The Besties - Getting All Gussied Up with The Last of Us Part 1

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

If you think you just played a version of the original The Last of Us, we're here to tell you that you probably did, but here's a new one with prettier graphics! Well, pretty is maybe not the right word as much as it is far more viscerally depressing now. Also discussed: Bounty of One, Zor: Pilgrimage of the Slorfs, Arcade Paradise, Dark Souls 2, and Immortality.   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!

So the only other game I've played this past week, aside from The Last of Us Part I, was Fortnite. That I played with my bros and had about the opposite experience. It's like the opposite game. So if I could start out the conversation with The Last of Us Part I,

just by saying Naughty Dog maybe missed a trick by not putting Goku in it. Goku but also grenades that make zombies dance would have been useful. Grenades that make zombies dance is funny. Darth Vader is funny. Weed stuff

kind of weed. What if Joel was like, now Ellie I need to take you to the Firefly checkpoint, but Snoop's about to drop his new single on that big screen, so we're gonna have to wait for a second. They fix that in part two.

There is a lot of pretty hysterical weed humor in part two, but no Goku in that one that I found. I didn't get the platinum trophy. So maybe there's like a secret costume, but just a note for next time, Naughty Dog, for the third time that you remake this game. Goku.

Goku, eat it. my name is justin mcelroy and i know the best game of the week my name is griffin mccarroy and i know the best game of like 2011 and then 2014 and this week my name is russ froschek and i know the best game of the week well welcome to the besties a video game club a game of the year show that goes all year long. We are so thrilled to have you today for our discussion of Last of Us again. We're going to do that one again. We're doing Last of Us again. Doing it again. So, okay, it came out in 2013 on the PlayStation 3,

and then it came out in 2014, remastered edition on the PlayStation 4. Yeah. One year later. And now, but then eight years later, technology has advanced. This is me doing the Chris Plant job. Technology has advanced so much that the,

that Joel's beard. We haven't taken the break. We didn't take the break. No, I know. This is me explaining what the game is. This is the Chris Plant job. Joel's beard technology. Out of sight.

And here's a word from our sponsor. Well, it's the Last of Us is back yet again. Last of Us Part 1 is what they're calling this. And it's to distinguish it from Part 2. And I think the idea is this is a version of this game that can stand side by side arm and arm with uh the last of us part two recently yeah was that year two years ago a couple years ago yeah and they've they've they've changed some things in this one to make it feel a little bit more like part two which is to say that when you choke the life out of someone you really get to watch the lights slowly extinguish from their eyes so

that's your nasty thing yeah they've got they they do neil has got your back on this one this for what it's worth for people listening that aren't aware is a full remake of the original game on playstation 5 not placed in exclusive to playstation 5 and it includes the dlc which was called left behind and it also doesn't include multiplayer so you just get the main campaign of the original game. And the whole idea, as Griffin sort of alluded to, was to bring it up to the, I would say, visual fidelity that was presented in Last of Us Part II, along with all of the technological enhancements that were introduced therein. And there's some mechanical changes there, too. A little bit. It does not feel exactly like The the last of us part two there's

certain things that like uh you can't go prone there's like little stuff like that yeah the design the base design of last of us one has not changed so all the encounters effectively play out the same uh there's some there's some small tweaks in in... Yeah, they made some tweaks. But in terms of your moveset and like what you're capable of doing, you're still gonna be crouching as Joel. You're not doing like Ellie's dope ass dive arrow headshot stuff. So like, yeah.

So let me start by saying, okay, so here's the thing, man, they wanted to have something to sell when the TV show came out. Like, well, the TV shows,

when's that come out? That's a way. No, no, no, no, no, no,

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no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no it. I mean, I'm sure they will do that as well. But I think it's more, it's a few things. One, I think they've sold a bunch of PlayStation 5s at this point, and it's difficult to not have any exclusive releases on PlayStation 5. There you go, that's huge. So now that we have one, that certainly helps. I think it's also, there's an element

at which they want this to be their, like, one of the few Paragon PlayStation exclusive series. And honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a third one coming. And at that point, I think they want them all to be kind of on the same or at least close to the same level of quality. So as Justin alluded to, they could eventually release them all together. Yeah, I think that was the rationale okay we need to talk like okay so we need to talk about this is all very this is it's all fine and it does just what it says on the tin i would say it it is a better looking is actually if you watch side by

