The Besties - Hitman 3 and the Great Muffin Assasination

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

You find yourself in an assassination gone wrong. All you have? A muffin. The boys journey into the World of Assassination with Hitman 3 this week, discovering whether they have what it takes to fill the mighty soles of Agent 47. Join them, won't you? 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!

I'm not going to pretend like this isn't the cold open. So Russ slacked us and said, I'd like to kill the video game book club tagline we've been using because I think it's doing us more harm than good in terms of growing the audience. And then we chatted about it for a long time. And then eventually he admitted, to be honest, it's more that I hate video game book club.

Now, I want to say, Russ, you have cloaked this for over a year. You haven't liked it since the first time I did it. And I want to say, Russ, you have cloaked this for over a year. You haven't liked it since the first time I did it. And I want to know what finally broke you. What finally broke me? What broke me was that Plant tweeted last week's episode using that tagline at the start of the tweet. And I saw it and I was like, no, I would never in a million years listen to a podcast that was called a video game book club that sounds like the dullest most boring it's so funny because it's not books yeah but

yeah would it help you russ if we just called it a video game club would that help and we just took books out of it entirely i mean hey russ would you like it better if it was a boys only video game club for he-man womanators would that be better would that be better jack is nodding he's nodding furiously yes two thumbs up whoa three thumbs up where'd that come from oh man exactly see not people yeah interesting interesting so we are changing it right to just a video i'm not joking i think the besties colon a video game club is probably the funniest final permutation of this show i don't hate it it does remove the book aspect what's the opposite of a members only video game club right My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of this week. My name is Russ Fershick, and I know the best game of the week. Come with me, and you'll be in a world of assassination. This week on the Besties, we're taking you to the world of assassination, which is really what it's called you know Tamriel you know Hyrule and now we're headed to

the greatest video game world the world of assassination with Hitman 3 this is the besties best of friends the best of games a video game club a video game club a video game club for boys only for all all are welcome it's a video game club a bold new idea somewhere excluded uh we're going to

be talking about hitman 3 chris what's hitman 3 uh hitman 3 is a game where you uh play as a hitman and it's the third one oh yeah or it's the 17th one depending on what it is there have been a million of this time you're back baby it's hitman 3 but the truth is it's just a continuation of hitman 1 hitman 1 was this big uh game that was going to span all the globe and they were going to recurringly update it and then they're like wait this isn't a viable business model so they made a sequel and then the publisher was like wait this still isn't a viable business model. So they made a sequel. And then the publisher was like, wait, this still isn't a viable business model. So then the developer was like, what if we just do it on their own?

And they're like, sure, good luck. And then they went and made Hitman 3, and that's what we're playing today. And in the game, you assassinate people, and it's the third one. Okay, that is, I suppose, a way to describe this. Let me just, for the people that don't know anything about it. Please. You're a bald guy named

47 the hitman in which version of it is it this is the third one okay got it got it got it and so you're bald and the whole spirit of the game is that you try to assassinate people but the guards and everyone

around them don't notice that you're assassinating them. So maybe that means... Oh, so you're a hitman, is what you're telling me. Yeah, like a silent... No, but like a hitman... You're describing not a mass murderer. I've watched...

An assassin. Gross point blank. You could like run up to someone and shoot them in the face. That is not encouraged in this game. That's not... They don't like that at all. They don't like that in this game.

So it's important to delineate that you are a specific hitman and you are a hitman of subtlety and cleverness. The previous hitman games, if you have not stuck with this franchise for a very long time because it's been going for quite a while, previous hitman games were much more buttoned down and very much about like getting – sneaking around, I would say, stealthing around, getting in the optimal position and then offing people and this new sort of iteration the world of assassination uh version of hitman i think is much more built around sort of leaning into the silliness of it like in in a way like the the way you can sort of like engineer the world to make interesting uh murder yeah basically the way i remember i've uh chris and i'm sure he'll talk about this had had some trouble kind of like understanding like what to do in the game and the

thing that kind of made it all click for me is that this new uh hitman trilogy is essentially tony hawk's pro murderer murderer where these levels are enormous. And there's only like, what, five of them, I think? Six levels, I think. Five or six levels, and that's how it's been for the past two Hitman games also. They are huge and they are very alive except for when you kill them.

