The Besties - March 2018

Episode Date: April 9, 2018

There were a ton of games trying to beat the Q1 deadline, but as The Besties soon learned, some of those titles may have needed a little more time in the oven. Or maybe they were beyond hope? Who’s to say? Not us, we have no idea. Listen, we don’t know what we’re talking about, OK? We thought you knew. Games Discussed: Deep Town, Alto’s Odyssey, Vermintide 2, FarCry 5, Ni No Kuni 2, Sea of Thieves, Fortnite 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!

beverage alert five o'clock somewhere what was that a little limonada did you turn around on it you have a limonada a limonada i can't do two no i blackball we're not doing two months of lemon drinks in a row no i don't want to talk about lemon drinks i want to talk about la croix i have big news i finally threw away the six pack of la croix that i bought to have in my house for people who drink la croix man the tabloids have been tabloids been buzzing about this six pack of la croix when are they going to get around it finally just sort of drinking up their medicine griffin and rachel were coming in they live in austin i thought for sure they would drink the la croix they did not seem like Austin. Oh, we don't drink it here. We're just impressed that the other person owns it.

What are you drinking it with your mouth and tongue and everything? Oh, my God. What flavor did you pick that you thought would apply to any potential guest? Just like pomplemousse. Oh, good move, because I was going to suggest pomplemousse. Yes. You were going to suggest that because you just fucking like saying that word. We're all on to sort of your schemes.

It's true. Drinking the La Croix, though. God. my name is justin mackery and i know the best game of the month my name is griffin mackery i know the best game of the month my name is chris plant and i know a very good game this month my name is russ farsink and I converted my closet into a whole recording setup. It's pretty cool. You sound like a Pixar character. You sound so good. I've seen so many pictures of Russ's closet

in the past couple weeks. It's wild. I have a very good sense of his closet. Russ, you sound great. I think that's the first thing on everybody's mind. You sound fantastic. What's that I hear rattling around a whole bunch though it's his skeletons that russ has in his closet yeah don't talk about them all the dead characters he's playing it's all his dead characters that's the skeleton it's cloutsy he doesn't know how to commit to a bit. Nope. So this is the best news where we talk about the latest and greatest in drinks, beverage news, and video games.

Couldn't think of other words to say there. Couldn't think of nouns. Beverly D'Angelo and Clearly Canadian and video games. So this month, it's all about video games folks they have come a long way since pac-man have they though have they what this month uh presupposes is maybe they haven't maybe they have not we have one we have at least one good game. This episode should be called Besties March. We warned you. We told you.

Try to tell you. Yeah. Did we warn them? I don't think we warned them. I think some of these games we were very, very excited about. We were very bearish. Was there any honorable mentions? Yes.

Was there any honorable mentions? My idle game update. Idle update. Everybody's favorite segment. Yeah. This month is Deep Town. Deep Town is a game where you've got a mine that's going straight down, and you hire robots to mine for you and collect resources. And then above ground, you've got facilities that process the things that you mine

and there's story elements because you find caves that you can send robots in to explore and you'll find like sort of like fragments of a fallen civilization you can try to learn about but also your tat there's uh bosses where some layers of the sediment are uh inhabited by monsters and you have to use your mining equipment to destroy them and they're sort of like gateways where some layers of the sediment are inhabited by monsters and you have to use your mining equipment to destroy them. And they're sort of like gateways that keep you from the lower ones, the lower levels. So you have to like continue to improve your lasers

and all your mining equipment as you dig down. And it's called Deep Town. Deep Town Mining Factory. Don't mind if I do downloading this right now. Yeah, it is quite good. The other one I wanted to highlight and I think Chris mentioned it briefly but I've really been enjoying it is uh uh uh Alto's Odyssey oh yeah you mentioned it last last month which I actually confused it with Alto's

Adventure isn't it the same style of game it is it is I just for some reason I hadn't processed it as being oh my god I've seen I've seen this game everywhere and I sequel it is i just for some reason i hadn't processed it as being oh my god i've seen i've seen this game everywhere and i thought it was just the game i'd played last year because it looks identical and the name's almost identical that's what i'm saying that it's not that it's really fun actually like and i i can't speak to how different it is from alto's adventure um because i like the idea that you thought Chris brought a four year old game I thought he didn't bring it he just mentioned it in sort of passing

so I thought like he was just trying to get into it but like it's a really good sort of one touch I mean like the best way to probably think about it is like if you were to make the greatest like Tony Hawk

downhill or like ssx right yeah i mean yeah ssx is like a fine comparison but like it is about like stringing together a run where you basically have one button that makes you jump you hold that button to do like backflips and then the rest of it is all about finding stuff in the environment. There's walls you can grind on. There's balloons are connected by ropes that you can grind on these ropes. There's rope bridges that you can travel across. You can't freaking grind on a rope.

What are you talking about? You can't grind on them. They break. That's actually true. If you grind on them too long, they snap. Ah, okay. So they hurt you. I'm back on board.

They got you. You mentioned this being the best downhill Tony Hawk 2D game, and Olly Olly was that, right? Did you ever play Olly Olly? Yeah, that wasn't downhill, though. That was Flatland. Yeah. No, it was downhill.

What are you talking about? Flatland, dog. That was a flatland game. Whatever was it? No, they never made a bubble. That's fair. Fair dinkum. It is about, like, I wish there was, like, a little bit more robust in terms of, like,

what kind of, like, tricks you could do. Because a lot of it's, like, at the point I'm at, a lot of it's, like, hoping that I have enough time to very slowly pull off a backflip and not always knowing if I'm going to have enough time to do it. But when you do tricks, you build up more speed. Um, and, and I think what's really neat about it is that it's continued to like open up and reveal new things as you go. Like it's, it's technically a, um, you know, endless runner.

I don't know if it's technically endless or not, but that's the sort of style it is, but it's actually like putting new things into the world as you play through. And I'm still like unlocking new characters and new things that like, I didn't even know were sort of part of the scope of the thing. Um, it's also very, it's lovely to look at. Um,

one knock against it being lovely to look at, uh, there's like a day night cycle and I wish when it gets to like dusk or later in the evening, it can be a lot harder to tell your, pick your character out from the background. You know what? That's true to life though.

It is true to life, but it is also like. You need some HDR. Yeah. True blacks. That's a, that's a complaint I'd like to leverage against one of our four main games this,

this month, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. But it's good. It's a, it's a, it's a nice nice thing uh i i have a thing that i probably should bring is my main game but i'm gonna i'm gonna drop it here but vermintide 2 oh yeah i played this yeah it's great it's the full title is warhammer vermintide 2 but i prefer not to say that because when i hear warhammer i don't want to touch it yeah the name warhammer is like a force field that protects otherwise good games that i

see that i'm like uh that's not excuse me chris are you going in there that's not for us it says warhammer there it's like you can't get through that it you're you are correct and the game does a good job of well other than the very beginning uh not really making you have to learn the intricacies of the warhammer universe they kind of like characters talk uh but you ignore them because you're slaughtering just hundreds of things uh it's basically left for dead but uh upgraded for like 2018 so instead of things like uh oh it's all about firing guns it's much more melee focused which fixes left for dead for me kind of because it makes it way scarier when things are surrounding you and you are um overwhelmed and kind of actually having to

get good position to like prevent 20 or 30 enemies from just gobbling you up um there are still long range weapons they're just way more precious there are four class types and then each of those class types has three subclass types so if you want to play rogue you could make it so that you're more stealthy or you can make it so you're uh kind of like an archer rogue um it's super interesting and then there are also loot boxes but you can't buy loot boxes in the game so the loot boxes just become this kind of destiny style um system of at the end of the match you go to the loot box spot you open it up kind of like a engram isn't that the destiny word yeah yeah and all the things that you get are usually just a little bit above your level so you have this kind of artificial but very fun sense of growth um so that you'll go back into a place that was impossible before.

