The Besties - Game of the Year Part 1

Episode Date: December 13, 2019

Who better to pick the world's best games than the world's best friends? The Besties kick off the 2019 Game of the Year special with an intense melee of the greatest video games to walk the Earth in the last 12 months. Got a submission? Send it to [e-mail] 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!

After this week, I'm done. I will be so glad to not have to play video games. I've been playing so many video games so I've played everything on your guys' list. Some, if I may, bad video games. Interesting. Yeah, I got these books. I got piled up knee high on my kitchen counter

because I have nowhere else to put them, so many books I have because of all the games I've been playing. Which books are those? Oh, you Count Monte Cristo and the Man in the Iron Mask and the Three Musketeers and uh the Four Musketeers and the Fight that's all of the books do you know what I got sitting behind my patented gamer chair? I have my Trumio gaming chair, racing style, large size, high back, ergonomic, soft, music video game chair. I can't believe it. Because of the neon glow.

I got the dang Mandalorian. He's standing behind me. The dang Mandalorian's like, Justin, let's go on another adventure. I said, I can't, Mandalorian. I gotta play all these video games. But my space baby Yoda, I got space pregnant with Yoda for you for our adventures. What?

You guys seen, watched that flick yet? No, I haven't watched that one yet. Oh, man, it's good. Watch the first one. That's the one where he gets space pregnant with baby Yoda. Oh, my bad. Are we gonna go with space pregnant with Yoda? Is that bad are we gonna go with space pregnant with Yoda is that what we're gonna go with for our cold open for our game of the year episode one of our first few episodes we're really establishing our

footprint here in the podcast space yeah Russ of course that's what we're going with My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the year. My name is Griffin McElroy, and Eureka, I have discovered the best game of the year. My name is Christopher Plant, and Spelunky is still the only game of the year. My name is Ross Froschek, and I know the best game of the year. My name is Christopher Plant and Spelunky is still the only game of the year. My name is Russ Frustrick and I'm the best game of the year. Welcome back to the Besties, a video game book club that goes all

year long. This week, we are going back to our classic format of pitting forms of art against each other until one is deemed better than the other art. And we have to get rid of the rest of the art the other art will be rendered worthless and valueless when only one art victor stands here russ we are doing our game of the year uh special it's a two-parter we've got 12 games can you run

us through extremely quickly because it doesn't matter how this will be laid out okay real quick so we're gonna do this in three rounds each round is gonna have four games at the end of each round we will pick one of the four games to move on and then once we've gone all three rounds we will pit the three winners of each round against one another in a battle royale where indeed the art wins the winner gets a hundred thousand dollars we will personally write a check to the game studio who does it so that will depending on the winner that will either be life-changing or utterly meaningless let's run through can you guys remember our previous we've been doing this since 2012? That sounds right.

The first winner was Dishonored. So whatever year, they made it Dishonored. Yeah, we definitely had A Link Between Worlds won a year. And then Breath of the Wild. So we've had two Zeldas in there. Last year was Return of the Obra Dinn. A very good game that I wish was back. I was good at Call of Duty games when we started this podcast.

Wow. Can you imagine? I can't. Should we get started? Probably only gonna have time for the first two rounds. We also got some, hopefully, by the time this comes out, some emails from y'all to talk about. Maybe we'll talk about some other stuff

that we didn't get time to talk about during these episodes in the second one, but should we kick it off with round one? Okay, so round one. I'm going to bring for round one. And we just talked about this very recently in one of the, like, what else have you been playing segments. My game is A Short Hike, which, incidentally, I have done no research in because I do not know who made A Short Hike. Good start.

But I do know that it is absolutely delightful and i really loved it again i talked about this a little bit before but just to recap the way i describe it is a mix between super mario odyssey and animal crossing you are a penguin person who is visiting a campsite and you basically have free rain. No? Griffin's like looking at me like I'm not. Penguin is a famously flightless bird. But they probably could glide. And anyway, you are maybe not a penguin visiting

a campsite and you basically walk around the campsite and you'll meet people and you'll go on a little quest to try to make it to the top of the tallest mountain in the area and one person might be like doing some fishing and they teach you how to fish one person might be uh climbing like a skill wall uh trying to learn some mountain climbing and it's just this like very friendly

welcoming game with a really cool like lo-fi 3d art style and it's like almost impossible to pitch in an interesting way because it doesn't sound that unique but it's all just put together in just this like brilliantly welcoming lovely way and it also one last thing I wanted to say is that like I feel like a lot of indie games get very heavy

and this while this game dips his toes into like important like personal stuff it doesn't feel overwhelming on that front so it feels like a personal story but it doesn't feel like oh this is really personal i think your point about it being hard to pitch is like a real short hike like it's it's hard when uh everything else is like oh there's all these features you can go out in the world you can do all these exciting things but there is like, oh, there's all these features. You can go out in the world and you can do all these exciting things. But there is like something pleasurable

about just going outside and taking a 20 minute walk around a campground. Like that's enjoyable, but it's hard to pitch that. How do you tell a friend like, oh yeah, just go outside and walk for 20 minutes? Yeah, it's also I think a little difficult because it's like not like a walking simulator

in the way that you think of like oh i'm gonna walk around and then like some dialogue is gonna happen and that's gonna be it like it's it feels like a game game like you're upgrading your flight abilities and like it all happens in like a 90 minute span it's a very short game but it does feel like a game capital g not to like define what a video game is but yeah no i was put off at first actually because i felt i was worried it would be just another kind of like twee like narrative device where it just used the game as like a way to tell a story the conversations feel very much like night in the woods sort of like that that was what it sort of initially reminded me of and and it was

all very low-key i think is one of the best ways of like describing this game um but there are actual like mechanics and the basic mechanic of like collecting golden feathers that let you flap more and fly and climb better around the island is actually like really pretty well handled i thought and actually like gives you a really good sense of like progression and freedom that i thought was really cool. It's the closest thing to like a tone piece that I think I've played this year, which isn't not a way of dismissing it as much as it is to say like in nearly every way that this can be true, it feels good. Like it has that gentle, you know, acoustic Animal Crossing music and general sort of

vibe. I disagree with the comparison in that it's not, you know, a life sim. It has nothing to do mechanically with Animal Crossing, but it feels like... It's got talking animals, Griffin. That's fine. But it feels good. Like, it feels nice. It looks nice.