And there are a ton of characters in them and there are a ton of places to go and a ton of different sort of like opportunities to do murder, whether it is through these like big showcase opportunities of like, you know, turn on this, turn on this super powered fan to blow somebody off of a high rise building like and working towards that sort of narrative murder opportunity or whether it's just like hey you know put some poison in that coffee and just walk away or hey hide in this bush and shoot them from a mile away uh you you can more or less do it however you want and there's challenges that you get experience points for for like you know doing doing these different you know essentially tony hawk's pro skater objectives um that that is what it is can i get everybody's uh like background with the hitman this new version of hitman to this point because i actually i don't think it's the the games before hitman 2016 or not i think super applicable right so i the last hitman game i

played actually i think the only hitman game i played before this was hitman 2 but the original hitman 2 that came out in 2002 so we're literally talking about crap 18 years ago i think i have played hitman 1 and 2 of the new of the world of assassination uh trilogy uh but i never it never clicked with me for whatever reason i played like the tutorial in in both games and just did not click through one one important thing to note here is that hitman 3 uh i forget like what the ownership like what you have to have but it ingests all of the levels and content from the last two hitman games uh and and lets you play through them with kind of the like hitman 3 ui and some of the the few changes in that that hitman

3 introduces so if you get like if you get the full bundle you're talking about like a a very very like huge amount of of murder opportunities what about you plant uh i have played uh hitman one and hitman 2 of this cycle but it usually is me playing uh i do the training which i think is the same for all three i'm really good at it um and then i do a mission and then i get so stressed out that i quit playing i played um was it hitman absolution was the one that came right before this that's kind of a transition point between how the series i forget which one yeah no blood money was before absolution yeah anyway 2006 absolutions 2012 so the the problem that i realized uh playing this one because it finally clicked for me this time with the uh the murder mystery level which we'll talk about i'm sure a lot oh yeah is you don't have to be stressed

that it's not a stealth game in the traditional sense that you can kind of walk around in the open and then there's like tons of opportunities to not be like constantly freaking out when i played it originally i was like man i'm in a costume but surely people are gonna figure me out i'm bald and i have a serial number tattooed to the back of my neck. So I kind of was like walking around crowded areas, crouching, leaning up against walls, hoping that nobody noticed me. And it turns out that's really not a fun way to play this game.

You're supposed to like walk around in plain sight and collect information. And I don't know, it's more like um treasure box isn't the right word i the tony hawk pro scare thing is right but i think it helped playing a murder mystery because it really does feel like that going back to older levels of like oh no you it really is about assessing the world and learning it um and understanding like the little gizmo that they've created yeah yeah the i think it's the thing that cracked it open for me and i played a good amount of hitman one and two um the realization that i have to have every time i play one of these things and i think

this this game does it really beautifully is this idea that they don't want you to fail if you can accept if you can remember that like they want you to fail. If you can remember that, like they want you to have fun and the developers of the game want you to succeed. So like a lot of times you go into these gigantic environments and the thought is like, oh God, I'll never be able to take on all this.

This is so overwhelming. But like, I'll give you an example. There's a point where I was supposed to, I wanted to poison a photographer, right? So I could take over for him. And I poisoned him with an emetic to make him throw up. And I saw him drink some lemonade and then walk away. And I thought, well, there goes my chance.

Like I could have poisoned his lemonade if I'd gotten there earlier. But I just went ahead and poisoned the lemonade. And my dude just like took a stroll around, walked around a little bit, then went back for some more lemonade. I mean, it's fucking lemonade. They want you to poison the lemonade. It is lemonade.