And suddenly you can just carve through enemies. It's smart. The world isn't like my favorite place to live in, like carving through these weird barbarians and rat people. But it's pretty pretty it's not like terrible to look at um and i'm surprised how fun it is even like hopping in with people who aren't your friends which again i i kind of had trouble with left 4 dead and different like the difficulty scale i feel like i always need to be playing with people i could talk with um and graham did you guys know it's a scientology thing i i did know that it has something to do with bad memories yeah it's like a bad mental image

of a traumatic event they are like ghosts in your brain and they push you into the volcano anyway destiny's scientology game and everybody knows about it that game that chris just said sounds better than a lot of the games that were formerly bringing us the best games of the month so what the fuck are we doing here? Russ, you played a little Vermin Hide, yeah? Yeah, I had forgotten that I played it, but I played a little bit with Dave and I really enjoyed it. It is very similar to Left 4 Dead, as Chris said. I didn't love the fact that I felt like I needed to grind the first level a bunch of times before i was powerful enough to

like do other levels i don't know chris if that's something that you experienced but like i felt like i was numerically underpowered for progression and the loot boxes were like not coming fast and heavy um so i got kind of frustrated but i did like i don't know I like the idea of like an RPG latched onto the Left 4 Dead format it's also really gorgeous and has Ratman decapitation which is always exciting

very violent as long as we're here in the honorable mentions we should give one to one that none of us played and should have which was A Way Out which we were discussing right before we started recording because that game looks like kind of all of our jams but i think sort of i i me personally i think this is probably the case for all of us it is sort of a co-op built game where like you really need somebody else to play that game with it has online and i think you literally need i don't think you can play it. So yeah. And, and it,

from what I've read, the thing that people have enjoyed the most playing this game is like just doing it either in one or a couple of sittings together. And that's a, that's a tough, that's a big ask. I feel like it depends how long it is for me, where I only have like maybe an hour of gaming time that I can spend in any given day.

And you're spending that getting all the moons in Super Mario Odyssey for the sixth time. What? That ain't me. That ain't my life. I only did that once. It was my life for a while. But I did that by myself. And that was on the Switch.

So I could do it fucking anywhere. That's true. I've only recently been able to carve out a little bit of time to play video games again um and and it it's probably even less than sort of what griffin's describing because i have too many children i have like a ton of kids and um i i thought i was needed to prioritize the game that i thought that i would enjoy very much so i didn't get to a way out do we want to start with that yeah let's start with that and then maybe we can to a way out. Do we want to start with that? Yeah, let's start with that and then maybe we can find a way to cleanse our palates as we move forward.

And I want to talk about Far Cry 5 and I know that other people on the call want to sort of weigh in on it. I have probably now full disclosure and other people probably got me beat here but we each have to pick a game so this is the only one that I've really played um i've probably spent about five good hours in in far cry 5 and uh i to tell people sort of where i'm coming from i'm like a big far cry uh three

on fan like i think we all are right i thought far cry one was interesting far cry two was very cool but it had some design choices that i know it endeared it to some people um but i could not get down with um but from three on three four blood dragon uh i'm i'm down with all of it like i'm i even really like primal like I'm like, I'm, I'm, I'm down. Um, for me, far cry five, the experience so far has, and I,

when I, I started to hear some negativity about it and my assumption was like, I'm still gonna go nuts for it. It's far cry. Like how bad, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll,

I'll look past all that stuff. Um, my experience so far has been, uh, I hear, here are the big things that I would say. One, very aimless. Um, my experience so far has been, uh, I, here, here are the big things that I would say. One, very aimless.

Um, I don't really feel compelled to do anything particular in the environment. Um, I don't really feel like incentivized. Like I, there's nothing I necessarily want to pursue. Um, it's extremely wide open. I mean, like when you get through the initial training area they're like just a massive world and it doesn't really it's everywhere it's the first time in a far cry game where you could literally go anywhere on the map right from the jump and i don't have any connection and it's asking me to sort of decide what i want to do when i have no conversation

like i sorry I have no connection really to like the world or the characters in it or anything I want to do so on a grand scale big picture I I don't feel I know that I want to um I know I there's a bad cult leader and I know that I want to uh mess him up and he's got people working for him and I know I want to mess them up but the the like day-to-day of that is just so like very aimless and I don't I don't really feel like compelled to do any of it they have made some very strange choices with progression which would be the thing I would sort of fall back on like well if I'm not really caring about the main game like at least I can start to grind out some of these you know i i'm the sort of person that like basically doesn't even want to mess with the main story until i've like upgraded my health some

and like do all the that kind of thing that i can do before i progress the story because i want to be like really well equipped um animal skins is the big one where uh previous Far Cry games like hunting animals was a way to uh create upgrades right so if you wanted to hold more money you had to kill some rhinos or something or if you had wanted like that's how it works in IRL yeah yeah that's the way it yeah that's that's, or like if you wanted to, you know, whatever, better armor, whatever, you kill the, you hunt an animal, get the skin. That's very concrete, sort of like, oh, cool. Okay, well, I'll do that. I'll just, you know, I'll hunt some of those animals.

And now all of it is replaced with money. I mean, you skin any animal you skin is just, it just turns into money. any animal you skin is just, it just turns into money. And there are, the rest of it is through a achievement system. And there are achievements for, and when I say achievements in this sense,

I'm not talking about necessarily the hardware side, the hardware side achievements. So it's like in game achievements of like, if you get some weapon kills, then you get achievements and those achievements give you perk points that you can then use to upgrade like uh you can get a wingsuit you can get a lockpick and a thing that repairs your vehicles and better health and better explodings and all you know the whole nine yards um but none of it's like but like a lot of those are very boring like yeah the the for example the shotgun achievement is kill 10 people with a shotgun so that's basically just like i don't know i'll just

run around the shotgun for a little bit and kill people and it's not difficult it's not that interesting it's not fun and as soon as i finished with it i was ready to drop the shotgun and get back to the thing i actually like using. It's so wild. It's so wild. Because the whole thing about world games is like tailoring your character and leveling them up and then play it your way, baby. But now it's like, and also go out there with a flamethrower, which sucks, and get a bunch of kills with it.

And then now you got points. Let me combat a little bit of this stuff. Let me finish a little. Let me just get through. Well, but I want to address as you go. I want to hit the world real quick. Okay. And then we'll circle back on those three big things.

The last thing is the world, which is just as somebody who lives in Appalachia, which is not what we're talking about, but it is a more rural area. It is- Trees and hills, right? So like not- Yeah, basically. Yeah, trees Trees and hills, right? So like not... Yeah, basically. Yeah, trees and hills and American flags and a few, you know, Trump signs, what have you.

