The Besties - October 2017

Episode Date: November 9, 2017

There may be be a bigger month for video game releases in recent memory, but we sure can’t think of one. Join us for a whirlwind tour of October 2017, capped off by an only slightly predictable finale. Games discussed: Assassin’s Creed Origins, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, The Evil Within 2, Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, Super Mario Odyssey. 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 had chili back to back. Oh, I thought you were singing the song from Grease. I had chili. I had chili two times. And my toilet is a big crater in the ground. That's a creepy minor key version. I need some pills. Chris Plant, go get me pills.

You're my neighbor. Get me pills. I got my neighbor, get me pills. I got NXIVM and Prilosec. No, I'm on both right now. It's a double up PPI. 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 the month. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best games of the Chili Boy. games of the month. My name is Chris Plant and I know the best games of the Chilly

Boy. My name is Russ Froschek and I've been hanging around this town in this corner. Welcome to the besties. Where we talk about the latest and greatest in Counting Crows tracks. Everything from August and everything after through

Hard Candy and all the other great Counting Crows albums of which I assume there are new ones. The law of large numbers would state that those have continued to be produced. Do you know the thing about the Crows, though? Sorry, I just want to hit this since we are a Crows podcast. The best music isn't on their albums. It's on the soundtracks, baby.

Shrek. Shrek 2. Shrek. Shrek 3. Shrek Ever After. Their last full album was in 2014, and I think we are overdue to get a little bit of that good old

Feast for Crows. A little bit of that. Feast for Crows. It's hot. Do they have a song that's like 28? 29? Oh, there's another one. 30? Oh, 31? have a song that's like 28 29 oh there's another one 30 oh 31 oh there's one up in the up on the telephone pole 32 oh my god griffin what happens after that one 33 that one almost flew right into me for this gag uh but this week we're going to talk about video games. You know, they've come a long way since Pac-Man, the Pac-Man trilogy.

Baby Pac-Man. Baby Pac-Man. Pac-Man. Pac-Man. Ms. Pac-Man. The whole quadrilogy. There's a fourth one, too. Did you ever play the fourth one?

No. It's an FMV game, full of nudity, and it was banned in America, so you wouldn't probably have played it. It was called Phantasmagoria. And everybody talks about how cool that game is you've never played it but pac-man is in it and he does all kinds of sex start adam duritz pac-man yeah start um adam duritz is pac-man gobbling up ghosts uh-huh what games did everybody play this time oh thank you thank you griffin well we should we should get into uh honorable mentions first right yeah that's what is honorable mention and i'm gonna alley-oop it to hoops himself y'all this assassin's creed origins what if i told you this

is this is my pitch for it assassin's creed right think about assassin's creed from last i don't know like five years but this time it's good. And release it on the worst possible day ever. That's not their fault, Russ. Get off their jock. I, yeah, so it's, oh man, the new Assassin's Creed game is something else, I tell you. For me, and I've played like a good amount of it, though I have like no metric on how far

into the game I have actually gone. Do you have those hand knives yet? Yeah, you do get the hand knives. Just one in this one. Born to hand knife, baby. So there's another one. That's a great kind of a good joke. Assassin's Creed Origins is in

Egypt and your cat named Bayek is a magi, which is like a protector, I guess. I thought it was magi. I didn't think it was magi. They pronounce it magi. I don't know. Let me ask you, I hate the lore, but does it have any, like, modern-day lore stuff? Yeah. lore but does it have any like modern day lore stuff yeah so you're uh a woman who seems to be sort of like on the outs with abstergo um kind of a a rogue agent with a friend and she's kind of

she has basically hooked a portable animus up to a mummy and that is what she is i know and that is what she is uh how she is exploring the. They are really just kind of expanding what this thing is pot. Like I put, I put it on a big bowl of oranges and now I get to be Picasso. Could you like dig up checkers, Nixon's dog and just like experience the Nixon white house that way. I mean,

in this rich fiction, in this rich tapestry. Yes.ixon white house that way i mean in this rich fiction in this rich tapestry yes um this white house is a wolf i want to hear what plant thought of it but for me it's like the definition of two steps forward and one step back like the so it's been a while since the last one syndicate i guess was two years ago at this point. Is that correct? 2015 for Syndicate. Is that right? So they took longer than they normally do to release this Assassin's Creed game. Or at least longer than they got in the habit of doing.

