but the author is just named Quantum QNTM. Is it? and it is a siphon Don go searching for it I hear clickety clapping clacking just let me tell you about it kills me tcb um it is it a sci novel about okay so what the book assumes is obviously there's there's uh there's monsters right and in this world there are psychic monsters that the government has to kind of keep track of so you can imagine your your x-files or whatever across government agency tasked with tracking them well nested within that group of monsters that are like psychic creatures are creatures that are uh by their very nature erase memory of their existence so they are designed these psychic enemies these psychic creatures they their abilities their powers are all sort of manifested around erasing the knowledge of their existence And that's how they're operating within secrecy. So this agency is people who are trained to notice things outside of what others would notice and are trying to use different methodology to find these creatures that are trying to escape notice. and as the book continues on what's fascinating is and what what i think makes really reading it such a cool experience is a lot of these entities have the ability to erase the knowledge of their existence from the characters but you the reader do not have that knowledge erased so you'll start to see characters operating using a different rule set or a different set of logic and you don't understand why then you realize they've forgotten they don't understand they don't they're kind of losing track of the book as you the reader are like keeping track of it um and all the different permutations of that like all the different ways that those like psychic creatures manifest themselves in the different ways that like the agents have to have a protocol of like several different methods of recording so it's like some people use dictaphones with a notepad with a recorder because different entities have different ways of erasing um knowledge of their of their existence it's a very cool book it's called there is no anti-memetics division um and it's it's it's really what the book starts to uncover is that maybe this isn't the first division like this and maybe that we've done this before on a on a very grand scale um and it's it's really really cool it's great um i played through act razor on super nintendo all right that game rules uh i had a device that i got ages ago the miu miu a30 and uh just booted it up installed spruce os which is a good uh custom flash custom firmware and uh just ran that game i wanted to finish it uh because i'm trying to finish more games rather than just messing with my devices constantly and so i finished it and i think what's so special about the game it's a mix of like side-scrolling action game and also like city building yeah and that meta element makes the they like work hand in hand where the action sequences play into the city building and vice versa in both narrative and gameplay ways and it i think it overcomes the hurdle that a lot of games of that era did where it's just like oh this is just a really fucking hard game like it's just super fucking hard whereas you can make that game pretty manageable if you just spend a lot of time like building up the cities and doing the little quests and things like that so i think it's a perfect pairing sadly the sequel is very bad yeah it's a rare a rare miss from quintet i i think quintet is maybe a developer that i have more nostalgia for than any other uh they only developed i think like a half dozen games or so but they are all really rad and a little bit like weirdly interconnected my favorite what's another one uh so illusion of gaia is the is the big one uh i think all the games were published by enix um but then there were like really good just sort of action rpgs like that soul blazer uh it's one of them terranigma is a really really cool one that uh came out pretty late in this kind of like 32-bit life cycle um but yeah rad rad stuff you should play illusion of gaia if you haven't it's a really it's a really neat game about um it's like if the seven wonders of the world were like an rpg quest and yeah that sounds very very interesting yeah um i'm definitely gonna i think i might do a run of their games um i have been playing two things one i bought a board uh which is a a screen it is a 24 inch sort of horizontal screen it's called board it's called board uh that wasn't taken no i guess it wasn't taken uh and when you buy it you get this big big ass nice screen uh and it comes with like 50 little um figures little uh i don't know totems little objects that correspond to the 12 games that are on it at launch. And the games are, I mean, there's a lot of different kinds of ones. There's like a match three one. There's a sort of Othello style, like territory claiming one. There's one that's basically lemmings, except like you're putting pieces down to make the little paths for the lemmings. So you put a little staircase down and then they will run on top of that on the screen. But then there's also like really simple ones like Snake. There's like a snake game that you control the snake with like a little piece that you move around the board or like a asteroid space shooter where you're moving your ship