The Besties - Best Games of 2018

Episode Date: December 25, 2018

Wondering what the best games of 2018 were? Join Justin McElroy, Griffin McElory, Chris Plante and Russ Frushtick as they venture forth and discuss the cream of the crop. Will it be the last Besties episode ever? Yes! Maybe! I don't know! We just hope you enjoy it. 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!

Now, guys, I wanted to mention, you know how we've been doing this as a daily podcast since like March? Yeah. And you guys have been sending me the files to upload and like edit and take care of it. Yeah, so cool of you. Thank you, man. Thanks for that. Yeah, so I checked because I kind of just like upload and file and forget and that's the end of it. But I checked today and it looks like none of them went up.

And it turns out I've actually been putting them in the trash can, which I thought that was the cloud icon, but it's not. I got that confused too because I thought it was the upload bucket. I thought everything you put in there went into the upload bucket and then it got put up on the website. I just want to, for clarification, are you saying the episodes where we talked about the world's best fashion, the world's best music, the world's best songs. None of those made it. Yeah, I checked. None of them were up

there. I feel kind of bad about it because I know people were waiting for them, but no one really mentioned it, so I feel like there's really no reason to ever release them, right? Well, the fact that nobody mentioned it says something about the size of our audience, and also says something about us

for making an episode of the besties in 2018, the year of our audience and also says something about us for making an episode of the besties in 2018 the year of our lord ad oh my so are you a fucking idiot or what oh man it's a trash can didn't even look like the cloud i'm sorry but i'm pretty steamed guys i thought it was a cirrus hey i'm pretty steamed i'm gonna need a second over here to calm down i'm seamed out wait you know what i think would I thought it was a Cirrus. Hey, I'm pretty steamed. I'm going to need a second over here to calm down. I'm steamed out. Wait, you know what I think would help? You know what I think would help, Hoops?

If we went back to basics and we just did an episode where we talk about the world's best games. Okay, let's do it. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the year. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I think I know the best game of the year, maybe. My name is Chris Plant, and I am 100% certain I know the best game of the year. My name is Russ Rostick,

and I know the best games of the week. That's right. We're back with the besties where we explore the latest and greatest in pop culture, trivia, fashion, sports. Kanye, Ariana, Nikki. We follow them all here on our website, the besties. It's also a hit podcast where we cover more topics like news you can use, video fast food trends and tipping etiquette but this week

we are going to really drill down on video games folks they have come such a long way since pac-man i cannot tell you my my nephew grivum was playing this thing. Have you guys seen, okay, you know how there's two weeks, right? And we all call it two weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right now they're calling it Fortnite and they are crazy about something that has to do with two weeks of time. I saw this game that your nephew was playing,

who I guess is my son, the Fortnite game. And I saw him building like a house made of wood and i thought this looks like a cute i thought it was maybe a licensed bob vila title um and then a clown came in on a jet pack and shot my nephew's son a hundred times did he make him dance from a grenade he then did the carlton dance oh no yeah Yeah, the very litigious Carlton, I'm glad, is pursuing legal recompense because my nephew was very embarrassed and I was very frustrated. Yeah, finally. This is the besties. We're going to talk about video games.

I'm so proud to join from Fox's new darling, McElroyroy dot family or the McElroy family. Uh, if you're not into URLs, uh, glad here to join our polygon brethren. Once again, to talk about video games. Uh, I don't feel like I'm an expert anymore. I feel like I'm more casual at this point. Uh, but we're still going to do our best. I think I've played a lot of stuff that is, that is good this year. Um, Hey, before we get into honorable

mentions, overall, just kind of like overall, 2018. Weird one. Weird one, right? Yeah, it was a weird one. I think last year, I remember throughout the year as we were recording, we kept remembering like, wow, there's a lot of bangers this year.

It is like month to month to month, every single month had like a game of the year contender situation. And that is not to say that there were bad games that came out this year. There were many good games that came out this year. Also there's bad games that came out this fucking year. Well, there were also bad games. But last year I think was one of those like seminal, like doesn't come around, you know,

it comes around once a decade kind of years. Last year was switch year, right? And so that like, that is already around you know yeah it comes around once a decade last year was switch year right and so that like right that is already you know you're talking about a handful of like bangers just just right there um everybody stepped in you know what this year reminded me of it reminds i feel like it wasn't just last year i feel like we were on a streak there of maybe four years that were like that where we broke outside of the only good games get released in october november december like that's what everybody saves it of the only good games get released in October, November, December. Like, that's what everybody saves it up for. Sure.

Maybe there's some earlier in the year, but really, like, that's the big show. And this year, while there were certainly some good, like, games that came out earlier in the year, this was the first year I can remember that had just, like, dead zones. Like, months where nothing happened. Well, yeah, and a lot of the mainstays, a lot of the holiday titles ended up coming out and being bad. Just kind of okay, yeah. We're in the hold your best bets for the next generation territory, right? Yeah, that sucks, man. We have four years to make.

We're about two years away from the next generation. You got to hold your bets. Yeah, but there's usually one or two crazy end of generation releases that just blow our brains out. We can still get this. Yeah, but there's usually one or two crazy end-of-generation releases that just blow our face. Yeah, we could still get that next year. Yeah, sure. I think what was missing for me was a lot of the sort of surprise, real buzzy games that people just sort of spontaneously started talking about.

There are a few on our list this year, but mainly a lot of known quantities. there are a few on our list this year, but mainly like a lot of known quantities, not just sequels, but like, yes, this was highly anticipated and it was very good. So like,

I think probably consistent from that point of view, but I don't know. Griffin made the point. I was looking at the list of the 12 main games we'll be discussing today. And I was telling Griffin, like, I don't know, this is a really great list. And Griffin pointed out like, the problem is there's no number 13 there's not like

a you know there's not 10 other games that you could have put on this list where i feel like we could have achieved that previously to wit we created the list we have that we're going to be talking about these 12 games basically we all just sort of listed out the games that we liked the point was to make a top 10 uh i think russ got there i think justin got there i think chris listed like 45 games because he's he's like that i think y'all are like could not be further off base that's well i just i wanted to say to finish my point i i had nine and i just to to put a 10th game in there that i would put forward as like a potential contender for like game of the year or fuck it like a game that i felt like a very very you know strong attraction to a game that i wanted to like champion like i couldn't

think of the 10th but that said looking at these 12 games six of them i would be completely happy with winning game of the year it is not like last year where it's like okay make up your mind between zelda or mario odyssey like or you the years previous, I feel like it's been easy to guess what the winner is going to be. This year, yeah, maybe there weren't as many great games that I loved that came out, but the ones that I love, man, I am fucking buck wild for. Yeah, Plant, I wanted to ask you,

so do you feel like this year was more, because obviously you put together and worked on the top 50 for Polygon, do you think this year had more uh i would say niche games that were very good but would probably only appeal to specific types of people like it's a few things i think last year there was 20 like a plus games right yeah and then that, there was a pretty sharp drop off. There's a lot of good stuff, but drop off. This year, I feel like there are 40 B plus games. Yeah. Maybe like one or two A plus.

And I think that, I think also you're right that, yeah, maybe it's a little more niche. I think there's a weird thing where certain types of games tend to get favored at year end. Where it's like heavy on story, heavy on cinematics, heavy on a certain type of gameplay. There's costume dramas. Yeah. Like we're not going to talk about battle tech today. And I think there is an argument for us to talk about it. If any of us had like really given it some time.

Here's the thing. We're not dorks. Thank you. To your point like about there being two A-plus games, like, yeah, you look at like any compilation of what other outlets and, you know, smaller blogs and bigger mainstream press outlets are rewarding. It's like flip a coin, gotta war a red dead. And I think that the conversation is so much more interesting that those are you know two games that we're definitely going to talk about today and who knows they might they might win

I just I feel like the good games were really good this year there were just sort of fewer like like you said like a range games yeah should we like speed through some honorable mentions yeah yes I'll go first if that's okay I have should we light speed through some honorable mentions yeah uh yes uh

I'll go first if that's okay I have go for it uh excuse me uh I just wanted to hit two of the games that came out um in December which is like usually a complete dead zone uh these were timed with the

release of uh I guess they were timed to the video game awards which were exceptional this year i don't know if you guys watched them uh that that show has really come a very long way from something griffin i used to love to uh lembast yeah mercilessly uh first is uh ashen which i'm so surprised at how much people are liking that game because i played it at, I think, E3 last year and it demoed horribly. Samesies. It is really good.

It is... Here's the way I would describe it. It's like Dark Souls if Dark Souls had, like, any chill. Like, just any chill whatsoever. That is Ashen. It is... When you go into... So, okay, Dark Souls.

The style is, God, I'm so bad at talking about this. I'm glad I'm not a professional anymore. No, it's not spooky. It's low poly, kind of like that. Oh, you mean the new one? Yeah, yeah. Or Ashen, you mean. I feel like almost like Shadow of the Colossus, that style of game.

Like that art style, it's very beautiful. It reminds me of Absolver, like the low poly count sort of character. But it's a little more welcoming visually. And musically, I mean, like a lot of the music in,

when you're in like the sort of central town area, it's very chill, very calming. And you actually can't even have weapons in your, in your central hub. And as you play through the game, this is sort of like, it's a fantasy,

basically like world changing, a huge world changing event has happened and people are sort of digging out of the muck and mire and your home base of sorts has a lot of people in it and more people come back as you continue playing through the game and start living in your town and almost it seems like every time you come back they're rebuilding there's new structures new buildings to look at new new uh ways to spend

your in-game currency that kind of thing and online people that you play with can move in too right like their character that's something i read i have not played the game but i remember hearing that you know they handle it they handle it really interestingly um you they're the people that you meet will be your ai companion and one of them will come with you on a given mission and they'll like have your back and sort of seamlessly um they'll just sometimes you just realize that it's a real person um that the the other person is playing alongside you presumably you know for them you look like the companion but that is what is what is happening so it's like a dark souls touring test like you never know

very much so and like normally i'll notice like whoa they're kicking ass like oh okay they're a real person oh thank god that's cool because I actually am about to go fight a boss, and I love it that I have a real person with me right now because that will be really helpful. So you're almost never alone, which is very on Dark Souls, I would say. Obviously, there are ways to summon people in Dark Souls, but that sense of a companion,

there are areas that you can't get to unless you offer to give someone a boost, and then they lift you up. It takes two people to open the doors to dungeons or that sort of thing thank god with the army of two we'd be lost um from a gameplay perspective so far it's like it's it's very souls like except for specific quests you are you are going on like specific quests to go retrieve things or kill people or whatever like you have missions

that you are going out to do blind wandering of dark souls right yeah absolutely and it definitely rewards that i mean there's things to find and it's constantly trying to lure you off the critical path but uh it is it is very cool i've really been enjoying it it's it's it has fewer i would say rough edges than a souls game uh a little bit of that if you like a little bit of that souls jank there's not as much of that here um i've seen some weird ai pathing stuff but nothing to write home about uh but ashen is my first honorable mention um that's cool i wanted to mention another game so weirdly enough ashen i think ashen is on xbox but if you're playing on pc it's only on the epic game store right right i think that's the case for for a limited time i think they're oh is it limited they had a steam they still have like a steam page but

now they're in the state it's like uh we'll see um another one that's like that is hades which i wanted to call out i imagine that's justin's second game it is please talk about hades so hades was also announced and released at the Game Awards this year. And it's made by the folks that did Bastion and Transistor and Pyre. Super giant games whose games, by and large, I really, really enjoy. But I will personally admit that like Pyre, for example, and to a lesser extent, Transistor didn't click for me as much as Bastion did. Yeah. And this feels very much like a return to form for them.

It's an action game. It's set in the underworld of, I guess, ancient Greece with gods and mythic beasts and stuff like that. But control-wise, it's very, very sharp. I would say much sharper than even Bastion, which I thought was well-controlled. And it's a roguelike, so every time you start a dungeon,

you're kind of starting from scratch. There's some progression elements, but what really stands out for this, the art is just so freaking gorgeous. They've always been like... Supergiant has always been a really, really good presentation, so voice acting and artwork, and this feels like the pinnacle like the best they've done on that front

it just is just like a feast visually really astounding and it plays great I the best way I can describe it just in terms of gameplay is sort of like Binding of Isaac meets like that's like God of War like original God of War where there's a lot of like roll out of the way attack roll out of the way attack attack, roll out of the way, attack.

But it's all played from like the classic like isometric perspective. It's terrific. I think it's pretty welcoming for a roguelike. I think a lot of people get scared off by the genre. And I found this pretty welcoming and great. Yeah, you're almost always making progress right given run um the thing that i thought was really neat about it is there's only like five weapons i think that you can choose right now uh but as you go through a run you get different blessings from gods of

olympus and they really change first off you usually get to choose between two or three uh but each one you pick really changes the way that you play, or at least it should. For example, a boon from Zeus might be that you can add lightning to your main attack. Or if you're playing with the shield weapon, it has a throw ability. Each weapon has a special ability, and it can add lightning to that. And then you get a blessing from Hermes that lets your shield bounce around more times or makes your dash do damage to people. That kind of stuff. So, like, at a certain point, I had a shield that bounced around four times and then hit people with lightning every time it bounced around. And then also, I was throwing magic that bounced around the room and killed everybody.

But it really shapes the way that you play a given run and really, I think, helps it feel fresh. Yeah, all the weapons feel very different, almost like you're unlocking new characters each time you get a different weapon. It really is a total surprise. Did not expect it and really blew me away. They also turned up the hot protagonist style to 24 or something.

Oh yeah, he's a hunk. Yeah, I like... I'm not the first person to say this, but the decision to like skip the path to fan art and just be like, no. Do it ourselves. That is the real art. We're going for it. We're

legitimizing our audience. It's good. It's also great every time you go back to the main area you have people waiting for you there, like your dad, Hades, who does not want you to leave the Underworld and just trolls you every time,

which in a roguelike is amazing. I mean, I've played through probably 15 runs, and he's had different ways to dunk on me every single time. Most recently, he was complaining to Cerberus, my dog, about how I had abandoned him to take care of him. So Hades has to take care of Cerberus while I'm running around the underworld.

And he was grousing about that. But there's really fun stuff like that, which really helps to make it feel like you're progressing even in a roguelike structure. Speaking of hot protagonists, I wanted to bring up one of my runners up. This was one we were actually considering for the list of 12, but didn't make the cut because not enough of us had played it.

It's Astro Bot Rescue Mission. Oh, yes. That protagonist is... Round and all the right places. Also, I mean, you are kind of part of the game in that game. You are kind of a protagonist, so that may have been just of part of the game in that game. You are kind of a protagonist. So that may have been just me sort of tooting my own horn. It is a PlayStation VR game that is extremely good and is among my top 10 favorite games of the year,

which I don't know if you had told me back in January or even fucking October, I would have called you a liar to your face. The best way that I have seen sort of the importance of Astro Bot Rescue Mission described is just as Ape Escape kind of proved the value of the two sticks, the dual shot controller, it sort of established why that was necessary for different types of games as they evolved and moved forward. Astro Bot does that for VR. And so in that sense, it is it is sort of a seminal game. Unfortunately, it's coming in, you know, kind of late in the current place, the current VR

lifecycle that we find ourselves in. It is a 3D platformer where uh you are using you use a dual shot controller and you control an astrobot which i think were in the yeah there was a demo disc yeah they were in the demo disc for the playstation vr they were kind of sort of the mascot i guess for for that stuff they were in that little demo where you could like uh you know control a bunch of the little robots at once and they would go and play i think it was even before oh shit you're right yeah before the vr yeah you're right playroom playroom that's right uh there was also a vr you know thing with them also but now this is like a fully fledged game so it is a a platformer that uh you know you're controlling this character with the sticks and there's nothing too like wild about the platforming you can jump uh your double jump

actually like shoots a laser out of your feet so you have to like use that to you know kill a spiky enemy that you couldn't jump on or punch normally uh you know there's there's tightropes you can walk on and bounce off of there's like there's there's enough sort of like platforming stuff to make it interesting uh and in doing so it kind of avoids what lucky's tale sort of the pitfall it fell into where it was super fucking boring and so it wasn't interesting to play that game in vr at all at least this one like you're playing it in vr you have this sort of omniscient overhead view uh but the platforming is is pretty pretty good uh what makes the game cool is that you are also in the game uh and by which I mean like your footprint in this world

is you control this huge flying robot that kind of follows behind the astrobot. Kind of like a giant Locky 2. Kind of like a giant Locky 2, except like you can have effects on the world. So first of all, pretty much every level has like these platforming challenges, but you're trying to find other astrobots that have been marooned in all these different levels.