Like it is a similar world to what is being depicted here, I guess. And the game has nothing interesting to say about the way our country is sort of like politically divided and the sort of environment that would allow a a cult like this to flourish and the sort of people that live in an area like this like as far as this game knows montana is just good preppers and bad preppers like those are the two people that live in montana is like good wild good old boys that live off the land and cruise around atvs and evil ones of those that get high on a

wild drug named bliss that makes clouds emit from your brain and turn you into a zombie can can i give you just a moment a quick anecdote that I feel like really captures this problem? I have one after you. Give me yours. There's a character who is running for the Senate, and he is Hillfolk, because that is what everybody is reduced to. And the mission begins promising. He's like, well, I was talking to the whozits and the whatzits, and they told me that there's this thing called gerrymandering and gerrymandering is gonna make it so the the evil cultist can just vote and get what they want

and i'm like oh great and he's like well you're probably like me just another real american who doesn't know what that word is so i guess you should just go kill them all and it's like wait what like you started to say a thing didn't explain what it was then completely wrong off of it and then the the the the great part here is then that if you go north there are very minor spoiler there's a series of missions that even if you're just trying to enjoy the open world it doesn't matter you get randomly drugged and you wake up they do that in all the regions by the way that same what mechanic great is in really really wonderful i hate it i i have i okay my my anecdote is two things one is uh i heard a guy and he was like just, just an open world, nobody character.

And this is a bark. I heard from him like three times when I was trying to get a bugged mission to work by, by the way, there, there are, there are so many of those healthy number of those. This guy's like,

I was always suspicious of our gun laws, but I guess it's a good thing. If we didn't have the right to keep and bear arms, we wouldn't be able to defend ourselves from this cult. It's like, yeah, dude, that's why we have the Second Amendment, to defend ourselves from fucking wild cults. And it's just like, it's like politically adjacent. Like, it's like the most Far Cry 5 thing.

It's like, okay, that's an opinion. Do you have anything to say about that? Like, do you have anything to comment on beyond just having a character be aware of the fact that there is a gun law debate in our country like there's no it takes no position it's just like somebody saying like well i guess it's a good thing we have guns because of this cult like you know for when we're all in that situation when we have to defend our state from a doomsday cult because that's why the right to bear arms is there the other one is i have i've been playing this game for five hours and i've already been tasked with retrieving two very important trucks like oh dude i've i'm i'm a little bit further than you i've done maybe four or five four important trucks in one important plane like these very important

trucks that are part of our family and please go get my special truck back like is it it's just it's just wild and it's like has nothing interesting to say and is also like it wants to be sort of like um avant-garde in its messaging in its world and its setting like setting a fargo game in america but it has nothing to add to the conversation and it's the problem isn't this is this is the conversation about this game the controversy these evil game journalists want it to be you know liberal in a way and tackle these real world issues and why are you the ones bringing this to the conversation and well first of all we're not they definitely did like they knew what the fuck they were doing when they made this game be set in the place that it's set

touching on the issues that it touches on at a time where like in irl it's like you know really popping off and it's kind of irresponsible but whatever if that's not your problem with the game that's fine but in the vacuum that they have created by not touching on that stuff they have created a narrative that fucking sucks the wind and the moon out of the sky i did a mission all the side missions by the way are either hyper hyper all the missions in the game are either hyper grimdark or fucking straight out of Tony Hawk Underground 2 level farts shenanigans. To wit, I did a mission where—I saw Chris tweet about this earlier today. Oh my gosh, in the cook?

You're sneaking through the woods with this woman who can become an accomplice of yours who's like a stealthy archer. She wants to kill this bad guy in the cult. And while you're doing this mission, she's explaining at length the grotesque things that this cook has done to the community, including. And this is truly upsetting. So a content warning, legit, not a joke. There's a bit where she talks about how the cook made these kids. He starved this community and so the people had resorted to drinking drinking their own piss and the kids had to do it too and the parents had to make them do it and they put up a resistance and then the cook fed the kids their parents

like cut off their toes while they hung them up and and fed the kids their toes and it's like fuck guys you didn't earn any of this. And then the next side mission I did, literally four minutes later, was running over bulls with a big threshing tractor to collect their balls for a big balls festival. And then there's a dude like, the sweet balls in my mouth. Give me those balls. I want to pop in those balls in my mouth.

And ooh, I love tasty, sweet, juicy, hot balls. You know how in the show M.A.S.H. when they would have a goofy moment because Houlihan was doing something and then they'd realize they were in Korea and things were really bad? Yeah. It's basically that.

It's not as good as M.A.S.H. It's just... It fucking sucks. It's so bad. It's so wildly wildly laughably bad i i i i want to chase the thing that griffin just said i i would have killed for the ball mission after it because mine was well first you get all this lead up and then the guy ends up just being a tank character that i like blew up from about 100 hundred meters away. Yes. Like a rocket launcher. There is no end to the story.

Um, but two right after that, and again, spoiler, but it's a thing that I, and it's awful. Um, but whatever.

It cuts to a mission or a cut scene with a character talking directly to you about how his baby daughter was born and they thought she wasn't going to live but then she does live and then they pray together and then the baby daughter has a breathing tube and he holds the tube shut to kill her and there's no logical explanation for why and that's that gets to the heart of what i find really upsetting about the game is making a game that has all these things in it and handled them with like any depth or intent would be fine or it would be like a start towards fine what's really disgusting to me about this game is that all of these things in the crucifixions everywhere the mass graves everywhere

i don't remember far cry games the landscapes being so covered and just blood and guts and like humiliated corpses it it doesn't serve anything like i i truly don't understand what the point of this cold is and why does it have daniel bryan yes yes yeah yeah that's a great question for another another podcast but like they're doing these things because these games have always and and really a lot of shit and this is not me grandstanding because i i i fucking platinum far cry 4 like i i love games like these like there's no fucking question and that's what i wanted to reinforce like i history has proven that i can ignore some whack shit yeah far cry games if the if the game part itself is good is

good and it's it's not it's not great here but like the reason the reason it does all these things the reason it has the mass graves and the reason it makes these people the cult is so cartoonishly evil they may as well be fucking bible thumping rabbits like it's that's legit what they're at and they i feel like the reason they do that is because you the player the deputy you're gonna you're gonna end 4 000 lives by the time the credits roll and so that's how this game solves for that is like well yeah you just do it because these people aren't real nobody's this big of a fucking ghoul i feel like rest what it wants to lend like lend some defense to the game parts i do yes here's what i'm gonna say the story is dog shit like i'm not gonna beat around the bush it's really bad consistently whether it's trying to be serious or trying to be goofy neither of them land it's bad but i actually do find the sandbox and the

things you do in the world pretty fun personally and i've played all the far cry games and i've experienced them all i actually found the freedom of it kind of nice because i would find similar to justin where he wanted to wait until he had his like souped up shit before he did the story missions. I liked that I didn't have to mainline the story until I unlocked the ability to get a wingsuit that I wanted to use all the time. How often do you use that? I hate the landscape

of this game because how often do you use the fucking wingsuit? I use it all the time. Really? All the time. I bought a helicopter. After the wingsuit you unlock the ability to fast travel in the air. So after you fast travel, you'll start like 300 feet up in the air. Okay, I guess I haven't gotten that 10 cost upgrade that I need to enjoy the first two upgrades that I purchased in the game. Sorry, go ahead.

