The Besties - November and December 2017

Episode Date: December 14, 2017

Since they waited so ding dang long to record their November and because December is a crummy month for releases, The Besties have combined both months into one big (OK, so it’s regular-length) episode. Enjoy! Games discussed: Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild DLC, Solitairica, Call of Duty: WW2, Star Wars: Battlefront 2, Hearthstone: Kobolds and Catacombs, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, Universal Paperclips, Destiny 2: Curse of Osiris, Battle Chef Brigade, Endless Space 2. 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 think we have a new house. We're in sort of the final stages. Looks like we've secured it, which is very exciting. But it means I'm going to have to start my gamer den over again. And I put so much work into making my gamer den in my current house just perfect. Let me ask you, did you make sure that the Naboo Starfighter fits in the new place? The reason we got the new house is so we could have a space for the Naboo Starfighter fits in the new place? I had, the reason we got the new house is so we could have a space for the Naboo Starfighter that is going to go in my gamer den alongside my,

you know, the usual stuff, two dart boards, controller koozies. Um, in terms of like, I know like some people like pre faded jeans versus like you kind of stressing them over time.

Yes, I made sure that it had been gamed in before. So it does already have the Dorito powder on all of the walls. That's actually the color palette that we've chosen is Cooler Ranch. Cool Ranch. That's great for, it's supposed to help you sleep. Yes. I mean, I'm not going to be doing much sleeping in there. Mostly just gaming with my best friends Sonic the Hedgehog

and Master the Chief. And so I'm going to get in there, and I've got all my rock bands, one through three, and Beatles rock band peripherals. Those are going to be all over the place. Van Halen rock band, I assume, is number one. Van Halen rock band is forbidden in this household. And I mentioned the controller koozies.

Yeah, you got the controller koozies there. The floor is made out of batteries. There's just like two inches of sort of standing batteries. What types of batteries? Yeah, like what types? You know, for my controllers and Game Boys. Oh, so not like the batteries. I mean, there's bats of all sorts.

You know, I play with the xbox pro pro controller and those take d cells because it's um it's about the size of well my current small bad house yeah you carry like a boom box i carry it like a boom box and it's very helpful for listening to master the chief's great dialogue and all of his halo adventures. Now, do you still have, I don't know if you kept the one I got you for Christmas, but did you keep the eight-foot-tall Crash Bandicoot with working lips that you're able to kiss sort of whenever you want? Yes, and what's great is I keep him right next to the gamer jelly, and so I can smear that on there whenever I need to moisten Crash.

Okay. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best games of like a month and a half. We're very late. My name is Chris Plant, and I've played games. My name is Ross Farshing, and I know the best games of the week. Hello, and welcome to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in pop culture sports news uh xbox one x releases jeff keely nomenclature uh fashion news of the day politics gaming uh fast food trends new pizzas that are popular but today we're going to be focusing

mainly on i mean you already said gaming you said gaming but we're going to be focusing mainly on i mean you already said gaming you said gaming but we're gonna be focusing mainly on drilling down on gaming and i think it's worth talking about because there's been a lot of changes recently and where once there was only pac-man now there seems to be much more miss pac-man for one for starters yeah um this is a this is a very late episode and i think i mean i kind of thought maybe we just skip november and just do the game of the year special but i think there's probably enough to talk about this is probably gonna be a short shortish one yeah it's gonna be short i would also say it seems profoundly lazy of us to not even be able to do the once a month schedule that we set up for ourselves. It's just weird, right?

Because November is historically, and obviously, it's the bonkers release month. Yeah. And now, like, the release schedule is so much more spread out. Well, that's not entirely. I mean, there were huge games that came out in november traditional like call of duty came out november the star wars battlefront like a lot of games came out november they just weren't it wasn't a great month yeah uh we're also going to be talking about the games that we've played so far in december because we're not gonna have another

chance to talk about those before the goatee episode um should we do honorable mentions because i actually have a couple yeah um are we talking about pocket camp is somebody bringing pocket camp okay i mean i don't i don't know if anyone's bringing it as their pick i don't even know what my pick is i don't know what our picks are we fantastic i yeah i'm over it i played it for two days when it was out in australia and it's just like it doesn't have the it just doesn't have the the soul of that of the game that i want yeah the the thing that bothers me and it's very simple is that the things that get me jazzed about animal crossing are not making friends i don't care i have some friends sometimes the things that i like are crafting my town,

crafting my house, doing all sorts of like collecting shit. Yeah. Not just, not just doing chores over and over to grind for like levels. The timers are really bad. Like really, really,

I didn't even find the timers to be a problem. To be honest, I just didn't care to wait. Like it's, it's not so much the timers. It's, it's the, it's how quickly the timers and the resources so if you haven't played it basically you are trying to attract different villagers to your camp and the way that you do that is by crafting furniture that they want in

the camp and so there's a little checklist that says like if you want to get this bear to your camp here are the things you have to make and really quickly the amount of time required to craft something escalates from it starts at like three minutes and then it's like one hour and then it's like nine hours which is like okay that just means i have no idea why why why companies do this i mean i do because then there's a way to pay to make it go faster but for me and i imagine a majority of the folks who play it i just say like well i guess i'm not playing this game again today. But like Animal Crossing had that. It had wait a day until you got the furniture.