And so you literally have to, you know, move around in your chair and like look down in pits to see if maybe there's like a hidden hidden one there. So you're constantly having to sort of like solve the puzzle of finding those Astro bots, which makes up sort of the main hook of the game. And it's fun. I. It is genuinely an enjoyable addition onto this general platforming thing. The other thing is sometimes you have to headbutt a wall to make it explode so the astrobot can run through it. Or you have to use your controller like a hose, and then you're shooting water up.

You can shoot it straight up in the air and look up and get it on your visor, and now you have water on your visor. There's enemies that will shoot ink at you and cover your field of vision with ink um there are so many ways of making you a physical member of of the game that makes it one of like the most immersive and that word can mean like a lot of different things for vr uh echo i forget what to get what the game was i think i brought it last year it was the oculus rift like you were a robot pushing yourself lost something like that uh that game is fantastic

and immersive because like you feel like this robot in this world and this one well shit you feel like a robot in this world and there's so many fun interactions that you can do like uh anytime you find like a new power-up and you think like you get a grappling hook and you're like what happens if i shoot my rescue bot with that? My, my astro bot with that, you can shoot him and he gets frustrated. Like there's everything that you can do in this game. Uh, they have like figured out a way to, to, to, you know, solve it in the game, which really just makes you feel like a part of this world. Um, I was not expecting much.

I knew people were talking big, big words big words you know justin and i have really been out of the industry for too long but um talking talking up this game and i didn't really get it until i played it and it's it is fantastic it's really the closest i've seen sony sony get to like making a nintendo style game yeah doing it to nintendo like levels of quality like sony does their types of games very well but they when they try to do kids games or family friendly games i should say generally doesn't reach quite the level you get knacked you get a little bit knacked uh this is really spectacular i love the perspective stuff that griffin was like being able to peer around a corner to like get a better perspective on a jump

or dodging like an enemy projectile like they'll shatter your screen if you get hit in the head so you literally have to like lean to the side to avoid yeah it's there's so much physical interaction that's great um also destination oh sorry i was gonna do two little superlatives to build off this uh of best surprises of the year uh vr being saved or kept on life support by saved or I don't know if it's saved or kept. Yeah, it is because the amount of investment that's going to be into it means it's going for at least another three years. Sure.

It worked. It's saved in that. Not in the way that we see it now. They're definitely going to be investing and trying to make it standalone and good, standalone and almost as good as Rift or psvr is the success of psvr in the past year and a half has been enough that sony is going to invest in it more um which is wild that like i mean the question do they do they invest in it will it be backwards compatible

with ps5 or whatever like that's that for me that's the big question if they're if they're working on that shit like is is vr going to be any consideration for it yeah yeah i mean overall the fact that it seemed like psvr would be the loser or at least the first to go of this war um and that it's not just a novelty uh like playstation move was before it that's surprising and then the i guess the other big surprise on the Xbox side is Xbox Game Pass being this thing Microsoft has done. Maybe, at least to this generation, but maybe since Xbox Live in terms of a platform. Ashen, I think it's on it, right? I believe so. I mean, they have hundreds of games on it.

Yeah. It is just huge. It hit 4 million subscribers. It's like targeting just an absurd number next year uh and both of them seem like things that most people don't talk about which is also weird that these two kind of things are happening simultaneously and largely go unnoticed yeah um i also wanted to talk about destiny well i don't want to talk about destiny 2 forsaken but it was it was good it fixed the game i played that game a lot and then stopped because i'd spent a lot of time playing it but i wanted to give kudos

to it because they fixed a lot of shit that i did not like uh about vanilla d2 um yeah it's good again i was able to actually start from scratch on pc and it wasn't a miserable experience uh having to like rebuild from nothing um whereas i didn't think I was ever going to do that ever. So yeah, yeah. Play destiny. Should we get into it? Wait,

wait, you can't just do that. What? I didn't even get my thing. Oh, I thought your thing was those two things, but no, my thing is prey moon crash,

a game that nobody respects because it's a masterpiece and you don't like good games, but that's okay. We'll get to that later in the episode. Prey moon crash is masterpiece. masterpiece it is if you played prey last year and you're like you know what i don't like about immersive sims is how i am motivated to never use my best abilities uh and also wow this seems like it might be a lot of money focused on a thing i only play once or twice through then here is a game for you it is a roguelike in the prey universe there are i believe it's five different uh characters each with different power trees or ability trees and your goal is to get all five of them off of a moon base uh with all the prey mimics the monsters in the original one in play.

Each round gets increasingly difficult. You collect resources. What you drop or what you don't collect remain for the person behind you. And you have to play through multiple times just to kind of build up that tree and learn how to play. What I really dig about it is it's the closest I've seen to Ken Levine after all the Bioshock stuff did all the talk of narrative Legos of how do you make an immersive sim or one of these types of games where the storytelling happens on its own. And I think it's the closest I've seen to a AAA game capture the kind of surprise storytelling of a game like Spelunky where the events that happen to you become the story in a really compelling way

that said it's incredibly difficult and I think the kind of grind of the skill tree is what scared a lot of people away I think including everybody who tried it in this room is that right? I will tell you

what scared me away. You do yours, then I'll do mine. Yeah, I have one too. Fine. What scared me away, even though I like it conceptually, because I like the idea of a roguelike that uses the Bioshock

or Looking Glass model of gameplay, what scared me away is that what I like about roguelikes is that it's constantly me reacting to the given situation that i'm that's in front of me right right at this moment whereas this structure actually requires that you kind of plan like 16 steps in advance and and some of those plans go awry granted but like the stress of like okay i'm gonna do a run and then i'm gonna switch to this character and this character is going to use this ability and this character like there was just like a lot to keep

track of whereas I prefer like the next five minutes being the only thing I have to worry about and whether I can survive through that and then moving on so that was what did it for me let's go down the line I just think feels bad to play that's really it

I do not like the feel of that game Justin I have anything sorry i got a nosebleed oh my god was it talking about this game it was too much too many too much games it this see i'm not a pro anymore yeah well should we start talking with that well i'll put a bow on that and what i'll say is i think it i think it preys on people like a fresh dick where if you try to beat it all in one go it will drive you nuts um it's definitely i mean in some ways i think again it's like spelunky and that you have to kind of find that inner zen with not beating it for a long time. Yeah, but Dead Cells was like that too, and I

played through Dead Cells a ton of times. Dead Cells is just grind it, and then eventually you beat it. I enjoyed Dead Cells, but it is when you have to grind and grind and grind and grind. Did you beat it? Yeah, I got to the final boss, and then I realized oh, there's no way to beat this until I hit a certain threshold. No.

I don't know. You have to unlock all the powers. Did you beat it? Do you think you could beat it don't know you have to unlock all the powers did you beat it with do you think you could beat it no you need to unlock all the powers but the skill okay grinding grind anyway um anyway frame when crash it's i want to get one more point in here because i think it's it's really valuable about this game and it's what separates it from everything that we're going to talk about is there is a huge conversation this year about the ethics of triple a game development uh things like assassin's creed odyssey where it's just the the way to make more game is to just make more game um and i think there's something really compelling about a thing like pre-moon crash that gets the vibe of a triple a game but approaches it with a genre and an idea that doesn't require the answer to be,

hey, we need to throw more bodies at this. And I think PT was another example of that, of what happens when the answer is to actually get smaller and master the craft and come up with an idea that is so inherently compelling that you don't just have to keep grafting more stuff onto it because that's what, you know, being AAA means. I think it's incredible that this game exists. Like, it is staggering to me, especially after playing it, that this AAA game studio made this very, very weird, you know, cool game. This very, very weird, you know, cool, cool game.

I just wasn't. It wasn't for me, but I super appreciate the fact that, especially in a year where there were a lot of games that followed a different ethical path, and I'm sure we're probably going to talk about that over the next three fucking hours. Justin, are you okay? Justin, you doing all right, bud? Yeah, I'm absolutely fine.

I'm really fine. I think I just, because I kind of made an offhanded comment about it, I just wanted to say I think this would be absolutely a rewarding experience to spend time with. There was just too much else going on, and I felt my frustration level rose too quickly to sort of stick with it. But it's new, for sure. Okay, round one.

Are we just doing these four games pitted against each other in a sort of, if you will, battle Royale? Yeah. So we have 12 games. We're going to do three rounds with each of us sort of repping one game. I don't necessarily think that means that like, that's the pony we,

you know, think should win as much as it is. Like we feel enthusiastic about these games as individuals and want to like put a case forward. And I think just after we decide those three rounds, we'll, we'll put the three winners against each other for the, for the goatee.

Um, I think, I think Russ and I had talked about it being kind of just like three mini episodes of the besties. And then, uh, instead of doing the fucking what three round structure where by the time we reach the third round,

we literally have nothing else to say about super Mario odyssey. Um, yeah, this seems a little smarter. So, uh, who wants to start round one? Hmm.

Uh, run one's weird for me because the game that I'm repping is not necessarily, as you said, the game, not necessarily the game that I would pick, but it is a game that I really liked. Oh, you want to switch?

We can switch on the fly. I'll it we're gonna switch on the fly all right cool uh russ russ do my game so your game was hollow knight um which is my personal game of the year 2018 and 17 and 17 now now smart people at home will know that hollow knight originally released on the pc in 2017 and um literally no one at polygon played it because it was not on our i think top 50 list it was really kind of an embarrassing mistake it happens these things happen um but i'm really really glad that we rectified it uh i think it fell in it like number 11 or something this year straight up i did not play it because of the art style i thought it was for lack of a better term like i thought it was sort of that goth style game like uh i like salt and sanctuary

a lot but like that art style does nothing for me yeah and i and i think um being for me at least being on pc uh scared me away I am not generally playing a ton of games on PC that like take me dozens and dozens of hours to get through let alone like really tough games that require platforming and fight it's just not the sort of games I like playing on PC

so with its arrival on the Switch which happened during E3 of this year I was pretty pumped because i'd heard you know everyone loved it but i hadn't touched it yet and it just for about a month after its release totally sucked in every moment of my spare time um i am a huge huge fan of the metroidvania style of game um and i've played every single one that i could get my hands on from Symphony of the Night to Super Metroid to you name it

and this is my favorite of all of those without a doubt and I need to clear my throat so someone can talk briefly. It's a good, good, good, good, good, good, good, good. Are you done? Good, good, good, good, good.

Okay, thank you. So I just want to talk real quick about some of the things that I think it does really, really well. For one thing, good. Yeah, good game. Okay, thank you. So I just want to talk real quick about some of the things that I think it does really, really well. For one thing, exploration. So one of the big things about Metroidvanias that I really love and doesn't happen very often because it's very tough to do is you constantly feel like this world that you're in is much bigger than you initially thought. So it's constantly like kind of unveiling itself to you. bigger than you initially thought.

So it's constantly like kind of unveiling itself to you. The most recent modern example would be games like Bloodborne or Dark Souls, where you are dropped in this world and you're like, oh, that's pretty small. And then you realize, oh, the elevator from the church connects to the front thing.

Um, it's exceptionally impressive that they were able to do this in a 2D game, which is all hand drawn. Um, and it was essentially made by two people with like additional help outside but like effectively two people made this game and it the world just like constantly surprises you with these like shock shockingly large interesting environments that like totally change up the look and feel and enemy types and everything like that I also want to jump in and say because I did I sound like i knocked the art style like once i got into it that art style like lends itself to what i my

favorite thing about the game which is just like the tone i cannot think of a video game maybe that has ever come out and i would stand by that that has established such a like cohesive and interesting tone that like kept me playing uh i think it works really well yeah i think the issue is that the opening area is literally like mist and smoke and you wear a dark cloak in the very first area but very quickly things uh get a lot more visually varied but like the levels where you are just going through like tunnels carved by these killer worms and it's pitch black and you're just trying not to die like being in those areas scared the shit out of me more than like any horror game i played this

year i um i i i want i bounced off this game pretty hard and i i will say that an issue that i have with it and i i'm sure it gets very fantastic i trust all of you but on switch it actually hurt that i could pick it up and put it down whenever i wanted and you have to unlock the maps and i couldn't remember where i was in a humongous world that all looks pretty much identical um and having to relearn my mental map for this game every when i would come back for it after two weeks was absolutely maddening and i it's like i really wish there was an option just to turn on the map solution yeah it sucks because you can do that in like five minutes if you know how to do it you can do it in five minutes but if you if you don't know how to do it like chris i i i wanted

around for an hour, like not knowing what the fuck was going on and saying like, wow, this game sucks. You can unlock all of the maps or you can unlock a part of the map. You can unlock what you're looking for was the like indicator of where you are on the map. Did you get that? I think I have that, but large parts of the map are still just blacked out. Yeah.

I mean, I think a lot of the game. Yeah. You need to have the patience this is one of the few games i don't do this very often maybe like once or twice a year where i play one of these types of games without any help whatsoever um and i had i mean i'm really glad that i did because the game is playable and beatable in the same way that like zelda breath of the wild is playable and beatable without a guide. Um, but you need that level of like patience and knowledge that like,

Oh, this is your kind of game. You're going to spend a ton of time figuring it out. I think this was also the year that I just couldn't play that game. Like having a new baby, I need, I needed games that effectively let me come back to them when I could. And I also have the luxury of of a commute, for example.

So sitting on a train for two hours, this was like a dream game to play. We haven't even touched on mechanically the economy of the game. The progression of the game is so fucking compelling and makes you want to look in every corner just to get every advantage that you can because it's also a really hard game at points uh but it feels you know mostly fair because the controls are so tight like yeah combat in that game is so good uh and 60 frames a second for even in handheld switch which is like a real accomplishment and very tough to do that they nailed and there's there's fights in that game where you feel like, I'm remembering one that's like this big badass cricket.

Oh, by the way, it's all bugs, which is very, very cool. There's this big badass cricket or locust or mantis. It was a mantis that you fight at the top of this tower. And it is, man, you feel like an Olympic fencer. Like you just have to be pitch perfect, kind of in a soulsy way of, you know, there's not much wiggle room here. You just have to be pitch perfect, kind of in a soulsy way of, you know, there's not much wiggle room here.

You just have to be perfect for a couple minutes. But it's fair because it just feels great. It feels so good. Very cool character customization thing. The last thing I wanted to mention about this is the story. So the story is very Dark Souls in the sense that like when I beat the game, I had no idea about like 80% of what was going on in the story. You get these like cryptic dialogue pieces from people. You kind of think you're kind of understanding the vague outlines of it.

And then after I beat the game, I went and watched like a 40 minute lore explainer on YouTube. And it was like this like thing opened up to me. And granted, I'm not saying that that should be every game where you need a lore explainer. But the level of thought that was put in and then being able to like go back after the fact and say like, oh, wow, that's why he was saying this or that's why this was here. That's why this was here. That's, you know, this interesting background art all ties into this like like on the level of like Star Wars level of like world creation. Very intense. That was put into this lore.

It also does like character arcs really well. Like like seeing a character in one area and then watching their storyline develop. I mean, fuck. I know this is like the most rote game critic shit ever but i'm out of the industry now but like it is very souls like like finding the zig zigfried of catalina uh you know sitting in front of uh the zen's fortress and then you know seeing him a bit later on and oh no now he's like possessed like this game does that thing and it does it really well i think it's better than dark souls personally i realize that people, and it does it really well. I think it's better than Dark Souls. Personally, I realize that people disagree, but I think it is a better game than Dark Souls or Bloodborne

or any other Metroidvania you can name. That's why. Okay, next. Should I do Russ's? Yeah, I'll do Russ's game. Yeah, so Russ's game for this round is Into the Breach, which is a strategy game, but I think it could probably be more succinctly kind of wrapped up as like a digital tabletop game or perhaps like chess. Wow, that sounds very boring.

Chess with, how about mech chess? It's a tactics game, not a strategy game. It's a tactics game. That's a good one. It's a tactics game. It's a tactics game. That's a good one. It's a tactics game. In this game, it is by the creators of FTL,

another sort of game about making painstaking decisions about, you know, sacrifice for the greater good. Into the Breach sort of boils that down into every single moment of gameplay. You control a squad of mechs, and the mechs have different sort of uh purposes there can be like an artillery mech that fires missiles from long distances and a brute mech that can you know charge in with a rocket powered punch uh and a gunner mech that can you know shoot two

blasts uh in either direction uh and using your team of mechs, which you can upgrade and give new equipment to sort of change their functionality on the field, you have to either defeat or delay or otherwise thwart a team of aliens that I called, what are they called? The Vex? The Vec. The Vec. And so this takes place in an isometric sort of chessboard like field where you will see, you know, human buildings and human sort of industrial places like power stations or a train that cuts across the map. And using your team of mechs, you have to stop the VEC from destroying human installations. Every time they do, it knocks down some of your power, which is a sort of meter that carries over mission to mission. You can increase it by doing well in missions, but every time a building is destroyed, you

lose power. If you lose all your power, the timeline collapses. And then at that point, if you have any surviving pilots of your mechs, you can bring them forward to your next game. So it is roguelike somewhat, but you have this sort of ongoing progression hook where you can you know keep a pilot going and increasing in uh ability uh from from one game to the other it is a small leg up but it can prove to be a very very valuable one um it is man i was talking to uh i forget who i was talking to about it um oh i was talking to one of my friends at like a holiday party about the game.