The music is just gentle and nice. And then also, like, as far as platforming mechanics go, and God knows this is an easy thing to completely botch like feels really good like there is a very tactile feeling to like uh you know scaling this scaling this mountain or just like collecting a bunch of feathers and standing on a cliff and just diving off to like try and see if you can find some new secret thing by gliding around like it what did you all play it with i played with a 360 controller on pc why did you all play it with? I played it with a 360 controller on PC. Why?

Did you play with keyboard? Don't play with keyboard, guys. It is rough. It's a rough fit to play on keyboard. Don't do it on keyboard. Don't be like your podcasting hero, Justin McElroy. Don't play it on keyboard. Yeah, it's a good game. I thought that this was a recency bias thing when you said that this was going to be on your list,

but I didn't actually finish it, which is a shame because it's not the longest game but it uh it's special it's a special the most underwhelming intentionally most underwhelming ending of any game this entire year perhaps ever it is wild yeah it it is a very funny abrupt ending, which landed very well. Next up, this game on cellular phones had us asking, what the golf? My friends. Games on phones?

Chris, are you high? What the golf is a new game. It first appeared on our phones through Apple Arcade, and now it's on Switch 2 and PC, but I on our phones through Apple Arcade, and now it's on Switch 2 and PC, but I played it first on Apple Arcade. That's important because, much like Apple Arcade itself, I completely underestimated this game.

I feel like I've seen GIFs on social media of this game for at least a year, and my general reaction was, that's cute and will surely get old after 15 seconds, like every game that tries to be about goofs. And I was totally wrong. The way where the golf works is it takes the very simple touch golf game of, you know, pull the finger back to aim the ball, engage the power and let it go and hit the ball towards

the hole. But then just completely subverts that over and over and over and over and over and over again uh whether that is you going to swing and then instead of your ball moving your club being thrown at the hole or you swinging and the hole moving or the hole growing that's like the beginning of the game um a good chunk of it is just a video game you know but golf now. So trying to play Mario as if you were Mario but a golf ball on a pitching wedge. Playing Portal but with golf. I feel like every time I would beat a stage I was sure that was great. I'm really impressed they found a new way to completely surprise me but surely they can't keep doing this over and over again.

And they just kept doing it. It's such a thoughtful and creative game. And one that, yeah, I kind of keep going back to, even though I really didn't think that would be, I never thought this would be the type of game that would make my end of the year list. It reminds me in a way of the witness in a weird interesting because it is what the witness said was okay the only mechanic which was the witness by the way for because it's been a couple years that is a

jonathan blow game where it was the only mechanic was dot puzzles right it was like tracing lines through dots and it was how many different permutations of that one core idea can we iterate on and it was constantly kind of amazing that like wow you really thought through this mechanic and like looked at it from every single perspective and the level of inventiveness in this kind of puts other games to shame like it it is wild that it is constantly like creating a new fun mechanic and then throwing it away literally two minutes later i mean it's it is it is almost showing off in the amount of like really fun interactions yeah it sets up and in that way

it's like the anti-mario like the core nintendo thing is at like take a thing and then just keep layering on it so that you become an expert. And this game just repeatedly will be teaching you a thing. So you assume that it's going to build in a certain way. And then it does the exact opposite of what it just taught you. So it actually like it's teaching you things to then subvert that and just completely undermine you over and over and over again. I would also say it is probably the best demo game I've played all year,

which is to say there's a mode called like share with a friend or something. And you literally just launch it and you hand your phone to someone and it runs through like a best of list of like 15 levels. And every single person, gamer, non-gamer, you name it, I've handed this to has absolutely been like totally like i've gotten a laugh out of them which like good luck in a video game getting a laugh out of a video game

but every single person i've gotten like a positive reaction out of it like demos so freaking well uh which is great what do they say to you uh after they play it what the golf uh plant i did have a question for you. Who made this game? Triband Games, I believe. Oh, okay, good. Are you trying to make it look like I don't know who makes these games? Yeah. I will also say I was blown away by how beefy it is.

Like, this is a beefy boy. There's a lot of game here, like a surprising amount, and maybe my expectations were low because it was, you know, free. It was free 99 on my phone, is wild uh yeah yeah did you play the hardcore levels uh yeah i yeah i went through them yeah that's the thing that i i like too is the you can play through the whole game and it's really easy in a good way i mean it's just supposed to be like kind of silly but you can replay each level and it's considerably trickier and it's

slightly different it's not just the same idea but like hard they actually just come up with a an entire extra set of levels that are just more challenging can we talk about the next game i am very excited it is hypnospace outlaw from justin made by justin mcelroy hi my game is hypnospace Outlaw, and it was very easy to make because the graphics are bad. Okay, so if you weren't alive or sentient in the sort of like, I would say halcyon days of the internet, call it like, what would you say, mid to late 90s? 96 to 99. Yeah, right around that era.

I'm not sure how this game will land with you because it is very much a game set in that era, both sort of thematically and graphically, but also literally you are contained to a sort of browser window called the Hypno S. And it's basically an, a version of the internet that you interact with through, through your mind. It's directly plugged into your mind. So there's a, there's some like overtones of cyberspace, um, and, and cyberpunk kind of stuff in there. Uh, but mainly the, the real draw for me is it is a game where one, the mechanics are really interesting. You are a sort of cyber cop and your different missions that you're put out on are your individual cases.