Sure. But what it did not have is the resources required to craft this stuff also escalates like to a preposterous degree where it starts like, oh, it takes six wood to make this chair to like now it takes 120 wood and 60 cloth and 10 preserves or whatever to make this this cabinet. 60 cloth and 10 preserves or whatever to make this this cabinet and that that when you do like a chore right when you go and you catch a fish and you give the fish to somebody they might give you one or two pieces of wood so you're telling me i have to do this 60 times just to meet the wood requirement for making this cat like no no fucking things it's not fun yeah the the main thing that is like um where you could sort of express some creativity with the design of your camp i feel like is completely neutered by the fact that you have to have certain items in your camp to lure in certain animals it like yes there is literally a button like throw all the shit you just made to attract somebody there and then okay

press another button to make it all go away it's like right it's completely pointless and it robs you of like how about this i have a cool camp that i made and they either like it or they don't like it removes the no especially since it takes so much time and so many resources to make something i stopped i didn't even start making things that i wanted to have in my camp i had to save that time and i had to save those resources to like do the one sort of progression hook for the for the game it's a huge disappointment it feels like they took happy home designer which i don't really like um but was but was a better game down on the worst parts of that like happy home designer at least like you went into the house somebody else's house and you designed it for them this anyway i i don't want to i don't want

to like bury ourselves in this game i don't think it's that good but i do want to uh if you don't mind share yoko tara the creator of near automata uh had something to say about it do you mind if i share that yes go for it this is from uh they he he talked about it on gama sutra and this is near the end of his his kind of rant he says i want to say something about the unreasonable shopping you need to predict what those monsters want like an esper and as for being a human who possesses esp and give those things to them to get your big reward what is this a metaphor for why do you have to collect things that are right next to the monsters to make them happy, like a slave?

I guess this represents the divisions between people in class society. I haven't put any furniture or anything in my camp except a kerosene tank. I started this game to get revenge on that raccoon, but now I have a different purpose. I'll enjoy playing this game until I burn that dark forest down.

Damn you you Katara speaking of I finally finished Nier Automata two times and that's a good game we shouldn't start talking about it again no we should not but we did get our Nier Automata in for this week so we're good there it is I've been playing Zelda again Breath of the Wild

because the new DLC just came out hell yeah maybe I want to bring that that'll be my pick well I thought about that but i haven't even gotten to the dlc yet because i decided to start over and try playing on master mode which oh that's a big mistake oh no i fucking think it's great i think it's so much fun yeah you like it yeah you're so weak and so vulnerable and basically like uh it scales up enemies like one class right so instead of starting out against these like weak uh uh whatever they're called boat coblins they're like one they're like mid-range but coblins like that you're starting out against they'll kill you in one shot and it really forces

you to use like all of the cool shit that is in the game that we all that we all talk about like when we talk about how cool this game is that you can do all this stuff you can push a rock down a cliff and kill somebody or set the grass on fire and kill people that way. And it forces you to use cooking like a lot just so you can sort of stay on par with these people. Instead of just like running up and hitting them with a weapon until the weapon breaks and then you take their all of these different systems that are built into the game in a way that is not just like a fun thing to do when you're stunting, but like a necessary thing to do to survive. Yeah. I God, what a fucking great game. Oh, it's tremendous.

Should we just decide the game of the year right now? What else? I feel like we've been playing a lot of stuff. Justin got me on solitaire let me talk about call of duty real quick all right now wait okay what let's can we do this like we don't know what maybe we don't have the month they're gonna be maybe we just then let's just maybe we just have an hour-long freewheeling discussion because i don't think anything that we're going to talk about here is going to be a contender in the goatee list

so let's just i'm i'm fine with with just talking about shit for an hour yeah shooting the shit um yeah call of duty i i really i don't know what they need to do i'm not going to go in depth because i've already spoken and written at length about the call of duty game world war ii and why it doesn't really work um but i guess the question i was sort of want to present is like, does call of, can call of duty essentially start from scratch and reimagine what it is. And is that PUBG? Like, is it that dramatic change?

You know, it'd be for me, uh, a call of duty game that is only multiplayer. No, no single player. That is just, that is just about having like progression hooks and lots of different ways to

play online because like but isn't that multi-part like that's the multi-part yeah i guess so i just know that if i get if i like really drill down into it then next year there's just going to be a new one and my like the idea of that and that's why i've been like a destiny player for as long as i have because it has that feeling of like the progress that I make here matters. And that's not really I don't really I haven't felt that to be true. Permacall of Duty is the only the only reason I would play Call of Duty, knowing that it's an annual event, is if it was like the only shooter that I and everybody I knew was playing which is i don't think the the with the like landscape of of games being what they are now like that's never going to be true ever again basically so yeah uh but but if if there if there was like something that was as like uh necessary

as pub g is and necessary as as destiny was when it first came out, like, yeah, I think I would still enjoy playing COD. Yeah, I think what they would need to do is, to do what you're talking about is essentially making, like, a Counter-Strike GO equivalent or PUBG that sticks around forever, right, and people have value, but it would have to have some pretty intense, free-to-play, like, monetization hooks for them to make up the money that they would effectively lose by not having this hardcore fan base buying the game every single year yeah it would never happen yeah i mean i don't think never i think there's an easy

way to do it i think the thing is that when they started making multiplayer single player was still bread and butter of the games right you make two games you don't want to upset an old fan base which is single player or three games three games with the zombie man well sure sure what i mean is like you make a thing that keeps a certain fan base and then eventually like that thing just dies off entirely and then you move to the next thing and then you can take risks on something else so like finally just cut single player have multiplayer be the new bread and butter because it's been that for a long time and then use all the resources that you would do with the single player mode on whatever your pubg thing is yeah make cool new types of mode like don't do a standalone

don't do a standalone zombie mode give me like a you know terrorist hunt style cooperative mode that uses the same multiplayer character that i have in i mean at this point i'm describing destiny i feel like a little bit but like i i i really do think i could get into that but it's uh when it's just like when the narrative is like oh it's it's another call of duty game i have i've played so many of those and spent so much time playing those that i don't i'm i i'm not interested in it anymore. Yeah. Should we go ahead and, as long as we're talking about this, should we do Star Wars Battlefront 2?