Like they want you to play, to see it as a ramp, to see it as a ramp. Who wouldn't want to go back for more lemonade is the real question. Yeah, it's the big thing. If you've never played any Hitman games, I feel like the big thing that it iterates on,

I think it does stealth stuff really well. I think it is very, very easy to tell when you are in danger of being spotted, who is spotting you, and all that jazz. And the way that you kind of build on that information is through disguises. is through disguises it's like the big thing in hitman is if you find that photographer like justin was saying and and that photographer would have the opportunity to you know set off some sort of final destination-esque whoopsie that would kill people uh you got to take out that photographer first wear his clothes and hide his body uh you you will be doing that a lot in hitman and sometimes it's like a little old lady who swallowed a fly scenario where you load into a level you're just wearing your suit you go into a bathroom knock out a janitor go into the you know uh laundry room as the janitor which you're

allowed to be in and put on a you know a security officer uniform which you then use to go into hearing and get this uh you like build this ladder towards the opportunity uh and and what i did not know that this game did maybe because i've never played a hitman game enough to really get there is these these huge levels are intimidating when you first load into them but if you look around uh in every level you will get a hint essentially a mission uh what is it called a mission story yeah uh which is like a sort of straight like straightforward if you follow like the objectives way to get one of these signature kills whether it's the photographer is an example of these story mission opportunities you get close

to the photographer a little blue light bulb appears on them and that's how you know hey like go check out this photographer see what they're doing hang out with them and you'll get like a some some ui prompts to like tell you how to achieve this signature kill which is like a great way to learn the the guts of each level and that's really what drew me in is like again having not played in 18 years i was very intimidated and so i did i basically followed the waypoints of like kill the you know knock this guy out take his costume do this do this it like really does lead you by the nose until you get to the point of assassination and using all that information i could then go off the rails in in future replays and say like oh

so i know the security officer's costume is here i'm going to take that first and then try to get this thing and what it does the tony hawk angle is that it presents you with this big list of challenges and you're like oh i need to electrocute this guy in the art exhibit how can i do that well i know that uh you know i walked past the art exhibit before i know there's people working behind the scenes of the art exhibit right and so what feels like it starts as like almost a very narrow guided thing and then as you gain knowledge the game trusts you that hey you can figure this stuff out for your own and right and what's especially cool is the more you play each level you unlock things

that speed up the earlier process so whereas at the beginning of that mission which is set in dubai initially you would start by like parachuting in and there's this whole thing where you're like walking on railings outside of the skyscraper you can skip all that once you've played a little bit and you've got some progression going and now you suddenly immediately you start in the kitchen and you've got a kitchen uniform and you don't have to stress about that like whole intro thing again so it speeds up the process each and every time you play to stress about that like whole intro thing again so it speeds up the process each and every time you play to the point where like you can do really intricate stuff in three minutes once yeah it's also like dark souls style like ladders that you can open throughout the

world yeah once you kick the ladder open they're just and they're persistent yeah yeah persistent so each playthrough yeah i will say uh fresh you're saying like the game trusts you. I think that it does that for more exotic kills because there's all sorts of, you know, like little achievement goals. But I've always been kind of, I don't know, skeptical to get too deep into this series because I'm not a big fan of point and click adventures. And I always had like a point and click adventure energy

for this game where it's like, okay, this game is me figuring out what the game wants me to do and then i'm going to do it and that will be my my like quest and it's going to require a lot of like guessing like does this work or does this not sure um what i did not appreciate until like really getting into this one is the world is covered with effectively just clear guides of what you should do like everything you need to do if you need to you know like trip a breaker or uh uh what is it a electric plug that is near a wet uh by a pond or something it'll say you need a screwdriver for this or like

to fix a distillery you need a wrench for this um the only thing that's funny and it very rarely will not put a screwdriver somewhere around they're not gonna go make you run across the map look around there's a screwdriver yeah it also even still uh my entire way of playing the game now is the first time i go through i just completely rob the the joint like everything my my my body is full of everything my body is full of everything and then i save the game and then that is my new start point and then i like go off in all the different directions from there which the game very clearly encourages you to do yeah right it gives you like eight save spots that are like okay save scumming is the order of the i think if you play on the

hardest difficulty setting you have like a certain number of saves you can do but on like the normal difficulty setting which is what i've played through uh since it's all one big bundle pretty much every campaign all the way through on now you can save and like you get into the room you get the costume you need to save there and then that's your sort of well and not only that the really cool thing that i really like is you can save in the let's say you're in the room with the target you have to kill. And you know that there's like six challenges you need to complete. Yeah. It carries that progression over.

So you can just kill him in like a goofy way. I'm going to jam him on this statue. And then reload your save. And you still have credit for the other challenge. Oh, really? I don't think I realized that. You can just blow through like six challenges right in that same room, which is very good. You don't have to exit to get the reward?

No, you just... I mean, so we should talk about it. So the reason that works, normally in most games, your save state would really carry that back. But because that works... The reason that works is because it's always connected to an online server.

And that's... That's going to be the huge dookie that we take on this game. Is there anything else that we want to talk about? Can we talk about the murder mystery? Yeah, yeah. And I will say, if you're going to play this one, this may be a discussion to skip ahead a few minutes

because it's so cool. But it's also, okay, you go in, you are in a mansion. It's classic, like cozy mystery, Agatha Christie stuff, Poirot, whatever. You show up in the mansion. It's classic, like, cozy mystery Agatha Christie stuff. Poirot, whatever. You show up in the mansion. Knives Out is a great comparison, too. You show up in the mansion. A woman has faked her own death. They're going to have a funeral for her, but her brother has actually been murdered. And as soon as you show up, you see a private

investigator who they've hired, and you're like, well, I know. I'm gonna take care of you and you like have to follow him through a window and he goes into a room and you take over and like no i'm the investigator and that's how hitman always talks no matter what he's doing like i'm here to solve the murder uh but you actually do an actual like no bs murder mystery which an actual like no BS murder mystery, which one is so cool because you never see a detective game that has this fleshed out mechanics of what you can and can't do in the world. Right.

I can't think of many other detective games that let you like climb out a window and scale around and do the stuff that like, there's so much more depth than you would typically get in a, in a murder mystery game. But you also are learning this entire environment. And it's really where this clicked for me again. Like I said, I have to relearn this every time,

but this it's the second level. And that's so brilliant because it, it really does explain to you, like, here's the deal. You can walk. No, one's going to get mad at you.

You're an investigator. You can go anywhere you want. No, one's going to get mad at you no matter where you go in here so just like learn and observe and by the time i finished the murder mystery which was actually like pretty tough i had to find a lot of weird clues and take some like actual logical leaps by the time i finished it i realized like i know this house like the back of my hand. Like, I run this place. I have all the keys. I know exactly where everything is. I know who everybody is. And I did it by just doing this murder mystery.

Are we okay talking spoilers of the mystery? Because I don't think I got the same conclusion that you all did. I think that's all we need to say. It is open-ended enough. You will find evidence, it he will say like okay i have enough to pin it on this person because guess what and this is what's so wild about this and we've talked about this and i was in this same headspace is i solved the mystery i went to this this matriarch who framed her who faked her own death and i i gave her the solution that i was

pretty sure was the right solution and she was like congratulations here's some information that you were looking for i'll check you later and i was like haha i'm the greatest investigator ever and then i was like oh i'm supposed to murder her like i'm not here i'm not a detective i just like anything i just like walked it over it walked over to her like on a balcony it was just like yeet oh i forgot i was this is that's what it is all about you're like walking out of the room in slow motion like glad i could help and then as you're going out the door like fuck just one voice yes i i got i got a very different ending than that well what did you do i mean are we this is a one minute spoiler right here uh i went in and gave her the wrong information which made her feel very guilty and then she killed herself whoa whoa yeah she gave me the information and she was like

i know exactly who you are i'm looking death in the face bravo you beat me here's the information you want and then she walked out the back window and threw herself off the ledge so my ending was one of her family members poisoned her without me doing anything what that's that is fucking wild yeah that's weird i uncovered that plot to poison her and i warned her against it okay um so she would give me the info so she gave me the information and then i just i i oh you know what i did? That is the point at which I was like, well, goodbye. I'm going to go become a photographer now. This lady who's like this genius, genius person does not realize that the photographer she sees five minutes later, this big bald larch looking motherfucker is also the guy, the private investigator. They're brothers.

That level, that knives out level is the level everybody is talking about uh the winery level was my favorite level it's like the knives out level is great it is not even the best shit that this game has to offer there is an enormous all the levels are so big and there's so many different ways to get through them uh and i i really have been i have fallen in love with this with this trilogy and it's like all i want to do is is go back and finish the the old campaigns and i've done almost all of them now uh and hitman 3 doesn't do like a ton of new stuff on top of the last two games but the levels are just like the best by far why like one of my favorites which was so which was actually a big departure i thought for hitman although very, very cool, and really gave me another, it was like another way of teaching you about Hitman.

It's called Apex Predator. Oh, my God, yes. They say basically, like, you don't know anything about this situation. Everything you've done before with, like, your planning and all that stuff, it's all out the window. There are no mission stories. There's nothing like that. It is literally like there's five bad boys in here. You got to find them and kill them to show, basically show them like, I'm, I'm agent 47. I'm coming. Like I'm terrifying. And, and, and it, and it is a big departure from the previous ones, which are all about these like clockwork mechanics or whatever. And this mission is just about like absolutely thinking on your feet in the moment, like react, react, react, react, rather than like plan a big thing.

It's like, can you kill't have to get hung up on this stuff you can also just like react and play and have fun and not worry about it. replied to us on Twitter about enjoying that. I ran the benchmark on the PC version and it is hilarious because it's just the entire the murder mystery mansion getting destroyed with thousands of bullets

from the inside and the outside. The entire world is destructible in a way that I really did not appreciate because I had no reason to know that every book in this game can be destroyed every piece of like the leather sofa the upholstery comes off i mean they have like really taken care to make this work so that when guns do come out that it looks just as amazing as the rest of the game does the only problem is i imagine a lot of people will never see any of that yeah um yeah it's pretty incredible we're about to dookie on the game because the always online thing but before we get to that point i just want to say

like it is very exciting for me to find a new game franchise that i like really like yeah after like not giving a shit about it for so long like that is a very exciting thing and to have it be something as huge as hitman is is really cool the always online nature of the game is quite bad uh you well you i just wanted to like let me just my experience over the last like week i think kind of yeah the basic experience that i've had is now if that was annoying to listen to you just had the experience that i had which is yeah it's suddenly stopping to work like just you can't save you can't load you can't look at menus because the servers just shut off and that is because for a number of reasons that i don't

fully agree with this is an always online game you can play offline but if you play offline it turns off i would say at least 50 of the content in this game well no no okay okay let's think of it this way saves are either online or offline those two things cannot if if you're playing online and the server shuts down you can't you cannot save that game at that point okay but why are you playing online is the follow-up question like what is the point well when you play offline you can play through the mission as normal it doesn't turn off content in there but you don't get scored you don't get uh experience points you don't you can't complete challenges uh all the progression like doesn't work you don't unlock like the new level by level like

oh you unlocked a new smuggling point you unlocked a new entry point and exit point like uh you can't do that stuff and i i i think it's just for like scoreboard purposes i think it's piracy would be my piracy i guess but like yeah i i it it's it is baffling and it sucks because i've played online pretty much the whole time because i want the progression i want the experience points that's a very good i mean yeah it's not uh and what does that mean in 10 years for like it doesn't mean anything right and and the biggest annoyance is what russ outlined is that uh especially on launch day the game was virtually unplayable because you would be playing and you would get disconnected or the worst thing would be you would save and it would be during one of these server hiccups and the game would just hang and you'd have to just like turn like go away from

your computer for 10 minutes and hope that maybe it saved because the audio save is kind of unreliable like that one it's one element of the game that just sucks them and honestly we're a week we are a week out of launch and i'm'm still running into issues. They aren't as glaring as they were, but I am still definitely running into issues. It's so unnecessary. It's just really a shame of an otherwise really just phenomenal game. So I hope they get that worked out, but it is kind of a caveat emptor situation.

So that's Hitman 3. I think it's great. It's a great package. I think it's so cool that those cats struck out on their own and are are making this make it for themselves got me extremely excited about the james bond game uh that they will oh yeah they'll be working on if they can if they can combine what they've already done here with like some big action i think it is going to be absolutely fantastic bond doesn't really disguise himself though, right?

Hmm. I mean, it's not, I'm thinking less the disguises and more the ability to be in an environment where you are not just mass murdering people. Like, because I think that

that is an element of James Bond that has been woefully unrepresented in previous games. That Game Boy game, they need to just make, adapt. Fuck yes. For the Game Boy game. That game game rules that game was very good um i we did we also didn't talk anything about like the special challenges which for me seems like the hook of the game once you

get past the the campaign but i've i've mostly just been trying to finish all the levels and all the stories before i i get to those those specialty things but those seem like a lot of fun also it also has the weird sniper missions, which was in like, wasn't that like an XBLA game? Like a Hitman sniper assassin thing? Yeah, they've had a few of those. Those are in here.

Those are fine. So that is Hitman 3. It is out now, basically. It'll be more out now, I guess, when the servers are working perfectly. But let's take a quick break and we'll be back in just a few minutes or no time at all instantly one of the two so what are we doing what we learned about murder yeah i mean we've had a few murder-based ideas for

the b segment for the b block and maybe we should be a little bit open and honest to the audience about that um like i don't think it would be fun to talk about how we would want how we would murder like if i was just gonna pick one of the four of us like russ like i don't think that that would be a fun that seems to me like a little edgelord sort of stuff and also in 2021 we're bullying chris plant and not russ anymore we have this is this is established but i and it just feels wrong um but i would say broadly speaking in terms of murder if we're not talking about specific people but like just the concept of it i don't want to incriminate ourselves no no no i wouldn't say that but i do think there is a level of like keystone cops humor that is required for just about any murder.

Oh, I see. This is so interesting because I've learned how to be better at it, I think. I'd like to talk sort of about like what we've learned about what doesn't work. Okay. As you've been playing Hitman games. What you've tried that maybe wasn't as successful, because those mistakes are just opportunities in disguise. Sure. One thing that I've learned that didn't work great

is if you're confronted by two hazmat-wearing armed guards, and they've got rifles trained on you, and they know that you are a popular murderer, Agent 47, if you instinctively throw a muffin at one of them, it's not going to impact the situation in a meaningful way. I mean, it will be meaningful. That's a story they're going to tell.

Absolutely. I don't remember it, but I, when I attempted this move, because it's what I had in my hand and I was reacting in that split second, I don't know why I picked up the muffin initially, to be fair, but I was holding it when they were like, hands in the

air, and I'm like, muffin. And that didn't impact the situation meaningfully. And honestly, that jives well with my understanding of, I think, what makes a good murder in the Hitman universe is, I think it needs a level of, like, rapscallion-ness

and like troublemakerness that I think, you know, my ideal scenario is like, look, murder is sad. I get it. It's a bummer. Someone's going to be upset. Even if you're killing someone

that is like truly bad, somebody is going to be upset. Someone's upset about it. So why not make that person a little happier by making the murder scene as hilarious as possible yeah why not drop some banana peels down so when two guys go to parachute they slip on the banana peels instead and then fall off the off the side of the building can i can i say my favorite funniest thing about hitman is like these big sort of showcase accident kills like the uh there's there's a a level in hitman 2 set in mumbai where you're at this like uh

bollywood action film set on top of a high-rise building and you're supposed to assassinate the star by turning on this powerful fan and then like turning the fan up to 11 and it blows him off the building there's a that's like a that's sort of a uh an archetype of a type of like big showcase accident kill sure that exists in in most of the levels in the series uh but what i love is as the sort of operator of that fan or inter you know uh means of of murder here that that is seemingly an accident i am pressing the button that turns the fan up and it blows the guy off the building to his death and nobody gets mad at me nobody in no matter what it is whether it's uh uh you know you activate this uh self-defense robot but you've changed the parameters so it shoots the guy that it's supposed to shoot, but you're the one that pressed the button

to turn the robot on. You're the one that pressed the button to turn the fan on. You're the one that pressed to turn the button to turn on the crash test dummy that explodes into the bird. It's the hot dog suit. Yes.

It's the hot dog suit guy. It's fucking Eric Andre. It's when Hannibal Buress shoots Eric Andre. It's like, who did that? Everybody's just like, oh oh man it's not your fault that fan has been shitty for so long yeah it's okay it's okay oh this is really gonna mess up our new bald intern there's a there's a an exploding golf ball in the first level of hitman three and what's hilarious about it is you encounter this information because someone in the

hallway is like on their cell phone talking to somebody they're like no i'm not gonna do it it's an exploding golf ball i don't know what i was saying it's stupid it's not gonna work no i hid it in the bathroom. Nobody's going to go in there. Nobody has the keys except me. Oh, hello, tall gentleman. Dead. I'll take that. But they like, this person got so far as to get an exploding coal fall and chicken out and put it in the bathroom. Yeah.

A lot of the murders are murders that people were going to do, took it to the ninth of ten steps, and then passed the torch to you. I just couldn't close you the new the new bald janitor who i've never seen before uh basically basically murder is easy we are all just a walking eggshells just waiting to be waiting to be cracked by the the murders that exist around every single corner and most of them are just hysterical. I like that we were worried about our listeners being put off by a video game book club but not the existential angst of we are all eggshells just waiting to be cracked and turned into gooey scrambled goop. At this point we've already got their download though. That's true.

It counts. Here's what it is. Do we have any communique from listeners? accounts here's what it is we got any uh any uh communicate from listeners i i i don't have an answer to this but i i think fresh has done this before uh andrew asked have any of you tried the switch cloud version i don't think any of us have tried that no i did not know it existed before right yeah i played the control cloud version and it was yeah we talked pretty much spectacular but given all the server issues that this game has had on normal platforms i would be a little hesitant to recommend usually these games have a demo though so you could probably test it that's true to see if it works i i would i would

bet that this would work better as a streamed game than control because control is a little bit twitchier yeah and and hitman is not quite i mean there there can be gunplay but you can also play through the whole thing without shooting a single bullet yeah and i would say control worked great so it so i have no doubt if the servers held up that this game would be totally like there's no twitch aiming really at all in this so you're right yeah multiple folks asked if this is a good uh starting point or if it's beginner friendly i thought 100 the the only thing you need to keep in mind and the ui is the menu ui is not good at showing you this make sure you do the training this is something called advanced training so

long as you do that you will be totally fine i had no problem understanding the like mechanics of the world um i don't care about the story at all all sorts of people are dying and everyone seems super sad about it like you're good friends i don't know who they are i don't care i just want to do more apparently the story is good in hitman yeah the story is is i can't keep track of it but that's nothing i i just because i've been kind of cramming all of the campaigns it's it's weird because i played three first and then one and two and so i kind of understand what's going on in the whole thing but in terms of it being a good beginner package i think if you buy the whole set that includes all three games and but you play

them like in hitman 3 that is the the way to do it because if you like it now all of a sudden i it is a a shit ton of stuff also you can play the missions in any order and i do recommend playing the murder mystery mission first it's the second mission of hitman three and i found that that that's when the game really clicked for me i found it really forgiving you can kind of go at your own pace um so i recommend that uh uh with this from james with the new james bond game ioi uh that's the folks who make hitman is certainly going to need levels that can't be completed as quickly as hitman levels how do they do this without removing the freedom these games are known for does working with that

ip mean we should expect a more guided experience i mean that kind of gets the question of like how do you go from this i i get similar to a sense, but also quite different. Yeah, that is kind of interesting, especially knowing that the owners of the James Bond IP are very, very precious. Giant head mode doesn't imply that from Gullton Eye, but generally speaking, they're pretty precious about what James Bond's allowed to do in these games.

So I'll be honest honest a little bit worried that like they wouldn't necessarily allow the sort of wackiness and like open-endedness that these games allow but maybe who knows maybe they will uh also uh from the 20 the d20 shuffle uh have any of you tried running through the story in vr and if not you want to tell people how this works yeah vr is i haven't it hasn't no one else has right no is that on is that only on playstation yeah it's only on playstation vr it only supports the ps4 version of the game you can't do it like playstation vr ps5 um i've watched some videos of people playing it general response is uh it seems very cool but it is also very hindered by it running on ps4 on like really aging vr hardware i think yeah were

it to come i think and i think it will were it to come to like oculus and like pcs and stuff eventually i think it'll be really spectacular to watch. Uh, it looks beyond hilarious, even though it is very low res and, and, uh, kind of minimal.

Uh, I think they cut down a lot on the crowds and stuff like that. But broadly speaking, like I think conceptually, like you could tap people on the shoulder and then punch them in the face when they turn around. Like that is hilarious. Okay.

Hey, uh, Justin, what are we doing next week how would i have any way of note what am i a soothsayer i don't have any idea sounds like it's a death stranding episode is that right no no no it says literally the notes say hitman 3 that's my fault i don't know bud we i would do i would i would talk about hitman 3 for another episode again um has Hitman 3 again?

Has anybody been playing anything else? I feel like that would be... I don't know what else it would be. Because I don't know what we're going to do next week. Eberspace 2. And Death Stranding. No. Yes, Your Grace. I downloaded that.

Oh, the medium. Oh, that's not a bad choice we should probably do that it's on games game pass uh it's like a horror game oh man i don't know it looks bad no it's by the blooper team it's by the blooper yeah well blooper it looks like a blooper i can see it's a bad reviews out there i'm not sure i want to play this one my gosh you're gonna make me if you're gonna make me just say it i just need to know who to blame uh it would be it would be weird to do scott pilgrim that game's a hundred thousand years old there's that ninja game that just came out that's oh from uh yacht club the yacht they published it that might be okay we'll tweet we'll tweet what game we're doing i don't know that we can figure it out are we going to leave this whole my failure of a rundown in the episode

absolutely my mistake we are it's in there I think we did it congratulations everybody thanks for listening please share the show with a friend if you would be so kind I have a request

even though it's wrapping up the show and people are turning off the episode now uh do us a favor i know justin has asked for reviews but also do us a favor and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcasting app uh that might be uh you know all the other ones that i don't remember but but to hit that button that causes it to sort of send us send you the episode when it gets released if you haven't yet I know a lot of people are listening on Spotify before which didn't really do

that it never notified you when new episodes and that's kind of a drag so go to another app and and maybe try hitting that subscribe button it helps smash it cool smash it thank you so much for joining us this week. Be sure to join us again next time for the besties,

because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!