sides like i think it's start we're bordering on like personal taste like I there are definitely more detail there's definitely better like lighting effects and stuff like that and I would also add the like if you've seen the performance capture in the original game and you compare it to the new game it is night and day yes dramatically better in the new one but it's not like you it's not like oh the the level of jump especially if you're looking at remastered to this it's not the level of jump that's going to continue to be super noticeable the ones that blew me away were um when you first go into the city proper like the downtown area and it's this thing of like it's not just the graphical fidelity is better you realize how much of like towns in that sort of environment are hidden from you by by fog and what have you being able to see these

like the full size of these huge buildings towering around you was really impressive i mean like and the the distance at which um you know and this is a game that both of them i think that like do a lot of we're going to that point and you have no idea how we're going to get to that point but like that's where we're headed and that and you could see that a lot more clearly um in this in this version yeah i i went ahead just to do some research because this is not my field of expertise but i know that people care about this a lot more than i do and watched an hour long digital foundry video comparing the two games. And there are definitely things,

you know, I mentioned the motion capture, the performance capture, and that jumped out at me as well, even before watching the video. But there are definitely things in that they call out in the, uh, digital foundry video that like,

I probably in a million years wouldn't have noticed. Like here's the specularity of how the flashlight bounces off water when you're going through water that's something that it's like there's like a ton of those tiny details that people that are like really into graphical details like that will notice and freak out about but for me it doesn't really stand I mean I can see that the water is looking a lot better but beyond that uh i think there's a lot of like fine tuning and stuff and it makes me wonder like is this for people that played the remastered one or are they sort of repitching this as like hey you've if you've never played any of them this is the perfect place to start if it is that i think it's i think they did a good job yeah this game is not fun like it is a uh it is a survival horror game more so even than part two yeah yeah where it is just very slow and

you are the the resources are very limited and you are placed in a number of high the whole time tension's high the whole time and and you just get dropped into a number of... Tensions high the whole time. Tensions high the whole time and you just get dropped into a bunch of different sort of combat arenas. Not even combat arenas. That sounds like Doom. It's like sneaky time arenas with blowed up face zombies that will eat you

if you fuck up even a little bit. And so the changes that have been made to make the game sort of feel a little bit more like part two i think have made it a much more at least for me like palatable experience because i did not like i don't know what they the gameplay wise what they changed to make it feel like part two apart from i know they improve the ai a little bit but outside of that i mean in movement like it's it's little things it's the way that the characters move.

It's the way that aiming and shooting a gun feels. It is little things. But I despised Last of Us Part I when it came out because it just felt like boring Uncharted. And the drama and storytelling and writing and everything uh was was definitely laudable but it just the everything in between that stuff i could not stand and i found myself being pulled through it this time uh with a little bit more smoothly than i did the first time that i got yeah it does feel like was, the first game when it first came out,

was a delivery mechanism for a very intense, mature, interesting, well-told story. But the gameplay, I think they promised a lot. I remember that E3 trailer where they promised the moon in terms of AI interactions and combat stuff. And they couldn't quite hit that. I know there have been some improvements on the AI here, but it felt like from a gameplay perspective,

they hit their stride with two, part two. And so going back to this on the gameplay front feels definitely stodgy to me. It just feels like, you know, literally last generation. There are some little changes. Also, I was watching a video earlier about like pace, like the pace of the walking, which still still to me it still feels kind of slow but but it is uh that is that is tweaked i i tell you the thing that really like it was i had a weird response

to this where i could see how much better it looked but for me the level of fidelity that they have brought in i found distracting because the the visual fidelity really highlighted and and and without the layers of veneer from fog and what have you it really highlights like how video gamey the design is of this world yeah like i don't know how long it's been right and i do understand that like it take like plant life will try to uh reclaim the earth right when we're not doing our our radical stuff but like in 10 years the world has been has become a video game level i mean it's just like a series of, you look at some of the like industrial areas

and it's just this absolutely insane mishmash of like, well, I dragged this big load of pipes over here and I'm going to set it right here in the middle. And then I got a load of metal beams. I don't want to set these about 400 feet away over here. And then it's really like, once you can see this really clearly it starts to hit you how like and I don't feel this way as much about to yeah, I think that's like