I made it to the very final mission and I spent literally, not a joke, one day. Not like 24 hours, right? Not like I wasn't spending every waking up, but when I turned on my computer and turned on the game when I had free time, I spent an entire day on one turn because there's, you, you convince yourselves, you convince yourself like, okay, this alien is

going to attack this building. It's all about sort of preventing what is just about to happen. So the aliens sort of show their hand, like what they're about to do. So there could be like a, um, a clawed alien. That's going to just like run up on a building and slash it. So on your turn, you can run up with your punching robot and punch it. Not enough to kill it, but just enough to push it out of the way of that building so that when the turns move forward, you know, maybe they'll miss. Maybe you can push them on top of a spawn point for another alien that's going to come in next round. Maybe you can push them into the path of another alien's attack which prevents a building being destroyed and does damage you're trying to figure out how much like to use like hearthstone terminology like how much tempo you can generate by canceling out

using your very limited moves to cancel out uh not just cancel out enemy moves but prevent them from you know gaining an advantage in the following turn and so it is painstaking you have to really really really read every situation uh to the best of your ability trying to find every advantage you can eke out of it trying to find every bit of like uh damage control you you can do in each round and that that's like the general idea of the game and then it sort of expands out with the the different alien types and what they do the different mission types sometimes uh you have to for instance missions that have a train you can't let that train take any damage and it's moving and if anything stops on the train tracks

and the train runs into it explodes sometimes you have to prevent these tanks from getting blown up but they don't function the first turn so you have to defend them until they come online and then you can use them for offensive purposes uh the different like abilities that the mechs have are fucking wild like there's an artillery unit that doesn't shoot you know harmful rounds it shoots shields that you can use to cover up a building so you know that negates the damage or you can cover up one of your friendly mechs you you have to figure out how to do all of these things every single turn of every single mission uh and it makes you feel like a fucking super genius when you pull it off um it is it is for me like it is the cleverest uh it is one of the cleverest like tactics games i've ever played and it's certainly the probably

the most i've ever spent playing a a tactics game because i think it just it distills down everything that is great about that genre into this like super um comprehensible like super digestible gameplay loop that I think is just absolutely brilliant also it's out on switch now too which is fantastic I don't think you can overstate for me I'm not somebody who who's ever wrapped their head around a tactics game uh that they really liked but I don't think you can overstate the value of like seeing your actions like there is something that is that that really helps to congeal it in your head when you see like okay when you do this here's exactly what's going to happen are you sure you want to do that because it seems like it's going to go so bad for you uh and it is really helpful to be able to see that

stuff and I and I love this game I played endless endless hours of it I think it is really helpful to be able to see that stuff. And I love this game. I played endless, endless hours of it. I think it is brilliant. Yeah, and there's no percentage. Like, it eliminates chance, like, to that point. You have a 50% chance. You will hit it. You will hit it. You will move it.

There is nothing unfair about it. It's just, are you doing everything? Are you sure? Are you doing everything you can with this turn? It's not enough to just block them for this turn there'll be more aliens next turn can you do anything else to get an advantage and i think what what the other thing i really like about it contrary to like what i was saying earlier about um uh moon crash is that the the problems ahead of you granted that you are

making decisions that will impact later on but by and large you can't fully stress about them beyond like, can I minimize the possible damages I'm going to take on this turn for the future? But by and large, the problems ahead of you are problems that are only going to exist for the next three turns. So those turns are so crucial. And then once they're gone, they're gone. You don't have to worry about them anymore. You're not stressing about like, where am I going to be 15 turns from now, which is

obviously like a lot of tactics games or chess where you just get super overwhelmed by your options here there are only like a handful of variables and whether you can just maximize those it's so good it's so good

on switch it's such a perfect fit on switch the controls feel excellent with a controller which is really surprising for a game that is about moving a cursor, but they did an excellent job with the switch controls.

It is really spectacular. It came out early in the year, too. This is one of the six games that, if it's Game of the Year, that's fine with me. It came out in, I think, February, and then I was like, well, shit be it this could be game of the year and it's only February it's also become the game that I recommend to people who don't play a lot of games but bought a switch when they came out um people who like played breath of the wild and

are now like well I don't love Mario and I don't really know why I bought this um griff and i have a friend who has become obsessed with this over work trips because it is it is the game of this year that you can you know play for 15 minutes or play for four hours yeah um and feel just as good both good good podcast game too yeah good i listened to the entire uh uh hello for the magic tavern back catalog while i played into the room um let's talk about celeste a action platformer by chris plant you made that game i made the game wow good work good work man that's a good game congratulations dude oh no big deal no big deal um celeste is an action platformer made by matt thorson uh and uh the crew at Matt makes games.

You might know them as the people who made Towerfall, which won our first besties. Is that right? I don't think it won. No, I don't think it won. And you guys regretted the decision. Yeah. Well, because you guys brought the fucking version or something like that.

We weren't about to name an OUYA game that fucking number one game of the year. This show still means something to people, Russ. keep cranking i'll get i think it was army of two was the winner challenging question sure sure sure uh so basically it it's towerfall without the combat uh they took the jump system of towerfall that kind of dashy jump uh and made it into a massacre platformer in the line of Super Meat Boy. The big difference, though, is it's extremely friendly. It's friendly in that it doesn't move quite at that pace that Meat Boy does. The characters are bigger.

The worlds are, I think, a little more readable, if that makes sense. Kind of like colorful and nice, like nice looking. Specifically, I mean, the puzzle, when you look at it, you get what you need to solve. Yeah. if that makes sense you like colorful and nice like nice looking to the action specifically i mean the puzzle when you look at it you you get what you need to solve yeah um and and it's waiting for you to figure that out uh brian brian david gilbert just put up a polygon video about how this game makes you better at all games and teaches you you know skill and knowledge like it's a it's a very good video that i think explains a lot of the actual climbing yeah sure it borrows a lot from um and and on top of all of that it has an accessibility menu that allows you to change how the game works so if you want infinite jumps and

you just want to explore or you want to be uh immortal effectively and not have to you know deal with the punishing death there's that there are strawberries located throughout the game which are entirely optional they're basically there for the pleasure of having an added challenge which i love i love that it's not oh hey you need to get this um to you know be the world's best at game, and we're going to award you with rankings at the end of each level. It does ultimately unlock some additional stuff, but again, the stuff it unlocks is more extreme and hardcore anyway, so if that's not what you're there for,

you'll be fine. And it's just, I don't know, it's a very straightforward game. It isn't a lot of the stuff that we'll talk about i think it sets out to be a a very straightforward well-executed nintendo style platformer which matt has always taken inspiration from it has a pretty um nice story about dealing with uh depression and anxiety that i think mashes really well with overcoming obstacles and again we have and culminates sorry i was just gonna say we have a great essay on polygon by uh

emily heller that talks about how well the mechanics mash with the story what are you gonna say griffin that that story i can't stress this enough like uh it builds to a climax that uh was more emotionally resonant with me than any other game i played this year and i did not fucking expect that from the platformer follow-up to tower fall like i didn't i didn't it tackles anxiety in such a like relatable way and then builds to like a confrontation with it that is so like it's sick it's like a sick it turns it into like a totally tight platforming level but also is is not uh is not rudimentary like it's not like i beat up my anxiety let's i won yeah uh it's it's a lot more nuanced than that i think i think that that element of the game should not be undersold i think the the

narrative of of the game and the sort of emotional impact that it goes for and succeeds in going for, which like video games often try to do and fail at, Celeste absolutely crushes. Fantastic music too. Yeah, it does. Best soundtrack of the year, hands down. It might also be the best paced game of the year. It might also be the best paced game of the year. There are a lot of games we'll talk about that I love, but I can't think of any other game where I didn't notice at least some lull at some point,

something that could be cut away. Where this game, it begins and ends exactly where it should. It does the Nintendo thing of introducing new abilities that you learn and adapt and include into your kind of toolkit but it doesn't do the thing that so many wannabe nintendo games do where it makes you repeat those lessons over and over and over again um and one final superlative it has the best easter egg of the year by far um which is the game was originally prototyped in part in pico 8 which is the virtual game console yeah um that we've covered on polygon a few times it is kind of like

a nes uh that you can download the emulator for and play all these weird games on and you can play that version of celeste in celeste and what i love about that is it is a rich game in and of itself. I think a lot of people who found that thought, oh, this is cute. It's like retro Celeste. I'll play a couple of them. Yeah, they played three hours of it. Yeah, and then it's just a full game inside the game. I used to think MapMix Games has has they've taken so much of what i love

about a nintendo game which is finding something really uh pleasurable tangible um potent and just polishing it into a and to true perfection and then walking away um there's every every bit even even the the level select screen which is this low poly um version of the mountain that you're climbing is is so perfect and charming and it was a choice um he didn't just you know it wasn't oh well we're doing pixel art so the level select is pixar it is hey what's a way that we can make this a little warmer a little richer um a little more interesting than what people are going to expect i don't know i was gonna say i also like the fact that you know speaking of someone that like really really likes very difficult platforming games that game was there for me like i could get that now the main story

was like hard but not very hard and then once you beat that there are like ultra hard levels but what i didn't really realize is that the fact that they have those customization options made this a super welcoming game to people that do not like those sorts of games that just really want to experience the music and the art and the story and don't want to suffer through like constantly dying and the fact that they have that stuff in there i thought was great but that master core side of it is and i just you know has no bearing on our consideration of it for this round but seeing the speed running community what they have done to this game is so fucking nasty and so like this this game is so good oh man they did they did uh i think in sgdq this year they showed off uh you know like a four-way

celeste speed run race and there is so much for you to you know shave off of your select it is very very fun to watch um yeah it's it's such a good game it's a good game any of these three these three would do it bums me out that these three are in a round together because any of these three could do it for me i I don't like Celeste very much. So here is my game. What didn't you like about Celeste? I don't know. I don't want to find any fault with the game.

It just wasn't my thing. And that is okay. Speaking of, here's Justin's. Speaking of, here's the true game of my lifetime. How's that? This is my... I have been waiting for the game that I'm lifetime how's that this is uh my i i have been waiting for the game that i'm going to discuss which is spider-man

a game on the playstation 4 console uh i've uh one of the first jobs i ever had reviewing video games was uh spider-man web of shadows in uh way back for official xbox magazine uh when that was still a going concern

i have played and reviewed when xbox needed a magazine to help you keep up with an official one i've played and reviewed every spider-man game since then except for this one because i was out the biz at just the perfect time thanks games you did it again um and i played i played every spider-man game uh that's out there um and this is the this is the best one we no longer have to point to uh heartbreakingly web of shadows as being the best spider-man game because it is, uh, this game for me. I mean, the stuff like the swinging is great. The city looks great. Uh, I think the story is surprisingly affecting. It is a kind of classic Spider-Man tale, but it is done in a really, um, smart way. I think for me, what, what sets Spider-Man apart is, I like to think a lot about

generous game design in that you're constantly being given new things to do in a way that makes it clear the developer respected your time. They respected the fact that you were investing your life minutes into this thing.

And so constantly inventing new mechanics and new ways to play when you, when you have something as solid as the, the, the swinging is in this game. And I would say the combat I think is also fantastic, but the, the, the swinging and seeing the way that that is used. I mean, so many different side missions and side quests and, and Spider-Man games, especially the open world ones have been plagued absolutely plagued by you know the the assassin's creed thing of like there's four different things you could do have a good 20 hours we'll see you at the end see you at the credits folks and uh this is so not that i mean constantly just inventing new things for you to do uh the one that's like springs out to me the most is a level where you have to reactivate cell phone towers that are being used by the bad people.

And as you're swinging, you have to stay above their signal. And they're sort of like waves of signal that are being sent out that you can see with your special spider goggles. And you have to swing between the waves of energy to try to reactivate these towers and that's just like one of i mean dozens upon dozens of ways these mechanics are used i would also say that like the uh combat and the way that spider-man's abilities are used are like so fun and when you invest the time like so fluid and cool like i to be able to hit a button to grab a trash can and spin around and throw it at a guy and then you turn around and web up this other cat and then somebody shooting a missile at you and you redirect that

missile at them and then you set up a web bomb and then you throw them all up in the air with like concussive i don't know web farts or something. I don't know. You know, it's so cool. I got all the, I hunted down all the collectibles. I found all the landmarks. It is the best, I think, best representation of New York that's ever been in a video game. Certainly the most, like, complete. It's very cool.

Okay, well, I hear some low bar. GTA 4 was pretty good right that's not it's basically new york it's not new york uh i would say that as somebody who has visited new york a lot never lived there uh it is cool to be able to go to an area and kind and it kind of have the feel of uh the the area that it's supposed to represent, at least as I could recognize it, like around 27th and 10th where Sleep No More is. It's the McKittrick Hotel for people that are, yeah. It felt very much like that sort of area,

which I guess is, is that Chelsea? Is that technically Chelsea? It's the meatpacking district. It's terrible. There's really no reason you would ever go there. Oh, Sleep No More. But anyway, I don't think that much more needs to be said, except I'm so, I hope that this signals like a renaissance for, we never really had a period where great superhero games were being made. I mean, you could point to individual examples like Batman, but we never really had like a bumper crop of great superhero games.

And I kind of lost faith that that would happen as the industry move much toward more towards games of service, ongoing, you know, seasons and all multiplayer and stuff like that. I started kind of losing hope that we were going to get that. And Spider-Man seems to have done very well. And I hope that maybe now finally we'll see people investing the same kind of energy. Into superhero video games. As they do into superhero films at this point. I think there's reason to be skeptical of that.

And I think also reason why. Spider-Man is a fantastic game. And I'm glad you brought it. It is a game that didn't click with me. Nearly as much as I hoped. Especially as an obsessive Spider-Man fan. And I think the issue is why it is good and why so many superhero games are bad.

And that's because a lot of times, superhero games try to reinvent the wheel. They try to figure out some very creative way to come up with powers. I think- That has ruined so many Spider-Man, like those Wii Spider-Man games where you controlled more Spider-Man so much like those we Spider-Man games were like you controlled more spider like those were fucking miserable in so many games that either haven't come out or may never come out I think the Avengers game I good luck trying to figure out one Avengers powers in the world of all of them at the same time and in what they did and I think it's a sign of a really mature developer who has

been around in the industry for a long time and is very good at what they do is they said hey we're going to use proven tools um you're going to climb to the top of buildings and you're going to open parts of the map you're going to use fighting mechanics that you've generally seen elsewhere we're going to elevate the swing uh that people love the most nothing is especially new or daring but but but and it's a huge huge huge huge but it is talk about map mix games it is polished holy moly moly is this game polished i don't think it's an especially great representation of new york but i think it is an astonishing representation of the new york skyline um when you are up high it feels like new york in a way yeah i can't think of any game that accomplishes

that the empire state building feels like the empire state building when you're on top of it doesn't feel like a building that's like, oh, a little bit taller. It feels dangerous to be where you're at. So I was, I was, I think I may have just had expectations that were a little too high in terms of where they would go creatively with it. And I kind of think that it's going to be

one of those games that maybe over the holidays I'll go back to, especially after seeing Into the Spider-Verse. How is is it i've heard it's really is it good i mean it's only like the best movie of the year if you're a spider-man fan i cried three times no big deal it's not like i wanted to see it every day since i was eight years old um and yeah i think bringing that that emotion back to the game with me and also just being like i think horizon zero dawn was this game last year right uh we just have to go okay it's just doing a known thing but it's doing it staggeringly well yeah um that'll open my heart yeah i think for me the the thing this is not an issue again but i

think the the best part of spider-man you experience in the first 30 minutes and I don't think there's anything in the game after that that makes that first 30 minutes like not the best part of the game the combat is pretty neat once it's yeah okay I didn't I didn't feel like it was evolving maybe you know I didn't beat the whole thing so I didn't feel like it was evolving

fast enough but it didn't feel I just never got the same thrill that i got from booting up the game the first time so of the of the 30 minute segments that russ played the best of those was the first one yeah got it cool number one it's what's weird to me man yeah it's really fun what's weird to me is like i did not finish the game but i kind of want to now because i've heard that this story is actually really great and that

is strange to me that this licensed superhero game is the first one to have a good story like the Batman games like had basically no story or the second game had a good story at the very worst it had a bad story where now the Joker's a big monster this game is it's own Spider-Man

reality and they and that's awesome. And they, well, it's important for the story because they make some choices. Like it is extremely cool. I will say slight caveat. The one thing that is still missing from Spider-Man that has been missing from all Spider-Man games and all superhero games that I can think of,

except for maybe the hulk one of the the hulks did this but uh for me i had the coolest moment of any spider-man or superhero thing is that like pulling open the shirt to reveal the costume underneath and like changing in a in a phone booth or an alley or whatever, and going from like regular person to superhero. Um, and that's something that like no game has really done. Uh, Superman, the NES did it.