And you're looking for infringements on the, theno s on the web here in one case you are asked to look for this copyright infringement of this little fish character uh gooper i believe is his name gumshoe gumshoe gooper gumshoe gooper and so you start looking through like gumshoe gooper web rings and like fan sites and stuff like that literally like the old school web rings where you and like fan sites and stuff like that and literally like the old school web rings where you'd like click through to the next page in the web ring as sort of a loose affiliation of of websites and when you find those infractions and you report them not only do you get money that can sort of upgrade your equipment but you also come back later to find those websites changed and sometimes just like the offending

art has been removed but sometimes the the person has like uh turned against you and you'll find a page about like organizing against the the government that has is oppressing gumshoe gooper fans as you go on through the game the interactions interactions get different. You have to like dig deeper into the web and you're getting into like harder stuff, getting hacking materials, um, choosing a side. There's like a surprising amount of narrative depth there.

Uh, and, and I just found it sort of like constantly fun and smart. And honestly, for me, a big part of the draw is like nostalgic in a weird way for this era of the internet that is like much maligned, uh, now because there are so many best practices that were created after this period um but but it's really cool to see how well recreated it is yeah i so we we have 12 games

on this list and two of them well i i want to spoil the other one but two of them i found like actively disliking them uh so interesting because so far we have withheld the negativity and just celebrated the games and withheld the negativity until later when we are uh pitting them against each other but you kind of want to be the first to chime in with sort of tearing it down it's called going negative it's a very effective political tool so interesting now is the time to chime in with sort of tearing it down. It's called going negative. It's a very effective political tool. So interesting. Now is the time to know. It's just interesting.

I know. I think what they did, what they've created is very cool and impressive. I found it to be the most anxiety driven. Like it was just everything about my brain. And Justin, you mentioned it like all those like design docs that have advanced like web browsing over the years you just revert to the point where i was just like overwhelmed by my like

lack of ability to like organize my windows in a reasonable way so that i could actually like do the work in front of me it kind of reminded me of um papers please sure in the sense of like there's all these things in front of me and I'm just, I think it was just like tapping into my ADD in like a weird way that was just like, there's so much text and spoken text and music and it was just like totally hard to parse for me.

I have a poll for the room. Who here designed their own webpage in HTML? Me? No. So Justin and Griffin raised their hands. Fresh, hard no. I did i i don't want to do that thing where like oh i think you can only appreciate this game if you were born during this period and also you used html coding on lycos or angelfire uh but that might be true

i mean i went to those websites no it's I don't even think you have to have made them. I feel like we just talked about like humor, humor in games from what the golf hypnospace outlaws, one of the funniest games I've ever played. And I don't even think you necessarily have to be especially internet wise from like that era to get it, but it is a game where like the main source of, of humor and really the main narrative plot is pulled forward by how humanity decided to express itself in like a nascent internet era. And you get like, that's how you get a lot of the old retirees who are either leading sort of new age websites about crystal energy or like really, really old school conspiracy theory website or young kids who are on Teen Topia

or whatever it's called, Cool Punk Station, like defining themselves by the like horrible new genres of music they've been inventing. Like that was so legit and is in a way like still how we use social media to a certain extent, but it is exaggerated and cartoonish in a way that actually wasn't so far off when like we just got started with like angel fire and geo cities and stuff yeah i i

really like this game but i do think to to fresh's point when i say i think having made a site helps a little bit is there is a language to just navigating the internet from back then that i don't know how many people who didn't get around the internet and like don't i'm older than you chris plant no i know but you're but you're like not great with the technology like i've seen you try to set up a vcr mostly campfires personally how many cell phones have you broken because you threw them out of pokemon while you're playing pokemon go because you're well it tells me to throw and i throw what do? I know. But what the gulf is going on here? Let's move on to our last game.

Of this round is Outer Wilds and I'm going to talk about Outer Wilds. If you're confused, this is not the Fallout one. It's the other one. The Fallout one was good and then I finished it and it was not as memorable as this one, the Outer Wilds, a game I can't stop thinking about.

It's an anna perna joint uh well they published it it is by team outer wilds but then the game got picked up by uh mobius digital which is uh i didn't know that uh masioka from heroes runs that studio yeah i don't know that either anyway this is a game uh where you are in outer space you get a spaceship and you fly between planets in a very small solar system, by which I mean like it's got some no man's sky stuff going on where there's no loading times. If you see a planet in the sky, you can fly right to it and land on it. And it's just there.

Everything is there all the time. It's like America in Pilotwings. Like American Pilotwings 64. Thank you, Russ. And you start out the game. You're a new astronaut. You wake up. You go around the town, you meet the people, you go up to the observatory and get the launch codes, you blast off into space. You say, hey, there's a cool looking planet. Hey, I see

some smoke there. I'm going to land. Oh, there's a survivor. I'm going to talk to him. Hey, how did you get boom? And then the sun explodes and you die. And then that happens every 22 minutes. So it is Groundhog Day by way of no man's sky but what it does that is so like i would say daring and what other people on this call will probably call very annoying and turn them off from the game uh is the point of the game for most of the game is finding out what the point of the game is which is to say if you google like does outer wilds have an ending travis asked me that travis is like yeah this game is cool but is to say, if you Google, like, does Outer Wilds have an ending? Travis asked me that. Travis was like, yeah, this game is cool, but like, does it end? Is there a conclusion?