And the things that are good about it. The world is like so expansive. I mean like massive. To a point where I've been playing for i would guess about 20 hours and there's like half the map i haven't even explored yet i just got to memphis which is massive um that's right it encompasses now you can get to tennessee so strange um no it i just got to memphis and uh uh, which is like a major city. And I literally just got there after 20 hours and there's huge chunks of the map that I've

yet to unearth. Do they have, do they have struggle with like, uh, environmental variety? Um, I mean, yeah. In like the most practical sense, because it, it, it, I mean, it is ancient Egypt, you know what I mean? Like it's not, there isn't like a Starbucks that you're going to be climbing over or whatever, but there is definitely some, some,

it gets a little grating, I would say, or a little monotonous because there's not that, there's not a lot of like tall buildings. There's some, you know, a few tall buildings that you're going to be scaling, but I think you lose that In a lot of us has to create games There's this cool thing of like I'm gonna get up to the rooftops and like that's how I'm gonna get around like I'm just gonna

Sort of like point A to point B along the rooftops. That's a very fun way of traversing This is much more spread out. There's a lot of like large expanses and you do have a horse that you can call at will you can use to ride the long distances between but it it feels weird it doesn't have the flow in in between the the the sections sure yeah the so so like it's huge but also it is there are so many things you can do and for me it has struggled with the um remember the in dragon age origins another origins game strangely like um everybody told you like you got to get out of the what's the first area the hinterlands is that right yeah yeah you gotta get out of the hinterlands don't you're talking about the the latest one that was

uh that wasn't origins that was inquisition inquisition uh yeah you got to get the hinterlands um and the yeah origins was the first one wasn't it but um i think it was just origins was in my head but uh there are so many side quests to do. And do you remember like two or three Assassin's Creed's ago, there was like a rating system for missions where like after you did the mission, you could like rate it like, good, good mission. And it's so strange. I actually found myself like wishing that was in there.

There's like so many side quests that I'm starting to get pretty done with Assassin's Creed Origins. And a lot of the side quests I've done have been like so bogus. There are some where it's like a chunk of the mission is you like picking up hay and putting it in carts for people. There are so many like odd jobs. Like somebody go check on my workers. I lost my horse. Go find my horse. and okay i don't have anything better to do so i'm gonna go go do that so i'm starting to get sort of over the experience

and there are still so many side quests popping up but i did so many early on because i like to be completionist with with side missions in games i don't go for like all the collectibles or whatever um and i feel like i'm starting to get a little burnt out and i do wish it was like a rating system so i can know like this is a fun one you should do this one and this is and then you can filter out from the map like just to hide all the one to two star ones just get the fuck out of my sight following a guy in a crowd i think it would be cool if for a certain type of gamer if you're buying the game and you're like this is my november this is what i'm doing this month then i think that like this it could be very good because the stuff is like none of it's terrible or annoying it's just like i'm sort of got the experience and i would like to finish

the main story path but i'm feeling so unmotivated um yeah the main hero byak is very good uh he's he's in a in sort of a break from recent assassin's creed like he's very warm and like smiles and laughs a lot and which is very cool he's not like super grim dark which is interesting because he has a sort of dark backstory that has gotten him to this point because it is so early in the uh canon there's not a lot it doesn't get super bogged down with like assassins v. Templar mythos, I would say, in the chunks I've played.

It is hard, though, because I have zero familiarity with ancient Egypt or this time period whatsoever, and it can get pretty overwhelming with the different factions and names being thrown at you constantly when I have no frame of reference for anything that's happening, which is a tribute to my own ignorance. And to its credit, I have felt like a lot more sort of in tune.