Well, you can see where they've improved the you know the visuals but the logic of the whole thing and just like the feel of it like it looks like this what it doesn't feel like the world like and just like the feel of it like it looks like this it doesn't feel like the world like it feels like a just video game yeah so i think two is part of the i mean i agree with you i think two is a lot of the reason you feel that way because they made so many improvements into not only from like a just overall level design but from a non-linearity standpoint so you can go through these levels 16 different ways and all of those ways have a certain logic to them but they don't feel prescribed so you know

i'm going to go through this bombed out house or i'm going to go through this alleyway and it feels grounded in ways that the levels in the original last of us just don't especially not now and you're right you bring that level of fidelity to those levels that were like well here's a cover-based box and here's another cover-based box and it it has this weird dichotomy it is definitely i mean i'm not really faulting them because it is the i mean that's the dna that they brought over right yeah what it feels like is uncharted levels i mean it feels like the the way uncharted levels are designed which i I think you can, yeah, I don't know, you can level the same complaints there, I guess. Yeah, but I think those are-

It's a little more organic because it's not our world, right? It's a little bit easier to ignore. I also think you're moving a lot quicker through those levels in Uncharted, and also there's a lot more visual splendor to take in in Uncharted. Of course. Whereas here, you've got a factory, realistically.

Right. There are moments of beauty in this game unquestionably but like a lot of the comp like you know i played through um left behind which i hadn't played through it's quite good i'd highly recommend it if you never played through it but it's uh both of them are basically set in malls and uh you know they're malls there's not you know a lot going on there and so um you sort of have to like find the beauty where you can but it's not a waterfall cresting over a fucking volcano right right it's not a uh man it's a bad feeling game and i don't mean that in the mechanical sense i mean it it is it is it is bleak from the from the jump to the finish and that is that is this is where this conversation gets pretty fraught which is like yeah man that's what they were trying to do yeah and this is where

it comes back to personal taste versus like how much they accomplished what they were trying to do yeah and this is where it comes back to personal taste versus like how much they accomplished what they were trying to set out to do right the latter i think they've done i think they have especially in this version which i think is the best way to play the last of us part one like i think that they made the game they wanted to make extremely well i also think that it is not a game i am interested in revisiting necessarily uh even with the like mechanical improvements just because it is uh it's it is so bleak from start to finish and and I don't really watch TV shows like that. I don't really play a lot of games like that, which as a critic is not a completely fair thing to say, but it is just like you can't fight personal taste. Yeah, the comparison I keep thinking back to is resident evil so resident

evil obviously very bleak uh most most of the franchise is very dark but once you've played through it once they kind of don't care anymore that you're in that vibe and they give you fucking infinite rocket lodgers and i'm not saying they should do that here, but they did do, they did do that here. Really? Yeah. Once you,

once you beat the game, once you unlock like cheat codes. So if you do want to fucking like run through it with infinite exploding arrows, you can do that. But I would agree with you. I think most people who play, I am also not someone that like is super jazzed at the prospect of like replaying a very dark game but i think the people that do

essentially do a lot of things one they skip all the cut scenes and two they just kind of like sprint through and feel like a badass using whatever unlocked features stuff like that i think there are people that do that and can ignore the like tonal elements when you're skipping all the cut scenes like realistically you're not taking a lot of that in so it's fine um i just don't think what are you doing this for well but but here's the thing i think you can do that with last of us 2 and i think the gameplay in last of us 2 is so strong i really do it's one of the best third person action games i've ever played it's so strong that i could

play through it not having to like take in the very brutal gut-wrenching story and have a good time just with the gameplay because they did such a good job with the gameplay which if i could just say i mean it is it is as somebody who is now a dad um and has also been through a global pandemic, the first 20 minutes of this game hit so fucking bad that I literally was pretty close to telling you guys, like, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to play this. I'm not going to, like, talk about it.

I, like, I really don't want to. It eases up after that. But, like, the added context that I now have for how utterly ghoulish, like, the beginning of this game is, it's, like, it hits, it hit really rough for me. It was really, really hard to, like, to push past. Yeah, and it's not out of step with, like, the genre, right? with like the genre right almost every zombie apocalypse movie starts with like a family member pretty brutally dying if not more of them so i agree with you you know again it goes down to the taste and whether you would taste and whether you can like stomach this sort of darkness but i yeah again just to go back to the gameplay i i i think if you're just playing it for the