You could be Clark Kent and wander around if you wanted to, for no reason. Uh, give me that, give me that persona shit. Like I'm not, no kidding. It seems like a weird genre mashup,

but like, give me a, give me persona shit where it's him in high school and him like walking around his neighborhood and like getting to know people. And then fucking give me that midnight channel shit of you tearing your shirt open and becoming Spider-Man. Like why doesn't every superhero game

do that? This one flirts with it but then it's like would you like to solve puzzles? Because we have tile puzzles. Oh man the tile puzzles. Come on y'all. I do love me a tile puzzle. Alright so that's Spider-Man. It ain't gonna win but it's a good video game. All right.

I don't know how we do this. Let's do around the table. I personally, of these four games, the one that I'm like would, I've played for infinity time and would still go play right this second again is Into the Breach. I think that the other three are exceptional but have like definite caveats uh with them and i and i can't find one with into

the breach i think it is uh just outstanding top to bottom yeah i'll show my hand and say i am right on the same page into the breach i i feel like i understand what you're saying like it is a it into the breach is i think a pretty flawless game and what it tries to accomplish but like i think it's i think it is hollow knight from i was i 108 completed hollow that was my final stat which i don't even know how that's possible uh you're very good griffin i really know i mean how i got more than 100 that's what i mean i i that was the game that i found myself so surprised by but at the same time it came out last year that's the thing that is very challenging for me i mean i don't think that's a reason to yeah we need to hold that as a mark i okay i mean

yeah i don't disagree i think that like the first time I tried to play Hollow Knight was on the PC, and I think the first hour is so sort of inscrutable, and some of the choices they've made actually limit the number of people that are going to be able to get the most out of this game. And I'm not saying it's a bad game as a result. We're like

grasping at straws with all of these, of course. They're all acceptable. But for me, that's a tough, this is not a universal recommendation that I would make to people. But though, I mean, I loved it the second time around. But that would be my argument against. I mean, I wouldn't recommend, like, the Souls games to most folks. But they are still some of my favorite games ever made here.

Here's, here's my, um, and I don't want to diminish FTO. I'm sorry. Uh, into the breach, which again is one really honestly,

one of my favorite games of the year. I think not only did hollow night succeed at what it was trying to do, it succeeded on every single front at a 10 for me. Like I think the art spectacular, the world, the storytelling, the game, the combat, succeeded on every single front at a 10 for me. Like I think the art spectacular, the world, the storytelling, the game,

the combat, there's like 45 boss fights, each of which feels different and requires like very intricate, hardcore, like, uh, attention and strategy. Um, I,

I just think as an overall package, it is such a difficult thing to pull off and they nailed it on every front. Russ is right I'm Hollow Knight and here we are again I mean this is really up to Hoops like to make a pledge because

I just I had too much trouble getting into Hollow Knight. I just for me it's I don't think a reissue should put it in contention, like, I think that that has to be considered, like, otherwise like, you know, when, like, Majora's Mask

is reissued, we could say, hey, this is still not a very good game, but like, I should pick a good one. I think the argument, I think the reason I'm okay with it is because literally none of us really talked about it the year it came out. No one, like, we really

missed it big time. So I think that's why. I think it'd be another thing. There is precedent, because we considered Towerfall the year after it had been released, when it made it on consoles and shit so there is precedent for it um i yeah i would recommend i mean for me like i'm not there's there are things

that people love and there are things that are uh have a wider appeal and for me the fact that like i would recommend into the reach to pretty much anybody, even if they don't like that genre of game. Cause I don't. And like the ability to get me to get invested in a style of game that like I actively dislike. I, I, it's just hard for me to,

to get past that. I think it is. It will also bring a lot of people into a genre that, that maybe haven't tried it before. And I, I just think it's such a such a huge accomplishment um and does so many things right where there are like i think like flaws with hollow knight like things that it did wrong like i think that there are things that are too obscure or punishing or whatever uh that that made it like less enjoyable for me you know what there's a side quest in Hollow Knight where you have to

take a flower from a woman on the far right side of the map and then carry it all the way to the far left side of the entire map without getting hit once and it took me fucking 20 hours to beat that shit because I wanted to do 100% the game and it was miserable I'm changing my vote to Into the Breach

punitively Hollow Knight is the best game of 2017 we fucked up by not considering it and that's I honestly think it's a masterpiece I mean I don't think it's better than Zelda Breath of the Wild but it is was an excellent excellent extremely good game let's move

on to the second round of competition this one's gonna be be nasty, too. Yeah, this is going to be a nasty one, boys. Let me do mine first. Please, no. Can we do yours last and the very last thing? I do

not want to talk about this fucking game. It's going to get so bad in here. I think it'll be air. I think I have an interesting perspective on it. I think you do do too, actually. I'm ready. Okay, Red Dead Redemption 2

is a cowboy game. We get our way all in agreement so far. So far, so good. I already disagree. Not a cowboy game. Not a cowboy game. Yeehaw.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game the first thing I tweeted about Red Dead Redemption 2 I wish I just I should just pull up all my like Red Dead Redemption 2 tweets because my first thing I tweeted about it is oh my god the first hour of Red Dead Redemption 2 is like books level boring

and that is the first thing I said about the game is that the first hour of Red Dead Redemption 2 is like books level boring and that is the first thing I said about the game is that the first hour is so boring that I honestly was like I have been looking for this game for years I cannot believe that I am going to bail on it right now because it is you're tromping through snow it's miserable

it controls like your sticks got dipped by your nephew into Mrs. Butterworth's and then hardened that way. And then you're just like fighting them for the entire game. And any game where it's like, any game where it's like, you have to look up on fucking VG two,

four, seven, like the hot strats to customize the menu. So you can actually play the thing. Everyone I know who played this game, reduce the dead zone to zero and changed sprint to press X once instead of tapping it.

Oh, I didn't know to do that. Oh my God. That's a good one. Literally, it is essential to enjoying the game. Oh no. But, and honestly, as I played it, even towards the end of it, I was like, okay,

I spent a lot of time in the open world of the game like doing open world stuff and uh i i was sort of this is gonna sound like i'm picking it apart but i'm really not i was sort of bummed out it's sort of the um dragon age inquisition inquisition dragon's inququisition problem where people spent 20 hours in the first area and then it's like no you all gotta get out of there please leave please move on I kind of did that with the open world

in this game where like I was exploring and I was living the simulation which is brilliantly done like stuff where I would do things that have no gameplay effect just to like because it felt right to like get a haircut or you know groom my horse or whatever not at people on

the on the road yeah exactly feeling you use the word feeling right and that is so important when you talk about this game because there is not really a good reason to get a haircut you just feel like ah this is what he needs this is what he needs I want to take care of my boy let's give him a haircut you know what he should this is what he needs this is what he needs i want to take care of my boy let's give him a haircut you know what he should have someone come into the

bathtub with him and wash his arms and legs oh i don't know about that uh it never gets nasty russ it's just i know your puritanical views as he did the besties once again uh and but i i spent a lot of time with that and then i was like okay story time. And I started to get the feeling like, man, I wish I had spaced this stuff out because I was not getting some of the video gamey type stuff you get from going through a campaign. I wasn't like unlocking a bunch of new weapons or abilities or anything that I found particularly meaningful. I had done a lot of that stuff in the open world already. And I was really like waiting for it to be over

like wanting it to end like i okay i want to see the end of this i want to move on to other things and then there's an epilogue that takes like another eight hours and it is a baffling choice but when i finished the game there was something about the the world of this game and the characters and spending the amount of time I had, like thinking about them and looking after them, uh, that I really found it hard to shake. Like I'm, I'm not,

uh, somebody who normally like keeps thinking about games after they finished them. I tend to like play something and sort of move on. And I felt myself like lingering in this world that is like really cool and fascinating and lovely to look at and like feel so full of potential and depth. And we're more than any open world game I can remember. The seams are not as evident. They're there for sure if you look for them, but the seams are not as evident they're there for sure if you look for

them but the seams are not as evident as i uh have been accustomed to in in a lot of games like this and i i know that i'm not i don't feel like i'm doing a great job of articulating why this game like really sort of stuck with me but the things that it is about and the way that it looks at violence and the way that it looks at loyalty and the value of that and the value of like who where your loyalty lies and who it lies to and the value of. And the value of, I think that the, and it's really hard to talk about uh having values in the face of um the grand scope of your life and what your life has meant and and seeing a character really look and think about that that i don't think i've ever seen a game do and not just that but seeing how your legacy affects the people that come after that I think is like extremely powerful and could only work in a game like this, um, that, that made it really powerful for me and difficult to, uh, to, to let go of.

So, okay. So I should first mention apart from Justin's tweets, I got probably 16 DMs from him totally ripping apart various parts of the game and saying, don't keep playing. You should stop right now. Let me see if I can find any. There were a number of them complaining about the sixth montage that was happening. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There are a

baffling number of montages in the epilogue of this game is like uh i think six or seven yeah it's pretty funny uh yeah here's here's what i'm going to say and the reason why i thought this is a very special game it belonged in my top 10 i do not regret putting it there but why it doesn't really come close to being my top game of the year is I what Justin's points about the themes and the topics that are brought up through the story are totally right 100% I thought they were interesting topics They get the story the like single-player like playing through missions Very easily could have been 20 hours shorter like heartbeat could have been 20 hours shorter Maybe 40 I think that's a stretch, but certainly 20 hours shorter maybe 40 i think that's a stretch but

certainly 20 hours shorter without a doubt there's an incredible 20 hour long game in this game there's an there's a fucking masterpiece of a 20 hour long game in this game unfortunately there is a kind of super tedious 60 hour game that you actually have to play and the other issue which which justin sort of alluded to as well regarding the the like you're not getting the typical things you get from an open-world game which are like tools and upgrades and stuff like that and while I grant that like there's a Story conceit to that where you're trying to make a grounded game of you know this guy and he's you know making his way in the world

You run into the biggest issue that I think it has which is they're just there's not enough into the biggest issue that I think it has, which is there just, there's not enough variety in terms of the actual things that you do in the world. You ride a horse, you get to the mission spot, you kill a bunch of guys with cover-based mechanics, the cops are coming, you got to run away, you run away. Like that describes, I want to say 80 to 85% of every mission in this game. And there are 60 hours of missions. like that is not a short amount of time where you're doing the same thing over and over again and granted there are very well acted and written cut scenes that like further exemplify what the characters are and stuff like that but you can't make the gameplay itself be that redundant without making people feel like

they're wasting their time i i basically i had the same arc as justin where i got through that that tutorial that was quite bad and then just lost myself in the open world and that stuff like somebody used the word special to describe this game and i think that's apt like i've never played a game like red dead redemption 2 because nobody's made a game like it red dead redemption 1 isn't even anything like Red Dead Redemption 2 because I had a lot of fun playing Red Dead Redemption 1. I lost myself in that open world and had an incredible time. I spent nights, like, over the course of weeks just, like, doing shit in the world. And then I was like, ah, let's play the story.

I quit in the middle of Chapter 3. And then, like'm you know uh earlier this week actually i was like listen i'm gonna give this another shot because i know we're gonna talk about it in besties i made it through the end of chapter three and a couple missions into chapter four i was like okay i'm probably not gonna play this game anymore because the stories are the the the missions are like russ said like everything funnels through the fucking barrel of a gun. All these like cool interactions and systems of the world like eventually just turn into bullets that you shoot at people.

And while I agree that like there are some interesting characters in the game, I am 20 to 30 hours into it now, probably 30 hours into it right now. And if you ask me like what the story is about, other than like the collapse of outlaw lifestyle, I couldn't fucking tell you. I had a conversation with Chris Plant that broke my heart where I was like, I'm almost through chapter three. I'm so stoked. It's been so miserable.

Chapter three is a fucking disaster where you just go from person in your camp who gives you a job. It usually fucks up. the job you shoot some guys you run away and you do this 16 times each time it takes a fucking half hour it is miserable and disconnected disjointed like not a story uh and then i was like oh i'm through it i'm so does the story get better after chapter three and chris plant told me chapter three is the best chapter in the game and i was like well then my time is up with random i think it's the best chapter i do think um to go back to adjusting wait i want to i want to get back chris i just need to address one thing i said you do not understand the i'm not one of these like give it 40 hours and see if it picks

up i'm not saying that i think you're completely justified in your thing. I would say that like the the care the way where these characters go in the last third of the game is the game like is what I mean, it is the character arcs. Like I think it is laying groundwork for the ending. And like it is I think it is only in the medium of video games where we would say I don't think this character is very good or doesn't have a good arc or whatever when we haven't seen the totality of it. But I get that. I made that argument for Final Fantasy XIII. I was there when that argument was invented. I do not discredit it. Everybody I've talked to says, yeah, it gets great at the end.

But it's 30 hours guys like that's i've spent more than a human day playing this game and i don't know what the fuck it's about the other issue is taken holistically it gets better at the end but the end itself is is i in my opinion the worst part once it gets into the politics of how this how much are we are comfortable spoiling here they get not because i'm mutation in a way that is so utterly disgusting and i think i think so many of the problems with this game could be solved with a solution that rockstar already came up with with grand theft auto 5 which is i increasingly don't believe games of this scope and style can survive off of just one protagonist if you have multiple protagonists you are you you immediately get licensed to do so many different

things you don't have one character who has to go through every single experience that this game throws his way there is an action set piece towards the end of the game that is absolutely ludicrous and comes after some very tragic reveals and and yet we're just supposed to jive with these two things being together with the same person and not having an impact on this person i think it solves um allowing for that type of um i guess mechanical growth that you were talking about fresh of oh hey well one of these people can be the kind of weaker character where you experience the grind of the west and one of them could be somebody who has access to lots of money and is put in adventurous situations um and and also there's just the weirdness of this is about a group

and there's so much opportunity to to put you in the shoes of people who I think are just more interesting Sadie is probably the most interesting character in the game and I kept wanting to live that story versus living a kind of like

knockoffish Breaking Bad the story the writing is just so much better than anything Rockstar has done in the past. But also, everything they've done in the past is so deeply cynical, and shallow, and satirical, in a way that doesn't pay off, that it definitely makes this game feel better right off the bat. But I think if I compare it it again uh to a boring book in justin's words no just books like just books it doesn't it it feels like it's going for that level it's going for this novel feel that it never quite earns and the other weird thing that

gets in the way is you can feel that this game got rebooted a number of times because there are moments that are still in the game that are ghosts of previous drafts that are nasty and cynical and you have that kind of shallow uh satire that rockstar is known for so i i'm glad you said that the tonal shifts in this game i i totally feel what you're saying where it went from serious game to like grand theft auto vice city levels of like go kill all of these, you know, kill everybody in this strip club with a chainsaw level of like, holy shit, guys. The first time that I had to murder an entire town, like the opening of the gunslinger when I was trying to go for a positive karma run. Are you? That was fucking wild.