Like it is sad when I can say Assassin's Creed game has been a good education for me, but it has in fact been just that. The combat is much more fun than I think previous Assassin's Creed games. It feels very good. There's a lot of like active combos and there's like an overcharged stamina bar. There's parrying on the fly. There's all kinds of good stuff. But the stealth feels worse than it has previously.

So you're, you know, as fun as it is to run into a group of uh people and just sort of level them um you get spotted super easy um there's a lot of uh i think that's that feels worse than it has in other games which makes me lean on that combat more um um the yeah the only other thing i i wanted to hit and and if there's like if there's specific points you guys want to talk about I think that'd be cool but the only other thing is you can spend a lot of cash in this game and I because I like I was like absurd Obstacle bucks that you by doing challenges in game currency or like real world You know like real world currency to a pretty buck wild extreme. I decided to

Because I didn't have a lot of time to play this game no I mean this is intentional I wanted to know if you could like sort of break the experience through money because ideally right you shouldn't be able to I would say

experiment for the good of mankind is what you're saying I was I was curious and curious and I had some bucks. I thought, hey, I'm going to see if I can. The answer is yes, very much so. You can buy gold, right? So you could buy gold. You can buy crafting materials.

And they have very much incentivized this because all the upgrades, it's a sort of Far Cry system. So all the upgrades to like your health and melee damage, range damage. You need like a goat head or something. Yeah. Except you need 50. And each animal drops three. So it's like so infuriating. And I cannot imagine anybody, like you would have to love hunting in this game to do as much as you would need

To for upgrading but now you could just give us a few bucks And we'll just give you a crate just drop a crate of 300 vulture skulls Actually does a crate actually drop it just spawns directly in front in your inventory you can buy weapons you can buy Exotic weapons you can buy the money you need to upgrade those weapons you can buy weapons. You can buy exotic weapons. You can buy the money you need to upgrade those weapons. You can buy ability points. So, like, you don't even need to level up. You could just buy the ability points in the game to, and it slows leveling way down to a point where you're not getting ability points very often and then abilities start costing three levels worth of points to unlock and they very much

like want to make it tempting to do this. But you could buy, like you could just sit down and pay a bunch of money and get like, unlock all the abilities get top notch gear upgrade them and just be

at what, like maps maps to everything you buy them and they'll just throw them all on your map for you um and they call them time savers but like the question i was struggling with um that's it you're literally described if you if you ever any box in any video game is explicitly a time saver because it's time you're not spending playing the game do it that's like the nature of this i wish we had more time to record because we i feel like we could go for a fucking hour talking about because in the last month like it felt like that conversation somebody poured gasoline on it and set up the fuck on fire of well that you can't have a single player game without loot boxes anymore and we're deciding this this month so if everybody doesn't buy Wolfenstein,

it's the end of the industry. And it's like, holy shit, guys. It's not loot boxes. Like it is much more explicit than that. And a little more craven. It is literally like pay us a bunch of money and skip stuff. And for me, the big question becomes like, do you as a game designer at that point balance the game so that it's fun to do the amount of hunting you need to do to upgrade all your stuff?

Or do you balance it so that people want to spend extra money to skip it? And the idea of a time saver in a game like this is crazy because you're playing a video game, right? Like, it shouldn't be a question of like, well, I got my chores to do this month. I got to get out there and harvest 60 fucking hyenas to upgrade my bracer. Like it shouldn't be balanced like that, but it absolutely is. And it really like, I wanted to see how bad it would be.

And it is really sort of unfathomable to me. And all of a sudden, once you do that, though, so much of the motivation is removed, right? It's like inputting a cheat code, because a lot of the quests reward you with, there are these tombs that you can explore, and the big reward for finishing the tomb is an ability point. Well, fuck off.

I can buy that for a dollar. What else do you have? So it's really like, and of so it's, it's really, it's really like, and of course it's not forced on you, of course, but I really feel like it's balanced in such a way that you are incentivized. That's not the issue.