Let me just on the game itself. I don't think the idea that it's a wide open game is a knock i do agree with justin insofar as i think what they needed was one more mission after the map opens up that sort of welcomes you into the world and gives you a little bit more grounding sort of similar to skyrim which has the like go to white hall or white horse whatever the town is called and talk to the yarl and like at least something to guide you in they do they do it well in the games events they do kind of the guy on the radio says here's three towns you should go to those first but i want to suggest

you go to that one first like my problem isn't that the world is too open and that you have too much freedom when you start out that's not my problem because i i also enjoy that my problem is that there's there's there's no i feel like there's no reason for me to do anything because I think the upgrades are really weak in this, in this game. The, uh, you have a rebellion meter or I forget what it's called,

but you buy like blowing up shit and stealing supply trucks and looting them and freeing people, rescuing people and completing missions. You raise the rebellion meter and it's like other than activating these story things which all come in the form of you getting kidnapped over and over and i've been kidnapped so many times uh there's i i don't know why i'm doing any of that shit it's just to move the plot forward if that's the case and i'm not getting some sort of tangible reward out of it like i'm just gonna pass on the next fucking doing those but yeah i agree with you guns unlock but like i already spent a bunch of money upgrading the first couple guns that i got

and as far as i can tell there's some of the better guns in the game so i'm good there like the whole progression system's kind of whack that's the kind of thing that like i i don't mind the openness i just would like just the amount of things that are uh foisted upon you without any sort of hint towards like why you would want to do them or like what i'll get here's an example when you you encounter like freedom fighters i guess you'd call them like people who are sympathetic to your cause that you can hire um and it just gives you a button prompt like Like, do you want to hire this person? And like, I already had, and I started running across people like this and I already had

somebody, like I already had like a partner, I guess, that was hanging around with me. I literally don't know like why I would hire them or like, should I? It's certainly offering me a lot of people to hire. Should I be hiring other people to do other things for me? Can I, am I paying them weekly? Like, what is the structure of this? Is it a one-time fee and they're with me? I have no idea how much hiring them costs.

I have no idea what the rebellion meter does. Like I'm getting, there's like silos, right? It's the most boring shit in the world. I just mentioned that, yeah. Throw a grenade at them and like you get rebellion points, right? I don't know what that's for. I don't know what, I don't know why I would want more vehicles. I don't know why I'm in the area that I'm in.

And while you're doing that stuff, while you're driving around and exploring or you stop at the side of the road and find a mission, inevitably fucking eight trucks from the bad guys. It seems worse than any Far Cry game I've ever played in that regard. You're just trying to get from A to B, and there's idiots every single time. Fun experiment. Fast travel literally anywhere except in the middle of one of the main towns and wait nine seconds. And you're just fucking swarmed. And I get that there's bad guys on the road.

Also, we haven't even touched on this. The autosave in this game is fucking criminal. It is so bad. It is like early 2000s era like oh looks like you just traveled across the whole map i'm actually gonna drop you back here arbitrarily like so bad um all i'm gonna say is i've played the game more than anyone i'm not saying you guys are wrong but i have enjoyed the game so long as i could turn off my brain part of the story i also want to say playing with other people is quite fun and the far cry arcade things are quite fun um you can like make your own maps and

do them with other people and it's pretty enjoyable yeah but i also accept the and i think the fact that you've played that long is why you are now having fun because right the thing with the perk system that sorry i just want to hit one more thing on it is this has been a problem with far cry from the beginning is they hide convenience or like comfort inside of your upgrade tree same thing with like a loot having to you know up well now it's i don't think it's in this game but having to upgrade a slot so that you can just walk over a character to loot them rather than having to do the loot animation. In this game, having your basic skills, so the wingsuit and the parachute,

be in the same thing as another basic skill, like being able to have three weapons at a time, because the game is meant for having an explosive, a specialized weapon, and pistol loop. Just to enjoy that part of the game is meant for having an explosive, a specialized weapon, and pistol loop. Just to enjoy that part of the game, you have to save up and upgrade for it. And having all that inside of getting health, and you'll want the health because, like you said,

anytime you just sit somewhere for a second, you have eight characters ambushing you. I think the game will be very fun once I have worked through probably like, I don't know, five to six hours of just grinding the basic features that I can then like, okay, now I have the basic things to have fun in this world.

Now I can go and enjoy it. It is more fun as you play. Oh my gosh. I also play on easy. The just the violent bodies everywhere. The gore, it just, it's such a beautiful game and it really is a stain we also i also have to touch on before we move on and we have other games to talk about i'm certain

of this fact uh but i think this is probably the biggest biggest release um the the bugs i did a mission where i was supposed to find three parts of an irrigation system poor fun and uh slow down far cry it's too delightful and i had to find three parts of it uh one was on top of a windmill fine i just shoot it down one was on top of a building and i'd climb up get it the third one was on a trailer that like the car drove away as soon as i got close to it right so i'm like come back like it wasn't a bad guy it's just a guy with this thing on on a trailer that i had to get he drove away so i chased like come back like it wasn't a bad guy it's just a guy with this thing on on a trailer that i had to get he drove away so i chased him and then eventually like i found the piece just

like lying on the ground a little bit down the road and like weird okay i guess it fell off because but when i picked it up and i brought the third part back the mission wouldn't move forward and it forced me to reset it and then the i reset it and i went back to where that the trailer was before it peeled out and it was floating on an invisible the trailer was invisible and it was just floating there in the air and then it drove away so it looked like this sentient irrigation irrigation part was just floating away from me to keep from being reintegrated in the system three attempts to finish right there they're also loot trucks that you're supposed to be able to loot by pulling them over and then lowering a ramp in the back and then the door to the truck

pops open and then you get in except uh i've stopped four of them and the door has never opened which apparently is a known bug there's a button there's a button you have to press on the side of the truck it's not in the back of the truck. It's on the side. It lowers the ramp, and then the door opens. I can get the ramp to lower, but the door does not open. What? That's wild. It's every time I've stopped it. I Googled it.

It's like a known thing. But there's other stuff. Again, I've seen way too much for as little as I've played. It bums me out so much when a controversial game like this comes out controversial and the conversation about it like cements into if you disagree with its politics you're not allowed to find it fun and if you're you just want it to be fun and you disagree without you it's not right to criticize this politics i'm just here for the fun when it's like hey everybody calm down it can be bad in both ways it can it's or you can or you can find its politics like whatever it's vacuous and shitty and still enjoy it yeah like that's the thing there's there i could

not tell you what the politics of this game are it does not have politics it doesn't have okay that's not necessarily a bad thing on its surface but at least you gotta have a story I could not tell you what the politics of this game are. It does not have politics. It doesn't have. Okay. That's not necessarily a bad thing on its surface, but at least you got to have a story. I mean, like if you're not going to take a political position, which I think, I don't think there's another fire car game that has honestly.

But that at least they have a narrative. They have a narrative that you give a shit about and you care about. And the, they have villains that are charismatic. I don't, I'm not feeling it from this guy at all. And, and again again i could

ignore the that stuff like that stuff is like it would be nice and and i think it's important if you're going to take it on but like just the mechanics are so disappointing and i will that's it i'll continue to plug away at it and i'm in the hopes that you don't have to there's not much there's not much else it's just oh yeah let's talk about another game that's true i'm over it there is other stuff can i do mine because i think that'll be a nice so i wanted to bring nino cooney to uh revenant kingdom which i had no interest in playing whatsoever did not like nino cooney one played like three hours of it uh of this huge sprawling jrpg and was like i'm good um but then we ran a review actually that was very

favorable um and i was like oh shit well maybe i should pay attention because uh ninokuni 2 drops basically everything from ninokuni 1 that made that first game not very appealing to me which is weird on paper because ninokuni 1 was kind of pokemon-esque you were collecting these like spirits that would battle for you and leveling them up but it was just super super clunky and super slow and uh didn't what it just wasn't wasn't a great game um ninokuni 2 opens up this is uh i guess kind of a spoiler but it's literally the first thing you see in the game is the president uh of sort of a fictionalized America named his name is Roland.

