398 episodes
The Besties Chris Plante, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, Russ Frushtick
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- Leisure
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4.9 • 4.7K Ratings
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It's Game of the Year meets King of the Hill as four of Earth's best friends – Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, Chris Plante, and Russ Frushtick – rank and review their favorite video games. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?
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Walking Into the Thousand-Year Door
This week’s special guest is Mario! Or as some people say, Merry-O. The most popular plumber on our podcast returns with a remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. This might shock you, but Griffin is in love. What about the rest of the crew? In the back half, the Besties share their best guesses for Summer Game Fest.
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The Great Indie Game Flood of 2024 Continues
Here’s a short list of indie games released in May: Crow Country, Animal Well, Arctic Eggs, 1000xResist, Skald, Hades 2, Indika, and the list goes on. We’ve already discussed some of those games. We'll discuss more in the future. Today, the game we’ve fished from the Great Indie Game Flood of 2024 is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, the latest puzzling adventure from Simogo. Bring your notepad! It’s time to crack the case!
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Into the Aether of Hell with Hades 2
The Besties went through HELL to record this episode. With Griffin and Justin out, Frushtick and Plante prepared to record with a special guest. But after Plante spilled water all over his recording set up, Frushtick was left to talk about Hades 2 as the sole Besty. Fortunately, he had back up. Into the Aether's Brendon Bigley joined the show for the podcast crossover event of the year!
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Going down Animal Well's Rabbit Hole
The gang has a spoiler-free discussion of one of the most intriguing games of the year, Animal Well. Will Griffin's life ever be the same? Probably not! We also dive into some of the horrendous studio closures happening this week.
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There's No Rest for the Wicked Nuns
What if you combined Dark Souls and Diablo, then added a pinch of city-building mechanics and survivor elements? You’d get No Rest for the Wicked from Moon Studios, the team best known for the Ori games. It’s ambitious and bound to inspire conversations — even in its Early Access stage. In the back half, Plante updates the team on 2024’s best nun simulator: Indika!
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A Souls-like for Fans of N64-era Mascot Games
Special guest Lucy James (GameSpot, Giant Bomb, Frames Per Second Podcast) joins Frushtick and Plante to discuss Another Crab’s Treasure. Have you ever wondered what it would have looked like had Rare made a Souls-like in the early ‘00s? Now you have an answer! Plus, the crew shares updates on other games they’ve been playing, from Stellar Blade to TopSpin 2K25.
Customer Reviews
The Perfect Podcast
I’ve been listening to video game podcasts for 19 years ever since Gamespot’s The Hotspot in 2005. The Besties is the endgame of video game podcasts. They’ve found the perfect format and host configuration.
By only focusing on one game a week, they don’t waste time talking about games that no one has played. They also tend to only focus on games that end up being important and considered for year end awards.
4 hosts is objectively the best number of people to have on a podcast. The hosts are also best friends, hence why the podcast is called “The Besties”. This also makes for great chemistry.
The length of the podcast may seem short by 2024 standards but it’s actually the perfect length. By keeping the podcast under 1.5 hours, they ensure that discussion is meaningful and not overbearing. The McElroy brothers are experts at podcasting and utilize this technique on their own shows as well.
The Besties may not be your average 3 hour long rambling show covering every new game, news and more, it’s the perfect video game podcast. If I could only have 1 video game podcast, it would be The Besties and it’s not even close. You could nothing but listen to The Besties for ~1 hour a week and you would have just the right amount exposure to modern video games.
boooo
pretty annoyed that they claimed they were having trouble finding advertisers, put half the episodes behind a paywall, then miraculously found advertisers again
Got me back into video games
I started listening to this show when I did not play any video games at all, and it got me so excited about video games that I got back into my DS and then quickly bought a switch (when I realized how little there is for DS lol). Even when I don’t know about the video game it’s fun to hear the discussions and make my wish list on steam ever bigger even when I don’t own a computer that can run any of this stuff lol