That's not the issue anymore. The issue is that like, if developers of these traditionally single player grand, huge experiences are looking at microtransaction loot crate models they're not most of the time they're not saying like how can i find a way to fit this into my game they're saying how can i find a way to retrofit this into my game using the systems that were already in there and then making them making making them sort of compatible with this business model and every single time that they do that,

it ends up, it always ends up like this. And like people gave Destiny 2 a bunch of shit for the silver market. And I guess Destiny 1 also, but like that's an example of, in my opinion, a developer doing it right. It's like, here's a bunch of dumb bonus shit and you can get it the way that you want to get it

instead of like, oh yeah, you could spend 30 hours grinding for, you know, insert exotic here or just give us five bucks yeah cool bye like i think i think destiny is a little better but i think the issue is bigger than the loot crates i think the issue is games are being designed now to make sure that you retain them for a given number of months and that that they don't fill up the used game market and then take away sales by way of used games so when you are spending money in assassin's creed and they're saving you time what they're saying is oh well you could give us money now which will make it so that you complete this game faster and you enjoy your time with it quicker uh but we're getting the money back that we would have lost by you becoming somebody who

then sells it back to the retailer and that's i i feel the same way with destiny i feel like so much of destiny's pleasure and i i use that like that's not the right term for in my opinion no it gets me it gets me hard i mean yeah it's locking it's but it's meant to lock the player in it is it's still work like you're still largely wasting your time and to participate in certain things in the game you have to do the work yes but it's this is two different conversations though because like no i i think i think they're very connected i think across the industry when we talk about moving away from single player, the very top level thing we're talking about is that games are now designed to lock people in, not because they're fun, but because they have hooks. And whether that hook is to get you to buy a loot box, or it's just to get you to play so many hours in a month, that way they can then use that as data, which they would then sell to an advertiser whatever it is the games

there is a trend that has grown and grown and grown towards developing games to be addictive rather than rewarding and i think that's what what bums me out is like i love i used to love the like i used to play games with hooks exclusively because i i enjoy a big rpg or games with rpg systems that i can get lost in and feel this path to power and customization and all that shit. And now it's been like perverted in a way. I know I sound very, very naive in talking about this. And it's probably because I'm a little bit salty because I'd like to talk about a game that I played a little bit. Well, I played a lot over a very short span of time. That's not officially out yet it comes out this month and it's animal crossing pocket camp i don't know if anybody else got down on this and i imagine i i

want to spend a little bit more time talking about it next month once it's properly out but that that game is a like a cute sort of boiled down version of the animal crossing experience that hits that free to pay monetization escalation so fucking quick that it left my head spinning so you go around and you do favors for your neighbors and attract new animals to come to your camp and you can go fishing and bug catching and fruit collecting and then give those to your friends and then they'll give you you know some bells and some experience points and all kinds of shit and you unlock furniture that you can then build and customize your camp to try to attract new people to come to it and like on paper that's great and it is like a genuinely good little animal crossing experience if not like the fully

fleshed out thing that i adore but it the the numbers of it get so buck wild so fucking fast and if it's not tweaked in some way which is not out of the realm of possibilities russ you remember when fire emblem uh heroes came out you could only play that game for like a little bit before you had to wait out that stamina meter sure and they finally they did tweak that actually pretty quickly so that you could play the game a little bit more um so like to craft something right you start out crafting something it's like oh you want to make this table it's six wood it's like oh okay i can do that and then the next time you build a table for somebody else it's 15 wood oh okay i knew that and then it's 30 wood then it's 60 wood

and then it's 120 wood and to get that much is it's preposterous it's it's so so so so much uh as a as a point of reference there's daily login, which is not uncommon for a free-to-play game. And I just got one today that was cloth, and you spend cloth on things like rugs. And there's a rug that I want for my camp. It's 120 cloth. And right now I have about 15, and my daily login bonus was three more pieces of cloth.