And you could be forgiven for thinking that there's not, because it's a game about exploring the world and learning things about this civilization that existed before the one that walks the planets now. But like, is it really taking you anywhere? Your ship has this onboard computer that will sort of build a network of like rumors. So when you learn something about a planet or learn something about this civilization, it'll try to like connect the dots.

So there is like a game mechanic there for you to chase of like, okay, I'm gonna fill out the net or oh, here's a lead I can follow. I'll go do this. But there's no like, you will spend most of the game not really knowing why you're doing that. Not really knowing like what you are trying to accomplish, like what those rumors are leading you toward. And that is a wild thing.

And I genuinely think it's a conscious choice because once you discover what you are supposed to be doing, it is intrinsically linked to like this solar system wide mystery that you are also trying to solve. And once you piece it together and what you're supposed to do and then how to take those steps, the game kind of becomes something else. And did anybody here finish it? Did anybody else finish the game? I do want to mention for people listening, and I might have mentioned this before, but I really love what this game is doing, but I could not physically play it because it made me very, very motion sick.

Yeah, it's on some like neil stevenson level like orbital mechanics uh it's not even that i think it's a mix of like the frame of view and the performance that like sets because even walking on the ground i get like sick huh i don't know what it is but unfortunately like the amount i've played i loved like it was totally my jam but i could not play for more than a couple hours before like really getting ill the shame of the the fact that you guys haven't finished it and a lot of people i feel like play it and they're like oh this is neat and you can explore and there's so much world building happening here but they don't finish it and that's a shame because the ending

of this game is the best ending of a video game i've played in a very, very long time because it is like terrifying and it is like exhilarating. It doesn't change. You have 22 minutes. You always have this 22 minute time loop to get things done. And you have 22 minutes to like do what you got to do and you get the one chance at it. It is exhilarating. And then it leads to an ending that is really ambitious and what it has to say about existence so like if you are one like me who is prone to fits of existential dread like playing a video game that actually has something kind of like interesting and valuable to say about capital l life like i thought that was pretty fucking stellar i watched the ending on youtube and it made me so angry that they are frustrated, not angry.

I'm not gonna get angry about it. It was very frustrating that that very cool ending was locked behind some pretty dumb fidgety mechanics that honestly are so inscrutable that it would be very hard to sort of organically come to them. inscrutable that it would be very hard to sort of organically come to them like it felt to look at like the path you would have to go down to get there um seemed wild to me and i would argue it's somewhat inauthentic for a game about like the meaning of life to waste so much of uh it i think that that's kind of i guess we are on the negative are we on the negative train no not negative just that that's a critical observation not even negative kind of more of a thinker yeah it should be noted that men in black ended with aliens playing marbles with the universe so that is really the bar to clear yeah that's what we're aiming for here they they

could have done a better job of illustrating some of those things like just to justin's point like the chain of events you have to accomplish in the last 22 minutes your entire like rumor system in your computer are all pointing you like towards these like handful of things but it could have been like way more explicitly you could have been like building out an objective list it could have been like explicit like that and i think you still could have had that exhilarating ending and that that beautiful ending and not have it be cheapened in any way by like having the game actually just say just a little bit what you're supposed to be doing but there are there were moments of discovery in that game and genuine like wonder in that game and frustration because your ship flies like a i don't know a toilet bowl covered in banana peels uh but it for the most part like this this was one of the this was one

of the coolest games i played this year and and definitely the one that made me think about stuff and have to go sit down and drink some ice water for a while okay we gotta pick a winner for this round god it's gonna be tough since we all apparently hated each other's shit. I think Outer Wilds probably it. I didn't say much during that, but... I'm only frustrated by it because I liked it so much. And I wanted it to be just a little bit more guided than it was. Not even guided than it was.

It's just like when I have a sort of idea about what i need to do and then i whiff it because the ship sucks and i fly into the sun and die and it's like okay well i guess i'll just do that like i'll go through that whole 10 minutes again i guess i don't want to but like i guess i have to and enough of that happened where i was like okay actually you know what I'm just gonna see where we're going with this because like it is too frustrating to continue to to do I it's my it's my I mean it's probably my number two game of the year my number one is not in this category so I would I would go for this uh or hypnospace I think those two are probably yeah

I'm fine with outer worlds I I liked what he was see not yeah outer wilds thank you yes it's you know what it's their fault they should they should have looked at the release calendar and been like uh-oh uh-oh well didn't outer worlds originally have a different name and then they also outer wilds uh has been around for like four years because that's when yeah they played. They could have changed it. Okay, so I guess we'll go with Outer Wilds for round one. Yay, Outer Wilds. Congratulations, Outer Wilds. Coming up next, a great round two

with four games that Frustic loved, all of them. I can't wait. We'll hear more about them after this commercial break. Welcome back. We're here in round two, and I'd love to start this time with outer worlds don't wait there may have been a commercial break substitution where justin said this other game i was going to bring actually it's trash no you know what it was i'll just go ahead and say it

it was grindstone grindstone is another good apple arcade game go play it but this outer worlds is the pitch i've been giving to people when I would play it, is they would say, how is it? And I'd say, do you like Fallout? And I said, I imagine Fallout, but good. It's like Fallout, but it's a lot of the cruft is worn away in Outer Worlds.