And you do it like eight times. I have to cry foul here guys because i'm looking at everyone's top 10 lists and red dead redemption 2 is on three of ours and i okay let me defend it let me okay because that is totally justified here's here's what i'm gonna say unquestionably in my mind this is the most realistic open world ever made bar none not even close like outrageously incredible open world the most believable i feel like i could live there i could build a cabin and chill out and just live there that is a feat that is not to be denied um so like that alone honestly would probably put it in my top

10 like right there yeah that the the fucking million ways that horses can crash alone is pretty i think i don't know i think it it is representative of what they tried to go for versus who actually resonated with what they tried to go for what they tried to go for is a very realistic very uh realistically paced it's like if you tried to play and i've done this before and i think russ you made a video like this before we're like trying to play gta 5 while following all the traffic laws oh yeah that's what it feels like it's it is it is not the fun way to play one of these games but it's very realistic and the the fact that that is the the tone that this triple a game developer was like yeah that's right this is the game you're you that tutorial doesn't lie it's not a fast-paced game and so that you got to kind

of sit back and uh enjoy it and three of us you know did enough for it to be top 10 and i found it quite bad and so it's not but i think that that's representative of like who's gonna get something out of this game maybe a good 75 of people there are also two things that came out right before the game that i think capture both its ambition i guess is a word uh and also its flaws one is obviously uh all of the issues with development crunch that they kind of copped to in an interview and then walked back of people working just absurd number of hours um and you see that in there's an entire extra place you go in this game that is just the pits um and really should never have been made or should have been cut from the

game but i also feel that there's an obligation to keep things when they cost that much money to make uh both in money and you know people's time uh but then the other thing that they that one of the hauser brothers said before the game came out was that he effectively if i if i remember this right didn't watch any movies uh like modern westerns or read any modern books or any of these things that they don't take any inspiration from it which which is sure let's give them the benefit of the doubt, hysterical. Because the number of times that this game turns to, like, spirit animal, quote unquote, imagery, is a lot. It is so weird how one moment it really can feel genuine and new and fresh and then the in the same scene just fall onto just the most sour trope um imaginable it's bizarre who played online did anybody play online yeah i played online

i played it once and i got in and i had found a mission and the mission was i think in like strawberry and i had to like ride up north, get a wagon to some guys that had stolen, bring it right back to Strawberry. I did just that. I had a 15-minute timer on the clock. Took me seven minutes to go up to the place where the wagon was. Got in. None of the AI seemed to activate and come after me.

Seven minutes back down with no real players or enemies coming after me at all. Parked the thing. Got made 75 cents. Turned the game right the fuck off. Said, no thanks rockstar and then the rockstar was like wait wait wait wait wait wait wait before we go do you want to spend do you want to spend 40 on a virtual horse and i was like yeah actually yes i do want to do that because i hate my i hate money and i love virtual horses a mixed bag um let's Let's move on to our next title.

What's that going to be? I think it's yours, Griffin. Sure. My second game that I am bringing is Monster Hunter World, another game that came out pretty early in the year, I think January or February, and that I got super, super, super into. So Russ and I had Destiny 2 Forsaken on our lists

and ultimately decided not to include it because we didn't want to talk at length about an expansion to a first-person shooter game. But I think another good reason for excluding it is Monster Hunter World does, you know, what Destiny goes for, this like, you know, online progression-based, grindy action game. uh way way better uh and

arguably better than i don't agree but you can go on um so what i think is so important about monster hunter world and you know one of the reasons i really loved it is it was the game that more than any other uh got people i know, people who play video games, into a franchise that I have enjoyed for a really long time. And that has been traditionally completely inscrutable. Monster Hunter World, luckily, is only pretty inscrutable. Not completely. So it's a step down. Man, it is not the most narratively interesting game on the list.

In fact, it may be the most narratively worst game on the list. Worse than Tetris. Worse than Tetris, certainly. But man, this is a fucking video game, y'all. This here is one of those capital V video, capital G games. It is, you you know just like every monster hunter game that came before you go out on hunts and you you know are usually trying to take down uh one of the big featured monster of which there are about i don't know like 30 or

40 or so uh and that's like most of the missions sometimes you'll have to take down multiple of them sometimes you have smaller quests like you know go collect some herbs, which you then take back to your hub world and turn into, you know, new item recipes or you turn into weapons and armor. Monster Hunter World succeeds in having all, I think, 14 of the weapon types be really fucking fun and really unique amongst each other. I switched between them. I think in past Monster Hunter games, I've like only done bow or only done longsword. In this one, I tried everything because every instrument is actually really, really great. It had really seamless, really well executed multiplayer and hopping into this game with you guys and, you know,

taking on big monsters or me being like sort of further along than you guys and coming in to help you like beat the smaller monsters was a complete blast. not to derail you. When I edit out you saying seamless multiplayer, it, can you say something else that's more accurate so I can like edit it in right here just they got seamless what did you not like what did you not like about just about how that entire system is deeply deeply flawed could you say like deeply

flawed uh i will grant you i will grant you when it comes to story missions the fact that you can't okay that's this justice right this is bullshit when you do a story mission there are some of them you have to do alone there are some of them you have to do alone there's some of them that your partner like your co-op partner can't do if they haven't done the mission but regardless they can't join your team until after you've made it through the opening cut seat of the thing so that would lead to like justin making like a private room that he would then give me the password fuck man trying to stream this game with well no because

then there's also the option of you creating a lobby that you and like 24 people can jump into you make a mission and then you go and run the mission and come back to that it's work it's I'm not saying it's broken it's well but it definitely has it does have issues but there's also the SOS

system where if you're having trouble or you jump into a mission and realize oh shit I want a team you fire up a flare you're having trouble or you jump into a mission and realize, oh, shit, I want a team, you fire up a flare. You like use an item to fire up a flare. And then other people who are just looking at the mission board can see, oh, this person needs help. I'll just hop in there. It is really I never had any problem. you know, some of its materials for a weapon or an armor set I was looking for, it was, it took seconds to find a game to hop into, which is evidenced by the fact that I probably ran, I probably ran several hundred hunts, like, because it was pretty easy to hop into. I just think it's great, man. I think the progression hooks are, that's like something

I'm very critical about in game in in games i think that monster hunter world does really well by them and it also gives you a lot of sort of customization feel so that when you play with your friends who are all using different weapons and different skill sets uh you you really feel like you know you've made a unique thing and everybody else is playing with their unique thing and that's very cool i have worked harder at getting into monster hunt monster hunting than i have ever worked i don't i don't meet games halfway usually i'm pretty i'm pretty fickle about that sort of thing i worked so hard and griffin maybe a couple of you guys can attest

to this there was an e3 where when i was sort of entering my um more figurehead status at polygon not so much like boots on the ground. More of a consultant phase of Polygon. There is an E3 while Pat Gill attempted furiously to edit video where I would just like sit next to him with my 3DS like, what the fuck, Pat? What do I do here, Pat? Pat, what are the paintballs for, Pat? Pat, what do I do next? Like literally the entire e3 i

spent trying to get into that game and by the end of it i was just like you know what i can't do it i can't get into it and monster hunter world is the one that everybody who plays monster hunter games says that each game in the series is the one that no really it's actually accessible this time and you can actually actually really play it's actually accessible this time, and you can actually, actually really play it. And I spent, this game came out right around the time that my second daughter was born. And when she was, like, waking up in the middle of the night constantly, and there would be periods, she had her days and nights switched, so she would sleep through the day and then be up for most of the night. And I would just sit up and hold her and hold the PS4 controller and play this thing like three in the morning for hours and hours and hours. I would play with Justin one day and then the next day I would play with him and he would be like 14 levels higher with like this sick new weapon and new set of armor.

And it's like, whoa, holy shit, you got you got yoked over the nighttime. I do want to address. I think it is just fantastic. Over the nighttime. I do want to address. I think it is just fantastic. I do want to address the statement that Griffin made earlier regarding Destiny and why. Yeah, please. So, okay.

So when I look at Monster Hunter, because I'm the same way with Justin, like I really in earnest tried to get into this franchise before and never understood it, like didn't even make a lick of sense why people like this game. And there was a moment that I finally hit, and it took me a while, and I think I talked a little bit about it in a previous episode, where it clicked for me, and that was when I was chasing a T-Rex, and it ran up to a bird's nest for some reason, and a bunch of raptors attacked it, and they all fell to the ground, and it was the coolest friggin' thing I've ever seen. So that moment is, in my mind, where Monster Hunter soars,

it does it better than any other game in the world in terms of, like, these giant monster boss fights are, like, super, super cool. Everything else that Monster Hunter does, I think, is horseshit and shouldn't go. Honestly, everything else. You're talking about the crafting, like, the progression stuff. The crafting, the menus, the load screens, the cut scenes, the story. Every aspect of the game is fucking horseshit wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait what about the cats

that prepare cats are good that's a good point that's the other thing I like I just feel like at every turn and granted like Justin had the luxury of you like walking him through it you also had the luxury of me don't act like I didn't play with you a bunch trying to but honestly I didn't have the patience to to sit there and have someone teach me.

And I think if you go in and do not know anything, it is worse than Dark Souls by a mile in terms of approachability. It is worse than just about every triple game I can think of in terms of approachability. And it kills me because I think what they do well should be something that a lot of people experience because it really is a fantastic thing. Yeah. It's so buried in like, fuck you mechanics. Okay. The mechanics I would push against in just this way, and it's going to seem like a bullshit defense, and maybe it is. I think in a game like this where you spend enough time, you're going to get a bit of Stockholm Syndrome.

a bit of Stockholm syndrome, but, um, the, the, the understanding a lot of the mechanics and being super familiar with them in the way that you like are no longer having to like check, you know, the monster hunter wiki pages or whatever does give you a sense that I don't

think you get with most games of like, um, I used to talk about in dark souls a lot, you know, there's the bit in a princess bride when they get really good at navigating the fire swamp. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, he's like, he hears a pop and moves her out of the way. And it's just like, by the end of it, they're just like navigating it.

And I love that in a Dark Souls game where I'm like, okay, there's a guy coming from up here. All right, watch out. With Monster Hunter, like being able to sense stuff, like being able to like to like oh i'm getting a really bad vibe about this or like you know i'm gonna i i this part of the of the world is often really dangerous i'm gonna do this thing or like understanding those mechanics i think does give you that sense of like being a real experienced like hunter in this world like you're you're you're smart about the way this world works and all your different tools and stuff and i think that knowledge that comes a little harder like that is often a lot more valuable in video games stuff that's not just like spelled out for you um i i think is is i think it

would have been fine if the game was uh slower in terms of introducing this stuff like maybe you know 20 hours in i mean granted it still like rolls in new information constantly but like within five hours i was so inundated with so many options that i was just i didn't know where to look like just making sense of the hud alone was chaos it's a lot we we it's and to that point there's new stuff and they're releasing an expansion next year i'm not looking forward to trying to get back into the game because i i hit you know in game i went far fucking into the end game i was doing like you know the advanced the double plus super advanced monsters and so trying to get back into like horizon a little bit or like trying to go back into the dlc for that like oh i don't

remember any of this stuff yeah we need to move on but i just wanted to say to russ's point like in terms of progression i get like it is still still it's still kind of tough to wrap your head around that stuff. And it certainly isn't, you know, done in the smoothest way possible. But like compared to Destiny 2, and this is maybe not the best thing to compare it to. I hit max level in Destiny 2. I did everything Forsaken. I did everything that that expansion added. I beat the raid a bunch.

I played all this stuff. i played all this stuff and i didn't unlock a single new exotic after playing it for over 100 hours easily so the power the power the like progression arc the strength growth of that game was going up going up going up flatlined literally for 50 hours and that's like i don't know games online games especially that are so afraid of their own mortality that they fucking do that shit to you and i think that red dead redemption 2 online based on what i played and what i've seen like it's certainly falling into that trap uh it sucks and monster hunter world doesn't do that uh because it just you if you can work for it if you can the hunts, if you can take down the monsters, odds are you're going to get the next thing.

And so that crawl, that acquisition of power that you then feel the next time you take down the monster that you killed to get it is really, really good. But we need to move on because that took a very long time. It's a very good game. It's a good game. I'll go. Yes. How about I go? Please.

Okay, so this is a game that I think I actually brought or Justin might have brought to an earlier episode this season. Did we? That I really enjoyed. I don't know how much you guys played of it, but I played a lot of it

and it was Subnautica, a game that has been in early access seemingly forever uh probably for the last two years or so but finally actually for for reels came out um early this year maybe february or march and i started it not really expecting that i was going to get that into it mostly because I've played a lot of survival games and you know I played No Man's Sky and I was kind of just expecting underwater No Man's Sky and

I was really surprised that how attached and like invested I was in not only like my advancement as a character but also the world that I had landed on and, like, this, like, slow progression

of, like, a base that I was building up to, like, act as my sort of home away from home. In case you're not familiar, you basically crash on a water planet and you start with essentially nothing and you go swimming and you, you know, kill fish and find, like, little pieces of ore and stuff like that. And slowly but surely you build, you know, a much more capable character that eventually the top tier, which I think is just fantastic.

You literally build a nuclear sub, a personal solo nuclear sub that you could run around and like drive yourself and it's and like launch like a giant mech suit out of the bottom it's like such an incredible power scaling thing um it's uh i don't know it's just like a really thoughtful very satisfying take on the survival genre which again i think tends to be very grindy and frustrating in that way whereas this i found really satisfying now i should mention the way i played it which is the way i would recommend everyone play this game is by turning off the food and water requirements do that there's a mode i think it's i've it's not creative mode where you get infinite everything there's like a mode in between game it's right at the beginning of the game.

You're given a choice. So just turn off food and water requirements, but you still have like O2. You can still take damage. It's still challenging, but at least that gets rid of like one of the kind of annoying grinds of the game. But the core game I thought was like really touching. The story goes like in really interesting places with like interactive elements with like

an open world that you really don't see in like these types of games usually it's like very like locked down and there's no story but you it actually goes to like really interesting places that like i felt like really moving um i i think that it is hard to overstate, uh, in survival games, um, what this brings to the genre in that there is something about being one underwater, but to like going deep that gives you the sense of like, oh my God, I should not be doing this. Like, and I experienced that so many times in Subnautica. I'd like go down a cave and find myself in like this beautiful, terrifying place that I like had no, I knew like, I've got to leave. This is terrible. I should not be doing this.

I have got to go. But still like, but what's down there? There's something like that sense of exploration and danger and risk reward, I think, is really heightened by being underwater because it's like you're constantly up against it. Like you're constantly, you know, out of your depth, if you will. And I think that that was a really, really cool element to bring to the genre. And they do the good thing that I think a lot of really good Metroidvanias do, which is you go to a place like justin just described which is like oh my god i should not be here and then five hours later you return to that place and you're like i got this like i'm a badass i've got like a mech with a drill arm and like i'm gonna blow through this and then get to another place that's like oh god there's lava spewing out of the ground and i'm in trouble and there's a

teleporting octopus and like that keeps happening for a surprisingly long time it's like not a short game i think it took me like 20 25 hours to beat and um yeah it really just kept investing me and making me want to play more the base building was super sick also like i was very impressed i i didn't really know what to expect from this game when i played it um obviously there's like not a uh no no lack of survival games especially like indie survival games available for pc or whatever uh and i you know i kind of felt like i knew what i was getting into but the base building is like it's great it's way better than a fallout 76, which we didn't talk about this episode at all. Let's turn our next game. Fallout 76.

Fallout 76. My, my, the, the thing that kind of broke my heart about subnautica, um, cause I was, I was getting into it.

I didn't like love it as much as you guys like, uh, immediately. And I think that whenever we talked about it, uh, earlier this year, that probably came through. Uh,

I hit a point where I could not progress through the story anymore. There was like a thing I needed to find or like a person I needed to talk to that. And I still wasn't like far enough in the game where things like oxygen and food and water were like no longer a concern for me. So when I went out looking for this story objective, I would starve to death. And it was really frustrating, like stumbling around in the dark, watching my meters go down, trying to find this waypoint that just didn't fucking exist. It was pretty punishing. Yeah, that's fair. And it really scared me off.

They do some weird time-gated stuff with the story where you're like waiting for radio messages to show up that i don't fully approve of like it's not a perfect game by any stretch but i think just core execution wise i thought they like nailed it i also speaking of the base building which you mentioned um really liked that it was not purely cosmetic even though you had a ton of control of how your base looked it constantly was was giving you, like, oh, I can make a little farm, and it'll constantly replenish this resource that I need. So there was constantly gameplay utility to spending time on your base, which I really liked. I think the creators were also really smart

about what they opted not to include in the game. There was a few different times the game's director, Charlie Cleveland, who, fantastic name, has been asked by people on Steam, because this was an early access game before it got released, to add guns, like lethal weapons, you know, big battles with big, scary underwater monsters. And he decided, basically, you know,

there are enough real shootings in the world um there are enough violent games that that doesn't need to be what this game is that by keeping that out of the game one it's it's kind of a vote of this doesn't have to be the type of industry we run but also we can be a bit more creative. And I think sometimes people don't consider that the time you spend making something is a resource unto itself. Sure. And if they set out to feel obligated to,

okay, well, we're making this sort of game and people expect combat in this sort of game, that is a massive resource dump of finding the combat system and adding those weapons and updating those weapons and you know making sure that those weapons are always balanced and

diverting that consciously towards other things I think is a choice that a lot of people just don't even consider I think it's just well we're making this type of game it's assumed it's going to have this type of combat and these type of weapons when it's assumed it's going to have this type of combat and these type of weapons when it doesn't really need to be.