Did anybody actually like play that? Yeah, I played it a little bit. No multiplayer, just a single player. I hear that the multiplayer is quite, quite large, quite a large sort of part of the, piece of the puzzle though. Yeah, I'm sure.

I just don't i mean i wanted to play the single player to see if it's because they did a campaign that's the new thing so i want to see the new campaign they did it's so how do you feel about stealth missions oh my god and starting the game with that it's so whack i mean it's just bold choice guys it's so like unbelievably boring like and and like the things that you're doing are like so unenjoyable. Like I'm, I made it to, I guess it's like the third mission,

I guess. And you're going on, you're on indoor and you end up in these, like you're kind of going from like large skirmish to large skirmish. And you're very vulnerable to to to enemy attack so like and and the checkpoints are way farther apart than they probably should be so there's like you have to be fairly precise with how you take on an encounter to get through it without getting shot all to hell and so like there was one specific section where like there was a,

I got the drop on some enemies. There were like eight enemies down at the bottom of a hill. And I like kind of got the drop on them, snipe a couple of them, you know, throw a grenade or whatever. And then have my little robot taser, one of the fools, just like,

and I figured out how to do it. But the checkpoint was before that. And then right after that was this huge battle where tons of people were shooting at me simultaneously That was really challenging and so I ended up having to do this one skirmish that I figured out how to do over and over and over again, and it's like it just feels bad like the the Sniping feels bad and shooting people feels bad because when you expose yourself you it's you're really easy to kill It's just I just found it so Shooting people feels bad because when you expose yourself, you're really easy to kill.

I just found it so just boring. I don't know. It is really hard to discuss what works and doesn't work in a first-person shooter, especially when you have as little sort of engagement with this particular game as I have at this point. But I can tell you that every time I restarted was like, okay, fine. Yes, fine. Yes. Fine. Like I, there was no joy, no fun, like not enjoying it. Also tangentially, I will go to my grave insisting that if you are put into a world where there are somewhere people are using lightsabers and superpowers, and you know, that's happening in the universe around you somewhere and you're like let me shoot him with a pistol it's like i just hate it intrinsically like it's never gonna be

fun to me please i know i know people have no you cannot convince me that it is fun to me when i know other people have laser swords and are flying around shooting lighting out their hands the inverse that the my only argument against that is uh the old republic the uh bioware mmo actually like the other class of the non-jedic classes were like super fucking fun because you also because then yes in terms of like action and combat and shit like obviously it's ideal to have a lightsaber and stuff but like living out the life of a interstellar smuggler i think is way more rad than like and now we study the books to learn what good is no banging allowed no banging meanwhile smugglers is like i got a bang ability that i unlocked at level two um yeah i we we played a little bit of multiplayer uh the me and russ and and plant and

um i i don't really love the sort of big team battle multiplayer genre in general so i don't feel equipped really to talk about it but i will say uh we played a couple matches of the dog fighting mode that was fucking legit i had a lot i had a lot of fun with that yeah that's neat um i think the on the ground stuff doesn't work because the big team battles i think only work in the sense of like battlefield where you're the map is so freaking huge that you have these mini skirmishes all around the map rather than having like oh there's 12 guys and they just kill me instantly and it seemed like the maps i don't know maybe the maps are a little too small to support it but i was just like running into just a sea of enemies and getting killed instantly every single time

which is assuming that there's no lag it's indicative of like you there's a way of playing these games where it requires group mastery and communication uh that is not super present in in like pickup games like we were playing right um let's talk about a good one i this is one i was thinking about bringing uh before we decided to do this strange new structure where imagine there's just four guys sitting around talking about video games it's a bold new uh podcasting yeah uh i want to talk about the new hearthstone expansion kobolds and catacombs uh which i've been having a lot of fun with despite the fact that i haven't actually played that much of the like a standard competitive mode with all the what like 135 new cards that are in the game because it is like a um it is not a there's there's two types of hearthstone expansions

right like the big single player expansions where you play through a series of boss fights unlocking cards as you as you go and then by the time you finish it, you basically have everything that's new in the expansion. And then just like standard pack expansions where there's just a fuck ton of new cards and you buy packs or unlock them in other ways. And then you get new cards. And Kobolds and Catacombs actually fall somewhere in the middle

because there's 135 new cards that you get through packs. And I've gotten a bunch of them. And there's some cool stuff. There's a new keyword called recruit, which basically when you play a recruit card it instantly summons a you know certain type of minion from your deck and puts it out on the battlefield which opens up a lot of new uh sort of sort of strategies there's a new legendary weapons for every class which is kind of interesting because a lot of classes don't have weapon cards like it's just not a focus so like mages have a staff that lets them draw cards at the end of their turn um and there's some new legendaries and some new mechanics that are cool but i wanted

to talk about dungeon run which is the new single player mode that comes in this expansion uh where you go up against eight bosses in a row uh you start out with a standard deck from one of the game's nine classes that starts out with just 10 cards in it i think and you start out with 15 health and then every time you beat a boss your health maximum increases by five and you draw uh three new cards from three different themes so if you're playing a mage right you beat the first boss your your three like themes might be arcane uh where you draw like you know arcane spells or card draw where you draw like cards that let you draw other cards or frost which gives you you know abilities to put ice armor on yourself and you add those three cards

to your deck of 10, and now you got 13. And then also, I think at four different points throughout the run, you will draw these special treasure cards that transform the game kind of completely. So there's one that makes it so that, and they're passive.

You don't play them. Some of them are passive. So you don't have to play them. They're just always active. So there's one that makes your battle cries trigger twice. So you build your whole deck around that. There's one that gives you a permanent plus three to all of the damage done by your spells, which is just like, okay, now whenever I'm drafting, I just have to pick up these heavy

hitting spells because now I can get this huge advantage by taking advantage of these treasure cards that I've drawn. And you really do have to be very, very specific about how you build the deck as you go through the dungeon, uh, because the bosses are super unfair, like really extreme. I, uh,

a lot of people talk about how it's very easy. And I think that's kind of bullshit because I played it a lot and I haven't beaten it yet. And a lot of it is like waiting for the stars to align and hoping that you get good cards that, that you can choose from that align with the strategies you're building around your treasures um but i it's it's really really difficult um i think it's it's probably falls in line with like a game like ftl where yes you basically know a

strategy that works and you're looking for specific cards and specific things that will assist you in no you know having known what the boss is going to be like then you could kind of build to that but it's so it's so like it's so fun and it's like a new way to play hearthstone because it's not there's nothing about um you know match to match it doesn't feel like a traditional game of hearthstone because you're you have built your deck around these weird strategies that just don't apply to the regular game. Like in the regular game, you don't get a passive boost that makes all of your minions have permanent stealth.

That just can't happen in a regular game. But it does happen here. And so it turns it into you're not just playing Hearthstone and trying to keep the usual stuff of, you know, keeping tempo and card advantage and all the regular TCG shit. You are also trying to figure out a way to like exploit with maximum efficiency these like super powerful bonuses uh and and just trying to stay stay alive uh from from boss to boss i think it's i think it's fucking brilliant there's not there's not

even like great rewards for doing it either like if you finish the dungeon on all eight classes you get a card back i think that's it there's there's certain you uh you get quests when you start playing the expansion uh that will give you a few free packs but like that's about the extent of it i've just been playing it and this is like rare for me for hearthstone i'm not playing it to like get something i'm not playing it to you know complete a quest or uh get cards or move up my rank or anything like that i'm just playing it a lot because it's fucking fun the journey the quest is your reward

it had been forever since I played Hearthstone I logged on to check this out and I literally I got my badge for the May 2016 season of Hearthstone oh no Jesus but it does this interesting thing when you when you start back up again.

Yeah. It actually says like, hey, it's been a while. I got like three real basic matches for you. And if you finish them, then you get like three packs of cards. And it's like, you could skip it if you want to,

but then you don't get the free packs. So they're really kind of forcing you to like, let's just like ease back into it. Let's let's see what's going on here again and it was like man i forgot hearthstone is very fun it's an extremely good it's maybe one of the best games ever it is very fucking good video game like i really missed playing it and like i got absolutely housed in the uh in the new mode. I mean, I got flattened. I got through the first thing, and then the second boss was like a dragon that was like brutal,

just like dropping dragon after dragon on me that like all worked together. There's a super duper dragon that brings all the dragons you have in your hand out into play at the same time so i had like seven dragons and then i ran out of cards which is a real concern in this mode yeah i ran out of cards and uh was just it was absolutely over with so uh it was very fun though i really missed playing hearthstone so it was cool yeah it's i i hadn't played in a very long time when i got back into it i'd missed a couple expansions and it always astonishes me because i've taken breaks from hearthstone before like i feel like it's a really easy game to get back like get back on board because the the meta is never like so complicated there's there's like a few strategies that people are using to like hit top rank um and it's not too hard to like look at

those decks and have like a a pretty clear understanding of how people are playing this game right now yeah um i also played xenoblade chronicles 2 on a switch it's yeah i really don't i'm a british boy underwater i'm on a ship and and then she he, oh no, there's a crystal sword lady. And then I fell asleep. It's not really my kind of game. It's just the, it's so like, I really hate the combat.

And I didn't love the combat in Xenoblade Chronicles 1, which I also never finished. It's just like MMO. It's like generic MMO. It feels kind of generic MMO. You're just standing there watching your attacks hit and you hit the special abilities to charge your meter and then it's just it's so it's so like the combat seems very uh simplistic

because you're just standing there and activating your abilities when they're charged up but at the same time it also seems fucking super complicated because there's like a shit ton of different like statuses and uh thing like effects that you're trying to apply to enemies to like boost your stuff that is just not explained very well at all um there is a game that somebody liked this month and actually i liked it too quite a bit so i don't want it to be fully a negative month no it was it was it was a weird it was a weird month i think i i just think we should talk about everything that we i think we should talk about everything we play because i didn't play a lot of stuff oh i finished neo which came out on pc that's a that's a fucking good one i think i brought that like when it first came out on consoles neo uh no neat oh the uh sort of dark

souls-esque uh ninja gaiden game, it's fucking fun, man. I never finished it on the console version, but on PC it looks so pretty and it's so fun. I've been dying for another Souls game. I didn't think I would be this ready for one this soon. That's funny. First year without a Souls game in a grip, right? Yeah, I guess so.

I mean, we got that video game awards tease which i'm hoping is for for bb2 but i guess we'll see um chris playing i want to hear about the game that you liked that i like as well i like getting over it getting over it might be i'm actually gonna kind of talk about two games because they're both by the same person in some weird capacity but bennett foddy is uh a friend i should also say up front but i also think a fantastic game designer he designed uh quop the game where you try to run with uh q w o and p on your keyboard assigned to what is it your thighs and your calves yeah you would recognize it i think i feel like everyone on the planet has played this game at this point yeah i mean it appeared in the office it was like one of those weird browser indie games that like really popped um and he also made super pole riders which is in my opinion his mat his fucking masterpiece yeah

i mean his his he has an adjusting incredible ability to make things feel right. It feels tangible in a really hard-to-pin-down way with words that just is there when you play the game. And his new game is, I think, truly the masterpiece of game feel, whatever kind of intangible thing he's been trying to uh create all this time it's called getting over it it is inspired by an old uh browser game in which you try to climb a cliff essentially using uh in in getting over it using a sledgehammer you are a naked bald man you're essentially're essentially, uh, who's the man

who made the witness? You're Jonathan Blow. You look like Jonathan Blow. Nude. Is Jonathan Blow that ripped? In a bod? Are you kidding? He's pretty ripped in the game. Dude, he's yoked. He's jacked. Don't mess with J. Blow. Um, yeah, and you're stewing. What'd you say about Braid? Punch, punch, punch, punch. Dead.

You're stewing in juices. I don't know. I assume maybe like a lot of body sweat inside of a giant black cauldron and you use your sledgehammer to climb up a mountain um and it is very very very very difficult to do that um and the game punishes you for even trying. The way the mountain is shaped is so that as you take risks to climb up the mountain using this precarious control scheme, you might accidentally throw yourself back so that you've just lost minutes, if not hours, of progress. Towards the end of the game, you can fall in a way that essentially resets your work um and while all this is happening there is gentle um music and there is bennett himself coming over the game on vo uh giving you notes about failure and what inspired the game and why it's very it's very stanley's parable

uh beginners beginners guide is that the name of the other yeah the other game yeah yeah i mean yeah it is in that like it's a designer talking about design what i like about it maybe in a different way than than those things is it leaves a lot of room for the player like it doesn't feel like it's preaching to you about game design it doesn't feel like it is proud of its uh braininess it just feels like somebody having a conversation with you and it feels like this weird opportunity that i feel like we maybe get to have a bit but most people don't to play a game with the person who created it and for it to feel like they're kind of encouraging you through it um and providing insight into like what it is you never really does um and it it's

also like one of the most i mean we've talked about how much of a game designers game it is it's probably one of the most game designers games that's also going to be like monumentally successful it does not happen very often yeah and that's because even if you take the words away i mean the game has become a huge huge huge hit in south korea um south korean streamers love this game it's also going to be at every games done quick throughout the end of time i'm hoping yeah for sure um so yeah, I don't know. It's just so nice to play a game that feels so warm and so caring and so genuine.

I also wanted to say, for me, I love Bennett's games overall. I think they're a lot of fun. But for a lot of them, Super Pole Riders is one of them. QWOP is certainly one of them. For a lot of them, I oftentimes feel like I'm playing

and when something happens that works out in my favor or against me i don't 100 know why it is um and maybe that's because if the the control schemes are like so out there that they're kind of removed from my direct inputs somewhat even though they're not i just can't like grok like oh x means y in a lot of those games in this game you can actually watch so plant and i uh stream this game probably two months ago and you can watch as i sort of vocalize my thought process of like what i'm gonna do next to like make the next jump or make the next ledge drop and the game is so precise in its movements and so accurate to like what ends up happening after you do those movements that it doesn't feel random it feels entirely like on

the player to succeed and is way more complex than say like you know a platformer that uh is totally on the player to succeed like the the number of variables that are introduced based on all this this physics engine that he's made yeah i there is infinite yeah i i also want to talk about oh sorry do you have a thing juice i think i think a lot about um the importance of feeling the hand of the creator when you're playing a game that you want to this idea that if you're going to be playing something especially something that's really challenging you want to know that the creator has been there. Like they have seen you go through this circumstance and you're not abandoned. In bad games, I think it's one of the first things that you lose.

It's one of the best ways I know of to get a sense of like something's going to be a bad game. You find yourself in a scenario where you don't feel like the creator ever intended you to be in or they didn't think through You experiencing this and it's it's really interesting what he's done with the narration basically is like He lets you know like yes, I I have foreseen the situation that you find yourself in I this is not I Know I'm specifically referencing what you are going through like I understand what you're going through and it makes it a lot more palatable and, and, and it makes you like you want to experience it because it's like they have,

he has seen this happen. Like, you know, you're in a curated experience, even though it can feel very, very frustrating and very sort of like flippant towards your time. Yeah. I think that's a really

great point um i want to talk about one other game that bennett contributed to um but i won't explain in any capacity how or why because i think it would be a big spoiler um but did y'all play universal paperclips this year no I've not even heard of it. Oh my gosh. Oh, no, no, no, wait. That's the Paperclip sim, the manufacturing sim. Okay. Did you play it?

I played a little bit. I did not know that Bennett Foddy was involved. Oh, you should finish it. Okay. It is the new game from Frank Lance, who was my old boss at nyu game center again disclosure um but he made uh drop seven long before he worked at nyu uh with a studio that ended up getting acquired by zynga and drop seven i think is one of the best puzzle games yeah it is fantastic

universal paperclips is uh it is a clicker game like uh so many things clicky clicker uh is it mobile or on treasure box it is mobile i would recommend you play it on a pc browser um i won't say why i think you should um and it is about making paperclips. And it is about everything else. I won't, I'm going to, I swear, not spoil anything, because I think this is very much a game that you should experience on your own. The one thing that I will say that I think is pretty evident early on is if you play Cow Clicker from Ian Bogost, if that was taking the idea of like what does it mean to like waste your time on nothing um universal paperclips flips that and it is

this is actually how the world works what does it mean to pursue larger and larger numbers and to for things to by having more numbers to make it easier to continue making even more on that and make multiples basically like what is the end game of capitalism the video game um all starting with the idea of making paperclips it is really really really good you can have it on in the background and complete it in probably two or three days. But wow, do I recommend it because it is just full of surprises and kind of like I'm getting over it, even though they're very different games. It is a game that I would strongly encourage you not to look for tips on it. you to look for tips on it there it regularly feels impossible um but with five minutes of just like taking a breather you can figure out what you want to do next versus i think a lot

of clicker games which get to this point i love uh candy box but candy box has these points where it like gets into all these other weird combat mechanisms and everything and suddenly it becomes like almost a war of attrition with the game we were letting it run for weeks this this does not know that this knows it clearly frank knows like how long people actually play these games and paces itself within that timeline yeah it's fantastic i'm i i want to talk about uh curse of osiris the destiny 2 dlc but like i was out of town all weekend and so i didn't get a chance to play the raid layers and then today there's an update that comes out that adds masterwork weapons and sort of some changes to the

economy and so i don't i don't want to we did a stream of it and i feel like i was too quick to judge despite the fact that I hadn't really seen everything that the DLC had to offer. But I feel like I can pretty confidently say that the campaign in Curse of Osiris is pretty disappointing and the new area in the game is not so great. And as somebody who was looking for a reason to get back into destiny 2 which i was

very very into until i like finished the shit out of it uh i it it is it's a disappointment in that sense because i don't i do not feel that fire to necessarily get back get get back in the swing of things yeah for what it's worth i haven't i haven't done the rate layer either um but for what it's worth um i have heard that the rate layer is quite good um and different from the normal raid um which is kind of neat yeah i am excited to to yeah i'm sure i will uh hop back in at least probably sometime this week to uh to check that out um yeah but i don't know in destiny one there was good dlc and there was bad dlc and the good dlc was something like the dark below which was huge and transformative and no not dark below god i get it confused dark below was the bad one uh taken king which was huge and transformative and added all these new uh sort of exciting elements and new ways to play and fixed a

lot of the things that were wrong with the base game that people have been complaining about for you know for months and months and months and then there was bad dlc like the dark below which did add a new raid which was fine but mostly had just like a really bad campaign and a really shitty economy and um i feel like curse of osiris falls somewhere in between where it just um if the first few hours are supposed to be like a a proof of concept teaser for what the rest of the dlc has to offer in the long run like it is it's not it's just not very good it requires you to there's some repetition of going back and playing other older uh missions well not the missions exactly but like run through this area and shoot some guys and you've been in this area a bunch before one mission is just like one of the strikes from the game that you just sprint

through for the most part uh and a lot of it takes place in this new environment called the infinite forest which is on the new planet which is just this pretty uninspired, randomized gauntlet of enemies on these platforms that just sort of materialize in random orders. And it's not very fun to go through the Infinite Forest and you have to do it like three times just in playing the campaign. And each time it was just kind of a drag. But I feel like I need to play a little bit more

of the, you know destiny like the the whole game is the shit you do past hour 20 past hour 30 and i haven't really hit that point in curse of osiris yet um but yeah i'm gonna shut up now i do want to mention um just in by nature we're just mentioning games that we played this month i this month it feels like um a lot of a lot more indie games are coming out on switch um games that came out earlier this year on steam are hitting switch now uh one example is end is nigh which is a steam platformer that i really like that is now just came out on, or it might be out like this week, one of those two. Hammerwatch is a game I put like two years ago

on Steam, which is like this really retro top-down hack-and-slash RPG with like gauntlet elements to it that I really like, and that's coming out on Switch. There's like a cool stealth game that's coming out this week. Enter the Gungeon is coming out

holy shit yeah that's fucking crazy i i just like i can't put it down like my my switch routinely runs out of batteries when i'm on the couch just because i can't it's like the only thing that i'm playing games on when i have free time and it just is so lovely to see it like everything that i loved about the vita but now we all these games run great well do you have this nice big screen i don't know i i what on that note i uh i picked up the sexy brutal to play on the plane uh because we went to seattle uh last weekend for a convention uh and it it has some pretty bad performance issues that are a huge drag like i kind of stopped playing it and started playing something else on the plane because,

uh, like sometimes you just like walk into a room and the game would just freeze up for a couple seconds while it figured out what to do. Uh, and then if you walked into a room where there was another person in it, which in sexy Brutale, you're not supposed to do, it is sort of this stealth kind of groundhog day ask game where you're

trying to affect affect events yeah it like the frame rate kind of goes to shit which is disappointing i guess there are examples now i think about it of certainly through the year we've seen especially like 3d ports of indie games uh struggle in some situations and that's a bummer um yeah i stopped playing and i don't know if they fixed this but i stopped playing overcooked for kind of the same reason and that like it has gotten better okay that's that's what i have heard i have not returned to it since then um but but yeah i was a little bit disappointed in that but yes for the most part it's it's just fucking great i looked at my library on switch while I was trying to find something else to play while I was on the plane.

There's like fucking 30 games in there, which is a lot. For a launch year, especially for a Nintendo launch year. It's buck wild. Yeah, it's crazy. And awesome. I mentioned Solitarica earlier, and that's an older game. But, Justin, thank you for that recommendation. That's a good one.

I started playing it again, and I sunk dozens upon dozens of hours i think it came out launch i think it came out last last year on pc i don't know when it made its mobile uh release and i know that they also added the the new decks to the game do you want to do you want to do you want to talk about it reminds me of about solitarica i don't think we think so it's a it's a solitaire based mechanic which i think is like delicious no matter how you slice it flip- of about solitaire i don't think we think so okay so it's a it's a solitaire based mechanic which i think is like delicious no matter how you slice it flip-flop solitaire by zach gage this year was another excellent pocket pocket card jockey it's a good one all good um solitaire uh you have an enemy in front of you that has a deck of uh laid out. Like their pile is already laid out. You see, you know, it's like six or five or six

or however many columns of cards that you start with. And you have one card in front of you that you can play on their deck to remove one of their cards. And it's solitaire rules. So it has to be one above or one below to play on it and remove the card. And then that becomes your card, obviously in sequence of solitaire rules, so it has to be one above or one below to play on it and remove the card. And then that becomes your card, obviously, in sequence of solitaire.

But the interesting thing about Solitarica is when you clear an enemy card, it has an energy tied to it. Either, I think, wisdom, strength, agility, or... Defense. Defense, yeah. agility or, uh, defense defense. Yeah. And you collect that energy when you, uh, get rid of an enemy card. And then you use that energy to, um, cast spells and kind of like kind of puzzle quest style where you're, you're storing up energy by collecting the gems that you use to cast

spells. Right. Uh, so, and, and there are also gold coins that you, that are that instead of energy on some cards and you use those in between matches to buy new spells and buy new items but um it that that is the basic thing it's a dungeon crawler sort of more boss battles i guess because it's like just you against the opponent but every enemy has like wildly different skill sets and wildly different ways of varying their cards so there's like maybe they can turn cards into metal so that you it takes two plays to get rid of them or

some of them have really annoying like consolidation spells so they'll instead of having five rows of cards that are five columns of cards that are much easier to play on they'll consolidate it down to four columns so you have have fewer options for removing them or they'll, some are like sticky. So they'll, it takes more, it'll lock one of your skills until you remove that card or, you know,

all manner of things. Then you have different decks that focus more on different energies. So there's a paladin that I think is like strength and defense maybe. And you know, all your spells are sort of centered on those skills. So you have to really rethink your strategy with every new deck. And once you make it to the end of the, there's, it's like an 18 battle thing. And then you take on the final boss. And when you make it to that you unlock a lot of these uh stones and you actually get the stones after every they're called wild stones i think you get them after i have no idea what's going on justin i gotta be honest wild stones are like you no it's the whole thing i've lost the thread it's just it's just a lot of mechanics it's

solitaire and then you have skills to help you when you don't have moves to make but it's just hard to grok when you're just listening to the description sure when you sure it's a lot easier to follow imagine playing solitaire but when you get a spade instead instead of getting nothing you get magic that lets you cast spells okay poker what was that game called the poker rpg that came out like 10 years ago on my phone dang i don't remember yeah you ever play sword and poker yeah maybe similar to that but then and then the wild stones are just because it's a you know it's the you die and that's the end of your run kind of thing the these are uh stones that you can use to upgrade your deck so like yeah you get a special bonus whenever you draw an ace or a king or something like that and you can how long does it take start to finish like if you're playing it's hard to say because you could have a really good run and and finish it and you know 30 40 minutes or so but you

probably won't a 30 40 minutes usually to get to the end i think each sort of like battle is usually around two minutes so and it you know which is perfect length for for mobile um it feels really good uh but yeah they have new decks that are even harder to beat the to beat it with because they're focused on single energy uh abilities but everyone feels like really different and fun to play with um and it's a fantastic fantastic mobile yeah anything battle chef brigade battle chef brigade yeah um i i enjoy battle chef brigade but i have stopped playing it um it is a it is another sort of puzzle fusion genre where it is a puzzle game mixed with this sort of 2d combo based action action game where you go out into these different environments and collect ingredients,

either through like harvesting a plant that you find out there or killing an enemy. And then you take it back into the kitchen and then the ingredient that you have is transformed into a set of different colored stones that you then have to match, sort of match three style in a grid that is represented by your your cooking instrument so a big pot or something like that um and it's not a match three in that you like to swap the places of gems to form uh rows or

whatever it is a it is a sort of weird new type of match three where you rotate a square of of gems i feel like i've played a match three that also did that but maybe um yeah it's a little weird and and you do that and uh there's sort of an iron chef style uh a modifier on each match where the judges want certain types of uh. That is the first thing that you have to put in the dish and sort of base the dish around. And they want certain colors of energy to be like the main focus of the dish. And then you receive points based on how well you adhere to those different rules.

And I think it's a really clever game and there's, there's some good writing and good character stuff going on in the game. If I'm being just honest, I don't love the square rotation match three. Like it's such a it's it sounds like such a simple complaint, but it is like, you know, the main way that you interact with the cooking part of the game it just never connected with me the the rotating a square of gyms to make uh you know sets of three just doesn't feel like it's i i can look at a a board of bejeweled right or uh dungeon uh what's the card dungeon there's there's a bunch of these different like puzzle dungeon type games where you you know draw lines uh like a puzzle uh shit dungeon raid dungeon raid right where you're like drawing lines through sets of energy to make big combos i can see like that type of puzzle game and understand how to make a move while setting myself up for the next move and i i just can't do like i don't know the language of of this enough for that to ever have

really clicked for me um yeah and so i kind of fell off yeah i didn't uh play a very much at all but it it didn't really click for me i think i think the art style kind of put me off it if for whatever reason i'm sure people some people really love it, but for me, I didn't like... See, I like it a lot. Maybe it was because the minimalist animations were like... There's just like... The running animation is very simplistic. I don't know what it is. And the combat, I'm not really into these sorts of combo-heavy combat games.

And then the puzzle stuff didn't really work for me either. I know a lot of people have loved this game it really this seems this seems like a like a very much a you're based on your preference you yeah you may be you may get really into this game because i think it's a really well made game it's just um i don't know there's just some decisions that were made that i don't really i don't know i just really don't it didn't it just didn't click with me for whatever reason sometimes that that just happens um i also played pokemon ultra sun some this month and i don't really have much to say except that like i didn't play very much of it because they holy shit did not change very much at all from pokemon sun uh from what i understand like a lot of the big changes come very late in the game and i just do not have it in me to play another 30 hours of the same pokemon game that i already played to get to the new

stuff and it seems i don't know this this idea of the uh expansion of a pokemon generation is you know it happens every single time pokemon yellow pokemon crystal emerald uh all all those games platinum um but it's just this one seems like they have reached new depths of not changing a lot of stuff just a year after and which is not enough again not an uncommon schedule for pokemon it's just like i expected a little bit more of a reason to stick with it. They've streamlined the beginning of the game, which in regular old Sun and Moon was like painfully slow. They've sped it up a bit, which is nice,

but it's still, I just couldn't shake the feeling that I was just playing the same game that I played last year that I just didn't really feel like it was time to get back into it again yeah um should we pick a game i think we could pick a game in the month um maybe i'm trying to think if there's anything else let's since this is our last episode before the goatee does anybody have like any games this year that we did not talk about that maybe you're super late on it and it came out in like april or whatever but now now is sort of our last time to to get into those conversations i feel like um have we talked about near automata at all i've heard that yeah i think we should

probably dig into that one so it's made by yoko taro uh it's a japanese video game but role-playing i just played uh endless space 2 which i am not like a 4x guy at all but it's a it's a really good strategy game um it's all about like uh you know expanding your space empire by collecting these different resources uh and you know sending settlers to new planets and then specializing those planets to generate the resources that you need to go for one of the like six specific victory conditions um and i've never been into those games but what endless space 2 does is it has a uh ongoing sort of narrative quest in each game uh that's all about how your empire is developing and so it changes based on that so uh you're you're you're playing as the um the united empire which is like the human civilization that's all about you know rapid

expansion and uh all about uh you know engineering marvels and stuff like that but the whole time there's like palace intrigue going on of insurrectionists showing up or strange technology uh appearing on one of your worlds and then you have to make decisions with about what to do with those things when they happen and then it sort of changes the rest of the of the quest line and there's also like constant like as you're exploring the the the galaxy there are these constant events that keep popping up that have a lot of dope flavor. Like, oh, you've found a herd of new animals on this planet. Do you want to use them as mounts for your new colonists on this planet? Or do you want to eat them?

Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. I have one thing that I guess is for this month. I honestly thought it wasn't coming out until next year, but I played it for IGF. Did anybody play Shadowhand? Oh. No. No.

Wait, did I? Maybe. You might have played it for IGF. That wasn't that weird student game, was it? No, it's a card game. And it's like solitaire meets magic the gathering okay now hold on how many solitaire based card rpgs are we gonna be talking about solitaire meets magic the gathering base i know and it has like more rpg elements i

know i know this sounds like very very familiar familiar. It's also really, really, really well made. It has this great like swashbuckling art style that is so charming. It feels like finding an adventure classic book, like when you're at your student library back when you were a kid, and you're like, oh, Treasure Island, and it has all that kind of art inside that is egging you, an elementary school

student, along through the book. I don't know. It kind of has that look. And it is super fun. I don't want to go deep into it because, yeah, we've obviously talked about very similar things, but I think... what platform is it on? It is on PC.

Um, anything else? When does that new FTL game come out? Russ, that you did a video on next year. Uh, yeah, it's called into the breach.

It's fantastic. It's a next year game. Okay. Yeah. It's so effing good. Then we've done it. We've talked about every video game of 2017. Congratulations. Congratulations. Yeah, we've. Then we've done it. We've talked about every video game of 2017. Congratulations to us.

Yeah, we've really done it. I guess we can do Getting Over It for our game this month, right? That would be my vote. I think Getting Over It is excellent. Is it out on iPhone yet or no? It's out on iOS right now. Okay, and PC, obviously. So, that's it, right?

The polls are closed, and now we next episode are gonna you know talk about a bunch of bullshit before we decide that breath of the wild is the best game of the year so that'll be a really fun episode to listen to um yeah we're gonna compare totally disparate games from one another and determine which is the better disparate game how uh how do we have the brackets set up how are we no i haven't i haven't i'll draw up the brackets but essentially i'll try to make it fair where you know we have an interesting final four and it's not just zelda stomping on everything yeah sure um cool well but it it has been even though this last month was kind of toast it has been an insanely good year for

video games uh just there's been a lot of really really good shit this year um and looking over our the polygon top 10 list was just like a reminder of how many good ass games there were um let alone the top more than that 50 how many i think uh allegra wrote an article about how there hasn't been a year that's good since 2007, which is actually like a theory that I've been thinking about for a while. And that 2007 was a dope year, right? It had Bioshock and Orange Box and I think Left 4 Dead maybe. There were like a ton of great games that year.

And then there hadn't been a year that good for video games since 1997. So it's just years that end in seven are just good-ass video game years. I'm really looking forward to 2027 and seeing what sort of new surprises Nintendo 2 has for us next time. Check this out. 1987, Double Dragon, Punch-Out, Contra, Maniac Mansion, Zelda 2, Final Fantasy.

Well, Zelda 2. R-Type, Wizards and Warriors. That's weird. Castlevania 2. 1997. Shadowgate. Afterburner. 97 had GoldenEye, Final Fantasy 7, Symphony of the Night.

Wow. Yeah, like, it's these seven years, y'all. Crazy. Weird. Alright, let's wrap it up. Juice. Alright right thank you everyone for listening the besties congratulations to getting over it uh next year or next time i get it'll probably be next year yeah we're gonna we're like recording this like next like in an hour right the wrap-up episode i don't know it'll be soon not it'll be soon it'll be soon all right so thank you for listening and 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!