gameplay and you know the story and you don't feel like you need to rehash the story i i i think if you're just playing it for the gameplay and you know the story and you don't feel like you need to rehash the story it i think is harder to have a ton of enjoyment out of this because it just the gameplay just feels very creaky at this point yeah but the story is really i mean we'll talk about it in the second half of the show i i think the story of the last of us part one remains easily one of the best video game stories and one of the show i i think the story of the last of us part one remains easily one of the best video game stories and one of the most intriguing video game stories i've ever experienced um so uh certainly stuff to talk about there but i guess if you want something that's like well if you're trying to show off the power of the ps5 i still think the demon souls remake

and ratchet and clank both do it better. I want to give a shout out for the, maybe the most accessibility options I've ever seen in a game before. Oh yeah, they're spectacular. Like completely, like just like bananas. And it's not, it goes so far beyond the usual suite. Obviously like I don't possess a comprehensive

uh knowledge of all accessibility options in games but like you can customize all the controls you can uh set up a high contrast mode that like turns the background gray and good characters blue and the zombies red and items in the environment yellow. And then like you can set that to toggle with a swipe of the touch pad. Some of them are, I think go on to address kind of annoying things about the game in general. Like you can set it so that you automatically pick up like like parts oh that's ammo whenever you get close to

them you can change the listening mode which is like how you hear enemies through walls to like switch it to like a radar ping tag mode you can activate uh a skip puzzles option which the puzzles in this game are pretty bad. So that might be something worth looking into. You don't like rafts? No, I don't like moving a raft or carrying a plank very slowly to, I think this game is a success in a lot of ways.

It just doesn't align with my taste, except I think the puzzles are pretty, pretty bad. I like the ropes in the second one. This has nothing to do, you've got to stop trotting out how the second one fixes these problems. I'm not saying.

You're charging people for this one. No, you're right. I'm not saying. All of that was to say that I, it is genuinely impressive to see how hard Naughty Dog goes into this stuff. Like it has all the other accessibility stuff like you know uh speech uh reading of of screen options and and all that

jazz but then it like it goes so far above and beyond that uh and that is really cool to see yeah i will say if i could level one other thing this um and i i should mention that i am a simple consumer and a critic i don't know how games are made don't know how any of this technology works it is frustrating to me that i am in this the year of our lord anodomny 2022 i am still being asked to choose between fidelity and performance it's wild what and the the uh if you choose for the fidelity by the way it looks terrible it looks really really bad it is chuggy and and not pleasant to look at but you understand the like you like i'd rather have the choice than have them choose for me how about you just do both of them how about you can't run the game at all those features made the

game they just made the game if they just made it but you just made it you couldn't like if you wanted ray tracing and at 4k you it the system can't do that they should make a better system but they shouldn't put that in the remake this is the ps6 they should wait for the ps6 if you can't do the remake the don't i want i think the one thing the console games. If you can't do it in the remake, then don't do that. I think the one thing that console games have learned... If you can't get it at 60, you don't have it. No one wants to play it less than 60. That's false, Justin. There are people that want to... I am not one of them,

but there are people that want to play games at 30 frames a second so they look gorgeous. I am not one of them. They don't look gorgeous. They look like I'm flipping a flipbook for my kids that I made while we were getting our hair cut. We agree, but I would rather have the option than them just not even trying, is what I would say. Yeah, that doesn't bother me. I would let it come to try more to just do both of those.

Okay, sure. Last thing I want to say, the only reason I keep bringing up the second game is because I think it is disappointing to me that they didn't bring a lot of the gameplay improvements in the second game over this one I realize that it would have made the scope of this project way way bigger but they're charging a full price 70 hours for this game yeah I think they kind of could have done that the the second game really improves melee like and in this one it's just kind of an afterthought. It's just like a thing that you do if you have enough hit points on your wooden bat or whatever

to get you out of a scrape, while in 2, it is an integral part of the gameplay experience. There's a dodge that you can do in 2 that you have to utilize. I mean, just moving around the world and and proning and crouching and sprinting everything feels dramatically more modern into and i realize you can't just port that stuff over to one and have it feel okay or be balanced but yeah no i just want also into they have the thing where if you murder someone and then someone comes along their body they'll be like oh no douglas douglas's fucking blood all douglas's blood is out that

was my best friend and in this one they just like see a body and they just kind of step over it like so there's someone made a body someone made a little i thought people get a little sad but they'll just say bro a lot they won't say any names yeah i need the names to feel the true sin of the murders that i did not i genuinely do not i am fine with uh not further humanizing the uh you know murder dudes that it would have been funny if there was just a group of like six guys and they were all named mark just coincidentally all marks yeah tall mark she got tall mark uh should we go to the break yeah let's go to the break yeah let's go to the break and then we'll be right back right after this we didn't discuss the fun factor that's a great that's true that's a great point we did not discuss where would you put it griffin yeah probably uh 6.5 okay um okay you want to talk

