Castlevania, Ace Combat, and Ron Funches. What More Can You Want?

Ron Funches joins us for a double header! First, Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse is the first new side-scrolling Castlevania in over a decade. Is it worth the wait? And second: Ace Combat 8 is the most decadent entry in the long-running series. But is this an entry point for newcomers, or has the series locked on to hardcore plane nerds? Plus, the boys saw some documentaries!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Russ Frushtick?

  Guys, I am worried about the structural integrity of Dracula's castle.

• 0:06Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 0:07Russ Frushtick?

  This does not seem architecturally sound.

• 0:11Griffin McElroy?

  Sure.

• 0:12Russ Frushtick?

  And I don't think they've thought about it.

• 0:13Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, you look at the clock tower and we've got like some pillars that are holding up the weight of the world. And if something went wrong, termites, gargoyles, like there's lots of stuff that could, a minute tower, there's so many minute towers, smashes in one of those pillars.

• 0:30Russ Frushtick?

  Wait, wait, wait, sorry, sorry, sorry. One second. Did you just call that a minute tower?

• 0:34Griffin McElroy?

  A minute tower, a minute tower, minotaur. I don't know how to say the word otherwise, I guess.

• 0:39Chris Plante?

  Wait, this isn't a bit?

• 0:41Griffin McElroy?

  I, minotaur.

• 0:42Chris Plante?

  Wow.

• 0:42Griffin McElroy?

  Minotaur, minotaur.

• 0:45Russ Frushtick?

  Griffin.

• 0:45Griffin McElroy?

  I don't know, I don't know, don't make fun of my accent.

• 0:48Chris Plante?

  It's not an accent. No, no, no, no, I want to live here for a while. I want to set up camp here for a while. I want to know more about how this happened.

• 0:54Griffin McElroy?

  The Belmonts have a way of doing things and it's

• 0:57Chris Plante?

  With minute towers?

• 0:59Griffin McElroy?

  Hitting guys with whips.

• 1:00Chris Plante?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00Griffin McElroy?

  And stake, no stakes actually, but a lot of whip work and then they kill Dracula with a whip and then they just kind of hope for the best. They hope nobody makes another Castlevania game. Because Castlevania games are the leading cause of Draculas. I'm saying if the Belmonts just targeted one of those load bearing pillars in the clock tower, we could really sort that, because he's always in the fucking clock tower, isn't he? He's always in the, the wobbliest place.

• 1:22Russ Frushtick?

  Generally speaking, yeah, it does seem like a dangerous spot, but I would say even those pillars are not held up by anything. They're just floating in space.

• 1:29Griffin McElroy?

  That's a good point.

• 1:30Russ Frushtick?

  Minotaur. I can't get over, I mean, Ron, am I crazy?

• 1:33Chris Plante?

  I can't get over it at all.

• 1:34Russ Frushtick?

  Have you ever heard anyone say it like that in your life?

• 1:37Speaker 03

  Look, I say so many words wrong.

• 1:40Russ Frushtick?

  But this one in particular.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  This one was, yeah, I'll try it, minotaur. Oh, yeah, fuck you. Yeah, you suck.

• 1:49Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, I expected it from these two, not from you.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  I had to make sure I could say it right first.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  But you guys, I gotta give them some slack. Medusa isn't a train contractor. You're just turning people into stone and pushing it into a pile and then creating a castle. By that regard, doing a hell of a job, I think.

• 2:14Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I guess so.

• 2:32Griffin McElroy?

  My name is Griffin McRoy and I know the best game of the week.

• 2:35Chris Plante?

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

• 2:38Russ Frushtick?

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

• 2:41Speaker 03

  My name's Ron Funches. I know the best game of the week, but I'm not gonna tell you.

• 2:45Chris Plante?

  Ooh.

• 2:49Chris Plante?

  Halloween season surprise.

• 2:51Griffin McElroy?

  I don't even know how we would, what are we gonna do here today if we don't tell them what the best game of the week is?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Just dilly-dally. Hey, yo, find out what words we say wrong.

• 3:01Griffin McElroy?

  This is the besties. Usually we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year club and just by listening, but today it's a dilly-dally club and

• 3:10Speaker 03

  I'm wearing that shirt.

• 3:13Griffin McElroy?

  You're wearing that dilly-dally shirt?

• 3:14Speaker 03

  I would love to wear a dilly-dally club shirt.

• 3:19Griffin McElroy?

  Just for, just so, so we have it clean in case we decide to go in this direction with the edit.

• 3:25Chris Plante?

  Minotaur.

• 3:26Griffin McElroy?

  Clean. We are going to talk, minotaur. We are going to talk about Castlevania Belmont's Curse.

• 3:30Russ Frushtick?

  Fair, fair.

• 3:30Chris Plante?

  Yeah, smart.

• 3:31Griffin McElroy?

  The new Castle.

• 3:32Chris Plante?

  And

• 3:33Griffin McElroy?

  Yes?

• 3:34Chris Plante?

  Ace Combat 8. I'm just gonna talk a little bit about it. Listen, some people I'm sure, I'm sure there are at least 10 people who are listening to the show who are like, were they gonna talk about it? They mentioned it weeks ago. Were they ever gonna talk about this game? So I just want them to know.

• 3:49Russ Frushtick?

  Plant is gonna talk about it.

• 3:51Chris Plante?

  I'll mention Ace Combat 8.

• 3:52Griffin McElroy?

  Plant's gonna talk about Wings of Theft. He's the only one with enough fucking RAM to run this, this incredible technical marvel.

• 4:00Chris Plante?

  It actually killed like a computer two weeks ago.

• 4:02Griffin McElroy?

  I think we should focus on Castlevania Belmont's Curse. What is it, Chris?

• 4:06Chris Plante?

  Guys, Castlevania is back, but this time with a little bit more of that Dead Cells flavor. This game was made by the team that I believe ported Dead Cells and then went on to do their own projects, like, you know, all sorts of stuff.

• 4:22Griffin McElroy?

  They did a DLC mostly for

• 4:25Chris Plante?

  There we go.

• 4:25Griffin McElroy?

  Evil Empire made the DLC. And then there was, I guess, some collaboration with Motion Twin?

• 4:31Russ Frushtick?

  Sort of advisory developer. I've never seen that in my life.

• 4:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think that maybe just that logo looks good on a search action game. We're gonna talk all about Castlevania Belmont's Curse with our good pal Ron Funches just after this short break.

• 4:45Russ Frushtick?

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• 5:28Russ Frushtick?

  into one iconic machine. Visit alienware.com/15 today.

• 5:37Russ Frushtick?

  Usually we save plugs to the end, but I do want to shout out, Ron, you have a comedy special coming out very soon.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  I do. I've been working on this for a while. It was gonna be a whole comedy special about life and love and my new marriage. And then I got divorced real quickly. So it turned into a comedy special about not knowing what you're getting into. And then sometimes you get depressed and you're like, should I keep going or should I just eat cookies and die? And that's the name of the special. It'll be out on YouTube, everywhere, December 1st. And then, but, but if you truly love me and you want to help me gain more money and friendship and acclaim, then you will go to the Gorilla Plus Comedy App, where it'll be coming out November 1st. You get a free trial just by putting in the code word Funches.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  If you want, I'll even set a reminder for you to cancel. You just come on back here. I'll tell you.