piece around the board to kind of do do all the stuff in that game there's a little virtual pet thing and you're like pouring a watering can on it to like wash it and do all of that stuff it is it is super neat i've only had it for like four or five days or so um but gus my four-year-old is is quite taken with it and really enjoys uh just the kind of like tactile I think experience of you know moving a little actual physical thing around to manipulate a video game it is it's 500 bucks and I don't know that right now it has quite enough going on to justify that but there are more games sort of coming there's no subscription thing like I think next playground which is another thing I adore and is always releasing sort of new stuff you have to be i think buy a game pass in order to do that stuff this doesn't have anything like that at least not yet but it's been it's been really neat and it's been a fun sort of their their big pitch is like you know no more screens in front of your faces as you play games together now you just have the one big screen screen it's still a screen but it's flattened on the on the table so you're not like hiding hiding your face um i've also been playing a uh i hesitate to call it game but an app that is on steam called pixel art academy uh pixel art academy learn mode henry has been very very very into pixel art uh messes around with it on his ipad basically every day and is is really developing some skills that has been kind of cool to see so i've been uh fiddling around with godot again and trying to figure out if there's like any way i can help him figure figure some of this stuff out but there's a game called pixel art academy that teaches you pixel art and it does so through like a dozen different kind of ways like you uh can recreate pixel art from other games it like has those as sort of tutorials but then it also teaches you like this is the fundamentals of like line work and this is uh you know best best practices for making a curved line in pixel art and then it has like review technology that will like look at the art that you make and be like okay so there's stuff here and here this line is a little bit like it's pretty sophisticated stuff um and then there's like interactive lessons where you make sprites for pico art games um and i don't know i i have i've put like 10 hours into it i keep kind of just like when i have nothing else going on pick picking it up and uh messing around uh and it's been it's been very very cool and a neat way to learn about this thing that uh my son is uh extremely proficient at so those are my two nice i guess i'm just a good dad guys i guess my whole thing for both of my shits this week is i'm the father of the year and possibly the decade wow and so early in the year already yeah no i know but i got the i got the award i got the award already dude that's great i got the doty yeah wow i mean i i just played sonic racing cross worlds my son loves Sonic. I didn't play it with him, though, so that probably makes me... That's good. He kept it a secret. He was banging on the door, actually. Please, Papa. Yeah, and I said, go away! Go away! Papa! I love the blue mouse, Papa! Yeah, I started calling me father, and I don't know what to do with that. Oh, no. Father. Hey, Sonic Racing Cross Worlds. It's so good. It's just a great car racing game, and they keep adding stuff to it constantly. They just added Pac-Man? For some reason, there's an entire Pac-Man track where it feels like you're on the set of Pixels. It's great, man. That game is good. I heard they're doing a South Park thing. You guys check that out? They are actively, at the moment, doing a South Park event. There's skins and an area, Cartman World, etc. It's pretty good. People seem pissed because the stick of truth is in it. Tell what it does. That's a really cool idea. Yeah, whoever gets it can basically decide where the final circle is going to close in on. So it kind of forces everyone directly to your position. So people have come up with like clever ideas of like doing it in like a bunker. Some asshole like put it way out in the ocean. So suddenly there's like just a water battle. So it's pretty smart. Yeah, that's cool. Good job. Okay, I think we did it. Did we thank people? Let's thank some people. We have some members over at the Patreon, patreon.com slash the besties. if you want to join us for content. We got Javier. We've got Matt. We've got Bennett. We've got Subzug. One of those pronunciations is right. Thank you for being members. We have a new Resties episode. It's actually the big predictions episode, which is live right now. If you happen to be a member, you can also vote on who was right in the predictions episode because there's some contention. There's some disagreement. Very nasty. So we've left it up to the listeners to vote. I love it. Very exciting. Next week, we're going to do a doubleheader. Mio, Memories in Order, and Pathologic 3. I didn't know the franchise existed, and here I am staring down the barrel of the third one, but I hear it's got a doctor in it. Sounds cool. You love those. We love it. I love a doctor. That's going to do it for this week on The Besties. Be sure to join us again next week for The Besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!