So I'm getting just 102 more. It's like so so bad um and it it genuinely sort of turned me off from the game because it's like is it gonna get worse is there the next time to build something is it 240 pieces of cloth am i gonna have to either grind my life away or spend money on leaf tickets that you can use to bypass any part of the game just so i can build a fucking duvet from like it's so it gets so gross so fast also i put out my friend code out on twitter and it broke my friends list and i haven't been able to open my friends list in the game for a few weeks uh which is a bummer so i don't know if the bones are all there but the fucking numbers are so bad

and so punishing so quickly that I played it constantly for about three days, and then I never touched it again. We need to talk about good things. Yeah. Like the games of the month? Yes. Yes. Why don't we go through the three pretty quickly so we can get to that fourth one and have

a lot of time to dump dump into it how about i blast through mine really quick because it'll be a transition because it's not good a great game but i'll get it out there um mine is middle of middle of earth middle earth shadow of war which is a sequel to uh oh my gosh middle earth-earth Shadow of Mordor? The title's in general. Similar to that game, the entire hook is that you are a man who is dead and inhabited partly by another ghost man, and together you use your powers to enslave orcs to do your bidding and to gradually take over a little kingdom the big difference this time is instead of a few small maps now you're taking over entire uh essentially forts or castles

and you can assign your orcs to fight battles that you're not even there for you can assign them once you take over a castle in these giant siege fights uh you can assign leaders to manage those castles which then later on much later on uh can be sieged by enemy orcs this is very big it reminds me of uh did y'all play assassin's creed brotherhood yeah yeah sure remember how you could like get assassins and then you'd like on text documents like tell them to go fight battles and then be like yeah they won or they lost yeah um it's similar to that but like you can actually go and participate in those battles if you so choose

um and it is technically very impressive the system especially with the orcs where you are constantly being badgered by orcs that you fought and you watch them evolve uh is just as great as it was before it's much funnier the i thought it was pretty funny the first time about the poet the poet one well i guess maybe don't spoil it if you don't want to i don't know if this is the same one that you're talking about but my very favorite experience was one who the guy was very eloquent uh it might have been the poet but very eloquent orc and uh you have the option to like kill the orc or uh take them to your side or just outright shame them uh which reduces their level and i just kept shaming the same orc because he just kept showing up on me And what happened was He became less and less eloquent

Until he broke down into non-verbal Grunts Because he completely lost his will to live At which point I cut off his head Jesus Dark No that was like I'm helping him Right he wouldn't have wanted to go on that way

No no he would have been Can you imagine a poet deprived of words well i meant it was dark that you brought him to that point to be honest yeah no that is that's kind of the problem with the game is the game does not know how it feels about the idea of enslaving creatures even i get like orcs in the fiction they are pure evil so i guess we're not supposed to feel well they also tended to be like very strict like straight like not like interesting evil they were just like i hate good things and i crush and i kill they are so much more interesting than any other character you meet right the main story is just dreadful and all the characters in it are just miserable

creatures and it's and it's hilarious because when you, with a lot of the orcs, when you enslave them, they become fully realized, lovable characters. And it's like, oh shit. Like there was one guy who went from like trying to cut off my head, I waved a magic spell on him and he was Shrek, just like having lots of fun

and cavorting with me through the ranks. It's like, oh, okay, so are you all kind of like, should I be feeling bad about this or not? Like, which is it? Late in the game, I'm not going to get into the spoilers, but it calls into question this and renders a judgment that doesn't make sense in the context of the entire point of the series.

And it's such a bummer. And I know a lot of people are going to enjoy this game without having a second thought on the series and it's such a it's such a bummer and i know like a lot of people are going to enjoy this game without having a second thought on it and that's fine but there's so many easy ways to fix this it would be so much more interesting to me if your character was a charmer and somehow got people to join his side or just had if there was any other reason for for why these people are becoming your allies the weird thing is it feels so obvious that orcs from what i understand and i have a feeling i'm going to get corrected on this but in the canon respect power and displays of strength you think

would pull people onto your side by choice rather than than this and that would make more sense too because then it would explain why their underlings also work for you even though you didn't use your magic enslavement power on them so i don't know it it really is just a game that you it always just feels a little icky on top of that rather than simplify the process of creating these armies, like that was kind of an issue with the previous one, they just quadrupled down on it. I mean, there are so many menus to dig through. You can pick up different weapons. There's a variety of loot.