He's in a limo. He's being driven as part of a motorcade somewhere. He's driving across a bridge into a big city, supposedly in the country where he is president. And he sees a missile fly overhead and explode. And it destroys the city and destroys his car. And then while he's kind of dying, he has teleported into the world of Nino Cooney. It is a,

it is a fucking buck wild way to open up a game. Um, the, the, the main game is sort of centered around this boy named Evan, who is the heir apparent to a kingdom called the Ding Dong Dell, which I'm all about, uh, uh, which is sort of a kingdom of sort of animal people and humans living side by side.

And he is sort of dethroned. And then you, as the president from this other world, are sort of helping him rebuild his kingdom. And that's sort of where the game takes you. But instead of being sort of a monster collecting slow RPG, all the battles are actually real time sort of like action battles. You have full control over your characters. You have a light and heavy attack button and a ranged attack button

and special abilities that you can learn. All the battles take place in like these circular arenas uh with a bunch of stuff going on so it's very like hands-on very uh very dynamic um and so this game is made by level five who is is one of my favorite rpg developers but they haven't really made anything that uh i've been like crazy about uh the RPG realm, they make the Layton games, which are all, you know, Layton games. They're all pretty good. But like Dark Cloud 1 and 2 are two of my favorite games ever made and two of the best RPGs of all time. And they haven't really done anything like that in a while.

And this is the first game that kind of feels like they're doing that. what they've done with ninokuni 2 uh that really reminds me of dark cloud 2 is a very like everything and the kitchen sink approach to mechanics so you have like these these battles these these real-time battles that are going on you do have some there's a light monster collecting element where you collect these things called oh jesus what are they called they have a really goofy name higgledies higgledees? Higgledees? It's even worse than what you said, which have different abilities, and all they do is run around the arena. And at certain points, once they've charged up, you just have to, like, move to them in the arena and activate their special skills, which adds sort of another layer on top of combat of this, like, positional sort of way of thinking about it. of of combat of this like positional sort of way of thinking about it um and then there is a whole kingdom building element where you have this kingdom and you can upgrade its buildings and

find new residents by doing quests and then assign those residents at those different buildings to uh you know maybe you assign a big warrior dude that you've recruited to work at the blacksmith and then he can research new uh armor and weapons that you can why has he got recruited to work at the blacksmith and then he can research new uh armor and weapons that you can why has he got to do work at the blacksmith why can't he be an accountant he has blacksmith skills but he probably if he has accountant skills he could be in you know work for the treasury like you're just judging him by looks honestly griffin no no i go chase your bliss blacksmith man please please balance balance the books for me that's what i that's what i oh we've bankrupted that's fine you did your best and i i'm i'm not here to tell you how to do your job

um and and so it's like it's a very mechanically rich game but you know in a way that i think everything kind of supports the other stuff going on in the game you have these monsters you can collect but those support the battles and then you have this kingdom that you can build but those let you get new skills and new weapons and other bonuses uh and there's a huge very very level five-esque their games have such a like iconic sort of um very anime inspired very like um notshaded in terms of like what the filter of the thing is but i feel like that term gets across a certain aesthetic to the game just very very colorful um and it's just such a nice game to play like it's such a uh it is a game about a boy like learning how to be like a responsible ruler of of this world.

And I was so worried when it was like the game is about a small boy and his building of a cat kingdom. I was like, oh, no, this boy's going to be insufferable. But he's actually a very good boy. And like there's some really great relationships in the game and like people trying to teach him how to do the best job that he can do of of ruling a country um it is it's just really it's really nice to play and it has a really nice story and then it has like a ton of very cool mechanics nothing nothing close to dark cloud 2 i don't know if any of you ever played it was a dungeon crawling rpg that eventually you unlocked a game called spada which was which was essentially mini-golf. So you would clear out a dungeon floor of all the enemies

and be like, hey, do you want to play mini-golf in this dungeon floor? And then you could do it, which would give you bonuses and shit. And that series obviously also had some kingdom-building stuff to it too. But yeah, it just has a ton of different mechanics to it that work really well together

and are unobtrusive and can i ask because i'm like real time there's uh real time strategy battles also i forgot to mention that i'm not really much with the jrpgs by and large like very few of them i can play although i do like more actiony ones how um cut sceney is the game oh pretty cut sceney yeah it's got it's got it some cut scenes i think if you are turned off by jrpgs in general this is not going to be the crossover hit for you yeah but for me like i have not played a jrpg that i really enjoyed in a long time in a really really long time um and and this was this is this is really the first one that I was kind of interested in and ready to sort of open up my heart to. And I'm about 15 hours into it so far, and I have not been disappointed at all.

Chris, you've played it a bit too, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, a thing that you covered kind of all the bases. I like the optimism of it, you know? it's just nice to play a game that is totally unrealistic about uh the way the world works yeah um in that your entire goal is just making friends and that will solve everything and i will i i haven't finished it but something tells me it works out um the other thing the number of crucifixions you come across will be limited a cap of five maybe maybe that's why i like it so much is it's the polar opposite um the other thing i really

dig is so as you know i like disneyland a little bit there's this ride in disneyland called story book village and it just opened it closed for a long time they had to repair it but the idea is you get in like a little boat and then you glide past all these uh scale models of the like famous disney kingdom so it's like oh there's the mines where the the dwarves live uh there's the uh castle from snow white um and it's very novel they're very very tiny compared to you you feel like just a huge giant um but the attention to detail is super neat in this game the open world map um how would you describe it what's that word for a cute version of chibi like chibi chibi version kawaii yeah well no it's not it's chibi it's kawaii kawaii means cute in japanese tv is the specific artistic sort of

vision yeah but you like walk around as chibi versions of your characters um for people who aren't familiar with that idea maybe like bottle bobblehead versions might be a good way of thinking of it. And you walk around these landscapes that feel more like miniatures of giant cities. And I don't know. It's a strange overworld thing that reminds it feels kind of like a tour of the history of rpgs because it's borrowing from all these different kind of periods and then piecing them together into something that i think gels pretty nicely but but what's great about it is that i feel like that is what a lot of uh rpgs especially jrpgs that are coming out these days are trying to do and it's not it is not in their it is not in their favor um and this game actually is also while looking like one of those

games and incorporating a lot of those elements it very wisely has a lot of modern shit there are these things called uh what are they called they They're like warp gates. And they're fucking everywhere. They are everywhere. So like when you're in the world map, you will, you know, you'll go into a dungeon or a new town. And in each one of those, you'll find like five or six different warp gates. And then you can instantly travel between any of them. So like, it's not like, oh, God, I have to go back to this town to give this ribbon back to this cat so that I can complete her quest and recruit her as a villager in my town. It's just, oh, I'm going to travel to the warp gate that's right next to her.