And I think you can see it in terms of the creativity that the game has and how it expresses itself and how it challenges you to engage with the world in non-traditional ways. Let's move on to our last game of this round presented by, designed by Chris Plant. Chris Plant's God of War.

So God of War is a little game I've been working on. It's, you know, nothing big, nothing special. It's, I don't know, it's a sequel, reboot, both? At the same time? What are reboots and sequels these days? They really blur the line of the classic PlayStation action game, God of War, where you play as Kratos. You're big and you're buff. You're a tomato can with chains on your arms.

And you got big blades at the end. And then you find the baddies and you kill them. pull out their eyeballs with big eyeballs because they're gods and you are here to war um sometimes you take baths with sexy ladies um and you sometimes you sometimes you murder said ladies and it's supposed to be cool it's cool. Is it cool? And not always cool. Always a thing you do. And quick time events. Who can forget those? Sometimes you use the quick time events

to kill the ladies because he's a cool guy. That's efficiency, folks. Here's the thing. At the time, people loved God of War. It felt good. It felt as an action game.

It did this great thing where, while it is a game about power, it made you feel small. It pulled the camera out really, really, really far. And here's this diminutive little muscle head Kratos fighting things that were the size of skyscrapers and other buildings and that was one hell of a magic trick um but how do you do that now seems to be the question and how do you also make it not despicable because hey what is uh acceptable has changed and when i say what is acceptable what is accessible with a certain type of audience i'd say it was unacceptable for a large chunk of people all along it's 2018 we can no longer use like a murdered woman's torso to unlock a door like yeah that's no longer a good kratos it's

wild it's wild um that was not a joke by my brother, by the way, folks. God of War 3. Look it up. Something along those lines. It's blurry in my mind, but I think there's a torso-based puzzle. It's blurry because it was traumatic, and your brain has erased much of it. God of War, the new one, made by Cory Barlog. Yeah, that's right. Alone? Yep.

One man. It's his one-man indie game. I wanted to try to say Barlog, because that's's right. Alone. Yep. One man. It's his one man indie game. It's really wrong because that's a whole, that's the trap. Um, he was the director, uh, but it's a huge team. A number of the people on the team were part of the team that made,

uh, God of War one and two. Uh, so it's not like they just got a whole new squad. No, a lot of these people came back and they, they looked inwards and said i have changed i am now a parent um they did the thing that is awful but in this case made

an okay game of well now that i'm a father of a daughter i too can see um that you shouldn't be heinous um and they made a really compelling story about fatherhood about a guy who is grappling with all these terrible things he's done about um how our anxieties and our guilt and uh the the pickles we get ourselves into can be passed down to our children um even if we don't want them to be and it made a game about, like, Greek mythology that was interesting and compelling. I think it borrows a lot from Neil Gaiman. Norse mythology.

Oh, sorry, thank you. Well, yes. I mean, both. How comfortable are we with spoilers? It's been a while. I wouldn't go all the way. Yeah. I wouldn't do the big one.

Well, there's still Greek mythology with him himself. That's fair to say. Yeah. And, yeah, and and yeah and and what and polishes the theme here with triple a this game is so good at justifying the decisions it makes um whether that is uh it's all framed as a one shot as in the camera never breaks never cuts away which keeps you in the zone with these characters um it manages to not have too much tediousness like that that in theory could be very tedious

of well now we have to follow them as they backtrack uh it's very careful about making sure that it it gets away with having its cake and eating it too in that way. And even small stuff, again I won't get into spoilers, but like, why there's gold arrows pointing your way throughout the whole world. The kind of generic, well of course the world is communicating to me why I need to move this direction to finish the game.

Even that is justified. And emotionally justified in a really smart and affecting way. It's a game that feels like it was caught in development really smart and affecting way. It's a game that feels like it was caught in development hell for a long time and mercifully is somewhat the better for it. I don't know how it was to work on, so I can't speak to that part. But creatively, I think you can see that they had the opportunity to hone it

and not just have to go off of the first draft, which I think so many games do because they're on a tight turnaround. This, I mean, we know for a fact when we spoke with the director that they threw away effectively an entire script before going with what everybody can play now. And it feels like it.

It feels like a game that they were comfortable scrapping large chunks of in pursuit of a more complete story. It also feels, you know, we mentioned with Red Dead. It's been so long. It's been 10 months since that game came out. Like, I remember playing it and thinking, well, this is one of the greatest games probably ever made. And now I'm like, what was so, what was the...

For me, if I had to put the mechanic mechanically it's all like fantastic i mean like it's it's it's fantastic you can't fault it i i think what is so as somebody who's like a long time fan of video games and has played them for his entire life there is something to me that is so and i if this has ever happened before in in a game please let me know but the idea that you can have a game that is a reboot of a franchise that also like looks at its history and and and and is able to say like like, these are the missteps we made as creators and where, like, this story went wrong. And then seeing that reflected not just by people doing interviews, but, like, literally in the journey of the main character. Like, seeing him deal with the things that he has done in the previous three games

and seeing like the weight of that I don't think that any game has ever like take it and that's such a powerful thing with a reboot you can do that right you could say like here's what we got wrong here's what we got right let's like take another look at it but rather than forgetting a lot of that stuff or

just cutting it out I think that God of War is one of the only games I can think of where it has the courage to like really take a stark look at it and like really sort of atone for its missteps along the way and like allow itself to grow in a way that I think is just fascinating. While also still presenting a fucking rad action game right like it's like it's like we can still make an action game that is not like gross uh right it's also not burdensome like you we talk about we talked about red dead being like specifically the last 20 hours just being like pretty brutal to get through and even though this game deals with those like pretty dark depressing topics it doesn't feel like oh i'm going home i'm going to sit down and play a dick punch of a game yeah 15 hours like this and part of that i'm sorry to use that is pretty crass of me but

um part of that is is the writing for kratos and the storytelling for Kratos, but also this using this, uh, uh, this dual, dual character mentality where you're constantly dealing with someone who isn't burdened by that, or at least not as, uh, crippled by the decisions he's made.

Cause he's a kid, right? He's, and he's kind of like curious and adventurous and fun loving. And he doesn't understand why his dad is the way he is. So you have this back and forth that makes it much more uh digestible whereas ordinarily it would just be like oh why am i why am i doing this i remember seeing the e3 trailer the e3 presentation where

you know he's trying to shoot the the deer and he can't do it and you know trying to instantly have that moment between kratos and his son i remember seeing that and you know people kind of gushing about it and i was like well that does look nice how do you keep that going over the course of an entire game and now that i've completed it they do that so fucking this is the this the pacing of the story and the sort of arcs and valleys of their relationship and how it evolves uh culminating in this like genuinely extremely good ending uh is is is a really remarkable feat i i think this is this is um yeah this is a good this is a good game i mentioned with um spider-man of you know setting out to make a really polished game but knowing your limitations and your timetable um and using a lot of the same tools i think there is a further

extreme you could go of that um with a game that's just all all risk uh and and that's maybe red dead if i don't think that's all risk i think it's something else but this feels like something in the middle where a lot of it is familiar but the risks it takes um it completely nails whether that is you know having the ai companion that actually works that actually feels present or um having the one-shot open world format um i i think it just it's careful and decisive about where it takes those risks and where it should just kind of stick with what everybody on that team is already good at i will say one knock against it even though it's my own game um it does really well, uh, growing up. It still doesn't know really how to write women. Um, and I'm sure that we will see a lot more of this game. Uh, the fact that we did not get DLC makes me think that we'll see a lot more of it sooner rather than later.

Um, and I hope that is a thing that they find ways to solve, you know, probably by bringing women into the writer's room. And I do think this is kind of a weird issue around the industry of dads grew up and now they're making their dad games. But again, there'll be more of these games. It's a thing that annoyed me through it, but all in all, it is a game that sticks with me.

And like Justin said, it's rare that you have those games especially story-based games that you are thinking about long after you played and this is a game that even if i have that moment of well i kind of don't remember that i'll look at an image of it and i'm placed exactly in that spot in the game and that feel and what was happening and just i become utterly wowed again by all of it anytime i see them climbing this snowy mountain it's just wow what a staggering moment that was in one of many all right y'all uh we have got to move on let's pick a winner out of these four uh it's got it's got a war yeah okay god of war perfect yeah since we have a little extra time i'm gonna i don't want it to be God of War though to win because everybody's giving

it to God of War I want us to continue the best Eastern and picking some dumb shit the next round has fucking Tetris in it so let's see how that goes anyway here's a quick halftime what game you can pick any game this is a very quick halftime because we're running short on time what game would you pick

to get the, the, the dad of war treatment? What game needs its dad reboot? Now I would like to suggest army of two and here it is. Army of two. And they've got two kids. The kids are wearing masks too,

but they're fun. And they, uh, like bunny, bunny mouse. And the kids are the ones that put the tampons in your bullet hole wounds to heal you and it's army of four because there's two kids you guys go I would say that I would say Skyrim and that way all the dragon shouts have to be your kids sleeping. Fus Ro Dah.

Fus Ro Dah. I just got out of sleep. Come on, please. Fus Ro Dah. Yeah. Man, I wish we had time to talk about Fallout 76 in here. I'm just going to keep peppering it in where it's not appropriate. I know.

It's all I want to talk about. A game in West Virginia, you say, how exciting for me as a resident. Can't wait. I played a lot of it, of that super bad game. It's the worst game I liked this year, and Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best game I hated. Real quick, you guys have your dad games? Yeah, I think mine would be Madden, where you're just Howie Long now. And you have to wake up every morning and, oh, it hurts. It hurts.

But then you go on and you pick the wrong teams to win on Sunday and you have to eat, like, turkey and it's been sitting out in the cold and Emeril's there

and, oh. And he's got a son. Yeah. And that's all you talk about. It's like, oh, you know, my kid's doing well. Oh, man. Missed the good old days though

bubble bobble but with kids wait as the bubbles or or the bosses little monsters little baby dinosaurs that's it that's okay you know what do god of war again this time the kid has a kid and there's now you're a grandpa i've gone terribly awry. My son's a teen parent. Boys, boy. Boys, boy. Boy, Jim. Boy, Junior. Shit. They should have given the boy a name in retrospect.

Who wants to start the third round, the final of our preliminaries? A weird round this is going to be. This is going to be weird. We've saved some weird ones. Who has not gone first yet? Did I go first? No, I went with Hollow Knight.

Russ, hit us. Okay, I'll go anyway. Okay, so my game is Tetris Effect 2. Tetris Effect, oh wait, no, it's not. Tetris Effect 2 is how many people had it on their list. I do apologize for that. Yes, okay, that was a little confusing. Tetris Effect 2 is going to be so dope though guys wicked uh tetris effect is gonna be

tetris i can't wait uh this is a puzzle game where small blocks fall from the sky and you match them up and if you make lines the lines disappear and you get points for that all right so next up we're gonna be talking uh so the reason i really like this game is uh so it was made by uh the folks that uh made very cool music games like luminesce and res and um basically the the child of light and child of light which i didn't really care for but oh you're out of your mind um and what's really cool about this game no not child of light what was the what was the connect game child of eden child of eden yes i apologize sure um what was really cool about this game is that it basically integrates like music into tetris in really interesting ways um basically it kind of creates like a to call it a visualizer sort of diminishes

it in some way but it makes it a much more like visual and auditory feast when you're playing through a Tetris thing each of the levels is sort of themed off of you know of a fancy beach or jungle bells or something like that

I love fancy beach fancy beach was the best level that was probably of the movies that starred the fat boys i think fancy beach was probably my favorite there there's there's something very weird about tetris effect where uh as we've talked about i played resident uh red dead redemption for 60 hours this year and i got more of an emotional lift from playing um tetris effect in about 30 minutes like weird uh part of that has to do with like how brilliant they are in integrating the music uh as the like music builds and have uh what are the kids called a drop if you will uh and then um i don't it's it's

such a hard game to talk about i would never feel comfortable like writing an essay about tetris effect why it works for me but the feeling that the feeling you get from playing res right that's synesthetic sort of feeling like you're bumping with the uh with the gameplay and stuff like that you get that but from tetris and because tetris is a game that kind of forces you to dial in it is a it is what is great about this game is how uh how adept it is at just completely consuming you especially if you're playing with a playstation vr headset which is in my opinion like the best only way to play it i didn't play it with i mean when you play it like that you actually reach sort of dangerous levels of being uh absorbed by the game but it is uh i mean shit man like every game that that ms gucci makes like

yes it is the it is the weirdest and most sort of uh mind-consuming uh emotional journey game that you go on and it it is it is tetris it's still some tetris in there you know that scene in hackers the movie hackers when they go into the cool hacker club and what's-her-name is playing that game on the giant projection board and it feels like the most futuristic game ever? You could throw a Tetris effect up there and it'd be fine. It feels like it's of another world that this game is,

which is very weird because it's Tetris. And I know that there were gameplay mechanics that were added to tetris where you could like freeze the block i never did any of that stuff oh really is that weird yeah you kind of you kind of have to use that to beat it without that but okay i needed it the the thing about this game is it gets so fucking hard that it turned me off a little bit like just in the journey mode like i was vibing to what they were putting down and like losing myself in the music and then there's certain levels uh because the the tempo and stuff changes the speed that the with which the blocks drop changes based on the tempo of the music so there's one sort of like chant that is is is happening uh and then like there's a drop where now all of a

sudden there's all of these like drums like fast-paced like uh you know like bongo drums happening underneath the chant and at that point it goes from like speed 3 to speed 12 and i fucking fail and it's like well okay let's see if i can get back into the vibe like as i play this song again for the fifth time because i can't handle the drop you know russ you talked about a visualizer and i think that you're not far off but it's actually almost the inverse of that in some ways because what i think is really cool is how the music is in a lot of stages is built in part by the movement of the blocks um i think that makes it a very uh coherent sort of experience and a lot more immersive which is a wild thing to be saying about tetris i played played this with the VR headset and I turned it on at like 8.30 in the morning.

And the next thing I knew it was like 9.30, an hour had just like disappeared. And I was so deep in, I went on this arc from like, man, I'm apparently not very good at Tetris because I like died on the third level. That was really embarrassing, too. By the end of it, like because of the way working in time with the music and everything makes you feel I was like the god of Tetris. It made me feel like so plugged into the game in a way that like no Tetris has ever made me feel before. I will say I didn't have a huge after that first hour. I did not have a compulsion to

like pick it up again i don't know what you could ascribe that to it may just be a lot of games coming out or trying to get through a lot of stuff in preparation for this but uh like a fascinating sort of thing again like in a really cool experience i would say if you can do it in vr like try it because it is uh, otherworldly. Yeah. The pain, the pain is that like PlayStation VR as a platform is for me, at least it's just kind of like a pain in the ass to set up. I'm looking forward to it being on like something a little bit easier,

like Oculus. I think I'll play a lot more of it, uh, in VR. Yeah. Um, also kind of a bummer that there's no local multiplayer and I get it right. Like if it was designed for, for PSVR in mind, like that would be tough to pull off but like it's a cool game and i want to show it to people but then i can't also play with them at the same time it seems i don't know strange man that's the that's the trial yeah well you don't have to play it in vr

uh yeah that's true um i can go next my game that i'm bringing this around is a very recent contender it is super smash brothers ultimate for the nintendo switch uh is that the only switch uh like exclusive game that came out this year list that came on our list uh looks like it yeah um wow yeah so you know it the switch was never going to compete with its launch year because they had you know been saving up those big guns for a while it could have competed a little bit more could have competed a little bit more than it did i mean there's no lack of game i played still i played the switch more than any other console this year but that was largely because mario tennis was not a bad game i mean i played celeste it wasn't

great uh i played celeste. It wasn't great. I played Celeste on it. I played a bunch of like I played Hollow Knight on it and I spent a very long time playing that. But Smash Ultimate just came out earlier this month. And I think it's just fucking great. I understand that Smash Brothers is like not everyone's thing. Like there are people for whom like no matter what they do different with smash brothers or how much they accomplish it is still like you're still playing smash and that's just not something everybody's gonna groove on um but i think smash brothers ultimate uh does two things

uh especially well the first thing is uh just the the ridiculous like scope of it uh every fighter that has ever been in the games plus some new ones are there i think there's 72 playable characters 74 up to 76 if you count the pokemon as separate characters sure and then what more coming as dlc including persona 5's joker which is fucking wild and the coolest thing ever uh there's over 100 stages for you to play. You can customize the game however you want to, whether it's setting the rules for a match all the way up to handicapping specific characters in your roster. So if you play with your friends a whole lot and Captain Falcon is too strong, you can go into the menu and turn Captain Falcon down a little bit.