You can upgrade the loot. There are gemstones that you collect, and you have to upgrade the gemstones to then upgrade your loot. Through gem infusion the the uh orcs there's like upgrade paths for them depending on how they conquer towers there are loot boxes that can factor in in a variety of different ways uh there are skill trees and then there are micro branches of the skill trees so one skill has then three additional unlocks that you can only choose one of and you alternate between them it it is dense and i felt like i spent probably the first 15 hours

just catching up to how to play this game and learn all these new moves that don't get me wrong are cool but at a certain point i want to feel feel like I'm not playing the menu and I'm playing the game. Yeah, I never got to that point. I played this for a long time, and you go down so many mechanical rabbit holes, to the point where I was Googling walkthroughs and not for missions, but for UI elements. How do I manage this?

Because I can't find the menu to do this. You can get to a point where you have orcs in your army that you want to level up and you can pit them in a fight against another orc. And the way that plays out is

you watch two AI orcs fight for like three minutes. And it's so wild that it made me feel like I had been abandoned by the, like no one thought about anyone actually taking advantage of this mechanic. Like, did you all think through watching two AI orcs fight each other?

Like, no one must have thought through this, right? one must go on right for a long time because there are scenarios where i had one where something like one character's strength was i don't know like fire and the orc he was fighting his strong defense was against fire it was i don't know if it was exactly that but it was something where it just was like watching them chip away at health bars forever. We accidentally triggered one of these fights in our stream and mercifully it ended very quickly. But I was afraid that we were going to have to have a 30-minute stream of just two AI characters going at it. It is desperately in need of an editor and if i had to guess i would say that a lot of this stemmed from and again this is complete hypothesization on a hot hypothesizing on my part but there are

chests that you could pay real world money for to unlock legendary orcs to fight alongside of you um and if if i had to guess a lot of these mechanics were glommed on to sort of justify that aspect. I don't think that's how... Yeah, I think the sad thing is they're just bad. Well, I don't think it's just that. I think what might have happened, which seems more realistic, is that they designed this game. And then they're like, okay, which parts of this game can we put behind monetization oh these orcs that let you kind of crush the opponents uh are a huge advantage

let's make them easier to get if you just spend money and that's where that issue comes from i don't think they're necessarily adding things to support monetization. I think they're chipping away at chunks of the game that work for monetization. Yeah, I think the other bummer, too, of this game is it's a weird game where its strengths somehow became its weaknesses. You can have these huge, huge crowds of orcs.

And on some level, the idea is that you could skip the entire process process don't put together your army don't recruit allies go right to a big castle get in a fight get overwhelmed and you'll probably die uh and that's fine that's like a cool gating thing it would be great if i felt like i had a chance when it came to fighting big crowds this it uses a very similar batman style combat and it turns out that that is great but maxes out around like seven or eight enemies once you have just a horde of enemies on screen it it just feels terrible and you don't have there aren't a lot of abilities that take out large groups uh trying to get the warriors games style uh and and i understand they're different games but you just

feel weak in a way that seems at odds with what type of game oh you mean dynasty warriors yeah yeah thank you i thought you were talking about the warriors the ps2 no there's just there's huge he's right there's huge fights that you feel like while there are too many people i actually there's one boss battle inside a castle where i think this is around the point that i bailed on it where you when you go in you are locked in a room where fire is shooting up from the ground and you can't escape. You can't get high ground. You can't like do some sneaky shit to turn the odds in your favor.