You are the rogue captain, sort of, filling in for someone else of a spaceship, and you are pitted against a corporation that has been doing nefarious things i don't actually remember what is uh hidden in this narrative i mean i know the story but i don't want to say stuff that happens 10 hours in you know but that is the basic gist uh much like fallout you're exploring the game world or worlds in this case outer worlds finding companions taking on their missions i think for me the

thing that i really dug about this one very smart way and so the vat system in fallout games sort of freezes time and lets you pick a place on an enemy to target and what this game does to sort of swap in for that is it slows time down and then adds status effects depending on where you have targeted and if you connect. It's a much more kinetic, it flows much better in terms of combat. I stuck with ranged weapons most of the time, pretty much all the time actually through the game, because I like the feel of it so much. I really appreciated everything in the game is there for a reason and feels crafted to deliver something. A lot of stuff that you do in Bethesda games tends to feel a little bit like a waste of time by the time you get to the end of it, and I never felt that with Outer Worlds. If there is something in the game, it is probably worth doing. I think I did every side quest that I had, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought all the stories were

really cool. The voice performances are great. The quest design is actually really neat. You do interesting stuff. And the writing, the writing I thought was really excellent, phenomenal. It's the original Fallout writers, like of the original franchise of Fallout. And Fallout New Vegas. And then they went ahead and made New Vegas. Yeah, so if that's the tone and the writing style that you dig, which is like, I think a darker,

more satirical tone than what Bethesda went with, which is like, I think a little more direct by and large, it definitely follows that. And I think the writing is quite good. The Bethesda fallout games feel like they looked at the original fallout games and said, we're big fans of those. And this one feels like the people who made the original fallout games.

It feels less like an imitation. Have y'all watched the new Watchmen on HBO? Yeah. So the difference here reminds me of uh the zach snyder movie watchman in the tv show uh hbo watchman where i feel like uh especially more recently the bethesda fallout came it's been like yeah we know why fallout's cool the heads explode and nuclear weapons right baby and and it's like no like that's like watchman's not cool because like people beat the shit out of each other

like watchman is cool because it has interesting things to say and i i think like that's what happens with outer worlds too it feels like they remember why they got into telling these stories to begin with and it doesn't actually have to do with retro music and bobbleheads and actually with having a point i think it also the biggest takeaway for this game for me, because I have kind of mixed feelings about it, but like what I cannot deny, I love Bethesda games. I've played an unconscionable amount of Skyrim and I'm a big defender of it.

But this game showed me sort of what you can accomplish if you are a little bit more deliberate about the scale of the game. It is very much an open world RPG, a grand space opera scale, but it is certainly like map size, length, like it is a shorter, smaller game than a Skyrim or even a Fallout 4. And it is much, much better because of that, because everything is so much more deliberate and so much more uh like justin said like everything that is there is is there for a reason and because of that it is much more dense

like every building you go in every bartender in this game has something going on and a lot of the times like it doesn't further a quest it doesn't further but like they all have individual stories that are neat and you can pry if you have the right speech skills into like how your parents moved to this planet and what life has been like growing up here it doesn't matter but like it's it's there and it's it is rich as hell yeah the last thing i'll mention just in comparison to the bethesda games but that's the games in case you don't know have been built on an engine that is like so creaky and falling apart that like that's part of the reason why they run into a lot of issues and the recent ones is because it's really like stuck together with bips and bobs i think this is

unreal i think this was built with unreal it just felt like i was playing a fallout game but it didn't feel like that because it was running it a steady clip in terms of frame rate and it wasn't hitching and it wasn't like glitching out it just felt like very consistent and just and it wasn't like glitching out. It just felt like very consistent and just high quality. Yeah. Also, if y'all like games that are in this scope,

I think we'll be seeing a lot more of them because this studio got acquired by Microsoft. And I suspect, along with all the other Microsoft acquisitions, the focus will be making

these kind of smaller, medium scoped games so they can get to my game pass, which I think will change the industry in a number of ways not all of them good but something that i am excited about is studios being motivated to like create interesting new surprising things every year or two that are like reasonably scoped because it's more important that they have many games on game pass rather than the current model which is make one game that you play for

two years. It should be interesting. Anyway, do y'all want to hear about the real GOAT, the number one game of the year, the game that everybody loves, especially Russ Fresh? Can't wait. Okay, so it's called Astral Chain. Griffin's laughing because the name itself brings so much joy to him. I'm laughing because it's the most Chris Plant ass video game that came out out this year i don't think of myself as somebody who likes weird japanese action games but starting to think maybe that's who i actually am and i'm coming to you and laugh for uh the people who do not know it is made by a company called platinum it is a nintendo first party game

weird and they the people who made it they made near automata the director of this game previously led that project it is not as heady as that game it is much closer to other games that this company has made bayonetta is i think the big one that comes to mind you play as a future cop in a world that has been destroyed by code demons and and you can i prefer robot ghosts but go ahead well yeah they're kind of yes yeah they're robots you you can take control of them by enslaving them and making them fight for you like grown-up pokemon and most of the game when you're fighting is you know when you're like a toy and you're very easily amused by just a piece of string and you're like what can i do can i make

knots uh can i cut off the circulation wait i'm a toy now in this analogy the toy is a piece of string wait who am i in this analogy okay what i'm saying is like as a child you rust frustrate baby rust oh yeah okay your mom gives you a piece of string, and you're like, I am entertained for days. Got it. That's this video game. It's like, what if it was a combat video game, but the only mechanic is an astral chain, a piece of string, and you use it to bounce enemies or tie them to the ground or perform all these complex things. And the great thing about this is for people who are put off by games like Bayonetta, or just

complicated fighting games, it's super easy to control, because all you do is twiddle the joysticks around to wrap up characters and do moves. Almost everything else is automatic. In fact, there's a mode that pretty much makes it automatic. This is all great. I'm going to say one more thing before Fresh lets us know how much he loves

this game. That's actually only half the game. The other half of the game is walking around the police headquarters or the street doing police business which includes checking your mail repairing office relationships giving toilet paper to the person and who's stuck in the toilet who might be a toilet fairy bumping into a soccer ball 70 times through an alley to return it to some children you know police stuff you uh collect ice cream cones and then try to balance them but my favorite thing is uh recycling trick shots you can collect literally hundreds of used soda cans and then you can throw them into recycling bins and this isn't an

automated animation no no no they didn't cheap out there this is real physics-based tin can throwing so you can stand on the top of a building and try to bounce it off a wall into that recycling bin do you get extra points for it no of course you don't you get the pleasure of a job well done and that's uh that's what i look for in my police force video games okay can i go I go now? Yeah, sure. What nice things do you have to say? Because we're saying nice things. We're saying nice things. Here's a nice thing. I really liked Bayonetta 2.