Oh, that's funny. That is how granular that is uh and so once you get into it once you unlock everything which can be a pain point which i'll talk about in a bit um you just feel like you have this infinite toy box of like possibilities which i think is so like a full circle for this franchise because the original game on nintendo 64 like the opening scene is you know the hand pulling a toy out of the toy box and dropping it down so you get the feeling i guess the lore of that game is these are toys that have come to life and they are battling and the final boss is you know the hand that controls them all the way

up to you know this game that has a much weirder storyline wait are you the final boss then are you the hand it's uh i don't know whoa uh just just the the scope of this game is is ridiculous i uh i i have only played uh some multiplayer uh russ and i had like three or four in a row yeah nail nail biter like screaming finish matches that were all like so so so fun like uh i don't know it's pretty amazing i mean griffin being in texas and me being new york like it felt like we were on the same couch one one v one however i from what i understand with more players it gets it definitely drops off and also it's it's kind of tough to get into the exact type of lobby that you want to get into so like if you don't want to play with items it can be tough to

anyway just just me and russ going against each other just playing the game was super super fun into the exact type of lobby that you want to get into. So like, if you don't want to play with items, it can be tough to anyway, just, just me and Russ going against each other, just playing the game was super, super fun because we were really evenly matched. Uh, and every match was like super, super close.

Uh, I played it here at my place with a few people for, you know, like 15, 20 minutes. Uh, we didn't have a lot of time to play, but like it proved to be like really fun. So looking at all the stuff you have available to you and thinking about like i'm going to be playing this

game for a very long time because just because the sheer amount of stuff in it i just don't think there's ever been a multiplayer game that has this much just raw content in it it has over like 800 songs and that's not an exact 24 hours of music in the game it's it's absolutely wild uh they have songs from the most obscure shit ever um and speaking of which the other thing i really really like about the game is something that i think a lot of people also don't like which is the single player mode which is world of light uh world of light sort of uh heavily focuses on the spirit system which are basically uh you know, stickers or something like that that are modeled after characters from Nintendo games and third party games across the

whole of time. There are characters from obscure NES Famicom games that never came out in the States and dropped over there in like 1986. And nobody knows who they are all the way up up to uh you know games that came out this year have have spirits and each one sort of either gives you a passive benefit or sort of establishes what your fighters stats are it's attack and defense and stuff like that and the way that you unlock those and the way that you can unlock actual playable characters is in world of light where you're dropped in on sort of a uh game uh board game board sort of think of it that way that you can move like a world map like a world map that you move through nodes and you can choose you know different branching paths sometimes there are obstacles where you can't move forward until you unlock a spirit that can

help you get past that so for instance there are broken bridges and the only way that you can like fix them is by finding a spirit that can fix them which for me was the llamas from animal crossing new leaf that build furniture like they were the ones that could unlock that for me um and so you go throughout this board and you do these these fights and you fight uh other actual playable characters and that's how you unlock them and uh it is i don't know man 20 25 hours maybe 30 if you really stretch it out of stuff there's new game plus mode what is so cool about this mode and what kept me like completely hooked on it is the spirits are modeled after these different characters throughout you know other other games but the the lore of world of light is these spirits inhabit the actual like playable characters that you are familiar with um so for instance it can be burdo is that the thing from yeah the spitz eggs and spitz eggs uh

maybe it's inhabiting uh you know mario um and so what what that fight looks like is informed by what like burdo actually does so first of all, maybe Mario's outfit is like, maybe there's a pink variant of it. And so he kind of looks a little bit more like Birdo. And then you get into the fight and maybe he has different, you know, maybe he has different rules, uh,

in the Birdo fight. He just exclusively throws eggs. Right. Like maybe eggs spawn and you can like fire those off. Maybe Birdo is Yoshi and Yoshi just does his egg attack. There's a swamp spirit and you fight kirby but kirby only does his down attack which turns him into a weight that comes down on you uh there is uh like a big the cat one where you fight uh incineroar who is this new big cat uh

character who has a skin that looks like fucking exactly like big the cat like there's there's every single fight is some representation of what that character actually does in the games that they stem from and they get so fucking clever with how they realize these these like 1600 characters viewed through the lens of super smash brothers mechanics and seeing like playing through that game and seeing like oh uh what what are they going to do with this character like how are they how are they going to realize uh you know dialgia from from pokemon or um i'm i'm now blanking because they're so like dr wiley the dr wiley fight is you fight against mega man who has like eight different versions that drops down

and then you fight dr mario who is dr wiley it's a super fucking tough fight because you have to fight the eight robot masters and then dr wiley like they're and and it does that hundreds of times throughout the campaign um i also really like unlocking shit which i think a lot of people don't like i was disappointed when the last smash came out and just like everybody was already there for you to play with i like the progression cycle of unlocking new characters and then i unlock somebody and play with them for a while to get to know them. I think that stuff is great and that's all World of Light is. Yeah, I wasn't,

I actually agree. I like the fact, I know there's like people that run tournaments and want to invite people over but I think even the people that like are having friends over and want to have

a bunch of characters because you're unlocking characters just by playing the game. Right. You'll have those moments where like four people are playing and you beat the match

and then it's like, oh shit uh dark samus just showed up and now somebody has to fight and beat dark samus and if you do then dark samus unlocked so it becomes like a multiplayer event where everyone's like rooting for this one that chase is great that chase is so great i don't i obviously this fucks over tournament organizers and i get that and they'll probably patch in some way to way to way to unlock them all but like for everybody else man like it's it's cool to unlock shit uh there's a lot of shit to unlock um i would i would i would just okay it doesn't really matter what i think because i don't i don't understand how to play smash brothers i don't get it and

it's a weird blind spot for me i press buttons and something happens usually i don't know what how to play smash i really don't and i've like played other fighting games not like competitively but like i'll play through the campaign where i can't figure out how to make these little idiots do anything they squat squat squat squat squat fall it's ridiculous i don't understand how to play smash well are you just pressing the down button because that could be an issue no there. It's ridiculous. I don't understand how to play Smash Bros. Are you just pressing the down button? Because that could be an issue. No, I just don't understand how to play this game. I got a trick for you.

This is me being sincere. It's not a goof. Turn on the game, right? And then the intro screen comes on and don't touch anything. Just wait for like a minute and a tutorial video shows up it's extremely helpful that would be great um that would be that would be amazing because i can't figure out how to play this game

anyway i did get it because uh i thought that it would be cool for my daughter uh she's four and i knew she wouldn't like get it but we could like 1v1 and have some fun that way and when I started the game there are no female characters at all huh it's the 8 Samus it's not the 8 it's the original 8

that you can play as she doesn't know Samus is a woman I'm gonna spoil Metroid for my daughter yeah Russ I guess so bud samus is a woman you could tell her i'm gonna spoil metroid for my daughter my daughter yeah russ yeah russ i guess so bud no i i that's fair like care she likes the prince she likes the the you know the princesses from the mario games and like well you tell her you tell her 10 hours into this like sometimes very punishing uh i i i totally fully get it i remember i was talking to russ because

russ polygon you know got a copy of this before uh i i did and i was very curious like is it good and he was like i don't know if you're gonna actually like the story mode it's a lot of like grinding and unlocking shit and like getting stickers that change your stats and i was like that's exactly my shit and i get that that people, you know, not liking that. I think that this game, you know, is going to be controversial for like the MLG community. Not MLG. What the fuck am I talking about? Like the Evo community, right?

But like maybe it shouldn't be specifically for that. It's certainly that is not what like Nintendo is thinking about. I just, I got Mario Party earlier this year, the new mario party and we played it twice i think and it was fun but it's mario party this is like the local multiplayer game that i'm like really stoked to put some more time into i just wish it was i wish they had made some nods towards a bit more fewer more nods for accessibility like i would have loved to get get deep into it i just like couldn't couldn't do it

it's apparently it's a video that's helpful there's so many modes it's wild that there isn't anything that like kind of on boards you a little bit better but yeah

that's smash it's not gonna work next up I can go return to the Obra Dinn this is a sequel to Obra Dinn this is the most Justin game I think I've seen in years.

Yumma yumma. I had to fucking pull you into this game kicking and screaming. Well, I was playing, I had to finish all 80 hours of my vegetables

of Red Dead Redemption. These two games came out at the same time and I remember I was playing a little bit of Obra Dinn and killing time while Red Dead Redemption 2

downloaded and then Red Dead Redemption 2 finished downloading and I said, nah, I'm gonna finish Obra Dinn, killing time while Red Dead Redemption 2 downloaded, and then Red Dead Redemption 2 finished downloading, and I said, nah, I'm going to finish Obra Dinn, and it was the best choice I've ever made in my fucking life. Yeah, it's amazing. Okay, Obra Dinn is essentially a murder mystery on an incredibly large scale. If you've ever done one of those logic logic puzzles you know there's three people and they live in these different colored houses and you make the grid that you put x's through these people don't live next to each other so i know it can't be the two of them uh that is very much the

central mechanic of uh return of the obra den it is uh you're an insurance adjuster who is brought on board this ship it sounds like the worst game ever. I know, right? You're an entrance adjuster brought on board this ship. I think Lucas Pope just can't have, like, he has anti-hero, like literal anti-hero protagonist. But you're brought on board this ship to figure out

why no one is on it anymore. How's that? A lot of the people have died on the ship and the way that you sort of unspool the mysteries, anytime you find a corpse you can use this stopwatch

that lets you go back in time to the exact moment of this person's death. When you arrive on the ship, you're equipped with a what's the word? Roster? Manifest. Manifest.

Thank you. Manifest of everybody who was on the ship and their jobs and their nationality. And you also have pictures of everybody who was on the ship. But you don't have is the names of those people. So the game – or obviously they're called to death. You do have the names. You do have the names, you just don't know who is who. Right, you don't have the names matched with the images.

So the game is very much about going back through and watching the exact moment of their death to try to unearth whatever clues you can about the person's identity. In each scene, almost every scene, you get a little bit of dialogue before, and that can be a huge clue. You could hear someone refer to someone else as sir, right? And that can help you start to determine their rankings. They can speak, one of the big ones is they'll speak in a foreign language. And you think, okay, well, there's definitely at least

two Russian guys in the scene, because I two russians speaking to each other so that that helps me narrow it down and the clues get like more obscure there's like looking at someone's shoes to see if they match this other thing and like uh a little bit of trial and error sometimes although i don't think you have to rely on that but it it does uh help you through some more challenging roles every time you top and speaking about trial and error the way that they that lucas has solved for that is there's so many fucking brilliant solves for making this new kind of genre of game work the way that they solve for trial and error is uh correct solutions are only sort of uh identified in groups of three and so

that that keeps you from just like putting in random shit until you get one locked in because the odds of you doing that three times are super super unlikely that is such a brilliant brilliant mechanical solve for what could have been a problem that would just like shut this game down instantly there's also something really interesting and when you oh sorry go ahead russ i was gonna say there's something really interesting about the way the game the difficulty scales, where you play through the first time and you experience all the scenes and you're like, oh, that guy called that other guy Jeff. So we know that guy's name is Jeff. And you're like,

you feel pretty smart. Yeah, I'm rocking this stuff. And then you're like, wait, all the scenes have played out and I've recognized no one. I have 6% of the manifest filled. And then you really have to, as Justin said, start to look at like these tiny little details that you really did not see the first time through. And a lot of times they feel like a hunch. Like a lot of times they're not like laid out right in front of you, but it's like, you know what? This guy's really hanging out with this guy all the time.

Like they're always hanging out together. I bet. There's a lot of like, like well this person is this rank and they probably wouldn't be here ever right like it wouldn't be this part of the ship right yeah it's a lot of deductive reasoning that gradually gradually pulls together making assumptions about who could be doing what and where they should be based off their professional rank on the ship when you do get three people nailed down the the what rest is talking about that moment where you're like i don't know who anybody is i don't know what anything is i'm completely lost when you start to dig out of that and like get three i'm not sure i've

experienced anything more satisfying a video game this year than this game telling me like hey you got those three locked in they're printed in the book now they're not just handwritten they're printed there so you know that this is true this is fact uh and and being able to nail those and starting to sort through uh those is like incredibly cool we haven't even talked about the aesthetic which is sort of like a patterned after classic pc you know sort of like mac apple uh and and other classic pcs he describes it as one he describes it as one bit art style because it's it's just black or white and it's or depending on if you change it to the different filters but it's a 3d game we should it's a 3d game is it right it really changes the the whole thing and like i i am

someone who uh feels like the retro art style is uh way way way overdone and like hey we know it's cheaper we all get it like we're on we're on to you that this is not always a creative decision. In this game, it feels fresh. It feels new. I have trouble finding fault with it. I think it is an incredible experience. It was maddening. Until I finished it, it was sort of like all I could think about was like this game and it really does I think you know Plant mentioned the difficulty with going back into Hollow Knight after being

away for a while I think that this is a game where you should plan to like try to play it as close to one sitting as you can and I don't think you're you know one sitting would be a huge ask and I definitely did not do that but like in as short a time span as possible because there's a lot of this stuff that you don't even

realize you're absorbing, you know what I mean? Until, and, and sort of knocking around your head. I didn't take any notes or anything. I just sort of, uh, watched and paid attention, but like, there's a lot of that stuff that you, I think would lose if you tried to spread it out over too many different, uh, plays, but I thought it i thought it was uh absolutely wonderful i really adored it the reason this might actually be my game of the year my favorite video game of 2018 now that i think about it is because i genuinely believe it has established a new genre altogether and it has it's done i calling this an adventure game is such a like bad way to describe it but it's it's kind of the best parlance we have to to describe it it is like

it's a it is a mystery game and a it is the best and one of the only like true detective games oh it's true detective season three it's you and a boat. No, I think it is a mystery game in a way that almost no other quote-unquote mystery game is, right? Yeah. There are games that are about finding clues. Even the Sherlock Holmes games are not necessarily always about this level of deduction. They're much more about finding clues and piecing them together and eliminating possibilities. I think this is one of the very few true mystery games. And that's awesome.

And I would play a hundred. Like the only thing I can equate this to is the first time we did. And this was like a few years ago. And this was still hot and fresh and new. We did an escape room. And I left that thinking like I would do that every night. Like I would do a different would do that every night like i would do a different one of those every night this is an exciting new fun engaging thing that i've never

done before and i i'm going to think about it and that's like that's what i think about oprah den i would play so many fucking games like this and it's so incredible whenever you see like a new genre kind of get birthed like this and this one does it so like so so well it is all it was all i could think about while i was playing it and i finished it and now i still do think about it a lot and i this is the game that more than any other i've been recommending to people this year because i just think it's fucking stellar i think fresh chicken i were talking about this where this game has been in development for so long and and took i think a number more years than its creator lucas pope thought it would and it feels like a game that uh when he found what the thing was that maybe i would love to

know for sure but maybe it moved a lot faster to like actually create and by that i mean when you play through this game the game itself doesn't feel like a game that took years to make um the actual like the the graphics that you see um the visuals yada yada yada but figuring out the mystery and then figuring out i don't know how you would qa this game like you every every person who plays it needs to be new i guess um and and how do you uh with a detective game i get why you know so many games haven't tried this of how do you find that balance of trusting the player to figure it out um versus just guaranteeing that they were and the just the amount the the different ways that it is rare that i look at a game anymore and think like

how did you do this but i definitely think that with this game where it's like the number of different ways you could have been misleading unintentionally or like given incorrect clues or or whatever is staggering i mean the fact that it hangs together is absolute madness it's we we haven't like said the number and it's not really a spoiler it's 60 people it's 60 people over the course of several dozen scenes like that's so many fates to figure out it's so many clues to make sure don't overlap aren't too obvious aren't too hard aren't too confusing don't contradict each other like it's it's it is so good there must be a crazy whiteboard in his house yeah i can't even imagine what's our what's our last game

plant it's sort of an anticlimactic yeah chris plant's and assassin's creed odyssey it's not gonna win i'll make it quick assassin's creed's Creed Odyssey is quite a bit like Assassin's Creed Origins, but in my opinion, better. It gets rid of some of the things that worked well in Origins, but it adds enough that I think... Origins is the British one? No, Origins is Ancient Egypt. Ancient Egypt, okay.