• 6:37Griffin McElroy?

  On your next visit to the Besties.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  I was like, hey, make sure you canceled that, that free trial. I don't want to cause you any troubles, but I

• 6:44Griffin McElroy?

  You're like a human rocket money sort of, sort of providing people.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. But if you go over and do the Gorilla Comedy Plus app one, they might then say, hey, Ron brings people over and then they'll give me money to make more specials for them. That's just as honest as I can be.

• 7:01Russ Frushtick?

  I love it. I love direct honesty. And I always look to you for that, Ron. I appreciate it.

• 7:08Griffin McElroy?

  We're talking about Castlevania Belmont's Curse today, which is the first Castle, mainline Castlevania game since, I believe, Lords of Shadow 2, which came out in 2014.

• 7:20Russ Frushtick?

  And, and do you know how long it's been since the last, the first 2D side scrolling Castlevania game?

• 7:25Griffin McElroy?

  The last one that came out before Belmont's Curse? I have no idea.

• 7:28Chris Plante?

  2008?

• 7:29Russ Frushtick?

  It's been like 22 years.

• 7:31Griffin McElroy?

  Was it the Order of Ecclesia?

• 7:33Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, Order, Order of Ecclesia, which came out on the 3DS.

• 7:38Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Russ Frushtick?

  DS maybe. DS, sorry.

• 7:40Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. That's crazy, man. Konami really is one of the worst stewards of intellectual property, uh, maybe in existence.

• 7:48Russ Frushtick?

  In fairness, they did make Pachinko games for a very long time.

• 7:53Griffin McElroy?

  That's a good point. I forgot about that.

• 7:54Chris Plante?

  Yes. What's weird about this game is it is part of like new Konami, right? Because we can kind of think of Konami as having blown up and decided to just try it all over again after splitting ways with Hideo Kojima. And this is part of this new model of like, what if we get new people to make remakes? What if we partner with studios that are not the traditional people that we would work with? Which I think is like a model that we're seeing elsewhere, right? Like, this studio itself, they also worked on the Prince of Persia game too. Is that right?

• 8:30Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, the Rogue Prince of Persia.

• 8:32Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Griffin McElroy?

  The, not Prince of Persia, the other one.

• 8:35Russ Frushtick?

  Lost Crown.

• 8:35Griffin McElroy?

  The other one that, the Lost Crown, which came out the same year as Rogue Prince of Persia. I thought Rogue Prince of Persia kicked ass.

• 8:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it was good.

• 8:40Griffin McElroy?

  I don't think anybody played it, but it was a pretty cool game. And obviously all the Dead Cells DLC, especially the Castlevania Dead Cells DLC was fantastic.

• 8:48Russ Frushtick?

  I do also need to make a correction and I apologize deeply to the audience. There was actually a side scrolling Castlevania game that came out in 2013. It was a, it was called Castlevania Lords of Shadow Mirror of Fate, and it was exclusive to the 3DS. So I deeply apologize. It was 2013. So we're talking about 13 years since the last 2D side scrolling Castlevania game.

• 9:10Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 9:11Chris Plante?

  Like Grand Theft Auto.

• 9:13Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Griffin McElroy?

  This one had a Grand Theft Auto dev cycle, for sure.

• 9:19Griffin McElroy?

  I, I, Ron, what's your, you, you wanted to come on today and talk about this Castlevania entry. What, what's your relationship? What's your history with Dracula and all of his deeds?

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Well, I'm old enough that I've been playing these games since the NES. So I have a heavy, heavy history, which is playing the original Castlevania. Some of the DS games were some of my favorite games. And I think really that's when they kind of birthed the whole metroidvania genre, right? And

• 9:49Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  And as well as Symphony of the Night, of course, one of my favorite games of all time. And so I was just very excited. I think it kind of goes to this trend that I've been seeing this year of this return to more, what I've just been calling dad core games. I feel like a lot more linear games where

• 10:07Griffin McElroy?

  We're eating good over here this year, I'll say. They're, they're giving us, they're meeting us right where we are. And I appreciate that.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, the only Mousha was very similar dad core style game. And so I was just very excited to dive back in, especially I've been playing cyberpunk for the last couple of months. And to go out of the open world, back into more of this 2D adventure game is something I was very much looking forward to.

• 10:33Russ Frushtick?

  So this game has been incredibly divisive. It has split the Castlevania loving audience in twain. Because there is a contingent

• 10:45Griffin McElroy?

  It has a female, a female protagonist. You can just say

• 10:50Russ Frushtick?

  Surprisingly, that is not, almost always that is the dividing characteristic, but in this case, it does not

• 10:55Griffin McElroy?

  Half the Castlevania games have female protagonists.

• 10:57Russ Frushtick?

  Exactly. They've already checked that box. No need to worry about that. So it didn't bother the audience. The audience seems to be split because, and I'm sure you guys have noticed this too, this game does not even from minute one, feel like a traditional Castlevania game.

• 11:14Griffin McElroy?

  Interesting. What do you, how do you, what do you mean?

• 11:15Russ Frushtick?

  I think just the game feel, the movement around the world feels to me like a much more, I would say physics based experience, rather than the like more, I guess, digital, you think about moving in the world in Symphony of the Night and things like that.

• 11:30Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 11:31Russ Frushtick?

  You don't do like a lot of flinging yourself or slot, you know, there's some sliding, but like usually it's pretty rigid. And this feels very, very different to me.

• 11:39Griffin McElroy?

  This is a good jumping off point. I, I like Ron was very much looking forward to this game. Love Dead Cells, love all the DLC. The trailers look shit hot. I was like, oh, well, I mean, this studio is so good at making this type of game. This is going to be a goat, absolutely. But it's weird. And I do think like, the feel of the game is one of the first humps you kind of have to get over, because it is, it is, it does feel a bit floatier, a bit slower. One of the first traversal abilities that you get in the game, and there's not a ton of those, which is a big complaint I have with it. But one of the first ones you get is like a, you use your whip and you can hook on to different targets in the background. And you can either, if they're purple, you'll sort of zip right up to them, or if they're like

• 12:21Russ Frushtick?

  It's a grapple, essentially.

• 12:22Griffin McElroy?

  It's a grapple, but then there's yellow rings where you'll swing on those. So then you have kind of an arc that you can release at certain points and, you know, either fly forwards or upwards, depending on when you let go. There's a good wind up before you execute this, this maneuver every single time, that takes some getting used to. Like you're going to beef these jumps many, many times until you get used to the fact that like, you're gonna have to start winding up that sort of grapple move, a little bit before you think you're gonna need to. And I think eventually it works out, and then it starts to feel kind of good. Like it has like a really nice momentum to it. But it, it does, it feels kind of, I don't know, it feels a little bit more, not clunky is

• 13:05Griffin McElroy?

  not the right word, but it just a little bit floatier than, than usual.

• 13:08Russ Frushtick?

  It felt to me almost like Spider-Man-esque, because you have these moments where you'll go through like platforming sequences, and you'll need to like jump over a pit of spikes, and then while you're falling, whip yourself up. And that delay, even though it does make it more challenging, also, I think increases some of the tension of those moments, where you feel like you're making that last minute, like, reach up to latch on to the thing. So I did, I, I kind of, it clicked for me, but you're right, it did take some time to get used to the timing.