about the story of the last of us now that we have seen the last of us 2 yeah so this is going to be pretty spoilery really for both games so maybe just like i don't know tune out review the podcast and you know do all the other things we normally do at the end of the show if you don't i'm gonna set it i'm gonna set a 10 minute time limit on this conversation okay because i do not want to talk about it more than okay fine that's fine setting the timer no no it's interesting because i got in a kind of a heated discussion with someone and i'm curious how you guys feel okay so the first game just to recap um the whole idea is that ellie is immune from the virus the cordyceps whatever it is infection and you're going with joel to find the fireflies who have the potential to maybe extract a cure from ellie right um it gets towards

the end and in that journey it's very clear that both joel and ellie develop a lot of fondness for one another to the point of like a father's daughter relationship um the sort of big moment and again this is big spoiler is the idea that you eventually get there and it becomes clear that the only way that they can sort of experiment and have a chance of maybe extracting the cure to this infection is by killing ellie in like a medical scenario and in an effort to sort of you know basically save her as it were even though this is against her explicit wishes like she makes it very clear to joel that she'd rather be sacrificed uh joel goes on a murder spree and kills everyone in the hospital and rescues ellie and then like

decides to not really tell her that. And then two is just the aftermath. And two is the aftermath. Two is very early on, Joel gets killed, and Ellie basically goes on a murder rampage in revenge for Joel, I think is a decent summary. So the overall theme of The Last of Us in general, my takeaway at least, and tell me if you disagree is people do horrible things

for the people that they love and it's like in these cases not the right things but they still do horrible things yeah I mean it's also about sort of the endless cycle of violence which I you, it's also about sort of the endless cycle of violence,

which I, you know, there's multiple... I think it's secondary. I think that's secondary. I think the primary focus is, like, Joel committing that incredible crime is, like, the core focus of the first game. And, you know, the second game is just a retelling of that, but from Ellie's's perspective because she's

do feeling like she needs to do this thing for revenge of joel so at its core it's like people oh i love this person i have to do whatever and and uh for what it's worth left behind the dlc has that sim a similar coda where at the end uh your friend i forget her name or your the first the person you kiss for the first time ellie kisses for the first time the girl uh says something along the same lines it's like you just have to keep fighting for the people you care about yeah and so that is the through line there and and even with um shit i'm forgetting her name in the second game the other protagonist uh yeah her the same thing like she's very much motivated by revenge for a lot of the game and then lets it go abby thank you abby was

her name um so i guess the question is are these uh is it just people that are like refusing to learn or is it like a human condition thing where realistically like we'd all like kill a bunch of people to save the you know a child a family member what have you the ending of once uh isn't it was so frustrating you have no choice right it puts the control in your hands you walk into the operating room you pull the gun yeah and then they make you pull the trigger yes otherwise you just stand there right and and so like you don't you don't get a choice i would leave if i'm those doctors this guy i don't think so let's go i don't think he's gonna do anything he's this is the only way they can get the cure of course they're gonna stay they're gonna stick it out so like that idea of

like committing horrible violence like apocalyptic violence for the people that you love uh and and then you know him essentially lying to ellie about it as as they drive off into the sunset is uh a very bad feeling and so two kind of echoes that in that like now you are doing the violence for the person that you loved who you have lost uh but at the end the very end of the game again like it's so deep in spoiler territory hopefully you either don't care or have played it already uh there is like a moment of grace after murdering all of her friends like ellie lets abby go and then has this sort of moment of sadness when she returns home and you know nobody's there to greet her uh and and so it is a reflection on that honestly i

feel like part one is a really interesting road trip story right like it's it's it is bleak and uh unappealing to really emerge immerse yourself in that world for 20 hours um but i do think that like they don't make a lot of games like this right right and i also think there are even though it is bleak there are moments that are extremely important to getting to that end of the game where you are seeing that bond develop between Joel and Ellie and you understand, even though you don't agree with his decision, you understand how he might have gotten there

because you have, they're building this father-daughter relationship. Oh, I understand how he got there. Yeah. I would be interested to finish this because I wonder how it hit differently for for me it's very easy to kind of cluck your tongue at at joel's selfishness if if you don't have experience with that kind of relationship and i'm sure i did when i was younger i think it would uh