Yeah. I think the storytelling is really interesting. I think it is almost too complex there are so many systems in this game you really are not figuring out um large chunks of the game until 20 or 30 hours in um i think the best chunk of the game is these uh assassination of cultist that you have to the figure out i guess and it gradually reveals it is very much the the triple a version of uh obra dinn and that there's a mystery and you solve it by just killing uh people on the map um but it's a hell of a lot of fun it finally breaks free from all of the obligations of the assassin's creed series uh

origin started this obviously by changing the combat style to be slightly more action rpg slightly more dark souls slightly more zelda um but this game its upgrade system just turns you straight up into a god uh you are jumping off of the highest building possible you no longer have to worry about breaking your legs you're firing are you talking about the skills or like the equipment both okay um the equipment also gets wacky but the skills i mean you are just super duper powerful you can fire a volley of fire arrows into the air that just slaughter whatever is in your way um it's a lot more fun i think part of this is because it really leans into mythology i the the core idea of the original assassin's creed of you know this

historical tourism was really promising but as the game became more conspiracy theory focused and focused on its own weird tech and its own mythology um it it had already taken a weird step away from history that it that loyalty no longer benefited the game um especially as it focused more and more on combat so i think just kind of cutting ties with, okay, this is, we're trying to create realistic fictional world or realistic historical worlds versus,

Oh, we're going to create these pseudo mythological versions of history. Um, is a really good pivot for them. I don't know. Like what they do from here. This feels it's so big that it it feels like a game maybe they should do one of these every three years but i kind of get the sense that they won't um it does have

some issues i wrote about how it's better at least in my opinion for somebody who wants to get to those abilities much sooner that if you play for the xp boost you can get straight to the fun parts um it's a shame that's just not part of the game um what did you have juice he said it sucks it sucks it's not the game it's something you have to pay boost i mean i i don't really think you have to i think the game's still fun even if you don't i just wish it was i wish there was a toggle in certain games it was like hey i really want to you know pace this for 80 hours or i want to pace this for 40 the pushback i would say actually that is frustrating and this is like nitpicky but um if you do the xp boost and i did because i in the same way i i heard it was more fun and i and i i did it and i don't regret

it but the enemy scale to your level so you're leveling up much faster and the enemies are leveling up much faster as well but the uh your gear to upgrade it to the level that you need it to match your experience level uh gets prohibitively expensive very quickly and you're it is outpaced because it's not balanced for that you're gaining levels quicker than you can upgrade your gear so it ends up like you're you're playing with bad stuff because you don't have the money because your level is so high let's talk about let's talk about can we talk about gear because this is what i tried to bring up earlier can we fucking talk about gear and god of war get back in here god of war sit down

Can we fucking talk about gear? And God of War, get back in here. God of War, sit down. Guys, like, not every AAA, like, action game or character action game has to have fucking Diablo, Borderlands, Destiny-ass loot systems. I cannot tell you how much that put me off this game of, like, oh, a chess piece just dropped that brings the numbers up a little bit. Cool, let me toss it. Oh, blue shoes

don't mind if i like you don't fucking need that for this game like it it seeing that stuff it got a war like it's very good that the rest of that game was incredible because i just didn't give a shit you found an orange gem better slot that into your gloves like it's so you can increase just enthused over collecting pokemon stickers but that's a that's a completely different that game is kind of like built for that these these these character action games like aren't like i don't so much shit drops in this game so much shit drops in this game that i felt myself like it felt like a job and not only that like you would get stuff that is higher level than you currently are so it's like oh i'll remember to put that helmet on when i level up in the next 15 minutes,

and then I don't. The gear system in this game, and to a slightly lesser extent, God of War, is just, stop, guys. We don't need it. Also, I just want to say, best protagonist of any Assassin's Creed game ever, unless you pick the guy, in which case, I don't know, he seems kind of whack. But Cassandra is an outstanding,

best protagonist the series has ever had. And really, really, really... I love this game. It felt like it is the least Assassin's Creed game I think that has ever held the title. That includes mobile games. But I thought it was outstanding fun i didn't finish origins and i played this for dozens of hours and finished it

it's of all the open worlds to probably the place i most enjoyed being in like it's just a really colorful beautiful the music is great the sound is great the conversations with people are so weird the npcs in this game colin campbell wrote about they're just some of the weirdest um i don't know why they took their out they did but you're constantly getting in weird conversations uh you're given so many opportunities with cassandra to just be this weird kind of like Cassandra to just be this weird kind of like predatorial almost like sex, sex addict. Yeah.

It's, it's a, it's such a weird game. Um, and I love how weird it is and I love how silly it gets with the historical figures that you do come in contact. It's so much more approachable than like the first four assassins. Creed sort of, of uh need to be a little serious a little serious we gotta save it from the templar it's like nah man

just like i want to fuck aristotle let's do it um i miss the silly out of game stuff by the way i thought the out of game stuff here was very dull and i miss uh especially around four black flag i think it really peaked where you're like working at a video game developer fantastic uh what do we think is the best game of this round y'all over over over 10 by a country mile yeah i gotta agree um okay yeah so this is it then i just got just one minute just one minute because there's been someone that's been staying with me for a while and he just wanted to take two minutes just to holy so hold on one second yeah 2018 gets worse and worse oh my god i was sitting here thinking who is it actually because i thought this is going to be a real thing uh-huh hello it's me new york giraffe what's up guys he? He turned British. He got British.

Is that British or Australian? What do you mean? Oh, yes. Yes, I've been traveling the world a bit. It's the same old New York Giraffe, but this is me now. It's British and Australian. Awesome. Well, to be honest, you know, lots of hostelsels lots of uh this is hostile what russ is doing

right now is hostile and uh but you know same old guy same old chap who likes um bagels with uh vegemite and usual usual stuff like that so no worries how you been how you guys been i can't i can't How you guys been? I can't. I can't. Cheerio. Wait, wait. Did he leave?

Did he leave? Yeah, he left. Is that the secret? We just don't say it. So Justin DM'd me and Chris on Slack and said, don't say anything else. Let him dangle, which is a fun new way of improv. But I didn't know if you don't. He's like a T-Rex. If you don't move, New York Giraffe will just one drop.

Oh, he's back. Cheerio! All right, New York Giraffe. We have literally 20 minutes before our hard out. So this podcast is going to be at the very max 20 minutes longer. What do you think was game of the year? This is not canon. Not canon.

Let's see. Game of the year. Game of the year. Well, I did want to mention Brexit for one thing. I have very strong feelings about that, specifically regarding how they feel about pizza and bagels in Brexit. It hasn't come up yet, but I do want to know whether the taxes will convert for the euro versus... Did you really go to these places, New York Giraffe? New York Giraffe.

You can't lie to me. I always know. Well, here's the thing, guys. Here's the deal. I watched a lot of Downton Abbey it turned out that was no longer the cultural moment so I watched Call of the Midwives I watched a lot of that and I watched

she had like a detective agency so I watched a lot of that and I thought just on those I'd seem a little more international I'd have more feelings more opinions maybe we just call you giraffe

yeah I guess I don't know what that does for my branding overall but personally I don't know I think I seem more erudite I know you can't see but I'm wearing glasses now I've got you know those jeans that people wear in Europe and you're like oh that guy's from Europe because he's wearing those jeans i've got you know those you know those jeans that people wear in europe and you're

like oh that guy's from europe because he's wearing those jeans i've got those jeans i need two pairs to make it work so uh you know but still same old guy can you solve the age-old riddle of how the jeans look on a four-legged hooved animal do they go over the do they cover the butt or just sort of the no it's just legs it's just legs i need. It's just legs. I need a large tarp for the top part. Okay, so. Well, this has been great. We do really have very limited time to figure out what the game of the year is going to be. So is there anything else?

I think it's going to be pretty easy. Okay, well, we'll see. But anything else giraffe? No, that's about it. Okay. Cheerio. Cheerio. Anything you want to, any final sort of uh i really want more

now actually okay okay what do you want from me what what questions you got just sort of uh just sort of your favorite cat your famous catchphrase give me that as you leave the room hey yo it's me new york giraffe and that's what he says okay it's all it's all in it so so I feel like it's into the breach God of War or Obra Dinn for our final I feel like into the breach since it

squeaked through the first round is probably not gonna hang with these other two games is that a fair thing to say I don't think so because I think Hollow Knight if it had made it in here would also be a strong contender like for me like looking at these at these games and what i got out of them um i i i have a i have like pretty strong feelings about one of them okay i don't know how you all are all right before you say like what is, do you guys have strong feelings about one of these three games? No.

Justin? I have... I mean, I like them all. Can I say, this never happens. I would be happy with all three. Honestly, I think any of those three games would be fantastic. I would be happy with all three. I think Obra Dinn, for me, is a clear winner. Yes.

Obra Dinn is the clear winner for me as well. It is the game that surprised me the most, that I think is the most satisfying, is the most exciting for the future, is the game that I have by far recommended to more people and gotten them into. I think I was really torn before we got started between those six games. I think Obra Dinn is it for me.

Yeah, so for me, it's between God of war and oberdin um god of war why i like it and i'm considering it just because it's just like such a overall overarching every single point that they try to do they nail um ober, why it edges it out in ways is mostly just from, just the like, execution certainly, but more originality standpoint. This is not a thing that I've ever experienced in my life. So that's very cool. God of War is almost perfect, right?

It's an extremely good game. Obra Dinn is also. So like, if that's not gonna be the metric by which I measure them, like Obra Dinn is the one that excited me more this year yeah obradin is probably going to be the game that i think about five years down the road i think god of war given the fact that it's going to have multiple sequel i mean i'll still think fondly on it but i don't know that it's going to have the like uh impact in terms of like game like long term on me that maybe over didn't did there was an

interesting thing i experienced with over den uh that i talked about that moment of satisfaction that you experience um and what i'm what i was realizing thinking back on it was that it was also tinged with sadness because there was like less of it. Like as I started to get two thirds of the way through, I started thinking like, man, I hope I don't solve all these like very quickly because I don't want this to be over. Like I don't want there to be no more of this for me to do.

Cause like my brain, you know, chemistry, right? Like the dopamine of it was like hitting me so hard that I just wanted to keep playing it. I wanted there to be more. I want the next one right now.

I would log off of the call. And when I finished God of War, I was completely satisfied. I think it's a fantastic game, top to bottom. But it didn't leave me upset. We told a friend of ours to play it, and she told us on a call this morning, Griffin and I, that she had finished it. And I told her genuinely, congratulations. Fantastic. Good work.

Because it feels that way. It feels like you've really done something. You've really achieved something with your intellect when you finish Obra Dinn. Is it unanimous? Yeah. I think I was going to say think Hollow Knight would have been my game of the year but I realized that it did not make it so

out of these I mean I don't know that it matters no it does I think it would be I'm curious what your thoughts are because I'm staunchly for it it sounds like Justin and Chris are leaning over it in yeah I'm down with that over den there it is the final besties go to congratulations final one the last episode last besties and we should also mention that um all the other games that

we didn't pick for game of the year were bad games and you shouldn't like them. Yeah. I wouldn't waste any time with those. God of War sucks. Shit. I don't even agree with that, really. I think there's lots of good games that came out this year. Alright, so 2019. Hey, listen. We got a little bit of time to talk about Fallout 76.

Listen, we wrapped that up quick, so let's just spend five minutes talking about fallout 76 holy shit this is like hell shit uh i played a lot of it because i played it with like uh some friends from like west virginia like we actually spent a few nights like actually digging in and exploring one thing i will say about that game to its credit is while other sort of multiplayer games kind of gate you off from shit uh that one doesn't really do that too much like i hopped in travis was online he was in camden park which was like on the other side of the map from the

starting area where i still was and he was like come on over and i was able to just instantly teleport to where travis was and boom like now i'm in camden park like unfortunately once you were there you didn't have a lot to do then you had to play uh then you yes then you had to play fallout 76 um i don't know there's there's something about like the isolation of it that does feel very wastelandy but uh for me i i got pretty i got to like level 35 or so in that game i played more of it than it deserved uh and then i just started hitting bugs that kept me from like completing quests and shit and i realized like i am struggling through this game mindfully

and it is not like it is not giving me anything in return it is not meeting me halfway at all and i i bailed heartbreaking heartbreaking game do you feel like it represents west virginia well justin yes like it represents what i think it does too i think it does a pretty cool cool job of condensing down like some of the the less like talked about less uh sort of stereotypical shit about the state that you that you know never gets represented in media and there is definitely like a i think the spirit of the state is actually captured really well by the idea of Reclamation Day. Like this idea of stick-to-itiveness being indefatigable, I guess. I don't know the exact word I'm looking for here. But the idea that you're going to go out and make a life for yourself despite all odds is very West Virginia.

And I think that that is cool and they did not fall on a lot of um tropey gross i don't i don't think they fell on it i don't give them that like not like no redneck you know where no come try and steal my gun of course there are no humans so it would be difficult for them to accomplish that there's a there's a sense of exploration that i really liked about that game like finding a a cave that is like this minor museum and like just exploring it and yeah it's bad gameplay while you're in there and there's virtually zero payoff for doing it um but it just like exploring those places was my prediction by the way in a year, it will be, I think it'll be a really strong thing. My hope is at least that in a year, it will be a much improved product if they stick with it.

I don't know if the launch was so disastrous that maybe they're just going to cut ties. But if they stick with it, I think they could make something very cool. If they stick with it, I think they could make something very cool. Here's the issue is that Fallout games have never been good action games, and this essentially has to be played like an action game, and there is no way around that. I don't know how you fix that problem. Yeah. But I can't believe this is how we're ending our Game of the Year podcast.

I'm sorry. I just wanted to. We didn't get to talk about it all year. Yeah, I know. We have to talk about everything everything um 2019 what are y'all stoked for i don't know what's coming what's going last of us two last of us two kingdom hearts three obviously animal crossing switch yes let's go ahead and give it to that let's go and do besties next and then we can take a year off go on sab sabbatical, explore, just ride the year rail. What do y'all think, Anthem?

Huge disappointment or extremely good? I mean, I don't know that it's a disappointment as much as I don't know that the stakes are even there for like enthusiasm right now. It seems like passive. I would bet money on it being just kind of okay and for like an online game that has to like hook you in for forever yeah that's not gonna cut it and it's gonna fail and then bioware is gonna die yeah i feel like them i feel like them coming out and being like oh but more more dragon age just around the corner is them like they they've been put under hostage

uh and they've you know shouted out the address of the building so now they have some sort of like defense yeah I don't know man I got four four real quick Resident Evil 2 is the very obvious one it's going to be very very very good

Noita which is like a physics experiment crossed with Spelunky is exceptional um spelunky 2 obviously yes is going to be uh very good baba is you will be oh the game makes me feel dumb of next year um there are so many good good games oh, and hey, remember Kentucky Route Zero, that game that we brought year after year after year? It ends next year. That might have been, did that win the first year?

That might have won the first year. I think it came close. Looking at 2019, it looks, I mean, right now, it looks pretty good. Like, there's a lot of good stuff it looks like due out. No Switch games, obviously, but hey, them's the breaks. So that's going to do it for us folks this week on the best besties make sure

to join us again next year for the subscribe hey subscribe smash that like if you can leave a review on itunes that this may not even make it it'll be there this may not no listen this may not make it on itunes if that's the case just leave a review for Besties on some other podcast that you like very much we pay it forward here on Besties McElroy.family

is our new website that Griffin and I made with Fox if you could go check that out and subscribe to our YouTube channel I would appreciate that Russ and Chris

is it okay if we talk about our website we didn't even you know speak about that before yeah hit it okay that's it

didn't you just do that it's a good destination for content no can can i ask you about the website yeah so they made hats that say the mcelroy family right sure if you wear those hats sure i get it yeah but when other people wear those hats frauds uh yes honorary members i guess um i i just wanted to Frauds? Uh, yes. Honorary members, I guess. Oh. I just wanted to say, like, Justin and I left Polygon in April, I think. And, like, I genuinely, the last, like, few months, like, I have genuinely been so excited to talk about these games with you. Like, this has been really fun, and I have been looking forward to it. Like, when Fallout came out, I was like, oh, shit, I wish I, when Red Dead came out, and I didn't, it didn't click with me. out I was like oh shit I wish I when Red Dead came out and I didn't it didn't click

with me I was like God I need a place to put these feelings maybe we should start doing this every week again thank you for listening and to piggyback on what Griffin said the only

reason we continue to do this is because y'all continue to add not the only reason we probably talk to each other independently but the main reason that we continue to do this is

because y'all continue to ask for it. So if you have, against all odds, stuck with this show for this long, thank you. Sincerely, thank you for giving us an excuse to do this. Because it is hugely fun for all of us. Well, at least for me. Anyway, be sure to join us again. No, Chris and Russ don't seem to be chiming in about how fun and good it is. It's super fun.

I guess it's their chance to try it. It's a full-time job for me and Justin. It's an exciting role. Be sure to join us again next year. It's fun. It's super fun. I hope full-time jobs for me and Justin. It's an exciting role. I love it. I love my friends. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Games.

Besties!