It is literally just like fight your way out. And you get so overwhelmed by enemies and there just isn't like a good AOE. I'm going to take everybody down. And the irritating thing is if you're good, you can continue to parry your way through groups of enemies, and it's exhausting, and it takes forever, and it's zero fun. And you can call in reinforcements. You can have a bodyguard as one of the orcs that you capture. You can make your bodyguard who you can call at your whim but if you're trying to capture another orc in there it's a huge risk factor because they could kill the orc that you're trying to capture and it and it's and i and i think it

was probably conceived to be dynamic but it's just like it is not built for those big uh group battles which is what you find yourself in a lot um okay yeah i want to say one nice thing really quick i'll say yeah because that was super negative yeah this so all this is super frustrating but when the game surprises you and maybe some of this is accidental maybe some of it is made to design to do these things it is magical and the example that i will give is at the beginning of the stream with uh that i did with frosh i wanted to get to a really the example that i will give is at the beginning of the stream with uh that i did with frosh i wanted to get to a really the highest point i could find to have start on a really gorgeous view right and two seconds before we start the stream i get bombarded by one of my

allies my number one orc my the dude that i had carried along with me the entire time, and I loved him because he was dressed as a bird, and he is the dopiest looking orc in the entire game. And he found me at the top of a perch, and then I fought a giant orc bird thing on top of the tallest tower in the game and cut him in half and his body fell all the way down to the bottom of this tower. and cut him in half and his body fell all the way down to the bottom of this tower. And it was such a great unintended moment. And when the game clicks like that, it feels so wonderful. It's just, it's a shame that it seems to get in the way of all of it.

Yeah. Do you want to go next for us or do you want me to go next? Well, I think mine is the big one at the end. So you should probably go. All right, well, I'll do the Evil Within 2. Surprise. You probably didn't expect to hear that one in here.

I didn't expect to play it. I had like, I was between games. I kind of have petered out on Destiny 2 almost completely at this point. And oh, Stardew Valley 2 came out on Switch this month. And I played a lot of that. No, no. Don't say it like that. People will think that the sequel to Stardew Valley came out on Switch. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I played a lot of St no no don't say it like that because people will think that the sequel to stardew valley came out on switch i'm sorry i'm sorry i played a lot of stardew valley

on switch and yes um i had sort of finished that and it was looking for something to play and so i saw evil within two and it was getting pretty good pretty good scores and it's you know close to halloween and so i wanted to play a horror game despite the fact that despite the fact i never played evil within one because i heard it was not very good. I really enjoyed the Evil Within 2, even though there are lots of problems with it. It's funny that it came out in the same year as Resident Evil 7 because it was made by Tango Gameworks, which is Shinji Mikami's studio. And there is so much of that DNA, particularly of, for me, the closest comparison is Resident Evil 4,

which is the best Resident Evil game. And yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. It is a survival horror game. You play as Sebastian Castellanos, the returning protagonist from Evil Within 1, only apparently there's like a lot more story, a lot more backstory given to Sebastian. He lost his daughter in a house fire, but surprise, she's still alive and inside of

this virtual environment called STEM, inside this virtual city called Union, and he has to go inside this virtual city and rescue her. But surprise, everything's really fucked up and spooky in the game. And that entails you fighting a bunch of sort of zombie like mutant monsters and going up against other sort of bad people who are also in STEM and have been granted sort of these special powers by the by the environment. So it's like halloween tron yes i mean it's kind of like um it's like uh i guess more nightmare on elm street right it's it's

it's this dream world where there are people who are taking advantage of the environment and everything is very scary and it sucks and also if you die in the game you die in real life um and wait wait for real real yeah i'm dead i died a couple times so i'm i'm damn what i love about the game is like there are some uh there are some genuinely scary moments in it there are some some jump scary moments and sort of the environment uh it's itself is very sort of twisted and scary and a lot of sort of the monster designs are uh are genuinely upsetting um there's a lot of gore and sort of horrible killings that happen one of the the first like big bad guys that you meet has this camera that he can use to create a zone of slow motion and his whole deal is he murders and then takes a