• 13:37Griffin McElroy?

  I don't think there's a ton of really groundbreaking stuff it's doing with the traversal. I think the exploration's great.

• 13:44Russ Frushtick?

  I think being able to latch, latch on to any enemy is pretty

• 13:48Griffin McElroy?

  That is very cool. Yeah. So sometimes you'll be looking up a tower and think like, how the fuck am I supposed to get up there? There's no like lasso points. And then you realize like, oh, there's Medusa heads. I can chain, chain between those. The exploration's great. I'm maybe like 97% done, like with, I feel pretty compelled to

• 14:06Russ Frushtick?

  Overachiever.

• 14:06Griffin McElroy?

  My last area that I have, well, I've really been enjoying exploring the world. And I've gotten really used to the kind of traversal mechanics. But it's not, it's not necessarily breaking the mold in terms of like what you're able to do. The only ability that kind of is new in the sort of traversal department is you have this halo of light that you get pretty early on, that you activate just by holding in the trigger. And when you, when you do that, you can do it right when an enemy hits you, and it will do like a parry mechanic, which feels very cool. And then there's certain, you know, things you can equip that kind of benefit that. But there are these sort of floating rocks, like these floating rocky platforms that you will pass through if you are holding in the halo. And you will not pass through if you're not. So sometimes you need those

• 14:51Griffin McElroy?

  to be there. So you can bounce off them or use them as a floor over spikes. And sometimes you need to hold it in, so that you can, you know, make your way through those. And if you release the trigger with bad timing, while you're inside of one of those rocky walls, it'll hurt you quite badly.

• 15:04Russ Frushtick?

  Which is true to life.

• 15:06Griffin McElroy?

  True to life. Yeah, sure. If you are enclosed in a wall, it would hurt you. But again, like, I don't know that, it never feels like super great. And it never, there have been so many search action games that have done so much interesting stuff with traversal, things like Well Dweller. The very first thing you get is you have a matchstick, and then you can slingshot it into the wall, and then it turns into like a kind of diving board. And like, that's cool. Like, that's not something I've really seen before in, in a game.

• 15:34Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. Ron, did you play Lost Crown, Prince of Persia: Lost Crown?

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:39Russ Frushtick?

  That game, didn't you, like, do you remember that game having like crazy unlocks with like teleport, where your weapon is and shit like that? Like, that was what I was hoping for here. And I don't think this game is quite as ambitious.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  No, I can say ambition is kind of where this game lacks. To me, this is a classic, like, 7 out of 10 game that feels somewhat hemstrung by, I mean, I'm just guessing, but it feels like by budget, because from some of the animation style and the use of the lock mouth animation, when the characters are talking to you, you never really get any like animated back and forth with it. And for me, a part of it, where I, I really enjoy a lot of the traversal mechanics. And to me, this game really gets you into a nice, it's one of those flow state games that when it's working, you feel it, and you're flowing, and you're moving quick, and you're seeing everything as it goes. But

• 16:31Speaker 03

  it's also a game where that can knock you back out of that flow state quickly. And then you're just like over and over getting murdered by these clear blocks that you keep crushing yourself under. And then you're like, I don't even want to play for another 15 more minutes. And the thing that was frustrating to me is that I really love the cutscenes and the art style that it portrays. And then when you go back into the game, you're dealing with more what I would call, it almost feels like a cell phone game style aesthetic, where you have these beautiful backgrounds, and then the characters feel a little cheaper animated above them, to where it's just kind of this mixed match where I like, sometimes I like the art style of the game, and sometimes I really don't.

• 17:13Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, they've leveraged a lot of the Castlevania like anime, I think, for the, for the aesthetic. The game takes place in, in Paris, which is basically from minute one, like on fire and under assault from Dracula and his forces. And it really feels very much like the, like, like the anime. It has that, it has that same look. But yeah, the, I would agree with that. Like, the backdrops are stunning. There's some like where you have all of Paris in the background, and it just looks like absolutely remarkable. But I don't know that the, the foreground stuff is really much to write

• 17:44Russ Frushtick?

  I liked that they were able to take some swings with designs on Castlevania, like staples, like the peeping eye enemy that flies around, or like the axe armor and things like that. Like, you will see a lot of, I think, familiar Castlevania characters. And historically, what they've basically done is just reuse the sprites that they made back in Symphony of the Night days. And they kept reusing them for like newer Castlevania games. And here they've like completely redone all of them. So I have not been as put off by the, the visuals, even foreground visuals. I agree, the background's stunning. Voice acting, eh, not the best, but quite honestly, like

• 18:24Griffin McElroy?

  Voice acting not the best. Writing, writing's super not the best.

• 18:28Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, super not the best.

• 18:29Griffin McElroy?

  There's, a big mechanic in the game is you have this deck of tarot cards. And each card basically is assigned to a different boss that you will have to hunt down at some point throughout the game. And the game starts you out with like three of them, that you have like a smaller part of the world that you're gonna go through and like really kind of learn the ropes, maybe unlock a mechanic or two. And every time you beat a boss, you get their arcana, which is the equivalent of, you know, the special items in earlier Castlevania games, your axe, your

• 19:00Russ Frushtick?

  They're magic spells, basically.

• 19:02Griffin McElroy?

  Or in the newer ones, things like the, you know, the magic spells from your Dawn of Sorrow, and, and the like. You can only equip one at a time. And there are like little subquests you get every time you unlock one of those arcana to like, make them stronger. There's like little boons that you can unlock as you like do these little subquests. But you can only equip one at a time, which I thought was kind of weird. Like in most of the newer Castlevania games, and when I say newer, I mean, from the early 2000s, you know, you're equipping like a suite of them. And in all of those games, you unlock the ability to like tap the trigger and switch between like an A suite and a B suite. So you have six different things equipped at any given time. And then this one, I don't

• 19:45Griffin McElroy?

  know, it hims you in a little bit more. And of the dozen or so powers, I've gotten all of them at this point.

• 19:54Griffin McElroy?

  I use maybe three of like only three of them that are like that feel pretty good and feel pretty game changing and are like useful at all in in in boss fights. But the Arcana is also the storytelling kind of conceit because you're like having to hunt people down and learn clues about where they're located and like maybe some secret about the area that they resided. And eventually, as you unlock more of them, they'll just they'll just chirp at you a lot. Like you beat Medusa and you get the Medusa card and then Medusa is like, you fucking suck, Rose, like constantly. So there is, there's a, I don't know, there's a lot of characters talking without moving their mouth.

• 20:30Russ Frushtick?

  I did like the puzzle stuff, though. There are a few puzzles in the game tied to those Arcana cards where you like actually need to think about like, oh, how could I figure this out? There are some well-hidden secrets tied to like fast travel, uh, which made me smile just because like with Mina the Hollow coming out earlier this year, uh, there are some similarities there. So there, I think it's an interesting game. I, I do, like Griffin, feel compelled to keep playing because I'm enjoying my time. Ron, are you sort of in the same boat? And I have not been talking about Plant because I think Plant, correct me if I'm wrong, kind of bounced pretty quick.

• 21:08Griffin McElroy?