I thought it was a really, really neat-o, super cool game. And part of the reason I liked it is because half the time you're flying on a bus through a giant fountain made of angels, and the angels are shooting lava at you, and you're diving out of the way of that lava, and that's pretty damn cool.

In Astral Chain, it seems like a lot of the time you're just sort of walking on the street, and then sometimes you get dragged into Robot Hell, and Robot Hell is just sort of like a dark bunch of rocks, and you fight some guys in Robot Hell, and then you get dragged back to the street, and you do your little day job stuff, and then you fight some guys, robot hell and then you get dragged back to the street and you do your little day job stuff and then you fight some guys and that's kind of it i didn't beat the whole game i just played enough to make me fall asleep but it really was not for me

it seemed capably made for what it's worth let me land squarely between the two of you i could play the combat side of this game all day long because it is so unique and so wild plant like hinted at some of this stuff but having an enemy seeing them start to charge at you and having you and your uh your demon like go in opposite directions so that you can catch them in a taut chain and send them launching like there's a lot of that stuff and it feels super good and it's super fun and if that had been the whole game like i would have been super good. And it's super fun. And if that had been the whole game, like I would have been super into it. If it had been that in like more of a style of a bayonet, that would be great. I even kind of like exploring the police station because the characters are neat.

And like the police station is neat. But going around looking for clues and then going and solving like. Scanning fucking footprints, guys. I did that in Batman like 60 times times i've done it but here's the thing i still really like this game like it i don't think that stuff is so bad that it it ruins the things that i think this game succeeds at which is to say like being a stellar genuine action game on a nintendo platform which there aren't a whole ton of i think it really succeeds i also can't believe i'm saying this because it's the opposite of how i feel about pretty much all video games right now especially post baby i enjoy the zen-ness of the walking

around doing nothing in the game and i think that's because it's on switch if this was on like just ps4 i don't think i could get through it but i am so thrilled when i am on the plane to play a game where it's like, hey, for the next hour, just chat. These people want to talk with you. I'm like, cool, that sounds real nice. Justin, how did you feel about the change? It's unfathomably boring. I mean, unfathomably

dull. I mean, before I had to do this, I tried to play this game four times, and it is so boring. And the pace, especially at especially the beginning is so indulgent and assumes that you are so excited to see human beings with robots on strings that you will just watch people you have no relation to blather on for fucking hours about nothing this game is dollsville the beginning of the game is also a on rails a motorcycle chase that never happens again in the game so i will right with good reason yeah

because it's so boring the length of time that it makes you go before you get your chain robot it's kind of not great but yeah it's good this was my third pick uh we're doing these kind of out of order and this was the one i kind of struggled with because I feel like I played like three games a lot this year. And then everything else was kind of sprinkled on top of that. So I couldn't really talk about Destiny again. I haven't gotten far enough into Shadowbringers, the FFXIV expansion, but that's been a neat thing I've been digging into.

The only other one that I thought about, and it's a shame I didn't actually go with this one because there was an announcement of a huge expansion today was Mario Maker 2 uh which I had a ton of fun with but there are so many things about that game and how it handles online multiplayer that are so broken that I couldn't do it in good conscience anyway I'll talk about Sword and Shield uh Pokemon that is because I feel like I don't have to go into it at length because we just did an episode about it, what, last week. So everybody's sort of up to date on my personal feelings

about these little pocket monsters. After spending some more time with it, my favorite Pokemon game since like HeartGold, SoulSilver on DS. I like it better than any of the 3DS games. And I think that the things that they have done that made me kind of hesitant at first, I actually think make it a really smart sort of update to the Pokemon formula. None of this is going to resonate with the other three people on this podcast.

This is an entirely self-indulgent. Look, any of the topics I was going to pick were going to be fucking stinkers here. This has been the Pokemon game that has gotten me into the, I guess, quote unquote, hardcore side of Pokemon. And it's the first installment that's actually made me sort of even acknowledge what's going on in that department. You think about like how Pokemon could be like played at a high level and you think like, okay, well, I put in my water guy and you put in your grass guy. So I'm going to switch out my water guy to my fire guy. And

now your grass doesn't hurt. And then you switch out your grass guy. Like it's like it's a game of rock paper scissors where like the other person can just change their answer every round and it doesn't sound very exciting uh there's actually like a lot of other stuff going on that uh i never really acknowledged and i think it is because they have sort of cut down the number of pokemon literally in in half down to a clean 400, and pared down a lot of the moves that have been in the game and have really turned out, I think, a really accessible online multiplayer sort of launchpad. So you're in the leave camp of Dexit. Yeah, I guess. Well, here's the thing. I also think that next year when they put out Pokemon Home, which is supposed to be their like all-in-one Pokemon platform, Like if that has some sort of like online battling component, I think it scratches this like platform itch that

I was kind of hinting at. But like in this game, for example, a lot of the bullshit that you have to do to like train really strong monsters, they have made easier than it ever has been. But even if you don't want to do that stuff, you can borrow a team. You can like go online and find some YouTuber who's like explaining the basics of competitive Pokemon and then take the code for the team that they put up, download it, and now you can compete in this high level play and like earn rewards. And it really is, I have now, I finished the game and I have now spent more time with this online competitive stuff than I did with the campaign, which has never happened for me in a Pokemon game before. And I think is a real success story here for what I think has been a sort of more controversial entry into the series.