i i think it might actually hit differently now that i'm oh for sure i'm older and a parent with kids. Not that I'll ever do that, but I bet it would. All that to say, I think that playing this game, and I haven't finished this playthrough, but it really, seeing how this game doesn't acknowledge the violence, right? In a lot of ways, Last of Us 1 and 2 is also kind of an answer to the wanton violence of the Uncharted series, which always gets a lot of ways last of us one and two is also kind of an answer to the wanton violence of the uncharted series sure like always gets a lot of shit where there's like this charming rogue

nathan drake who fucking mose you know it is a running gag but you cannot like deny the fact that this man is a mass murderer he is a he is, he is one of history's greatest villains. Well, later on, later on, they're a little better about like, oh no, they fired first, and then he murders them. Yeah,

not much better about it. the whole thing, yeah. Right? And, and so, Last of Us Part 1, kinda,

kinda hits that, but Last of Us Part 2, is just a reflection on that, in, in, like that tendency, in Naughty Dog's games in the past. Well, and most video games, games in the past and most video games i would say and seeing that be absent from laszlo's part one i feel like only kind of makes the themes of

part two click a little bit more for me i it nathan drake should be the batman of this world right like this he's not just an action person he's the orphan maker like if they if i'm a criminal and i see someone with anyone with their shirt half tucked in i'm pissing my pants that's that's the orphan maker i don't want to he shows up everyone you know everyone you've ever loved they're all dead uh and then he'll do this like smirk yeah you're a murderer he says a funny thing to his old friend but he just killed like everyone i know everyone i know i once watched that man kill everyone i know and thank god i pretended to be dead so i lied on the ground and then i watched this thug climb a wall for a half hour. It was amazing.

What an absolute disgrace of a human being. And then he paused the game. He turned on big head mode. He turned on DK big head mode. My head was big. His head was big. All my dead friends' heads were so big. It's funny.

I was just thinking as we were talking about that uh about two games one death loop and b fortnight both of those games are like very light-hearted generally speaking a death loop gets the very dark tones but at their core the way they work why they are able to get over that is because part of the narrative is that everyone's just in this big loop and everyone just comes back a second later so it ends up feeling like effectively paintball or something with way lower stakes. Yeah. So it works,

but I agree with you about uncharted. Uh, I liked your point about last of us too. And the idea of like, when you think back to last of us one, you're right. Like we have one minute left in this conversation. Oh no.

The violence was interesting in last of us one, uh, but was never really commented on at all. And you really, it just, it this conversation. Oh, no. The violence was interesting in Last of Us 1, but was never really commented on at all. And you really, it just, it felt like, oh, whatever, a means to an end. And Last of Us 2 becomes so much about that. So it does add a layer to it. Yeah.

But overall, I don't know. I agree with you. I think 2 hits a little better in hindsight. Last of Us 2 is such a fascinating game because I didn't enjoy it when i played it and yet i couldn't stop thinking about it yeah and upon further reflection like totally acknowledge its merits like as a game i think it is one of the more sort of successful games that naughty dog has ever made uh and i i i don't i just don't think that part one has a lot

of this stuff that makes that true for part two. I think it has the narrative stuff, but not the gameplay stuff. Maybe. I don't even think the narrative stuff hits quite as hard, but yeah. Yeah. Here comes five.

Four. Any last thoughts? Three. Two. Pizza. One. Okay, pizza. Thank you, Rhett.

What else we got going on, Russ? You maybe been playing other stuff? I'm still playing Dark Souls 2. Okay. That game is awesome. I talked a lot about it on Rusty, so I won't go at length. But, like, man, it's a slow build.

Like, the beginning, I think, is slow and not great. But the later and later I get into that game, it gets kind of better and better, and that's weird for most of the Dark Souls games, which tend to fall off a little bit towards the end. dark souls one which gets pretty bad um so yeah that game is sick i'm really enjoying it uh i went back and uh after last week's revelation uh like just destroyed immortality over the course of like two more play sessions. Oh. And it makes me-