  Well, I, I have thoughts. I'll, I'll, I'll go after Ron, yeah.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think, again, there's a loyalty I have to this style of game and I enjoy the exploration and, and the, I think at a base level, just watching the map open up for me is always something that I enjoy, uh, in my mind. So I think I will keep going on it. I think it's a perfect type, you know, I travel all the time. It's a perfect triple travel game to just pick up a little bit and put down. I will say, uh, what do you guys think about the, the, kind of the overall world design and layout? Cause I feel like it's been a little less intuitive than most Castlevania games to me where there's some like, oh, I need to, whereas, you know, there's always special moment where you hit, hit a wall and this wall disappears and you go through, but some

• 21:51Speaker 03

  of those have been like necessary parts of moving forward and they don't seem like they have any clue that showed you it was there to me. I might've missed it in the cards, so I'm, I might be the wrong one here, but there seem some parts where it's just like, okay, I, I don't know how I would've gotten further if I hadn't just looked up a walkthrough real quick.

• 22:10Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, there, I definitely hit a few of those as I've like tried to, uh, you know, I've gotten to the final boss and didn't do it. I want to like go through. So in, in clearing out areas, I've definitely found some things that are like, why the, how the fuck, I wouldn't have found this unless I was at 99% of this area anyway and just like trying to jump through every wall. That's kind of unintuitive. They do signal some of that stuff pretty well. There's usually a little mouse or rat that you will see by breakable walls, um, which is never communicated to you, but like after seeing it enough times that, I don't know, I, I picked it up as a clue. Um, there is, there's some stuff I don't want to spoil that brings the world together and makes like, uh, doubling back and going back to earlier areas like so much easier.

• 22:54Griffin McElroy?

  And Russ alluded to it, uh, earlier. It's like a pretty cool, it's one of the cooler moments in the game. It's one of the cooler kind of areas in the game. So like, it does eventually, I think, get, get to the point where the world feels a little bit more cohesive and a lot easier to kind of get around. Uh, but again, like it doesn't show its hand in, in that regard.

• 23:13Russ Frushtick?

  I also think once, for people that might find it a little too linear, uh, I do find that once you get to the castle, spoiler alert, there's a, there's a fucking Draco's castles in it. Uh, once you get to the castle, it starts to feel structurally much more similar to the Symphony of the Knights and things like that, where you have this huge fucking castle to explore and you really do have a lot of freedom in terms of how you approach it. Like you could go to a lot of different bosses.

• 23:40Chris Plante?

  Structurally speaking, how stable does that castle seem?

• 23:43Russ Frushtick?

  Hard.

• 23:44Griffin McElroy?

  Not, not very, man.

• 23:45Russ Frushtick?

  Very dangerous.

• 23:46Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, it's too bad. Chris, how are you, how are you feeling? Cause I know this search action is not usually your, your cup of tea.

• 23:51Chris Plante?

  Yeah, it was, I played probably, I don't know, three hours of this on a flight back from New York to California. And Ron, what you were saying about traveling, this genre is just perfect for that because it's, there's a compulsion when you play these games. There's always like some new piece of the map to unlock. And I feel like this and Rogue Lights, they, they have a really high floor as genre. Like they're basically going to be a seven out of 10, no matter what, because you just are gonna wanna keep moving. And I found it really fine, like while, while I was on the plane and had zero desire to

• 24:31Chris Plante?

  go back to it the second I was not held captive by, you know, seat 28F on United Airlines. You know, it was, it, it feels like an utterly fine Metroidvania. And as somebody who is not in love with the genre and who kind of almost bristles against that compulsion where I feel like, am I playing this because I enjoy it or am I playing it just because I want to like keep moving? I, I, I, yeah, I bounced off it pretty hard. Again, I don't think it's bad. I think it does exactly what it's doing really well. It just has, probably because it is a genre that tends to do, like have a, a high floor,

• 25:15Chris Plante?

  there's so much competition. There is so many Metroidvanias you could be playing. You could go back and look at Besties and Resties combined over the last year and probably find 20 great Metroidvanias. You could probably go back an episode and find a better Metroidvania.

• 25:32Griffin McElroy?

  And we just talked about Echo Weaver. I don't know if it's a better, I don't know if Echo Weaver's a better Metroidvania, but it definitely does more interesting.

• 25:38Russ Frushtick?

  It's more ambitious.

• 25:38Griffin McElroy?

  Stuff.

• 25:39Chris Plante?

  Or Well Dweller. Like, I mean.

• 25:41Griffin McElroy?

  Or Well Dweller, yeah. I, I, I mean, this thing like, I, this is, this is what I've kind of struggled with is like this, I realize this is kind of an unfair position to take, but I was expecting this game to be an all-timer just because of the, the lineage of, of, of the developer and just how long it's been in development and how long it's been since we've had a 2D Castlevania game. And there's a lot I like. We haven't really talked about the combat that much. I think the combat kicks ass, like especially when you're like whipping around to enemies and comboing them and stomping on another one.

• 26:09Russ Frushtick?

  More so like, we compare that to the combat of like old school Castlevania, which is just like jump attack, jump attack.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Best combat in any Castlevania game.

• 26:17Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 26:17Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's terrific. And you get locked into enemy arenas and usually that's a thing that when it happens in Castlevania games, I'm like, fuck. And then this one, I'm like, all right, let's, let's party. Let's go. Um, but for all the stuff it does right, there's like, there are just things about it that just feel like a pretty obvious miss. Uh, there are relics that you equip. You don't unlock armor or enemies aren't dropping armor or weapons or weapons are found like on the map. There's a few different ones. Uh, there's like eight, I think, different categories of weapons and they do feel different and it's, it's cool finding those, uh, especially like the legendary weapons, which are usually all kind of like callbacks from past Castlevania. Like that, that stuff's pretty cool. But in lieu of like, you're finding armor and equipping it and, and, you know, customizing

• 26:59Griffin McElroy?

  yourself that way, you have three relic slots and the relics are, you know, those fill the, um, you know, this function that exists in every modern Castlevania game, uh, you know, Hollow Knight has them, Silk Song has them.

• 27:12Russ Frushtick?

  Their passive abilities.

• 27:14Griffin McElroy?

  They're little passive things and those, there's like 30 of them and almost all of them are, feel point, like feel absolutely used. So there's not like a carrot on a stick constantly that it, I feel like other Castlevania games have done a way better job of kind of tapping into.

• 27:29Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, maybe you're farming souls or something like that and there's none of that here.

• 27:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, there's experience, you're like leveling up, but it's, that's like flat statistic kind of things that really, you don't really feel that much. Um, so yeah, man, I don't know.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  I was just in agreement with you that it was a game, or excuse me, maybe even with Chris, who's, we talked about where I just would play this and similar, like when we were playing Beast of Incarnation where I just kept being like, oh, there's older versions of this that I need to go back and play that are better than this that I fell off of. And so like playing this, I just like, oh, I need to go replay Ori and the Will of the Wisp because I never beat that. And that game is like one of the most gorgeous games I've ever seen in my life. And it was like you said, just a kind of a disappointment because I was, I'm a big fan of Dead Cells and a big fan of Metroidvania in general. So I, I like you was like, oh, this is going to be one of the sleeper best games of the year. People are going to not know that this is the banger of the year.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  And then I came out of it being like, it was okay. I'm glad they made it. If they want to give it another shot, I think they could do an even better job, but it, um, yeah, I think right now with there's so much going on, so much competition is certainly a game that you could miss and then come back and get it cheaper and, and not, you know, miss out on anything.

• 28:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I, I, I mostly agree. I, I'm, I think maybe a little bit, uh, higher on it, uh, but I agree, like there are unquestionably better Metroidvanias that have even come out this year. So, uh, if you're really trying to make a decision, uh, you have a lot of options. But as, in terms of like re-reviving this franchise has essentially been dead.

• 29:06Griffin McElroy?

  I think it's a good job.

• 29:07Russ Frushtick?

  Pretty fucking good start.

• 29:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, like it's a, it's a, it's a really good game. I'm about to a hundred percent. Like obviously I've enjoyed my time with it and, and want to see it through. But this is like the, the thing I keep coming back to is like, it's, it's a, it's an infuriating 8.5. Where it's like, man, I really thought this was gonna fucking, I really thought this was gonna be a great.

• 29:26Russ Frushtick?

  It feels a lot like a first draft and I, I would love to see a similar arc to what Mercury's theme did with the Metroid franchise where they did, uh, Samus Returns, which was a 3DS game, which I really liked, but like it was, it was okay. And then continued to like make those games and each one, I mean, we don't know what the third one is, but Metroid Dread fucking rock socks. So I could see the studio getting the baseline down and then really going nuts with it, but we'll see.

• 29:54Chris Plante?

  I also do wonder like how fast this game needed to be made because Rogue Prince of Persia came out last year, like last fall, right?

• 30:03Russ Frushtick?

  Like it's. Yeah, I don't know how big the studio is.

• 30:06Chris Plante?

  And I mean, either way, shipping a new Prince of Persia game and a new Castlevania game, both of which I'd not had games forever, like that's a, a lot of pressure and a lot of work in a very short amount of time.

• 30:19Russ Frushtick?

  True.

• 30:20Chris Plante?

  So I don't, yeah, I don't know what's going on, but it makes me think that if they had a more of a single focus on a game, things might go even better next time.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I mean, just from watching it, it feels like they needed more money.

• 30:32Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Russ Frushtick?

  Send it to them, Ron.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I gotta sell my arcade.

• 30:37Griffin McElroy?

  Well, I'll change my mind.

• 30:40Griffin McElroy?

  Let's take a quick break and then find out finally what the fuck a Wings of Thev even is.

• 30:49Russ Frushtick?

  This episode of The Besties is sponsored by Alienware. You know, gaming today isn't one thing. It moves between cozy, chaotic, and everything in between. One minute you're exploring something slow and immersive, the next you're in a fast-paced match. And somewhere in there, you might be creating, streaming, or seeing where the session goes. That's why Alienware systems are built with the performance to handle it all. With Nvidia GeForce RTX, it delivers powerful graphics that bring every world to life while optimizing battery life. So whether you're playing, creating, or jumping between both, everything runs the way it should. No interruptions, no slowing down. You don't have to adjust the way you play. You just keep gaming your way, however that looks in the moment. Be more Alien at Alienware.com/gameyourway.

• 31:37Griffin McElroy?

  Chris Plant, what is a, what is an Ace Combat, Ace Wings of Thev? Who is Thev and why, why are their wings so important to us?

• 31:45Chris Plante?

  I feel like I really misled all of you. It turns out that it's Thief. It's a Wings of Thief. I can see how you got confused from the last time we spoke.

• 31:56Griffin McElroy?

  Because of the spelling and it's not really-

• 31:57Chris Plante?

  Because of everything. Yeah, yeah, that's probably it. Ace Combat.

• 32:01Russ Frushtick?

  You, oh-

• 32:02Griffin McElroy?

  You've been saying Thief?

• 32:02Speaker 03

  I've been saying Thief. I just thought, I was like, I felt silly.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  I was like, it's Thev, but you know, I'm like, E, Thief, I'm into it.

• 32:13Griffin McElroy?

  It makes sense. The silent E usually does make the other E sound sound-

• 32:16Chris Plante?

  Ron, have you ever played any of these Ace Combat games?

• 32:19Speaker 03

  I've played most games, yes. I've played a little bit of Ace Combat. Can't say it's one of my genres, but um, I've been hearing a lot of good things about this game and I'm always a big fan of like, if there's a big buzz about it, I might even give it a try, even if it's not my style. So I'm, I'm with bated breath waiting to hear what you gotta say.

• 32:39Chris Plante?

  Here's my pitch to you. You've probably played, everybody, you know the idea. You're, you're flying around in your, your superjet. You're participating in wars in a world that looks like ours, but is not ours. You're shooting down enemies.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  You're listening to the eighties rock music.

• 32:53Chris Plante?

  And that feels kinda samey. Yeah. Like, what, what could we add to that to make it feel really special? What if, uh, it was like the beginning of Top Gun, except Tom Cruise dies while you are in the plane with him, and then he gets somehow transported into your brain, and now is the voice in your head telling you what to do while you're hanging out with your friends?

• 33:16Russ Frushtick?

  Now, is, what is, what is Tom Cruise telling us? Cause that's a little worrying. He might have some perspectives.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  In like, uh, like a, like a cyberpunk V type of way, or, or in a way where you're just, you've had a traumatic experience and now you really got PTSD and you should-

• 33:34Russ Frushtick?

  Do they explain it?

• 33:35Speaker 03

  Be-

• 33:36Chris Plante?

  I, I would say more on the V side, more of he is quite literally in your head, while it is also playing with like ideas of like, are you the ghost of Thief? Are you going to like be able to save the day? Are you the, you know, the Baba Yaga? What is it? Uh, like the, the, the mysterious force that people tell their children at night to make sure that they either feel terrified or safe.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  The Golden Child, from the movie The Golden Child.

• 34:04Chris Plante?

  So, the, the-

• 34:05Russ Frushtick?

  So, sorry, Thief, Thief is Tom Cruise in this case?

• 34:08Chris Plante?

  Thief is like an idea of the like lead fighter in the, in your, your squadron, basically. So you, I, I, I believe, kind of become Thief, as in like you are, well Thief is a place first, but the Wings of Thief is like this idea of-

• 34:26Russ Frushtick?

  They're like the Blue Angels.

• 34:27Chris Plante?

  A great fighter. Sure, yes, that's a way of putting it. So you, uh, spend the game, there's like 30 missions and it's a mission-based structure, and, uh, before a mission, you hang out with your friends on your tiny little, uh, aircraft carrier, because basically your entire

• 34:45Chris Plante?

  nation doesn't exist anymore. You are effectively down to an aircraft carrier.

• 34:51Russ Frushtick?

  It's like the Terminal.

• 34:52Chris Plante?

  And you're like, yes, sure, thank you. It's just like the movie The Terminal. And you, uh, have to rebuild and reclaim your nation by pushing back these like way, way, way more powerful forces. And a mission, like early on, it's a lot of like, go in, knock out a few like, uh, of their planes and get out. And it's just very basic. And then it's like, ooh, we're getting a little more powerful. We're feeling a little more confident. We've got some friends with us. It'll be like, the, whatever big powerful weapon they have, we don't know what it is yet, is away. You need to go and you need to go bomb one of their ports and maybe we can move into a port.

• 35:32Chris Plante?