I think it's a very good Pokemon game. I liked it a lot. I didn't love it, love it, but I liked it a lot. I think for me at this point, Pokemon as a franchise is so screaming for the Breath of the Wild level of like rethink that just has not happened and it's still this same flow of grass gym red you know fire gym whatever and i realize like the end game might be a little more fleshed out and i haven't jumped into that stuff too deeply but just as the game the campaign and that's which is what most people are going to play yeah i've been here before and it's fun i enjoyed myself it felt like very much like the game that i have played 10 times over at this point and i just need some reinvention

of that well my argument would be the pokemon go has been that i feel like a games of service pokemon game is the next game of the year 2019 can i bet that yeah sure go for it go for it like that level of it's not just a one-shot rpg that you finish in 20 hours like having it be something bigger than that like having it be like really really focused on this like pseudo mmo stuff like that for me is like where this thing should go because uh i think you there are some people who could argue like oh and pokemon sun and moon you don't go to gyms you go into mazes and it's like it's the same fucking shit it's the same thing you have to be full you don't get badges you get crystals okay well that's i i don't know

i'm not looking for like a new formula or a new way to like interpret that formula i'm looking for like a new way to play this game that i have played and maybe pokemon home will be that maybe i don't know but i think that this has gotten me closer to that than any pokemon game ever has and i am uh i'm really really loving it really enjoying it and nobody else has to say anything nobody else talk actually because there's nothing else that anyone else can add i just feel like i talked about pokemon last time yeah uh for sure and i don't think that my honestly i don't feel like my criticisms that i leveled last time like really matter there it's more of like a public service announcement for people that have not gotten into it that it's still kind of overwhelming like that change has not been made

but it's pokemon let's talk about a game that will win game of the year 2019 my game is you know you talk about the recency bias with a short hike this is a game that i played for the first time like just a couple weeks ago And it instantly grabbed me. And I want to jump back in time real quick to Super Mario 64, which I played in the mall in my neighborhood. It was one of those places where you can rent time on an N64 for like five bucks an hour or something. And they had Super Mario 64.

And the thing that blew me away is that just running around the world was a fucking blast i loved it i was sliding down banisters and double jumping and triple jumping it was amazing we got kicked out of blockbuster because they had in one of the rental units and we would just like wait for the kids to get off and fucking monopolize it uh it is so hard to do that to make the core boring gameplay of just running around fun it's you almost never see it it's like a very rare thing obviously nintendo games do it more frequently than a lot of other game developers but man that is a really hard thing to do and god damn it if luigi's mansion 3 doesn't have that in spades the second that you pick up this game and you have a goddamn vacuum to suck up

everything around you it is an instant blast and it hasn't gotten old i'm i'm like probably i don't know 15 20 hours into the game and just walking to a room filled with shit and then saying i'm gonna suck up all this shit because i know you're i know you're excited about luigi and his magic vacuum. I really was not expecting it. So full disclosure, I have never played a Luigi's Mansion game before. It came out on GameCube originally, and then there was a DS game or a 3DS game, I think. So this is the first one I've ever played.

I've gone back and looked at the other ones just to see, and it seems like the advancements that you have here is the fact that everything is a physics object. So you walk into a room and there's like stacks of books and, you know, trophies and all sorts of shit in these rooms. And everything can be sucked up or sucked out or crashed or like slammed or it's just like detritus everywhere. And it's so satisfying to just like mess shit up. So you have that. And as I said, that is like a very hard thing to pull off.

And I think they pull that off very well. On top of that, you also have like brilliant, like Nintendo game design, like puzzle solving stuff. Granted, some of it is a little arcane and tough to figure out, but most of it is just like very clever,

like boss fights and puzzles and exploration. And the lighting is really great. And it's the more I talk about it, the more I'm fully convinced that it is just a dynamite, dynamite game, and maybe, maybe my game of the year. And who made it? I think that, what is it, Epic made it? No, it was Next Level Games,

which is why it's all the more impressive, because it wasn't the core Nintendo team. Right, they are known for what do you remember their titles from being from vancouver i think that's what they're known for yeah okay well obviously uh another you know retro obviously was another studio that made metroid prime so it's not impossible that like an amazing nintendo game from outside uh has made one i think they worked on one of the punch out remakesakes. Most notably, they made Dark Moon, which was the second Luigi's Mansion.

And they did make the Wii Punch-Out sequel remake. They made some badass games. Question for you, Russell Froschick. Do you think that you love this game because you are a completionist and every room is full

of stuff to just destroy and suck up in a hundred percent the room for example the best room in the game can i say what the best room in the game is is that a spoiler i'm interested what you say the best room in the game uh so i love that you think that your opinion is a spoiler i was i was surprised that that this thing happened and there's a room room probably midway through the game where you come across a table saw and you can suck up the table saw and then destroy everything in the room.

You can cut. There's grass growing in the room. You can cut it. There's a bed. Yeah, there's like a four-poster bed that you could like slice right in half. Bits by bits. Yeah.