It has like all those rough edges are are polished off. So it's not like, yeah, it's very retro inspired, which is to say it hates that you're playing it and wants you to waste your fucking time. It's it's actually very thoughtful of your time and very, very smart in how it incorporates that stuff. Cool. Do we want to take a- It also, and I don't know if this is a knock against the game or what, but it really makes me just want to go back

and play Dark Cloud because those games are fucking great. Great. There's our Dark Cloud Minute that we have every episode where we talk about Dark Cloud. Do we talk about Dark Cloud a lot? Do we talk about Nier Automata this episode?

Hey, Griffin, it's a new segment. Okay. Just every segment's got to start somewhere. Now it's time to talk about Nier Automata. I haven't played it this month, but it is still a very excellent video game. Do we want to take a break? Or are we going to hop into the next game? I don't think...

Do you have something to talk about, Chris? I think we used a lot of our break time dunking on Far Cry. Yeah, I don't think we have leftover time for a break. I want to talk about Sea of Thieves. Can we talk about Sea of Thieves? Wait, what am I talking about? Isn't that my game this month? I mean, I want to be in a conversation

that is based on Sea of Thieves that is initiated by my dear friend Rush Fresh Tech. So, Sea of Thieves. We were all, every single one on this call, I would say, I don't know about Chris Plant, but certainly the McElroys and I

were very, very very very excited about sea of thieves um they had played it um i played it a couple i had a couple three i guess a year ago i was a big i was a big evangelist for this game because that game the first you know uh the demo of that game i think is is it sells it really well griffin's love of sea of thieves took the internet by storm true when he ate a banana which ended up in the game in multiple it is it's an achievement it's in a sign he's famous finally you made it griffin well done um we were all very very excited and um but i think there was always whenever we talked about the game whenever we played it there was always this sense of like okay they nail like being on a ship

and working together and the way those the water effects look amazing and the lighting is amazing and the sunsets and everything it looks stellar but you know these missions are fun but like you know it's gonna go somewhere right like you're gonna do a few of these like fetch missions and then you're gonna unlock maybe a faction and the faction is gonna have specific faction quests that you like and there's a little story and you follow it along and you progress and there's like a thing that's gonna keep you coming back there's gonna be a game here that conversation also got more and more hopeful i i think is maybe the right word as so we played it like at e3 and we're like okay it's fun but i'm

still wondering what they're gonna do with it and the first beta came out and was like all right it is fun i played it a lot just waiting for them to patch in like the game and then the last beta was like oh they've added some more stuff and it's looking really promising so maybe it's only got a couple weeks till it comes out but then the game well i i remember thinking like the beta's out this is only gonna be like 10 of the game in the beta like they're gonna hold back all the really juicy stuff right for the for the full game release and then the game came out and it was the beta like every aspect of the beta showed the full game good news everyone that played the beta you got a free copy of sea of thieves for a week that's not you saying that this game is a beta which is like a way of knocking it it's just literally it's

literally identical to yeah content wise what was in the beta which is to say what you're doing is a lot of um fetch missions uh everything that you're earning is purely cosmetic which is fine like i'm not gonna there are plenty of games including pub g that i absolutely adore that are purely cosmetic games but you definitely fall into this very familiar loop very very quickly where the first three hours you play the game you are like totally enraptured by everything that's going on and then you basically as we've said in the past you see the matrix you understand how this whole thing works and essentially the rest of the game just boils down to like those missions in um bethesda rpgs that are like randomly generated where it's like go to X and collect Y and bring back X. That's every mission you do. So you really don't get a lot of thrill out of the missions,

which really, from a thrilling perspective, really only leaves PvP, which more often than not, you are just trying to avoid because you've got a bunch of stuff in your hole but if you go and do pvp you can do that but i even that i felt like had a ceiling of variety because everyone has the same gear the same loadouts the same ships every single thing is exactly the same for every single person so even though no one has an advantage you also don't feel like there's a lot of um opportunity for variety in the way you conduct yourself and and that's really the biggest issue with sea of thieves is it just ends up repeating itself over and over and over again and i can see a year from now i can see it being whoa like it does this and it does this and it really reinvents whatever because the foundation is actually really interesting and strong but

right now it's definitely not that. And it would take a major overhaul of the game to make it something more. It's just guys. Come on. If you're going to, you could do the game that they did. I would play the same missions, the same three types of missions,

not the merchant missions. Those are terrible, but I would do the other two over and over again if i was if i felt like i was working towards something and if you really if you really yeah i would and because i'm broken inside but if you really if you really want to keep it even playing field and i definitely understand the reason for doing that um and not have these mechanical upgrades that's whatever although if you did have mechanical upgrades like you could even do a fine touch i would play for an hour just to get a skill that's like you raise the anchor up five percent faster like they didn't have to be that wild but okay you want to keep it flat cool

whatever give me like a pirate base that i can take my friends to that i can unlock furniture for give me like modular ship upgrades that i can show off to my friends to at least show them and have them operate in an economy that is not fucking inscrutable where you can get a haircut for 350 gold or you can buy this new paint job for your ship for 250 000 gold and it's like well i'll never i'll never do that i won't i won't do that i've heard about the ship cosmetic stuff who like this is probably clear to you if you've played the full version um but like who owns that like whose ship are you driving at any one point like i am not 100 sure because i did not play like you legit need to play probably 30 hours to unlock the first cheapest ship customization um it's like 70 000 gold for the the cheapest sale you could possibly get so i i'm not actually sure who owns that stuff and like how it determines what the front of your

ship looks like it might just be the host of the game but i'm not sure it it's but we that was a wild example right the ship upgrades are all really expensive. On a smaller level, I played for two hours. And a lot of that was spent on one voyage. I knocked out this huge treasure hunt and got three chests out of it. And then on my way back, I found a sunken ship and dove into it and found a couple skulls. And I got those skulls in my ship. And you turn those in an offender for gold and then i took out a small ship in pvp combat and took their chest that they had and had a ton of shit and i came home and i sold it all and i was like nice and

then i went and i like couldn't afford a shirt and it's like why is it why did you do it like this the the economy it's hard to explain because like you need a spreadsheet to really like see just how wild it is but it's just like there's a small tier of basic gear that you can buy and then most of the most of the the stuff most of the clothes and uh just the clothes most of the clothes you can buy is like actually pretty expensive and it's like okay so i guess you wanted to gate that for the higher level players the cheapest like sword upgrade i still or i have not been able i keep saying upgrade the cheapest sword or gun or whatever weapon paint job is i've never had enough money to earn one of those it's it's just like i get

the idea of wanting to make it so that you have to be a higher level pirate or whatever in order to afford that stuff but it just makes me not want to spend any of my money for any reason and i don't know why you didn't just do like a loot box that you could find or purchase right because it's all cosmetic so it wouldn't necessarily matter. It's all cosmetic. Just make that shit random, and then it's not like I'm going to spend fucking 30 minutes staring at a screen of things with wild prices just thinking, like, well, should I buy these gloves that look like bandages,

or should I save my money for something else? And it's weird for a game that is purely cosmetics effect if you work it out it basically only has like four or five armor sets like it's not armor it's clothing but like clothing sets and that's bonkers and when i bought the game it came with a set of like badass looking blackbeard techno blackbeard armor and i was like oh i'll just wear that and never spend any money on my clothes ever it it it may but but if i had gotten a chest and it was like here's an ugly green shirt i'd be like fuck yeah ugly green shirt let me throw that shit on it's also weird for a game that's all about cosmetics and like changing the way you look

how although creative how limiting the character generation system is um because like i wanted to make like a really round looking guy and it took me 45 minutes of scrolling through people to find one that i looked liked because you don't have any direct control over it you just randomly generate like you just. I generated probably hundreds because I was like, well, I'm going to play this game for 100 hours and I want to make sure I like the way my character looks. And is that a better experience than like just having a slider to tell me, okay, I want a fat guy or skinny guy or whatever.