  Except, when you do that, what you see first is not this big powerful weapon, but it's whatever it can use to blow you up, which are borderline nukes? Like, these, I mean, humongous skyscraper sized explosions just start going off. And suddenly you just have to perform a traditional mission, shoot planes while dodging these like, again, skyscraper sized explosions. And the game's like progress system is just these increasingly elaborate set pieces, until the point that you are fighting a land cruiser that is itself the size of like a small town that is barreling through cities as you are trying to like bombard it from the air. The easiest way of thinking about it is

• 36:17Chris Plante?

  like, it's just an anime. It looks realistic, like they're trying to go for like the very real looking aesthetic, but in terms of story and missions, you are doing increasingly impossible things after starting from a really realistic spot.

• 36:34Russ Frushtick?

  Does it, uh, follow a similar cycle to like, sorry, what's the mech game that FromSoft makes?

• 36:40Chris Plante?

  Armored Core.

• 36:41Russ Frushtick?

  Does, does it feel like Armored Core?

• 36:43Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I mean, that's a good way of putting it, because the actual gameplay is, oh, I have a really base level machine, but I'm going to, over the course of the game, unlock this tree that gives me better and better planes, and I can add my own little, you know, gizmos to it.

• 36:58Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 36:58Chris Plante?

  And similar to Armored Core, ahead of the mission, you can say, well, I know that I'm gonna be the plane that's focusing on taking out the ground stationary troops. So I wanna bomber plane, I wanna like put these sorts of weapons in it. Um, you might have a mission where you wanna take out ground forces, but you don't wanna set off a like massive fuel pipeline explosion. So you're like, okay, I want ground-based weapons, I want a slower plane, and I wanna know, make sure like whatever I'm bombing with is very precise and doesn't have like massive radius damage. Or you could end up doing like the opposite. You could be focused on air and you could have a ultra-fast plane with really tight handling and really sharp homing missiles, if you're focusing on your air

• 37:41Chris Plante?

  squadron. Because you also have these like, in like AI NPC characters who are on your squadron, you can also set those to handle whatever you aren't handling.

• 37:51Russ Frushtick?

  Sure, that makes sense.

• 37:53Griffin McElroy?

  Is this the, is this the one for me? Is this the Ace Combat game for me?

• 37:58Russ Frushtick?

  Is this the crossover?

• 37:58Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Chris Plante?

  This is, yes and no. If you have ever been curious about this sort of game, even mildly curious, and you like just action games, it's definitely worth a try. Like, it's absolutely worth a try. It moves very fast. The story is like compelling enough. It's doing interesting things. These games always do more than you would think about their ideas on war. This is a game very much about like propaganda. You, both you and the enemy are constantly altering images and videos to try to like mislead the public, and that is like where you are creating the myth around your character. And there'll be a mission where like, you think the mission is one thing, and then you realize, oh, your entire mission was based off of doctored images, and

• 38:43Chris Plante?

  you have been like lured into a trap. So like, the story is good. It's mostly like the action. If you are going to love going a gajillion miles per hour chasing, you know, enemy drones, and then realizing that they've basically taken you right to the cliffside of a mountain, and you're gonna pull up as sharp as you can, and like feel the rocks like colliding underneath like the belly of your plane, only to like get over the mountain and realize that is where like the entire enemy forces are waiting, and suddenly you're in a dogfight. That feeling that like, oh, this is, I am in Top Gun, it does it. It nails it. I also just know that like, that is

• 39:26Chris Plante?

  not one of the most widespread fantasies in the world. It, it feels like relatively niche. It feels like, you know, you like to go to, uh, the hobby store and, you know, like recreate World War II soldiers. Um-

• 39:42Chris Plante?

  And yet, I don't know, like, it seems like it's selling well. It seems like it is finding more and more of an audience with each release. I just don't know if this is quite the, um, it's certainly not the Dark Souls breaks big moment. I'm not even sure it's the Armored Core breaks big moment. Um, but it is a really good game for people who like this sort of game.

• 40:02Griffin McElroy?

  I'm, I'm curious, but I.

• 40:04Russ Frushtick?

  Ron, is this gonna, does this sounds like something you would want to try?

• 40:09Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 40:13Russ Frushtick?

  I'm sort of in the same boat as I still can't really see how this is different necessarily from the games that I haven't clicked with me.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  I think if everything, I so hate that everything's so price point based, but if I find it and I'm like, oh, it's under $20 and I got nothing going on and I'm in between games, it sounds like that's, oh, I've been hearing great things about this. It's not my type of game, but I'll give it a shot for a weekend and see if I like it. It feels like that type of game for me, but it's certainly not, um, yeah, that's just not my type of fantasy. And I just don't think it's in my wheelhouse. And it's just a year and right now we're in a series of, there's just so many great, I haven't played Control Resonant. I haven't played so many good games. So I can't see me jump into that currently, but maybe next year.

• 40:55Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 40:56Chris Plante?

  The price point thing is, is spot on because right now, if you are the type of person who's gonna play this on the hardest difficulty where you can completely control your plane and you can do bonkers barrel rolls and turns like that, that obviously you've already bought the game and you're enjoying it. If you are the sort of person who's gonna play it, like I prefer it on the kind of like normal difficulty where it's more just about experiencing the missions, it feels like the most glossy version of a Earth Defense Force type of game. Which I guess is a weird comparison because that's bugs and cities, but it is like go in, have a mission, blow up a whole bunch of stuff. A really weird, surprising things happen. It's a great, cool, skeptical,

• 41:41Chris Plante?

  finish mission, go land, go do next mission. And that like, it's, it's almost Arcady in that sense. And yeah, with, with games costing a gajillion dollars, that is a tough sell. Um, also, I don't think it runs on any of the portable handhelds.

• 41:57Griffin McElroy?

  It does not.

• 41:58Russ Frushtick?

  Big time now.

• 41:59Chris Plante?

  The clouds look unbelievable in this game. I also thought they looked really good in the last game and that ran on handhelds. Um, but, but yeah, they made a choice to, uh, go even deeper into realism and that means it runs on fewer places.

• 42:16Russ Frushtick?

  If, if people can get like Ace Combat 7 for a steal, should they just do that?

• 42:22Chris Plante?

  I don't think that that is a bad idea. I think that, I, I think if you are curious about the series and you don't want to spend a lot of money upfront, do that. And if you like it, obviously, this is, I think this is a more welcoming and I think even better game than seven, but I think seven gives you a plenty of an idea of what you can expect here.

• 42:41Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Chris Plante?

  Uh, cool.

• 42:44Russ Frushtick?

  Looks like seven has gone down to as far as $10. So.

• 42:47Griffin McElroy?

  God dang. Not bad. Um, you want to read this reader mail?

• 42:51Russ Frushtick?

  Sure. Uh, this comes from Lemon Puddin'. Uh, not that we're hurting on Metroidvanias, but we have another Metroidvania recommendation. Not sure if y'all checked it out already, but I strongly recommend looking at Silver Pines. It's a 2.5D horror Metroidvania that came out last week from a team of five people that's got a huge Silent Hill, old school Resident Evil slash Twin Peaks vibe to it. I think Griffin particularly would love it since he likes things like Signalis and Crow Country. I finished it last night and it was a truly special experience and I couldn't recommend it more. That sounds really good.

• 43:24Griffin McElroy?

  It's in the cart.

• 43:25Russ Frushtick?

  It's in the cart.

• 43:26Griffin McElroy?

  Forget about it, baby. It's in a, you got the discounted bundle with Alan Wake, which I already own. It's in the cart, baby.

• 43:32Russ Frushtick?

  Done.

• 43:33Griffin McElroy?

  Don't even worry about it.

• 43:34Russ Frushtick?

  That sounds cool.

• 43:35Griffin McElroy?

  No, this, this does look, uh, this does look really neat.

• 43:37Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I've heard some really good things about it.

• 43:39Griffin McElroy?

  It's overwhelmingly positive on Steam. That always carries quite a bit of weight.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  I'm adding it to cart myself.

• 43:44Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, we're selling some copies today.

• 43:47Griffin McElroy?

  Um, any honorable mentions? Ron, you been playing anything else?

• 43:50Russ Frushtick?

  Seeing anything? It's up to you. Anything, you can talk about anything you want. It could be games.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Um, I'll start with games and then end with one that I imagine everybody might have already been talking about. Um, I finished Cyberpunk, including the DLC, one of my favorite games.

• 44:05Griffin McElroy?

  DLC's so good.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Loved it. A great game. Oh my God. You're right. And the DLC makes me go like, oh, these regular missions suck ass.

• 44:15Griffin McElroy?

  Markedly better.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  So much better. So much twists and turns, great boss fights. So much better. Um, one of my favorite games of all time. Don't, don't enjoy any time I had to go into anyone's brain and relive their things and investigate. Feel like that was one of the worst parts of that game, but other than, yeah, other than that, loved it.

• 44:35Russ Frushtick?

  Did you, did you know they're, they're releasing a new patch with new missions like in a minute?

• 44:40Speaker 03

  I heard that, but they, this is too late for me. I'm out now.

• 44:43Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, you're done.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Uh, but I'm excited for the new season of Edgerunners. I want to see that. Um, and then I've been playing a new rogue light fighting game called Polyfighter, uh, that I've been really enjoying. I don't think it's multiplayer, which it might be the one thing that's holding it back because I love that, you know, it's basically, you go through the fighters kind of look like Tobal number one, a high res version of that, which I.

• 45:08Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, I love the art style.

• 45:09Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, this looks cool.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  And so, and then every time you beat a fighter, you get to choose whether you're gonna take a special, a dash move, or just like a regular attack from them. And then they have some passive abilities. I ended up with a dash that would refill a small portion of your health, uh, which turned out to be very game breaking because I just kept dashing the entire match. Every time I knocked someone down, um, I think it's really silly fun. Another great playing game for me when I just need to pick something up for a minute and, and play it. And I'm really enjoying that game. And then of course I went and saw, um, You Can See Everything and it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. And I can't recommend it enough. And Nathan Fielder's a genius. And I don't throw, I, a lot of people in this business throw that word around a lot. I don't.

• 45:53Griffin McElroy?

  I've never heard you say that.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  Never. None of you are geniuses.

• 45:55Griffin McElroy?

  You're usually extremely critical.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  But I think it's one of the smartest and, uh, just the Abbott and Costello scene alone is just some of the best comedic and, and just intelligence work I've ever seen. So if you get a chance to go see that movie, go see it.

• 46:11Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. If you can, uh, try to go in blind if you can and just go off of.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  I did. I didn't even know who that lady was.

• 46:18Griffin McElroy?

  I knew very little about Elizabeth Holmes before I went into that. They do a good job of kind of explaining, I would say in the first 30 minutes of the 176 minute runtime that that movie demands. And I would stick around for another 170, easy. Uh, I, I, it's such a good theater going experience. Cause everybody in the room is suspended in the same state of, you know, hands clasped over mouth, not like in horror, but just in, uh, absolute disbelief. It's, it's like a, a mirror, uh, into another reality. Uh, and it's, it's really trans, so much clapping. Like, did you, did you all have a ton of clapping in your theater?

• 46:58Russ Frushtick?

  We didn't have a lot of clapping.

• 46:59Griffin McElroy?

  No, just a lot of gasping.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  We had a lot of clapping, a lot of laughter, a lot of people talking. It was just, as a person who works in comedy and loves comedy, it was so beautiful to see a theater full of people laughing at a comedy movie. And it was just so much fun, so enjoyable. And at the base level, I love this idea of what if you take a very direct, neurodiverse autistic person and drop them in a world of two narcissists who created a world of illusion? And it's beautiful.

• 47:30Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, it's such a good extension, I feel like of, uh, of the rehearsal. Like I, it feels very much like a, uh, obviously it's a different format, but they do get into some of the kind of, uh, deep, ambitious recreation shit that they do in, in rehearsal. Uh, and if you are someone who has followed Nathan Fielder's career, it's like a really, I think, uh, an important part of the, of his oeuvre.

• 47:56Russ Frushtick?

  It's been very interesting to see because I've seen people react like very extremely to this movie in the negative sense as well. And I think a lot of it has to do with like how you're interpreting Nathan's approach and what his goals are. Um, and, uh, but regardless, I think it's eliciting a very strong reaction, which I think is a successful piece of art.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  That's art, baby.

• 48:19Russ Frushtick?

  Yep. Um, that was mine as well. I, I saw it last night and I was like completely fucking floored. That movie ruled.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, and the biggest recommendation I can give you is I'm not even a big movie guy. I fall asleep during most movies. And when I heard three hours, I'm like, oh, prep for this nap. This is gonna be nap time. And I was incredibly engaged.

• 48:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I did not feel the time at all completely.

• 48:43Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. No, it goes by real quick.

• 48:44Chris Plante?

  Uh, I have another documentary that people clapped and hooted and hollered in, and that is History of Concrete. Uh, this is the new film by John Wilson, another Nathan Fielder project. I believe Nathan Fielder was the producer on it. And another documentarian comedian who started on TV and their project has now evolved into being on film. This is a movie that is a history of concrete, but also not really at all, is about why things just seem to get worse and break and how we invest in things without planning to restore them. Uh, and it is

• 49:24Chris Plante?

  fantastic. It was the loudest comedy environment I have been at in a movie theater in, I like, since I couldn't remember. You would have thought this was like. Peak Apetow, uh, Will Ferrell era of comedy. People were losing it. And I, I get why it's very, very funny. I think it's also a reminder of like, with both of these, we've been trained to watch both Fielder and Wilson at home. And it's already funny alone, which is like a miracle. And then you take that and you take all these people who are used to watching that and you put them in a theater with other people and you get that benefit of like the laughs

• 50:09Chris Plante?

  compounding and it's, it's like a force. It's like people are discovering that they can laugh like that with other people again. And it feels really good.

• 50:19Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, Ron, have you seen any John Wilson stuff?

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Uh, no, I'm familiar with his work. I've seen maybe of some clips of how to, but never watched a full episode.

• 50:28Russ Frushtick?

  It's worth, well, I'm, I'm constantly blown away. I would say very similar to Fielder. I'm not surprised that they work together because, uh, just structurally it's so ambitious and goes in such like interesting directions that you wouldn't necessarily expect. And very honest too, like he puts himself into a lot of the stuff.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  I'm open to it.

• 50:47Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it's good shit.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Watch this.

• 50:49Griffin McElroy?

