Podcast Recommendation: Polygon's The Besties

Hey you! Do you like video games? Do you like jokes? Then you might well like The Besties podcast from Polygon. It's weekly and runs about 45 minutes or so for each episode. It sort of snuck up on me in that I enjoyed it at first but I realized this week that it's really become one of my favorite podcasts.

Here's the idea: four guys from Polygon each bring a game they want to be Game of the Week and they pitch the games to each other. After picking a winner for the week they compare it to the current "Bestie" to see if it dethrones the previous winner.

So far so good, and they do genuinely bring games that I've bought and enjoyed, but the the part that really elevates it is that the whole thing is done tongue–in–cheek. For example one of the early winners was the new SSX game and the reason they gave it the prize was that it supported racing against a previously saved ghost and therefore if your Dad had raced a game and then died you could play SSX with your dead Dad, thus keeping him alive. SSX was dethroned by Journey because Journey lets you play cooperatively online with somebody you don't know and has no voice chat so it was possible that somebody from Israel could play with somebody from Palestine and thus bring peace to the Middle East. (Journey was recently dethroned because it had two months on top and failed to deliver the promised world peace.)

So yeah, I like it. It's a good blend of game reviews and jokes. Check it out!