I think we should have, don't go too hard. I would like to do a B segment when Plant comes back. Okay. Like a spoiler cast? Yeah, spoiler cast. Yeah, because I really wanted his thoughts and I feel like we can talk more about it. And I would like to do that if

we could uh yeah cool cool fucking game yeah that's still i need to watch a video of like someone explaining to me what the hell is going on because there's elements of that that i just don't get there's a lot of i think it's wildly open to interpretation uh and and i think that there are interpretations of it that are like deeply cynical and then there are interpretations of it that are maybe a little bit more sort of like sci-fi literal um yeah but no matter what like i i i once the hook of that game clicked for me it also made other parts of the game click click for me and i just i just think it is a a stellar thing it's better than her story yeah for sure i think it's i think

it's tough to refute it as the best fmv game but also at the same time it does make it more frustrating that like that that the key to that game is obfuscated in the way that it is because travis it was the next one to be like so i've watched um the movies i think i get what's going on and we're like play with the controller and then like 30 minutes later he talks like holy shit yeah it needed a giant like very obvious pop-up you know outer wilds has that and it's like recommended with the controller at the very beginning of the game and yeah this needs that recommended isn't even in the right word like i i get so there is an audio cue yeah there's a lot of audio in this game so i

think that is much much harder to catch than a controller vibrating in your hands yeah um well i i i agree with you juice i don't want to go too much more into it uh except to say that it really hooked me once it hooked me and um it feels i feel genuinely silly for my position on the game during the episode where we talked about it where like i thought i had played enough of it to get it but at the same time like i guess there's some value in having that position represented because i also think there's a lot of people who may never hit that part of the game and fall off of it um so yeah so i have a few real quick because we were traveling, so I played a lot of stuff. I wanted to mention in order of how much I played them.

The first is Bounty of One. It is a new and still an early access game like Vampire Survivors, a one stick shooter, if you will, where you are walking around and shooting stuff. The interesting thing about bounty of one, it's a, um, like sort of a weird West theme, like Western goblins and, and, and monsters and stuff like that. Uh, but you two differences is you don't shoot unless you've stopped. And there is a dash. So the flow just feels where,

where vampire survivors can feel sort of like methodical in the like how you are corralling or avoiding large clumps of enemies or trying to clump them together. This is a little bit more kinetic where you're seeing how long you can sort of hold your ground. Yeah. And then dashing away at the last second. That's cool. It's fun. It's still it's pretty early. But if you're interested in this sort of like burgeoning subgenre, it's cool it's it's fun it's still it's pretty early but if you're interested in this sort of

like burgeoning sub-genre it's cool i also played zor pilgrimage of the slurfs zor pilgrimage of the slurfs it is how do you how do you spell zor z-o-r okay traditional now this is made by righteous hammer games which is notable because their last project was the, I think, or their last major project, the last one I'm aware of, is a game called Solitarica. Oh, yeah. One of the best. One of the best ever. Like, talk about a mobile game that I played beyond the point where there was anything to do. I was just playing it.

But this is in early access on Steam right now. It is a God. Think of like a deck building game where you are taking these little creatures on a voyage to clear out like monsters in their in their home world. But while you're building your deck which lets you like attack or you use cards to move you use cards a hex base thing so you use cards to move use cards to attack sort of like a tactical thing um you're also managing resources so that you have food and water if you stand next to water if you're standing next to water your water refills each one and it's sort of like analogous to mana i guess you'd say and then you have food as a resource that you use to

do like a lot of different actions moving combat actions things like that and so you are building up your deck of like uh balancing expenditures of these resources you're collecting the resources on the stage like there's food there that you want to head over to and collect so you can do your uh combat actions um this is also another one that's in early access but it's a really cool somebody who really likes deck building games it's an interesting spin on that where it's sort of blending i mean tactics with deck building i think is the is the way of of it. It's not as seamless as that. Solitarica?

Solitarica, thank you. But it's got a lot of promise. So it's basically the logical island of the Zumbinis, is basically what you've described. Okay, I don't know what that is, but I'll take your word for it. The last one is Arcade Paradise, which is fucking great, and I really love it a lot you got a rich dad and he tells you to run his laundromat and in the back of his laundromat you find a couple of

old arcade cabinets and you realize that you can make more money from the arcade games than you can from the laundromat but to get to that point you have to run a laundromat so you can get the money you need to buy new arcade games so it's a very interesting oh oh oh and if you play the arcade games more they generate more money and also there are goals in the arcade games like uh achievements basically that if you complete achievements, then the game will also make more money. And the sim parts are really cool, right? There's like, you know, you have to go around and they have a little mini game to pop gum off of something

or to pick up trash or to throw the trash bag in the dumpster. There's a mini game to clean up the toilet, and so on and so forth. And you have to go from cabinet to cabinet collecting the money out of the thing. So those things are really interesting because it gives you this – it makes you really appreciate the time that you're playing the games. So you'll like start a load of laundry and you're like, OK, I got three minutes before this is done. I'm going to get in there and try to do a level and then I'll run back out and put those clothes in the dryer because the faster you do it, the more money you make.