  Um, I've been playing a little bit of Enshrouded, which came out in 1.0 last week. I, uh, opened up a private server because I played the, the early access with some folks and had a good time. I was like, hell yeah, let's get this going. Let's build a little town to you, but nobody else. It's dipped into the early access.

• 51:07Russ Frushtick?

  Really bad time, Griffin.

• 51:08Griffin McElroy?

  It's, it's a bad time. I'm definitely going to shut down this private server because it's like 20 bucks a month and I, no, thank you. Um, but the single player is also very good. I don't know, I haven't gotten quite far enough into it. Again, I started over basically. I haven't really felt a lot of like the 1.0 shit that's in there, but it's such a solid game, uh, with really fun, like, you know, base building mechanics and, uh, just a great kind of progression loop. Um, I, I've played like 30 minutes of Final Fantasy Resonance, which hopefully I'll be able to talk about more next week because it just came out this week. And I know, I guess it comes out tomorrow, I think, uh, as we're recording this.

• 51:47Russ Frushtick?

  Reviews have been very good.

• 51:48Griffin McElroy?

  The reviews have been pretty good. Uh, it's a, you know, a mobile game that has been pulled from gotcha upon hell, um, to be like a, a real game. Um, and it looks great and I need to spend way more time with it. Um, the thing that I really want to talk about is I've been reading, uh, Terry Pratchett's Discworld books for the first time, which I've never dipped into because there's fucking 41 of them. And that's a lot of books and I've always felt like really, uh, intimidated by it. There's, you know, like six or seven different kind of like storylines that these 41 books weave between.

• 52:30Griffin McElroy?

  And so there's a lot of people who have a lot of thoughts about the order in which you're supposed to read these. Um, but I listened to the, uh, the very first book published in, I think 83, uh, which is called The Color of Magic on, uh, audiobook and it was fantastic. Uh, and then I just finished reading The Light Fantastic, which is the second book, uh, in the series and they're so good. They're so fun and, um, funny. Uh, Justin's been reading them, uh, too, because we were talking about it during the, the besties live show and he described, uh, Terry Pratchett's writing style as like very generous, where it just feels like every paragraph, there's like a good joke, like a joke that lands. And I don't know, I, I think there's also a part of me that really wrote this off as

• 53:14Griffin McElroy?

  like, I'm not, that's like deep nerd shit. Like I'm maybe not, I'm maybe not nerdy enough to hang with the Discworld books. Um, and I realize that that is, you know, a very foolish sort of closed minded thing now because it's, they're just, they're just great, fun, very, uh, irreverent books. Um, I don't know what to read third. I just finished.

• 53:36Russ Frushtick?

  Okay.

• 53:36Griffin McElroy?

  Now it's like.

• 53:37Russ Frushtick?

  I can give you some recommendations.

• 53:38Griffin McElroy?

  The witch, uh, uh, uh, writes, what equal writes is the next in publication order. But then like a lot of people say, hey, jump to the city watch.

• 53:47Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, the city watch stuff is very good. What I would say about, uh, for people that have never gotten into them, part of the reason that I actually don't think that they're, I mean, a lot of nerds read them, don't get me wrong, myself included. Uh, his writing is primarily satirical and so it's less about, we're going to like go in the fucking depths of like how these magic candles work and blah, blah, blah, blah. The whole world, even though it's fantasy, is really just an analog for our own world. So he has like a wizard bank, but effectively it's, it's run like a bank and it's, so it has corruption and it has all these elements to it that are just satire of our own life. So I actually think it's maybe much more approachable than something like Lord of the Rings, which is like so far afield from anything that we know from a day to day basis.

• 54:32Russ Frushtick?

  Um, so yeah, I, I would, I agree. That's where I started as well, was with the two Rinse Wind books, Color of Magic and Light Fantastic. And then from there, yeah, I would just like.

• 54:43Griffin McElroy?

  Seems like you can get, there's like five different books you could jump to.

• 54:45Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 54:46Griffin McElroy?

  If you want to continue the Rinse Wind stuff or, or jump to a different.

• 54:49Russ Frushtick?

  Right. Different protagonists that have different focuses and things like that, but they're all largely great and, you know, uh, there's just so much. It was a, I was crushed when he, uh, died. Uh, it was such a sad thing, but it's great that he has such a huge catalog.

• 55:05Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. How, have you like, of the bulk of the 41, like Discworld books, have you like read most?

• 55:12Russ Frushtick?

  So I read them pretty extensively when I was like in late teens and like mid twenties.

• 55:19Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, wow.

• 55:20Russ Frushtick?

  So it's been years and years and years. I probably in that span, probably read about 20 of them. They're very quick to read.

• 55:25Griffin McElroy?

  They are very, very easy reads. Yeah. Um, all right. I think that's it, right?

• 55:30Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Russ Frushtick?

  We did it.

• 55:33Griffin McElroy?

  Ron, do you, can you tell us once again about your new special coming out?

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Sure. Again, it's called Eat Cookies and Die. It will be on the Gorilla Plus Comedy App November 2nd. Uh, and you can use code word Funches. You don't have to spend any money at all. Use code word Funches, it'll give you a free week trial and then I will go online and tell you to cancel and you don't have to worry about it, but it will truly help me out and they'll be like, oh, Ron gets people over here. Let's get him more money to put more specials out and that'd be really helpful for me. Um, but if that's too much to ask, then just set up your calendar for December 1st. Go on to 800 Pound Gorilla YouTube or go over to my Ron Funches YouTube. I would probably prefer that. And then come and watch the special there.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Give me a follow and then just share it and tell people is the best you can do. Cause I've been working on this for a good five years and, and I'm so excited to have it actually come out and I just want people to see it. If they like it, they like it. If you don't, you don't. I worked my ass off on this, so please check it out.

• 56:34Russ Frushtick?

  I'm so excited for you. That's awesome. I can't imagine how exciting that must be to finally get to the point where you can release the special.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  Oh, it's been a whole thing. It was a whole thing and now I have different managers because of it.

• 56:50Griffin McElroy?

  Hey, thank you for listening. Thank you to our patrons who have gone over to patreon.com slash the besties, uh, where you can support us and our show directly and get access to, uh, episodes of the resties. Where Russ and Chris talk about the games that we don't cover here on the besties, uh, and also our monthly bracket battle episodes. Uh, do you want to talk about some of our backers?

• 57:11Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, I would love to. Uh, some recent backers, we have Luke L, we have Nelson L, we have Parsnippi and we have Hongo Hippo. Thank you for being backers. Thank you to everyone else for being backers. We greatly, greatly appreciate you. You guys rock.

• 57:26Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, Chris, you want to tell us about the games we talked about today?

• 57:29Chris Plante?

  Oh man, we talked about so many games. We talked about Castlevania, Belmont's Curse. We had talked about Ace Combat 8, Wings of Thieves. We also talked about a lot of films like History of Concrete and you can see everything. And we got Polyfighter, Cyberpunk and Shrouded 1.0 and Final Fantasy Resonance.

• 57:46Griffin McElroy?

  Thank you all so much for listening. Next week, we're going to be talking about Nintendo Switch Sports Resort. So get those bowling arms ready. Is bowling in it?

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:56Griffin McElroy?

  Get those, get those bowling balls ready, baby. Cause we're shooting for strikes and shouldn't you listen to that? And every week on the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games?

• 58:08Speaker 03

  Land the plane!