And then once you've broken it up, oh, you can suck slice right in half bits by bits oh yeah and yeah and then once you've broken it up oh you can suck it up in that vacuum it is so good like just that that it should the game could have just been that i've been like yeah yeah i'll pay 40 i i uh i'm you know me they call me mr nintendo around these parts uh i love i love these these crazy guys and the games they make are super good and fun this game had made one decision that oh really that really put me off that really i feel like kind of uh soiled the experience a bit for me not every game can star mario is on no i like the red one better uh what is that chris it is i mean and it's truly damning it is why this cannot be our game of the year it does not allow you to invert the y-axis okay that's not it either oh shocking

no no it's uh the previous games i actually don't know that this was true i was kind of cool on dark moon also i think i reviewed that a while ago but i loved the first luigi's mansion game uh and what this game does that i just wish it didn't is Luigi's Mansion is set inside of a giant mansion. So you got the sort of Resident Evil thing of like wandering around this huge space and there's a little bit of gear gating stuff going on. And, uh, you know, you, you feel like you can, uh, return to rooms and like, you can go, it branches off in all these different directions. So, uh, you know, you might miss a ghost the first time you walk through the nursery but hey maybe you walk back through there on your way to something else and you you know oh hey there was that ghost there

was a sense of discovery based on it being more open uh and accessible right from the jump that uh in in luigi's mansion three you have to uh basically you will go to a new floor the new floor will have some sort of gimmick this one is a shop this one is like the lounge with billiards etc uh and you find the boss in that and then he drops a button for the elevator which will take you to a new level it is essentially level based as opposed to more open and sure you can return to other areas and there are some upgrades that like you need to get in order to fully unlock floors or whatever but for me it felt more like i was playing a game with proper levels in it and when you frame it like that i feel like it got so repetitive so fast it was just that that method i just said of like going into a floor figuring out its gimmick and

then killing the boss to go to the next floor. It's not, it's the furthest thing from repetitive though. Every level introduces new concepts. Like it is in no way repetitive. And I feel like for me, the, the level based structure made it infinitely more digestible. It's one of the things I love about it is cause I felt like, okay,

I've done this floor. I can move on. I'm not overwhelmed. Um, you know, there's not a huge map that i have to worry about you literally like don't have the buttons to get to the other floor it's just like enjoy this one floor do everything you want to do and then move on i really really like that about

it and like effectively what you're talking about is a presentation issue not so much a gameplay issue because you can go back to any floor you want whenever you want so it's the equivalent of like instead of walking down a hallway to get to the room you were talking about before you're just taking an elevator to get that no that's not what i'm saying i'm the thing that i liked about the sort of mansion style layout and you could frame this in any like game franchise right this is the difference between uh resident evil 7 and resident evil you know 4 where you're going through acts and you can't you know you don't really return once you leave the village or whatever.

And Resident Evil 7 takes place in a big house, right? It is that thought of you walk onto a new floor and there's this bread of rooms that you could go into any one of them and just start exploring. When in this one, I always felt like the next step for me was prescribed because it was whatever.

I have to get the button by beating the boss on this floor. I think it is a different strokes for different folks thing because I knew it had been sort of set out in front of me. And I also feel like I knew how to do it, which is to say suck something up and shoot it into another thing. I kind of fell off of it, which surprised me. Your point, I think, is fair, but it kind of reminds me of when people found out that Astral Chain

wasn't going to be an open world game like Nier Automata. But then they realized after playing its level-based gameplay that it was actually a more thoughtful and engaging experience, and that's why it's the game of the year. You know, it's funny. I don't remember renting an N64 to play Astral Train. Astral Train is not the name of it, but it is extremely powerful as a concept, and you should trademark it immediately. This is my chain, and it's connected to ghost training. Oh, fuck, it's ripped my arm off again. I gotta stop tying chains.

This is fucking trained to my arm. It hurts. Hey, Justin, where can our listeners share their thoughts? No, we have to pick the winner of this round. Oh, gosh. And then we can do that. I'm trying so hard to move past it uh i will fight for luigi's mansion to the death i agree i i think it's gotta be outer worlds though uh here here's my problem

with outer worlds is that i wish i hadn't finished it because i feel like the it's kind of the same complaint i just leveraged against luigi's mansion In that it felt so broad and so open. If you have the same complaint about two great games, it's starting to sound like a you problem. Also, the combat, the shooting in that game is still not great. It's still not very... Justin's giving me some full-blown Rodney Dangerfield vibes on the camera right now. Things are getting a little hot for Griffin. I would say I actually think I like Luigi's Mansion

better than Outer Worlds. We did it. Russ only likes Luigi's Mansion because he's basically Luigi. That's the thing nobody's saying. Fucking easily startled, skinny, loves to clean. A good brother.

Indeed, I'm a good brother. A younger brother, no less. All right. So Luigi's Mansion then, I guess. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't matter. Next week, we're going to talk about four more games in round three before we decide the winner, and I'm looking at this round, and boy howdy, it's got some

heavy hitters in it. Yeah, next week, yeah, do we want a preview with the round? No. No. It's going to be a surprise. My actual game of the year is next week, and it's, I can't imagine anything beating it, because it's so good, and it already won all the trophies from the other sites. So we can't not give it to it. That'd be embarrassing.

If you've been screaming at your podcast device saying, Hey, you idiots, you've got it all wrong. Astral Chain is good. Then you should make your voice heard. Send us an email. Mail at besties.fan. And just give us a name of a game that is your game of the year. And one sentence as to why it is the best game of the year.

And we'll read a few of those in our part two game of the year spectacular. With all these heavy hitters. And of course come to a unanimous heartfelt decision on the best work of art in the interactive digital space in 2019 that we're all going to feel good about for the rest of time as we do about all of our decisions i'd still feel good about over den i play that right now load it up in fact i'm gonna do that. And why don't you subscribe to us on Spotify? If you've enjoyed these opening episodes, in 2020

the whole operation is going to be exclusively on Spotify. So head on over there. You don't have to pay anything. You just have to subscribe to the show through the Spotify client, either on the web or in an app, however you want to do it. And we will be there for you every week with a new game hell yeah dude we did it wait is that how you're ending it you have to end it

no i didn't know if you guys had anything you wanted to say i said hell yeah dude i think you nailed it thanks spotify we wouldn't exist without you and that is going to do it for this episode of the besties be sure to join us again next week for The Besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties! And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch.