The Besties - April 2018 and a Status Update on the Future

Episode Date: May 14, 2018

Hello Besties fans! First off, we love all of you! Secondly, we wanted to let you know that we'll be shifting back to just having The Besties as an end-of-year special. You can hear all about it in the episode, but this was the solution we were able to make work with everyone's schedules. While we know you'll miss hearing from us each month, know that we'll do our absolute best to make the end-of-year episode a true banger. But before that, please enjoy this episode where we discuss the very best games of April 2018. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

It's weird, y'all. Justin and I have been gone from Polygon for eight days now, at the time of this recording. I swan to John. I can feel myself getting better at and just generally knowing more about sports. That's so strange. The longer I go...

Oh, I thought you were going to say video games. I thought you were going to say better at first-person shooters. I mean, that is a thing, too. going to say better at first-person shooters. I mean, that is a thing, too. I'm getting better at first-person shooters. My body's becoming stronger. Like, I'm finally, after leaving the games industry where I worked for a decade, my muscles have started coming back from their atrophied state.

I know the names of a lot of baseball players and teams, and I can throw a baseball way faster. And is it just nonstop sex now? I mean, I don't like talking about my bedroom stuff. Realistically, yeah. That's a kind of sport, isn't it? It is. Take from that what you will. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the month.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of April of the month. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best game of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of April the month. My name is Chris Plant and I know the best video game ever. My name is Ross Froschek and I know the best game of the week. Yeah, welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in sports news and hockey the playoffs are in full swing

where do you guys come down on the Pete Rose thing oh let it man let it let Pete in let Pete in we placed a few bets we've all been there um yeah just let Pete in

and we talk about popcorn, new flavors, and video games. But this month, it's a lot more about video games than usual. You know, they have come such a long way since the original Pac-Man. I'm so sorry. But before we get off popcorn, because that's where we left it off in the previous episode, Old Bay as a popcorn flavor yeah you're interesting go on i have no idea what old bay tastes like it tastes like maine or baltimore baltimore baltimore is very proud of baltimore on your popcorn if you pried

up the wood of an old shrimp boat and then ran that over a cheese grater. You know, when I briefly dated Dame Judi Dench, I told everybody she was my old bae. Yeah. I have a follow-up question. Picture, you know those tri-tins of popcorn that come in like three flavors? Picture that, but it's actually like the revolver, like the spinning part of a revolver. Ah. Which of those parts would you like it to fall on?

Assuming that it would have to be shot into your mouth. You're talking about a popcorn gun that has maybe six popcorn things. It's a popcorn gun, but it's the size. It's like the barrel or the revolver part is like a foot wide. You're talking about popcorn Russian roulette. What's the best scenario that it lands on? Oh, it's like different flavors in each. Oh, you didn't clarify that it's one of those drums that has multiple flavors. It's always three different flavors.

It's not always. Sometimes you have just one flavor. No, that's chaos. If I could. Is this the fucking intro or is this the show? It's the show now. This is how it's going to go. If I was going to marry fuck kill this popcorn equation,

I would say marry the cheese because I could eat an infinite amount of that. Oh, fuck the caramel because I want that very badly, but only a small amount of it. Kill the regular. Get out of here, regular. I don't. Why are you here? What are you doing here?

I don't even know why they bother. Why don't, why did Griffin bother fucking the caramel corn? That's the question on everybody's lips. Uh, we want to talk about the video games of may, uh, towards the end of the show.

I'm assuming we'll talk about maybe we can do April first because this is the one that we're actually doing. May hasn't happened yet. We just missed April entirely. So April is the month that we're talking about. May hasn't happened yet. We just missed April entirely. So April is the month that we're talking about. So does anybody have any honorable mentions? I'd like to start with one, if that's okay with everybody, because it didn't come out in April, and it might have come out many, many years ago.

But I started playing. We were up in the Midwest on tour this past weekend, and I started playing this game on my ipad called dream quest and it is a roguelike deck building game uh okay that it has been out for a few years and the look i'm sending you all a screenshot if you could just pop that open real quick and just look at it real quick in the skype yeah that's what it literally looks like i thought justin was playing a game he made on the airplane next to me it is the single worst looking game i've ever played in

my entire life i would also say i already forgot the name of the game dream because it was that generic dream quest so you you uh go into the dungeon which is like a on a on a grid based thing and you uh go through this sort of maze-like structure looking for enemies. You're looking at other elements in this screenshot, I can tell, that you're looking for enemies. When you run into them, you play like sort of a card game against them

and you level up your character. You find treasure chests that have new cards. It's just really brilliantly balanced. If you look at the iOS reviews of this game, it is incredibly like rabid. People talk about playing this game for hundreds upon hundreds of hours and I completely get it.

At first, I almost instant deleted it because I opened it and I was like, oh my, no fucking way. No way. And you can't even do pixel art. No, it's great. It's MS Paint. This is like the early days of shockwave though like free online games this is make this makes me so happy that a game can become popular again with like line writer art um but it's it's it's uh if you

like that kind of thing that roguelike deck building thing it's basically like you do a run and then you get uh maybe like an achievement for number of monsters killed or number of steps taken or whatever, killing a certain enemy that makes your next run a little bit better. And you have different classes you can go in with that feel very different. There's like a thief who after every eight battles, they can find a hidden treasure chest and the warrior can smash through walls of the maze. can find a hidden treasure chest and the warrior can smash through walls of the maze so you can like find shortcuts to the to the end if you or to like health power-ups if you want to uh did you play uh did you play slay the spire that that uh deck building rpg i brought a couple months ago comparisons to that it's fucking excellent i think if you dig this you'd like that um i did team though right uh yes for now i bet it seems like a good fit for mobile I think if you dig this, you'd like that. It's just on Steam though, right?

Yes, for now. I bet it seems like a good fit for mobile. Speaking of mobile, I played a mobile game for the first time in forever. I played Florence, which I believe Allegra wrote about at Polygon. And it's sort of a narrative adventure game that Justin and I were talking about right before we started recording. You said we were going to talk about it on the show. And I gave you all my great insights then. Yeah. Well, Justin, go ahead and share your great insights.

Well, no, you have to set it up first. Mine is a criticism. What's cool about it is that it tells this story about a young woman named Florence and this relationship that she gets into and how it sort of impacts her creative life. And it tells that story through like really neat ways of interpreting story beats through like game mechanics. And so, for example, and I guess this is like a slight spoiler because it's not a long game at all.

There's a bit where she's going on a first date. And in order to like have a conversation, you put together these little speech bubbles that are made up of different puzzle pieces. So there's like six puzzle pieces and you snap them together and then she says something on this date. But as the conversation goes on, there are fewer and fewer puzzle pieces, which represents like the idea of when you're going on a date and getting to know somebody like it gets easier and easier to talk to them like really clever. Like it gets easier and easier to talk to them. Like really clever. That's like all the game is just that, uh, these,

these very sort of clever ways of, of, of turning these relatable ideas into game mechanics. I, I found it very charming. If not the most like a original story, uh, ever told drop the hammer,

Justin. No Griffin kind of touched on it. It is a very cool, it's like a very cool experiment and telling a story and, and, and hitting the emotional beats through like in the same way that you would use music, uh,

to pick up the pace. If you were trying to elicit the sense of, um, uh, you know, uh, joy or slow the, slow,

slow the pace down, um, bring it into a minor key to make it like scary or sad. Um, this really uses the, the mechanics of video games, uh, to communicate the undercurrent of the story.

There's like, um, uh, I'll give you a good example. There's a section, there's a little bit, it happens a couple of times where you're like stuck on a train or a bus and you're flicking through Instagram or Twitter photos,

you know, some sort of undisclosed social messaging service. And it's like, you don't even see most of the image. You just see like the retweets, the retweet button and the like button. And you flip through them that way, just like, like, like, retweet, like, like, like. And it's like, you're not even registering what the image is because you can't see it.

You're just sort of mechanically going through. And it's like, that is also parallel to the sort of emotional experience that's being communicated by that portion. There's a ton of really smart stuff like that. I do wish the story was uh a little bit sort of less well trod but i can see how if you're trying to do something really interesting with like storytelling you maybe wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel vis-a-vis what the what the

actual structure the narrative is yeah but it's like can't all be david cage it's jesus christ it's like it's like three bucks it's it's it's a good pickup i also uh on this last tour played a lot of hearthstone new expansion mostly it came out with a new single player mode called monster hunt which is a lot like the i think it's called dungeon run mode where you go up against different bosses and you like build a deck as you fight through different bosses and you find these permanent treasures that sort of change the rules of the game as you go um and this monster hunt mode is neat because instead of playing as the nine established classes that uh have always been in hearthstone you play as these characters with like new powers and kind of hybrid decks so

there's like one that has rogue cards and hunter cards um and i found it really compelling i played it uh a lot i beat it a couple times with a couple of the different characters uh so it uh harston continues to surprise me at how many fucking times it has pulled me back in like 15 times have i returned to harston after saying like i think i'm done with hearthstone um i wanted to bring to honorable mentions a game that uh came out after april sorry but uh it's also a game that we probably wouldn't do ordinarily it's donkey kong country tropical freeze which came out on a platform known as the wii u uh like four years ago or something like that. I love, I don't know how you guys feel

about Donkey Kong Country games, but I have very strong nostalgic memories and fondness for them. And I think both of these games, but Tropical Freeze in particular, because the original Donkey Kong Country Returns came out on Wii and it was very good, but it, I don't know, felt a little unambitious in parts like it just kind of felt like it was retreading and donkey kong

geez the names i keep forgetting tropical freeze is the new one which just came re-released on switch um i did not like they were branching out a bit more which i really liked i did not even know that this happened i did not know this got re-released i never played this on on wii u so it is so ridiculously good is it okay it really it really is it's like i think it's one of the better platformers made in forever no i mean i don't i don't think it's on the level of like a mario platformer like i don't it's good totally different games i think like that's the thing is for a donkey kong game which is like a weird difficulty really heavy weightiness i mean you have to completely abandon the feel of what a platformer is because it doesn't aspire to be like mario which is why i like it um well i

would i would also add like i think what it doesn't do that mario does very well is constantly constantly remix the ways that you sort of experience the world whereas this i think it's more about like oh there's a new enemy type or oh there's a new like platforming like mechanic but by and large like the core gameplay stays pretty consistent sure um i totally disagree i don't really we should have brought this game um i mean i'll talk about now fuck it yeah but what i what i think is really interesting about it is mario does the and i'm not the first person to point this out with this game but mario does the very slow like here's one thing in the next level here's

another thing in the next level is the combination of them and it's very carefully paced well i feel like donkey kong will do like three in one level will drop three things and then it'll forget them for four stages and then out of nowhere they'll all be back halfway through another level yeah but ten times harder yeah the other thing that i i really really really like about it that mario straight up just doesn't do is freeze has like a lot of interest in world building and that's not to say like oh full-on you know half lifestyle but its environments are really rich and really interesting and playful and not mario is fantastic but sometimes i feel like it's so obligated to the imagery of the franchise that it gets really stuck kind of locked in that's why uh what is it

the city was so fun in the most recent mario because it had some breathing room um yeah where tropical freeze i mean it goes nuts on on which directions it wants to go with there should be a a video on polygon.com's youtube page all about the small details that make this game so lively and interesting to look at um by the time this episode goes up so keep an eye out for that i remember dan reichert fighting very hard to get the music from this on the giant bomb best of list is is it is it still yeah it's excellent i think yeah it's good i don't know i i wasn't super plugged into the music but it seems pretty good i i i do love donkey kong country music in general so i wouldn't be surprised i will say it's good enough that i was playing it on uh my flights to and from new york last week and i usually just you know use that time to catch up

on podcast and had my headphones in for the first however many minutes and then never ended up taking them out just because i was really really enjoying it um yeah i mean it's just it's like so many of these other wii u games it makes me so happy that these games like you can tell when you play this game the team like put their heart and soul in it and i can only imagine yeah how crappy that felt at the time and now it'll like get a second shot and be portable and be all these other things um it's great and i and i do think i've loved those donkey kong games when i was a kid but I think these are just so much more playable. I think it's really hard to go back to DKCs

where this is forgiving enough that it doesn't feel unfair. Before we get into talking about our big games that we're bringing, should we talk about what we're doing with Besties now, or do we want to save that for the end? I think we can do it now. Yeah. Yes. Let's do it now.

Okay. Well, so what are we doing? I forget. So last I remember, uh, we're going to be just doing an annual episode after this episode. Great.

So now who should they tweet out if they don't like that? If they want to do something different. At Justin McElroy. At Russ Prushtick. If you don't like that if they want to do something different at justin at rush fresh dick if you don't enjoy that idea um is this is this really our explanation are we going to edit this out and come at it a little better i mean what here's what i'm going to say is like we can talk about why i mean there's very good reasons we don't like each other like as people it's been so obvious not true no we we all love each other it's just it's just a matter of you know we like getting together and talking about games but we're all of our schedules are very busy this time of year really all year uh at this point and we're all working on different things and uh we thought

what better excuse to come back together at the end of the year and have a nice showdown as usual those episodes are the most fun anyway and they are we'll really go listen to by a an enormous margin um and we'll do a good job with them you know we'll come out we'll do like a full-blown we're like eight hour long episode let's promise an eight hour long episode right now volunteer justin mccroy's house and we'll all go there oh my god video one at one time and we did that was great right that was fun we should just yeah uh we we uh we like recording the besties but honestly it's a lot to keep up with the latest game the latest and greatest games i mean how many months have we had times we're like i don't know i haven't

we're like we're like rushing to play games at the end of the month because we're like two and a half weeks late on this and have had to reschedule it twice so i think that's evidence of yeah so we like doing it um very much but it's just's just hard to get all of us around a mic and then edit and play all the games and everything. Look, if you listen to the end of the year episode ten minutes at a time, you could stretch it out all the way across the year. It's fine. But I think the important thing is that we did tell you what was happening this time, which is a step forward for the best days.