Like, it's cute, but there's no reason for it yeah yeah i don't know it's a real bummer there's not much to talk about because there's not there's not much to talk about like it really isn't it's a very i like it i enjoy it i do still enjoy the game because it is i and i still play it um because it's still like a unique thing and i'm all about like play it how much time do you think you've spent not not often but i do still turn it on because it's like a nice um it's unlike any other game that i play that is it is a sailing simulator and it's fun to just like hop on a ship even by myself yeah and just sail sail around the ocean and maybe knock out a couple chests or so bring them back and sell them for money that like i don't give a shit about um but but it's still like neat to to sail around the

world and playing with a party of people is still really fun because that's what they that's what they spend all their time on that and the most beautiful fucking water i've ever seen yeah it's astonishing it it's just like that's not going to last for much longer. I don't think. Yeah. I don't think the audience is going to be there. You know, I think it was like a mad enthusiasm for it in the first week.

And I think it's going to, from a user standpoint, like just fall off a cliff when everyone realizes, Oh, like I have, I had a bunch of friends from college that were playing and like the text chain went silent, like dead silent because because just there's no desire to keep playing oops oops god i hope the last game we have is a good one because i'm feeling fucking down

in the dumps can i say i i want to play sea of thieves i feel like i missed my opportunity it was a very narrow window for what it's worth well there was all the betas too but it's been out for nine days that's crazy it's been out for nine days even evolve we got a good month out of that one well i'm gonna talk about a game that has been out a lot longer and i think is going to be popular for a very long time uh y'all i finally got into fortnite and i'm going to use fortnite mobile as an excuse to talk about it and pretend that somehow that makes it a new game um finally i get to find out what fortnite is because i have the kids all my kid all my mini kids have just been wild about this

game fortnite hey hey i'm going to try to describe it in a different way than the obvious way so let me know if that works i could go hard uh what if you took pub g right and you think of pub g is like the hardcore pc shooter of the 1990s, and then you wanted the GoldenEye equivalent, I would say it's Fortnite. It is a drastically simplified Battle Royale game. It is, going with the Nintendo 64 comparison, very rigid geometry. So a thing that i think is really noticeable about the maps versus

pub g is it's not super open things tend to funnel you into corridors between areas um and it i mean the the world looks like old school hard polygonal um open world settings uh looks like a banjo kazooie map yeah kind of kind of um and it's just so much more friendly uh picking up weapons and not having to worry about how you're going to spec each weapon is a relief especially when you're playing on controller i don't know if any of y'all have played pubg on xbox maybe this latest update is a little better but i found it to be a pretty joyless experience versus the pc version um fortnite on the other hand i've really enjoyed it on every platform i played it works obviously very well on pc it works just fine with a controller and it handles pretty okay on mobile to the point where for a while i was preferring it just because

it was easy to like load when i had a few minutes here and there um the other thing that i am really digging about it um that maybe will put off some people is that i i have won squad matches i don't know if i'll ever win a solo match unless I get lucky with who gets killed early. Yeah, no, you won't. The end game is not about shooting in a lot of ways. It's about this insane skill ramp of people who can build and will trap you in tunnels. They essentially use building as shields

and then will move in close on you put you into a tunnel or start building towers and you'll have towers that like take off into the sky and branch off in all sorts of different directions where people are kind of hiding in these little tunnels that they create it is bizarre and it feels like kind of a natural evolution of all these kids who were playing minecraft when they were 10 um are now playing a shooter when they're 15 16 like younger like the target audience for this is like 12 uh sure i i would say that not intentionally i'm sure epic is not marketing to them but like think about like tonally and the art. Sure,

sure, sure. I guess what I'm just saying is the kids who are like at winning this game feel like they are people who have had five years of building video games about building and crafting experience and could build and craft in other games rapidly. And now we're using that skill alongside shooter skills, which again,

like I can't compete, but it is super fun to watch. There's this whole universe of multiplayer Minecraft combat mods that I, we never ever covered. We never, like it was so on the periphery. Um, and then I would go to a convention and I would see it everywhere i would see it everywhere these mods where there's like arenas uh or you know almost a battle there were battle royale style games where you could

like craft little hidey holes for yourselves and have to make bows and swords and shit and it's like i i i totally think chris is on the money here of just like, this was, this was, it is a, it's real similar to fucking PUBG, but I think that there are lots of different sort of places where this thing finds its, its roots. Yeah. Oh,

go ahead. I was going to say, I wanted to talk about the end game specifically, cause you brought it up, uh, specifically about how you would never potentially win a solo match, which I actually agree with, but kind of in a weird way, i first started playing you know obviously i'd been playing pubg for a very long time a year or whatever it has been and when i first started playing fortnite

i was like oh whatever it's like a like an arcadey version of pubg what i've come to realize is actually much more maybe hardcore is not the right way to put it but it's actually a lot harder to play and do really well i should say because um we're gonna get a little groggy for a second time to kill is like a big deal in shooter games um if there's a fast time to kill it actually allows for shittier players to do well because even a really skilled player if they go down in a split second there's nothing they can do about it and in

Fortnite it takes a really long time a surprisingly long time to kill someone usually like three or four or five shots and being able to stay on target for that long is really tough add in someone that's doing that and also building walls and all sorts of stuff like the skill gap towards the end of the game

the last 20 or so players becomes way way wider than it is in pub g where you could arguably sit in the grass and get lucky and kill the last guy there's almost no way to do that in fortnite which is interesting i think that's really fascinating yeah i've heard a lot of people make that case that's the first time that it's ever actually clicked for me and yeah i totally agree i also want to say how just dramatically better it is at getting me interested in spending money on the game despite being free to play the season format is inspired and i know it is in some ways borrowing from other uh formulas like hearthstone but there's this that you you measure your progress whether you're paying or not you are constantly uh increasing your level and every level or i mean not every level but as you progress various levels have different like rewards so uh level two you maybe you get like a new shirt

at a different level you get xp boost uh none of this affects the actual play of the game so it is kind of silly to be getting all these xp boosts that don't uh improve your play in any way but so while you're doing that there is another uh level progression that is stuff that you only get if you bought that season um and i i saw it and i was like well i don't care about any of this stuff so no big deal free game um until i had made it to probably like level 20 or something and then i looked back and i saw all of these items that i had earned i was like man that's great like 10 bucks i get all that stuff sure um i'll pay for that and then i did it and afterwards as somebody who i don't think i've ever bought a cosmetic in a game i don't

know what i was thinking because i did individually i would not have bought those in the store um but there was something about this sense of like well i already earned it yeah not paying for it i would not have bought those in the store um but there was something about this sense of like well i already earned it yeah not paying for it i would be silly because i've already earned it you're losing money if you don't buy it yeah well in reality it's like well they just got me to pay for something that they were holding away from me i mean pub g does that now too with the every crate you earn is locked and you have to pay two dollars, 50 cents, whatever for a for a key to actually open. So obnoxious. I hate it. Also, the the like rapidity of these modes that they're adding, they did the 20 B, 20 B, 20 B, 20 B, 20, which was great. But even better is Blitz mode, which have any of you tried this?

No, no. It's oh, my gosh, it is perfect. And it feels like they I hope they make it permanent because it's so wonderful for mobile. But the idea is it is hyper fast and the weapon drops are everywhere. They're much higher and you harvest, I think it's two or three times what you normally harvest. And so as the plane is going out over the map the first circle is already there and as you're dropping it's already counting down to the circle moving in um and then i think it's like two minutes between each circle push

after that so things move very very very very fast um and because you're dropping into heavy weapons uh you can like drop into the city and 30 people will drop into like a major location all of them will get weapons really quick um i dropped into an into a town um and the first thing i got was like the best kind of shield thing um and i drank that uh i started chopping through a building somebody had clearly seen me on the other side because the second i broke through the wall they detonated explosives but it wasn't enough to kill me because i had the shield and then right next to me on the ground was a sniper rifle which i picked up and just shot them in the face and then took all their stuff. Shit, yeah, dude.

I wrecked them. And then I got like put into a little box by some probably like 12 year old. And he just let me die in the circle. Can you in like 60 seconds so we can at least put an asterisk next to this when we list it in the contents of the episode? Explain what the mobile is like. Is it good? I think the mobile is good for somebody like me for somebody who is probably never going to be a great builder um the mobile is like totally fine it has a good deal of auto aim that helps without feeling cheap um

it looks pretty good i oh also your progress is carried over between love that all from mobile to console to pc every platform it carries over so good that is such relief and should be in every game and how is that like how is this the first game where we like it's not the first game the fact that destiny doesn't do it is so dumb well and also the fact that you actually can play your like make progress on mobile that's for me the deal breaker because being able to just hit like i am not usually the person who like hits the daily quest but being able to like put your phone it's just like i don't you know survive to be in the top 50 three times yeah i can do that that that doesn't take any time i have my phone i can no i i'm not that sleepy um where i would never go into the living room turn my console on and start pursuing daily question or free-to-play shooter they also do a couple really neat things

on mobile one of which is they use haptics for like vibration which is kind of cool like whenever you shoot or hit a thing it'll vibrate your phone yeah the other thing that i love is the footstep the way they handle footsteps is awesome um so if you've played a shooter pub g certainly obviously sound is very important knowing where people are shooting from uh direction of people running how close they are stuff like that uh if you're on a phone obviously you don't have surround sound or a setup that'll tell you so there's actually a visual indicator that they added to the mobile version that'll tell you uh so if there's footsteps it'll show a little footsteps icon if there's like a gunshot it'll show you an icon in the direction of the gunshot uh if there's like a chest nearby it'll

kind of give you the vague idea of a chest location. It's great. Is the whole game on mobile, or is it just the Battle Royale thing? The whole game and all the new modes and your season pass. No, Justin's asking if the cooperative. Oh, I see what you mean. Has anyone played that? I've spent a lot of time with it. That's not part of the game anymore, right? I mean, that's not really Fortnite anymore, right?

It's not. Although all the all the branding is still that but like i don't know who plays that are there people that play it i know i did not care for it charlie and i got pretty deep into it for a while it was it was deeply flawed but it had its it had its moments um it's fascinating there's never really been a situation like this where like one side part of a game became like the reason people are playing the game i guess goldeneye multiplayer maybe would be the comparison but like it's weird yeah uh is this gonna be our game you think

because it's gonna be wild if we're like our game of the month is fortnite but if we say like fortnite fortnite mobile and then a winky emoticon and people know what the fuck we're doing here i think we can still do it i don't because i think i want to be able to talk about fortnite at the end of the year i also want to say like the second that fort and i know this is every month but like the second fortnite comes to switch which it has to right um no i'm just gonna leave it at that um okay well presumably i would be surprised if it was here soon i could be wrong but i i think that they are smart with where they are investing the resources and like mobile seems like the type of place that you want to, like, I think they want to get mobile perfect, you know,

before they, like, figure out Switch. Yeah, but, like, I mean, that's kind of the impression that I've gotten is they've been so good about scaling, and I don't know. The only reason I think that there's a chance is that it would be a big Nintendo press conference play. That's true. Yeah.

Even if it comes out six months to a year from now. By which I mean Nintendo Direct, not press conference play that's true yeah even if it comes out as six months to a year from now which i mean nintendo direct not press conference right um all right all right i mean i could make a case for nino cooney too but i think that this is the more obvious choice but yeah and i think we'll probably talk about the main thing is just to be on the year i think the important thing is just for us to get on trend. Yes. You know what I mean? We need to start saying Fortnite more on this program no matter what it takes.

Drake is cool, so we could be friends with Drake because of this. Ninja's not as cool anymore. Ninja is... Oh, yeah. He said a bad word. Not good.

No good, Ninja. All right, let's wrap up. Okay. That actually is... That's a quarter, right, let's wrap up. Okay. That actually is... That's a quarter, right? That's a quarter. Yeah, that is the first quarter. That's the first quarter.

And the games of the first quarter are... Fucking Subnautica. God, Subnautica? Is that right? Great, love it. Stand by that pick. Subnautica and... Finally played it, didn't care for it. You did it pick. Subnautica. Finally played it. Didn't care for it.

You did it wrong. Subnautica. What was the one last month? That was a good one last month. Far Cry 5? No, sir. That's this month and it's not this month. What was it? What was it, though?

Was it near? It could have been near this time. We were in agreement about the last month. We like, yeah, we liked a game. Wait, I'm going to Google it. Wait, no, I got it. I got it. Okay, here it is.

It's Monster Hunter World. No, it wasn't. Monster Hunter World got beat by Subnautica. It was Into the Breach? Yes. Yes. Oh, man. Can I talk about how Into the Bre breach is probably the best fucking game of

the year yeah yeah yeah i mean we can't wait for that it's the game of my quarter for sure it's amazing it is definitely my pick for the quarter uh i'm i'm okay having that be our quarter pick i think the breach games asses i love into the breach man i could play it forever i think we're going to discuss like all three of these games at the. I love Into the Breach, man. I could play it forever. I think we're going to discuss all three of these games at the end of the game. Yeah, for sure. An honorary distinction for sure.

All right. Thank you so much. Congratulations. Congratulations to Into the Breach. There's just so much passion and enthusiasm. Well, I honestly think this little mini debate was muted by the weird omission of Monster Hunter World in that slot. It really should have beaten Subnautica, but it didn't.

Stand by it. But congratulations to all the smooth games. but congratulations to all the smooth games it's an honor as we say no matter how much we may literally pull down our pants and then pull down our underwear and then deposit fecal matter directly into your gaping maw

it is an honor just to be nominated here on the besties so congratulations you know how at the Oscars they bring out the best pictures and then they have somebody come up on stage for each best pictures and then they have somebody come up on stage for each best picture and if they don't like it they just shit all over it that's my favorite part but congratulations to all the games especially to uh fortnight and uh just fortnight fortnight mobile wink fort, Fortnite, Fortnite. Just to maximize our SEO here.

Fortnite, Fortnite. Congratulations, Fortnite. And congratulations to our games. We will be with you again next month on The Besties. So be sure to join us again next month for The Besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best game? Besties!