So balancing those two is really cool. A lot of the games, I've unlocked probably 20 games, 20 different like full arcade games. And a lot of them are excellent. I mean, a lot of them are like really cool, interesting. Some are just kind of meditations on like a dual stick shooter where you're unlocking a bunch of different weapons and fighting a bunch of zombies that's zombat too um but then there's

some that are like uh there's one called blockchain that's where you're like hacking stuff there's um a lot of there's like reskins of classics there's a pong there's a pool stuff like that um i really really like this game a lot um i spent a lot of time playing it i think a lot of the the side games are fun the ones that aren't fun you don't really have to play them you'll have plenty of money to get the stuff you need um russ you played this one some right yeah yeah we we played it for resties i thought it was interesting like the stuff you talked about we're balancing the arcade playing versus the laundry stuff is interesting i found it uh a little too stiff just from like i'm moving around the world and like crouching and getting the money out and like

it it for for what is effectively a progressive game where you're in theory you know constantly getting more and more productive at what you're doing and that that is true. You are, it didn't feel like it had as many, you know, hooks or upgrades as it were to make me feel like I was getting more powerful. You were unlocking more arcade machines, which is a neat twist on that, but I didn't feel like the earning was really that rewarding. Did you get to the upgrade?

Okay, so at a certain point of upgrading your arcade, your dad starts giving you to-do lists and he pays you actual direct money he pays you in pounds right for for that and you can use those pounds to buy upgrades like to your walking speed and buy someone to empty out the machines for you so don't worry about that that's cool yeah no i didn't get that far and you and those to-do lists are things like a lot of them are things like in the games like kill 100 guys with the flamethrower in this game you're not wrong though it's interesting that that this will hit differently for different people but they're sort of creating a fake stress with the the chores that you have to

do to make the playing of the games like that part is more immersive and not necessarily entertaining. So when you can do less of it, you know, like they want a metaphor for you doing the boring dead end job that your dad wants you to be doing. Like they want that metaphor to be there. At a certain point, I just stopped with the launch.

I just didn't do any laundry anymore. I walk right through the laundry. It took me 10 seconds. I would clean up the trash. Okay. But then I walked through the laundry it took me 10 seconds i would clean up the trash okay but then i walked through the laundry i was making 2g 2gs a day off my arcade i'm not gonna throw someone's nasty nasty t-shirts in a washer for 10 no thank you yeah again i think it's conceptually cool switch too uh is it on switch believe it is yeah or at least it's gonna be if it's not i played it on steam deck uh i think it's probably been updated since but there were some aspect ratio

issues on steam deck anyway uh yeah no i i thought it was interesting it's definitely worth checking out i i think i liked their other game more which was volstock inc which came out uh several years same same director what was volstock inc you were in space it was like an anti-capitalist but also you were an extreme capitalist uh basically running a bunch of different planets and it was like a dual stick shooter with upgrade mechanics similar to this oh yeah yeah yeah there's a version of that in the in That's fun. Yeah, it's cool. What's up next week? Next week, we- How would I have any way of knowing that?

It's Splatoon 3. Oh, I can't wait. Me neither. I'm excited. I genuinely am. I love Splatoon 2. I know. Hey, listen.

You're not going to find anybody that loves, what was it, Splatoon 2 more than me. Splatoon 3. Oh, well, that I don't have any affinity for. Splatoon 2, call me when we're talking about that, because yes, please. Plant will be back next week. So there will be three very enthusiastic squid heads

is what we call ourselves in the Splatoon fandom. So be sure to tune in for that. Oh, games we discussed this week. The Last of Us 1 and 2 and Left Behind. Uncharted a bit. Dark Souls 2. Immortality. Bounty of One.

Zor, Pilgrimage of the Slurfs. Arcade Paradise. Slurfs. Slurfs. I think it's Slurfs. Oh, you would know. Sorry. I Googled it because I wasn't sure.

It's Slurfs. Sorry, Justin. You. Sorry. I Googled it, because I wasn't sure. It's Slurfs. Sorry, Justin. You're right. My bad. Yeah, I played it. So those are the games. That is excellent. Thank you, Griffin.

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 Besties!