Which tends to disappear like brigadoon into the mist and reappear without explanation so um we're happy so i'm glad we did that because now it's going to bring a sort of uh gravitas to all of our discussions of the many many great games of april uh can i talk about lab? I wish you'd talk about Labo. Labo, Labo. It's definitely Labo or Labo. Labo sounds

Labo, right? It's the Nintendo Labio. I don't know what the problem is. It's not that for sure. So I kind of dunked on this thing when it first got announced. Even though everybody was really excited about it, I was being really cred on this thing when it first got announced, even though everybody was really excited about it. I was being really crotchety about this when it got announced.

Cause it just seemed like a bunch of cardboard that Nintendo was charging you a lot of money for. And I'm here to announce I was wrong. It comes with a game cartridge as well. So it's not just the cardboard in the box. It is the game cartridge. And the other thing I was wrong about is that it's very fun and I like it very much.

And in the very best sort of Nintendo way, it feels kind of magical when it all is finished. So let me, I'm going to give you a this at a microcosm right one of the things you put together is a radio controlled car it's like okay that doesn't make any sense it looks like a little uh robotic ant i i guess is a way you could describe

there's like six little legs that that come down and then you attach your Joy-Cons to either side of the thing. And it took like 10 minutes to put together. There are step-by-step instructions in the game where you say, I'm putting together the RC car, and it gives you like, not just step-by-step instructions, fully 3D rendered. You can turn them around on the fly,

see it from every angle. You cannot get confused doing this. It is like so blatantly obvious exactly what you should be doing each time. I spent a lot of time building like Ikea furniture in the last six months. And there are definitely times when you're building Ikea furniture when you're like, I have no idea what I'm even looking at. And being able to like rotate the 3D version of it would be a lifesaver. But you can't because it's just a stupid piece of paper.

Yeah. And so I finished putting the thing together. This one took all of 10 minutes. And when I got done, I put the little remotes in it and I started up the game that is connected to it. But it's really more like toy is more accurate. You're not like there's no goals or anything. You're just kind of playing with your little toy. And it just kind of worked the the the joy cons rumbled in such a way that made the legs move

and it doesn't go in a straight line it kind of roams around a little bit but if you hold in the button on the screen you know you control control which one is rumbling by holding the uh the screen part and pressing blue or red, and then it just kind of rumbles, and if you hold both of them at the same time, it'll go forward, and there is a cardboard antenna that you punch out and slide into the tabs

where the Joy-Cons were removed that goes on the screen to make it look like there's a, like you're holding a sort of like- That's not doing anything. No, it's doing nothing. That's the most Nintendo ass shit. It really is. And also, this is so cool.

There's like a little monochromatic readout from the IR camera. That's the craziest part to me. It tripped me out. I was like, where is it pulling this from? I had no idea it was even capable of that it is grainy as all hell it looks like sewer shark yeah on game boy and but it's still like well it gives you a little it looks like the game boy camera did you use that exactly yeah the

quality um but it but it like worked and my uh my daughter and i have done that, and we've done the fishing rod, which is so cool. I mean, it even feels kind of good. Like, once you've got it all put together, like, it doesn't feel cheap. I mean, for something made out of cardboard, it feels pretty solid. Like, it could handle some play. And the parts that are going to get a little wear and tear, there's a little cardboard tab that you put in to make a clicking noise when you use the rod and reel, and they have a replacement for those because that's going to get worn out.

They have like replacement rubber bands for the rod and reel. But like once you're done with the rod and reel, there's a sort of stand that has a spool inside of it. sort of stand that has a spool inside of it. And so you can pull on the, when you pull on the fishing rod, it pulls the line out of this little stand and it's on a rubber band. So it pulls it back in as you let go of it. And then a string that is exactly the same color as the one on your toy is represented on the screen.

exactly the same color as the one on your toy is represented on the screen. So like, it looks like you are pulling, uh, an actual fishing line that is underneath the water and it bobs up and down when you move the stick up and down and it, uh, you know, reels in and out.

And it just is so neat. Um, and I, I, it's, it's really a delight. I, the one thing I will say is my daughter is probably,

she is three and a half and she is probably too young yeah to to to focus on it she likes it when it's done and and what they what i will say is that like um they break the construction on the ones that aren't the rc car they break the construction into steps so after like 10 minutes or so it says like hey that's the end of this sort of round you're safe to uh you know put stuff away and kind of come back to it later if you want because the rest of them that aren't the rc car you can take like 45 minutes to an hour um it's like an hour and a half uh and i haven't even messed around with the, uh, I mean, I didn't even buy the robot thing. I hear that's like a multi-day sort of project. So,

um, if you have, I think kids who are a little older, like up, up six, seven, eight in that neck of the woods and older, um,

or, you know, you just want to do something that's fucking relaxing. the, uh, I, I really, I,

I was bowled over by how just really neat it was it's just a really cool sort of thing i'm very i am i am jealous that henry is not of an age because i don't i don't know that i would get a lot out of this just doing it myself it seems really cool and it actually seems like the kind of thing that i could be into but i know that it would be so much better if i was like sharing it with somebody but henry at this age he would just destroy it in a way that would make the experience not pleasurable at all for me yeah he would he would moisten it with his many fluids he produces it's uh it's a it's a cool thing um and and i think honestly like if you had this was link home and you're an adult i it's it's not unenjoyable to to put it together i found very satisfying even when my daughter had sort of lost interest i still very much enjoyed the

folding and and even though i was having to kind of rush through it to try to keep her interest um and to make components of a fishing rod seem like a fun thing like oh look that's look sweetie it's a third of a fishing rod we are we having a good time um but she does enjoy the finished product we've had a lot of fun with it so so i think my the part that makes me interested is not here yet which is to say and this probably still exists i just haven't looked the community creating things out of like oh an amazon like a standard amazon that is absolutely already happening yeah there's absolutely people making some buck wild shit with with the i forget what

the like studio mode is called where you can like make your program your own shit um but i have seen some some wild stuff that people have started making with this it's like it's like full-blown lego mind storms already yeah that's cool stuff i'm i'm down with that i it'll be interesting to see how they support it and whether i don't know how well it's sold like i don't know if it's like stacking up in toy stores all over the country because no one bought it but it seems like kind of a sleepy launch i will say like they have not been hitting it really hard um it'll be interesting i also think in the holiday season when people are like well i don't want to buy my kid just a video game i want to get them something

that's like quasi educational yeah this would be the opportunity to do you know it's weird though it seems like even from its announcement nintendo has been uncharacteristically pretty cash about it like i remember even when they announced that they were like it's a new way to play with games if that's what you're into well it's i think it's because they were going for like a very very very broad like casual audience like for example they didn't send early copies of it to any uh like gaming outlets very few outlets got it early so and they were mostly like you know the time magazines of the world like that equivalent so i think that's why you haven't seen it is because you know if they went for like i hope we get like a big splash in new york times

you know if they went for like i hope we get like a big splash in new york times um and so i also i know the switch has been selling well i don't know that it necessarily has the penetration like a lot of the people that i would have normally recommended this to um were not people who are already switch owners and like i said i know this has been doing really well i don't think it has like the if this is something it has not hit uh wii u numbers yet as an interesting right like if this wasn't for the wii where it's like everybody already has it um i think it would blow up yeah i think it might be um but like the other cool thing about it is like it's not timely in any way right like nintendo didn't break the bank manufacturing this, so you know, maybe it's something, although the boxes are large,

that's gonna be, like, tough keeping that in retail, but as something to just, like, pick up in a little bit, like, why not? Yeah, and the really cool thing is that now it's done and it's out, they can make a game. You know what I mean? Like, for the Switch, they can make a game for

it to play. Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, now that it's out, they can make a game for it to play do you know what i'm talking about like yes i understand they can do a game that's kind of why i was so thrilled about donkey kong because there had been so little coming out for so long it's been like a little bit still love it still love it seems like even you would think the first year would be the slowest but this last like four months in switch time seems like the slowest by far and i think a lot of that is like it's also not getting like as many it's getting still a lot of like good indies but not it doesn't feel like it's as many maybe i don't know um it's just been a little slow uh i need that i need that stardew valley multiplayer to come come right so that will happen.

Dead Cells, I think, is still on its way. Still coming. Mario Tennis comes out in June, I think. So stuff's coming. Hyrule Warriors is in a week or so. Please clap for Hyrule Warriors. Please love it. Enthusiasm.

Russ, you want to do your game? Yeah. It's been a while since I played it um so my game is minute it is a game designed by um the guy behind super crate box and um loof trousers and what's their big game that everyone loves nuclear throne nuclear throne thank you was like the the big breakout one for them um and he uh is an awesome game designer and he worked with a team of folks to make uh okay so picture zelda like original zelda og zelda and unlike in zelda where you have hearts and you die uh here you only have 90 60 seconds i was gonna say 90 seconds and that just goes against everything

You have 60 seconds and after that's the sequel this sequel minute and a half minute a half After that 60 seconds you die and you start from scratch now Not fully from scratch because you get basically any items you picked up or any information that you gleaned Obviously you still have so the idea is to sort of leapfrog in that 60 seconds to make as much progress as possible. So let's say you start out with nothing and then in the first 60 seconds you're running around and you find a sword on the beach.

When you respawn, you've still got that sword and now you can run directly to the wall of trees that you can now cut down because you have that sword. So you then progress further where the game gets neat where i really like it is when they play with you and time in interesting ways so uh very early on there's a turtle at a lighthouse that you start talking to and the turtle predictably talks very very slowly so you basically spend your entire life talking to this turtle to learn a secret which is very funny like it's it's and they and they play with a lot of that stuff um and you know

by and large it's not a very long game at all i think it took me probably an hour maybe an hour and a half to finish um but there's like a bunch of secrets to uncover. There's like a lot, the map has like a lot of like nooks and crannies to find. And there's like a lot of charm to it. Um, they, all the characters like have like a lot of like personality and are like goofy and funny and memorable. And it, uh, you know what it reminds me of is Link's Awakening. Uh, I feel like Link's Awakening had like a lot of like goofy cast of characters and the art style definitely kind of follows that as well.

So yeah, I really liked it. I put it on Steam. I don't remember what other platforms it is on. I know it's not on Switch, even though it would be a nice fit on Switch. It's on PS4 and Xbox. It's on PS4 and probably Xbox maybe. It is. I was really looking forward to this game and played it.

And the concept I adore. Yeah. I was really disappointed in the length of it because it is such a cool concept. And they do, I guess to its credit it does each of these like clever ideas and how it uh like handles the the minute long limitation uh it does have like a decent amount of those ideas represented and it does each one once so you're not it doesn't feel it feels respectful of your time in that way but i was i was so in love with the the idea of the game and the execution of the game and i was really having a really good time with it um and then it was just over and the

ending is very abrupt i think like super super abrupt and i was i didn't find it that abrupt the yeah i think it's pretty i think it's a little i don't know i guess tasters tasters choice um but it it it for me it just kind of like ended and i thought that there was going to be a lot a lot more to it and i was i was pretty bummed out about that but i think that i mean i guess silver lining way of looking at that is that it's because the game was very good and i was having a very good time with it and very disappointed that it just kind of that it just kind of ended but um uh yeah that was that was kind of my takeaway there is like a new game plus mode where you have uh i think like 40 seconds am i making that up oh i don't know i haven't played the near game you have uh you have fewer hearts

that you start out the game with and it is just generally much harder i will say i enjoy watching speed runs of this game too because they've got it down to like under seven minutes is the current record yeah that's cool um and it's really neat to watch all the little optimizations but i just wish it was a little little beefier yeah yeah that's fair the new game plus one's pretty different if you're if you're looking for more, I would poke at it. I don't know. I thought it was right length. I'm also at that point where I like things that are really short.

But overall, I just like how... I think this is kind of what you were poking at too, Griffin. How well thought out every detail is. It feels like a very edited game. And I don't feel like you get a lot of those very often. I feel like usually all the fat is left on the bone. And I appreciate how, I don't know, it just feels very clean and crisp

in a way that not many games do. There's a way of looking at it through my criticism of maybe it is the right length. And I just, it's that longing that makes me think maybe it is the right length and I just it's that longing that makes me think it's not the right length but that if it was longer the shtick would instantly overstay its welcome

yeah for sure and it doesn't it definitely doesn't do that so that's a good thing I just man I really liked it I guess I guess I liked it then huh you've convinced me wow this is why it's good that we talk about these games on the besties just man i really liked it i guess i guess i liked it then huh you've been around what happened wow this is why it's good that we talk about these games on the besties um i liked minute i thought it was neat i i i didn't finish it maybe i should go back and finish it i just wasn't

see to me that's not a big endorsement of its quality because it's not a hard game to finish no i just i got a little um i i like games that look a little bit nicer than this, like Dream Quest. Oh my gosh. I found myself not knowing what to do next a lot of the time. And I think I just was kind of... That wasn't a joke. No, it was a joke.

It's an adventure game and that's the whole point yeah i know but like i really actually that's a good point because it's funny because you do love that genre but it really parts of it do feel like why is that like this weird rabbit is talking to me and he's asking me for something like i don't know where to go i do yeah that was kind of like classic adventure game there's like a uh there was a bit i know the bit i stopped at so it was like i need this plant that grows near snakes and i was like well i guess i'm gonna wander around and look for it that sounds boring because i only get 60 seconds to do it but i fine i guess uh but i don't know that's not being fair i i think that

i think it's my i disagree with that because i think that it actually makes this idea of fetch quest more exciting because then it feels like I got to find these fucking snakes. Where are the fucking snakes? Oh, my God. Do I think I hear snakes? I'll come back in my next life. I'll get you next time. Thanks. I did.

I did hit one point where there was like a character I had to like rescue or something that it's funny. I tried to do a video of the game. It was me and Simone. And that was the exact point I was at. And I probably went through 30 cycles. or something that uh it's funny i tried to do a video of the game it was me and simone and it was that was the exact point i was at and i probably went through 30 cycles uh just unable to find this fucking character and that was a big bummer but i mean that was literally the only that was the only i guess it padded the length of the game for me by nearly a half hour so that's good but uh it was kind of kind of frustrating but i i really enjoyed

like being being lost because unlike a lot of uh games to try to do this thing like i think the the pressure of the of the time limit it kind of makes everything more fun um yeah yeah so should we talk about the game the biggin chris and are going to do it together because I hated it. No, that's not true. Yeah. Can you guys do, like, role play where one of you is Atreus and one of you is Kratos? Yeah, I'll be the boy.

Uh, uh, I don't like it. Good, but I want to love you i i love you i love you daddy but i'm a big piece of shit just kidding i love you and i want to do a good job but fuck you dad that is my favorite if i had to choose one thing that i loved about god of war and there are many things atreus turning into a little shithead scamp yeah oh man that that i loved that part has anybody gotten has there been a hot take article where david jaffe takes a dump on this new god of war yet i kept expecting to make the rounds and i kind of thought that it would just happen like i would will it into existence because i wanted it so bad and then i don't think it came together yeah he said i definitely read a tweet of his where he said it didn't have enough good south park humor in it and um we're talking about god

of war and uh chris you want it's like one of the best games ever made chris you want to talk about it oh sure i'll give the the brass tacks um remember old god of war well what if they took that and they removed uh the the orgy bathtub uh scenes is it bathtub is it a hot tub that's probably closer to it i i did find the secret orgy scene oh you found it you did yeah yeah just he please tell me he gets rid of atreus before that scene happens yeah he says boy wait outside i have dad stuff to do oh um yeah it plays it's it's god of war um with very very very light uh dark souls inspired melee combat, but not even close to as difficult. And I don't know. I would say it's more Tomb Raider than Uncharted

in that it's not as obsessed with environmental storytelling or stopping the game for like 15 minutes to have flashy cut scenes. For me, it was more, if we're just talking about like mechanically and feel, it was way more like Batman, just talking about like mechanically and feel like it was way more uh like batman the arkham arkham games more really yeah that's kind of how it hit for me yeah sort of see that yeah yeah interesting the sense of like yeah cory bar uh i was gonna say balrog

but that's that's the other one i'm sure he gets it only cory barlog uh was most recently the um the other one i'm sure he gets if only cory barlog uh was most recently the um cinematic director on the tomb raider series and this has no no cinematics or cut scenes whatsoever so like that's what he learned about the cinematic process is like actually fuck these no but you realize like the whole game is a cinematic yeah i guess you understand 100 there's obviously an implication in that that that it is not interactive this is this is this is fascinating us us talking about me and chris having sort of disparate ways of comparing it to games and none of them really fitting very well i think is actually i don't think i appreciated this while i was playing the game while i was playing it i was just like this is a fucking great game with like cool combat and shit but i didn't

really appreciate that like it does feel it may not look super original in terms of like combat and mechanics but in thinking back on it like yeah i actually think it is i don't know that we've necessarily seen anything quite like it before yeah and i think oh i think it's one of those weird things where it's that and also everything is like it because they went it feels like they went uh buffet style across all the games and like hey what what feels good and how can we mash it into one thing like the the axe throwing mechanic um is like very clearly built around headshots in a action mostly melee combat game um the boomerang effect is i don't know it kind of has a something about it that reminds me of old grappling hook mechanics for some weird reason there's all there's this like trade-off of you know whether or not you use your fist for building up the stun damage to do hardcore hits,

which reminds me a lot of the most recent Doom that gets you in there or staying away, but slowly picking at things. It feels like there's just so many influences in that rather than doing what I suspect a lot of developers do when they set up to make a genre game and look at their peers it feels like this game looked at everything and yeah and just wanted to like incorporate as many things that they know feel good no matter what the genre was and stuff it into a single game without like adhering to the baggage associated

with those things and like there's a lot to talk about here and that's why i think we're going to be dedicating most of this episode to it but like the idea of combos right uh paschal of war games had like a combo meter and then you see that in like the ninja gaiden games and devil may cry and all the platinum games um is definitely present here because you have to do them to live you have to do them to like succeed in a fight but there's not like a number on the screen like going upwards um but even without that feedback i was pulling off some of the most like definitely the most satisfying combos i've ever had in like a god of war game before and also like maybe in any action game

ever like being able to hack at a couple folks with game before and also like maybe in any action game ever like being able to hack at a couple folks with my axe and then use my runic power and then toss my axe into a guy to freeze him and then just start punching the shit out of another guy like all of that stuff was so fluid and so cool without necessarily having a numerical or mechanical like reason behind it yeah i think part of the reason that feels so good is because just like the mechanics themselves like hitting things feels really good because of a number of reasons so sound effects uh visual effects etc but also they designed it in such a way that like you do not need to remember xxy combo right to accomplish something cool and make yourself feel good so like the fact

that you can like one of the most devastating combos in the game is just hold r1 like for a second and it like unleashes this like helicopter attack another is just like wait a second and then hit r1 like they're all really really simple in it and the end result is that it feels great but doesn't require you to memorize the idea of yeah the mapping the combos and only letting you have two powerful combos at any time is yeah early i i i agree i i just most people end up just spamming the two combos they can learn anyway so recognizing that i think is smart sorry it's also it's it's custom oh sorry go ahead juice uh no i i i don't know if it's useful to differentiate the the sort of powers from combos but i think thinking of them as combos is interesting i didn't think of them that way i

thought them just as like uh powers but it's it's there's something about the way you're talking about like doing the idea of combos without like throwing a multiplier up on the screen um and it is really cool how well the pieces of the combat in this game fit together in a way that makes you want to tie them into a fluid thing like throw your axe now you've got your your bare fists you pummel a guy and then you have your son you know just pound him with arrows and then his stun meter is up and then oh if you grab your axe back you know after during the combo then you you'll have that and ready to start again on the next cat like it it is one of the very few normally i am notorious for in an action game like character action game

finding a series of moves that works well and then just like leaning on it um but god of war both demands that you branch out but also like rewards that with just being fun like it just feels fun yeah i was i was to use different abilities i was doing shit not because it was like the tried and true best thing to do it's because everything you can do looks and feels fucking fantastic and so i was doing stuff and found myself doing stuff not because i had formulated like a best strategy around my combat but just because like i've felt like the god of war and had all these cool things i could do and so i wanted to try and do them in the coolest way possible um and we've talked a lot

about well sorry have you seen that of course you've seen this that scene in uh captain america civil war where it's bucky and captain america like beating the snot out of iron man and the shield is bouncing around that's's what it feels like. That is the closest thing I could think of. It's not a video game. But everything just hitting so hard. And rotating and switching up styles in a matter of seconds. It's very strange.

Yeah. like seconds uh it's very strange yeah um there's on top of that like a customization layer that i kind of bristled at um for like for the first couple hours that i played the game because it is dense there is a lot of stuff you can do and i i do think it is a i do think it is a genuine modern masterpiece i think there was like one too many customization layers for my taste because you had these you have these runic powers that you can weave into your combos that have a like a cooldown associated with them and you can find new ones and you can upgrade those you have skills that you can unlock as you sort of level up your your weapons that you can upgrade and customize then you choose what you want to spend your experience points on to to unlock and that's

true for atreus, your son as well. You unlock his powers also and can buy him new gear. You can buy yourself different armor pieces or find different armor pieces or craft different armor pieces and upgrade them individually. And you can slot gems into each of them. It's like it was a little bit too much management for me. Like if you could have cut out like the the gym enhancements maybe just like cut that out i feel like maybe yeah i think what would have been smarter if they

had like locked all that stuff like like they were smarter about like easing you into that stuff where it was like okay for the first 10 hours of the game you're only gonna get armor that's it and then slowly but surely maybe you get a gem here or a gem there and then hour 20 you've got like a few gems to pick from but like they really do give you a ton of options very early and the gems are also kind of a pain in the ass too it makes it hard to compare gear like if you're trying to buy a new piece the stats of your currently equipped gear incorporate the gems that are slotted into it. So it's like, okay, well,

if I really need to know what's best, I need to go in and take all those gems out. And also, if you want to change your gear, you have to manually pull each of those gems out. And I don't know if you sell gear, if those get automatically pulled out or if they're automatically sold. I don't know.

I didn't end up having to sell much of anything because I always had plenty of money. There's also some weird balance issues. You gain experience that lets you unlock new moves. That's also a resource that's being put into the different powers, like the abilities, or we were talking about them as combos that you get. And that is hard because it,

you're using the experience that you spend on like buying new abilities to level up those powers. So it really can discourage you experimenting with new things because you got to spend a bunch of points to get them up to snuff, to get them to a point that the ones you're already comfortable with are at. But then I hit a point like two-thirds of the way through where I just had more points than I knew what to do with. Like I had bought everything that I could have.

So like definitely felt like there's some sort of – I was like really struggling with them at first, and that made me not experiment with new abilities because i didn't want to spend the points on them i just wanted to beef up my core stuff the result of that is i hit a point where i felt like i was getting kind of weak i was i was like falling behind the power curve a little bit and so i just invested everything i had into a new loadout and then that's all i used for the rest of the game. Everything I found from that point on, I was just like, oh, OK, that's going in the old God bank.

So so I had a few issues there, but I still it does do a lot. I made this complaint about Horizon Zero Dawn, right, where you had like a bunch of different upgrade and customization options. And I didn't think that any of them felt especially meaningful. And so if that was the case, I was like holding onto everything and waiting for something that seemed like it would be meaningful. And the result is just that I wasn't getting powerful and it was weird and I didn't love it.

At least in, in God of War, like when you do invest your, your points or, uh, resources into like a new loadout or a new power that you've upgraded or whatever you do fucking feel it because there are pretty big sort of tangible differences as as you upgrade them um yeah so it had that going for it so i i there's there are things about this and i i do want to talk about like the story and the writing and everything i don't want to get into spoilers but like it's extremely good but i did while we're sort of nigga talking about a little niggling things that like kind of bother us um i think the combat is extremely extremely good unless you're fighting one large single target which happens a fair

number of times in the game and then what's your problem with that it felt so you fight like the same ogre about 12 times right it's the same dude with the same like large stone pillar and he has basically the same moves sometimes he's fire sometimes he's ice but by and large he's the same ogre and whenever i would do those fights they just felt kind of um damage sinky to the point where like i didn't have a lot of opportunities to parry attacks he was just like this giant like damage soak and i'd hurl my ax at him a bunch of times and i'd like whack him in the knees a few times it just didn't feel great there's actually a couple like true boss fights in the game that i feel the same way uh i don't want to spoil things

but like but like when you're fighting very powerful guys um you're not talking about the first boss fight which is one of the greatest boss fights in history right okay which i don't i don't really consider that like mechanically a boss fight like that it happens in the first 10 minutes and it's more of a cut scene than anything you're're out of your fucking mind. You're a whack job and I'm glad this show's over. You're in such a nutcase. It's a boss fight and it's like one of the best fucking boss fights ever. I didn't find it like

necessary to like use mechanics. I know what fresh means. I mean it's not even whether or not it's necessary. You actually don't have many of the mechanics. Yeah, no. You're kind of just learning how to. It's a very good boss fight. It's also a tutorial hey yeah fresh dick did you did you like the like talking about fighting the ogres did you like that any better when see I really dug that when it was part of a larger encounter where like managing that was like part

of part of the fun specifically because if you pile damage onto them um you can stun them and climb on top and well so that's two those are two different guys there's like the trolls with the giant like stone pillars and then there's the guys you can climb on so those are two different enemies i did find the guys a little better there is one instance for the most part of like a recurring single target fight that is if you've played the game and you've played the post game you know what i'm talking about there's like a post game series of fights yes yes yes involving a single target and those in my opinion are excellent yeah but but through the campaign whenever it was like a single target fight i i felt myself kind of bouncing off of it be mostly because like whenever i would do the group fights against like a batch of six or eight enemies however many it would feel so good yeah so the fact that like

those other fights felt like kind of a drag to me was a bummer but again i think that's just like them figuring out ways to make the combat more unique batman for what it's worth another game that i absolutely love those uh arkham games had the same issue which is like well it's you know once you were fighting like a character like bane you're just gonna punch him a thousand times yeah yeah you just lose some of the finesse of it did you get to the end game fights yeah that's sort of what i was referring oh yeah you thought i that's surprising i mean i i know those are excellent i like those a lot okay those are excellent i think those are really well designed and like feel like the best

possible dark souls boss fights imaginable like i always love those dark souls boss fights that are like human v human but like it's like a total like battle of father the father gas columns of the world yeah exactly so like that we've only talked about the mechanics and the mechanics are very good okay we should talk about the story is like why i think i'm going to remember this game. Like I think it's why it's going to like stand out. And maybe it is like perfectly executed. It's also just like I could not shake the feeling the whole time I was playing it that it's got a war.

if there was one franchise that I thought would tell a compelling story about being a parent, it was going to be fucking God of war. Like I could not shake the, the, uh, how, how wild that is the whole time I was playing it. Cause man,

it, it does a very good and surprisingly, and this is not, uh, an adjective I ever thought i would ever ever ever apply to this series a very reserved job of of telling this like nuanced story about about a relationship can you guys think of another sequel uh and sequels like a stretch but a re-launch a relaunch, a revamp that was so much about subverting the games that came before it.

I think Breath of the Wild was a return to the aesthetic of the very first Zelda game. It was going against Skyward Sword. I'm even more thinking from a narrative perspective. first but it was reverting it was going against like yes skyward sword yeah and that well i'm even more thinking from a narrative perspective because like for me god of war is like is interesting because a lot of games take the mechanics and and like we're gonna make this feel like it used to feel god of war is very unique is I think, unless I'm forgetting some games,

but like unique in that it is a game that is sort of obsessed with regret for the actions of its main character in the other games. Games that like lauded his sort of brutality and his single-mindedness this character is a character that and this story is one that is undercutting what the entire rest of the franchise is about it's fascinating so i think i think it exists elsewhere in two spots that go to what i thought this game was vibing like from the beginning uncharted uncharted 4

is that story wise it's supposed to be maybe i shouldn't have done any of these adventures um and the new tomb raider the yeah that was the only one i could think of the promise of the new tomb raider and they've kind of done it in previous ones but it seems like they're going hard on on the upcoming one is oh i think even the first the first tomb of the new tomb raider games uh again it really doesn't feel like a sequel as much as it feels like a complete relaunch of the of this series but it feels much more uh i don't know if it has a completely different vibe from the old the old Tomb Raider games but I mean specifically the plot of the new one is oh actually robbing tombs is despicable yeah um which is like oh okay that's the name of the game um and I think God of War is the exact same thing but yeah I other than those yeah I mean the only thing that I can kind of think of, and this

isn't quite that, but the shift from Grand Theft Auto 2 to Grand Theft Auto 3. I don't necessarily know that was the best direction. Well, I know, but I'm not saying it was the right direction, but I think it makes a pretty significant shift in terms of like the tone and critiquing the tone. It's wild in that it manages to reinvent God of War, but in a way that makes this feel very much like the second half of a great novel. of a great novel you know almost like the the first half was very much about a character seeking revenge and the second half is about the cost of that and like the hidden price of that and like that's something like film and books have done but like i don't know that you've ever seen video games which are so much about the power

of fantasy subvert that power fantasy in in this in this and certainly not within the bounds of the same ostensibly same series the thing that you you have to keep in mind is and people i think sort of forget that like they associate dave jaffe with like all the original god of war games but barlog was worked like he was correct me if I'm wrong the lead director on two that is correct which was the best of them which was excellent like fantastic so

like it's what's really interesting is like he has been with this game the whole way pretty much I'm pretty sure he worked on the first game as well he did yeah and lead animator on the first one lead animator so like he's been with it the whole way and so like who better to sort of appreciate these like twists and turns and potentially missteps tonally and then and then like do something completely different like turn that on its ear like how else could you be working

on the same thing for 20 years or however long it's been and still keep it fresh in your mind and not have it be like a drug like a slog yeah you don't even have to cory bar slog you don't even have to go that that far to see the parallel of like and i don't i don't mean to read into the contents of Mr. Barlog's heart but the idea that he might like he has become a father since this

like in the middle of this franchise and like I wonder if there's some part of him that felt a need to atone for the game, like the, the, the tenor of the lessons,

things. Yeah. God of war games. Like, okay, if I'm going to show my son or my, my daughter, I don't actually know when I show my child,

like this is how a person acts. This is, this is an acceptable way. Do I need to now undercut that to like show them that there is a price to that that people can grow and change like it's it's really yeah it's interesting i my read on it and again who i don't know i haven't i think plant has spoken but i don't know specifically is that again if you're going to be working with the same character for that long having them be a one note angry guy for that long is just a bad character like you just it's just bad if they just if they just made god of

war 4 i i was kind of i felt the same way about uncharted 4 where when uncharted 4 ended i was like okay that's it no no more uncharted games we can't we can't do this again especially not with the sort of introspective tone that this game had um and i felt the same way after god of war 3 where i enjoyed it but by the time i reached the end i was like okay that's it right like we can't no more psp games ready at dawn y'all are doing the lord's work over there uh the only people making psp games but we gotta stop right if this was just god of war 4 it would have been even if it had been great it still would have just been okay if that makes any sense um and what what it is we we've i i don't know i feel like we haven't actually like talked about what makes this story great and i think it may be difficult to do so without spoiling it

right um i i do want to mention one thing about the story that it won't be a spoiler but i think is probably the hardest thing that they do that no other I really can't remember another game that did it there is a ton a ton of prattle in this game and by prattle I mean like back and forth like conversations between two or more characters and it's done not as like core storytelling mechanics it's all like ancillary like side story stuff world building learning like cute little dial whatever cute little like stories or myths or whatever that they're talking to each other about and invariably whenever games try to do this i check out 100 yeah i usually don't read flavor text in games i know how much time is spent writing that stuff I really have a respect for the people that do it. I just don't read it.

And here, I was so engaged that, like, whenever a story was being told, and I was in the canoe, and I was rowing, I would sit and wait at the beach until the story was finished, because I really honestly cared. It's amazing. That's an amazing accomplishment. Not only does it do that, it made me care about, like, Norse mythology, which i had no fascination with before going into this game for like the first time ever like it explores it does a good amount of not just character building but world building as well in a way that i like could i really sank my teeth into um but but to like go back to what i said about it being like reserved that to me is like what made it so special. And it's what made it so successful as a story about a father and son,

because it has, it has these, it has these moments, these like emotional spikes, but you, you have to work for them. And they come at points in the story where they feel very realistic. Like that, that development of that relationship is very well paced and very, even though it's taking place in this like fantastical world, it feels very realistic because it's, it would be way too obvious if it's just like in chapter two, you know, the boy saves Kratos's life or something.

And he's like, boy, I love you. Like that would have been kind of busted. Um, and it, it, nothing is obvious like that in the game. And it's what makes the moments that they do have. And there's not like, it's not a tear jerker, right? It's not constantly trying to deliver these emotional payloads and that's why whenever they do it even if it's in like a very very very subtle very quiet moment um it it hits with like tectonic force um and i i don't want to mention any of them here because they are very very special moments that are like the the i think the reason why i loved the game so much so i don't want to mention any of them here because they are very, very special moments that are like the the I think the reason why I loved the game so much. So I don't want to spoil them.

But it's the it is the scarcity and realism with which those moments are delivered that really just blew my fucking brain. It really, really blew me away. Yeah, it also. Sorry. really blew me away um yeah it also sorry it also does open world stuff i think in a equally sort of reserved i i i don't like character action games or open world games basically at all anymore like a new open world game will come out like a far cry or a uh just cause three and i'll play it for like a couple hours and i'll be like i don't want to invest all the time to run around this whole place um and the same thing for like character action games like bayonetta 2 i picked that up and i was like hey i bounced off this before maybe

i'll get into it now and i bounced off it just right right again but i'll be damned if like this game didn't didn't make me care about both of the things, both the character action elements and the open world elements. It is fucking good. 10 out of 10. Well, I think that I think what why it works as an open world game is similar to why like the Tomb Raider reboot did, which is to say it doesn't feel like an open world game unless you want it to. So you can like play it as like a linear story game. And then but you can also do side stuff and like there's reasons to do the side stuff but like it still stands on its own feet as like a linear

story game which is cool it also does a great job of capturing the feel of a parental funeral and this is the opening of the game so i don't think i'm spoiling anything but it opens up with a parental funeral and there's so much relatable stuff there like how 90 seconds after walking away from the funeral your dad punches a treasure chest so hard that the lid explodes it's just really like stuff that really uh resonated with me and everyone gets knives at the end yeah yeah the dad gives the son a knife and then yells at him a lot for not stabbing the animal right and then he punches another treasure chest so hard that the lid explodes it's like yeah that's me did we talk about the interrupting dialogue thing? No.

It's got a really cool, and talk about like small things that I don't think I have seen anywhere else. You are often like, sometimes Kratos will be telling a story. So the open world is connected by this big lake. And a lot of times you'll be kind of rowing to your next objective. Or it sometimes even happens like while you're climbing on something if you're in the middle of a long climb Kratos

or another character will start to tell an anecdote and if you arrive at where you're going pretty much every game you like lose that it's just gone you never hear the rest of that dialogue or whatever

but this game will actually provide another character to give a contextual prompt for what like hey you were telling us about some giants can you finish that story and and sometimes like you're in the middle of a story or you're almost done with that story or you just started a story about giants can you pick up where you left off and they'll start telling the story like from from the point they were at it's amazing like it's it's such a smart idea yeah a lot of this stuff that it's astonishing we haven't talked about this yet is uh in service of the fact that it is one long camera shot camera never cuts away the whole time unless you i guess go to the pause menu or die and when you die god the game reloads so fucking fast it is a miracle from christ on high when you die it's like oh no i died press x to

oh i'm back in it again it is so fucking good um but when you don't die it's the game's just one long camera shot which i remember reading about in like a review before i started playing and i was like wow that sounds like the coolest shit ever and then i started playing and i instantly forgot about it which i think is the best which is the optimal way to sort of appreciate this this feature of the game. But then like looking back at it and realizing what they did, it is a game design feat that is almost beyond comprehension. Yeah, they do. They generally like are very smart

about hiding loads in interesting ways. So like when you go into the whatever central area to like port to another realm, there's like a very drawn out animation that you're sort of waiting to complete before you can move on which like again hiding a load screen the interesting one for me is there's a fast travel mechanic where you go through the world tree it's like a creepy ghost tree and um effectively it's like a long looping path that never ends. Truth be told, like, if you could run forever, you'd be able to run forever, essentially.

But the idea is, after a certain amount of time, after the game is actually loaded to whatever area you're going next, a door appears. that the game was just hiding that load screen i would always always always sprint through that stupid tree thinking that i would get to that stupid door sooner yeah even though i knew i would not um and that is uh a testament to like how good the magic trick is that you really think oh i need to actually travel around this tree to like get to the spot that i need to go to nope you don't you know but uh it's a very good video game nintendo labo for yeah labo game of the year game of the month year year oh wow shit are we so i guess we're gonna jump all right then we'll do our first annual episode 2019 i guess okay because we already decided on Labo uh how's May looking for the May episode uh

let me just see here we got uh I'm looking forward to checking out um Sly Spy on Switch Johnny Turbo's Arcade Sly Spy Secret Agent it's a hell of a better time to switch daniel because it is unquestionably the slowest may i could ever remember in the video game history like star trek outrageous a ccg is in early access in may um woofsisy, y'all. This is what happens.

You have bangers in 2017, and then it's sleepy time junction. Well, we've had bangers in the first quarter of 2018. Sure, but not in the quotient that we had last year. Yeah, state of decay is like the only thing. I should maybe like stretch out God of War. You know, I'm hurtling towards the finish. I think I might just like try to stretch that out a little bit. Flashbacks.

Flashbacks to June 7th. Teach your son how to shave. Right. Well, folks, that's going to do it for us forever. Thanks so much for listening to the besties. I will say this. I don't know if we're going to continue to do annual episodes. don't know if we're gonna continue to do annual episodes

I don't know if the podcast feed will necessarily be the best method of doing that like I will try if it is possible but I don't know like if I'm gonna still have like if these accounts will stay active

or whatever you can just we can get it up on art 19 that's not a problem well I mean it's assuming a lot should we like a year on the podcast are we doing this if they want to find us again like where we'll be at like it'll probably be on youtube too if you want to subscribe to polygon yeah it'll be on youtube i think i will strive and ensure that it gets up on the right feed don't worry about somebody somebody will make sure it happens I have abandoned enough podcasts and tried to return to them to say that sometimes people go out of business

to provide or shut down things happen so I'm just saying that's true but all things change just like the best has changed but I will say we've had a lot of fun here today well about the regular amount of fun for besties episode and medium medium amount of fun here today. Well, about the regular amount of fun for Besties episode. Medium. Medium amount

of fun. This could be fun, because I want there to be some like... I have deeply enjoyed all the times that we have done the Besties, both in sickness and in health, and I really appreciate

people who've, against all odds and reasons Stuck with this goofy podcast This whole way So thank you to you sincerely We very much appreciate it I do want to say something to those people Like the bummer is

Like you guys The fans will not have any Opportunity to listen to any of us In any other venues That's true we're going dark it's like all of all four of us just will not have any other outlets or i'll tell you if you're not listening to history of fun you should it's a very good podcast about the histories the secret histories behind fun things um and you should you would very much it is it is chris and it is fresh and it is allegra and it's a very good show thank you justin i'm just saying it's a good program

also very successful and good is sawbones a great podcast that justin does with his lovely wife hey got a book coming out this october bit.ly forward slash sawbones book buy my book Hey, got a book coming out this October. Bit.ly forward slash Sawbones book. Buy my book. Buy my book. And the Adventure Zone is also very good. Hey, thanks, man.

Wonderful. Let's name them all. Let's go down the list. Let's go down the list. The whole family. I want to, before we wrap up, I want to know predictions for the next episode that we do this December what's going to be the hot shit I think God of War is going to merit

a big discussion I think for Godi I think yeah there's going to be a few of them I think God of War certainly is has a very good chance Red Dead very very good chance Red Dead 2 comes out in October oh yeah you said Red Dead I know you're talking about Stuttered.

Let me hit you with this. Let me scoop you up a big doll of Spider-Man. Oh, yeah. Spider-Man, sure. Do you know what's going to win? And it's going to be very appropriate because I think it won, almost won the very first annual Besties Award. What?

Kentucky Route Zero. Oh, wow. It ends this year. The full game comes out this year. Do you remember there was a time when we were like, hey, maybe we can't give it best game of the year this year because surely it will be finished next year.

Like 2013 or whatever the hell? Yeah. That does sound familiar. The Crew 2? Come on. Now you're just having some fun it's gonna be a call of duty it's gonna be a battlefield i don't know there's a lot of x factors honestly like until that was really good july and august look fucking rough things pick back up around uh spider-man shadow the tomb raider september but um shenmue shenmue three how about a game of lucky hit again with me your old pal shenmue is that the guy's name yeah his name is lucky hit shenmue knew it all right all right lucky hit shenmue the forklift man i want to i i

let's wrap up on a great note uh thanks so thanks so much for listening to the besties. Be sure to join us again next end of calendar year for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!