picture and so you will stumble across the crime scene and see this murder played back over and over and over again in slow motion in a very stylish but very very gory way um there's there's sort of just a lot of tone work like that that is uh very very effective but what i really like about the game and it's like my favorite shit in in survival horror games and again it's why resident evil 4 is my favorite game and i honestly think that evil within 2 did it better than uh resident evil 7 did earlier this year is the escalation of power the the slow and hard earned escalation of power where you start out the game and there there's some stealth mechanics in the game that are actually pretty good um there's you know taking

cover in uh in bushes and instant kills and uh throwing bottles to distract enemies to sort of gain an advantage over a situation and uh you know ammunition for your weapons is very scarce uh to a certain point. But as the game goes on, you can find parts that you can upgrade your weapons with in various ways, or you can find weapons or find broken weapons that you have to repair with parts. And so, you know, you kind of pick a favorite one. For me, it's like almost always in these sorts of games just the the first handgun you find and then turning it into a you know a ship cannon is is always a very very satisfying thing for me but you also get uh this stuff called green gel from uh enemies that you kill that you can use to customize sebastian in various ways so you can make it so that he uh sprints faster or regenerates

health faster or uh it can sneak better or gain special uh you know instant stealth kill abilities um and so by the by the at the start of the game like you are completely helpless and you are dropped in this city where the streets are just flooded with these monsters that will annihilate you and so um it kind of has an open world feel to it you have this uh communicator that you're using to track your daughter through this environment, but you will also get signals from downed members of this military organization or from civilians who are trapped in Union. And you can sort of follow the path of your communicator to find them.

And a lot of the time they'll be dead and you can use your communicator to sort of witness their last few few moments um and you can use the communicator to track down upgrades and all kinds of stuff um so you start out the game you're completely weak and and you can be killed very very easily and then by the end of the game you are this zombie slaying demigod which is like the trajectory of my favorite horror movies also and so when a game pulls it off really well um it's it's always really satisfying and yeah plant plant and i streamed what was probably the first like open world area yeah and yeah he was definitely just getting like yeah creamed left right and center it's so tough there's there's a lot of variety in the uh not a lot but there's there's some there's some cool variety in the uh enemies that come after you um there is one enemy who is essentially the witch from the uh

left for dead games which is hey horror games put those in all of them because it's super fucking scary to hear like the croaking and then all of a sudden this, you know, old woman with bleach white hair is running at you with a knife that she will just stab you to death with instantly. It's it's it's not a great game. It gets a little bit. It is, I think, a good game. I think it gets a little bit repetitive. And around the halfway point, like the main villain changes in a way that i don't think is necessarily earned and it's like it completely changes it's almost like they had an idea for

what they wanted evil within three to be but then they realized that what they had for evil within two wasn't enough for a whole game and so they kind of squished the two together in a sort of clumsy way um but that said the last sort of chapter of the game is actually really fantastic and i was not expecting this game to pull off sort of a an emotional moment that it kind of did in the finale which was uh unexpected and impressive but um yeah i don't think i like it as much as Resident Evil seven all told, because I think, uh, in, in total Resident Evil seven was such a fresh, uh, like revolutionary take on survival horror in a way that maybe evil within two is derivative, but it's derivative and successful in, in what it tries to drive.

Um, but it, it also like, I wonder if it's, whether this is true. I might be totally crazy, but I feel like there's something very hard about making a game where you have these abilities to like customize and make yourself more powerful over time and maintaining that level of tension throughout becomes very difficult because you don't know. Oh, did you collect all the shit in level three? Well, if you did, you're probably collecting all the shit everywhere. It's not that it really I don't think it's that where like it's like oh no i missed one thing because you can kill enemies and get get gel out of them and you're gonna be you're gonna be good um i

think that maybe it actually get the the balance as a whole was pretty good but the last few chapters of the game i was untouchable um my pistol was upgraded all the way so that i could basically uh two or three shots to any enemy and they go down and i had enough oh you collect resources as you're exploring so like raw resources like gunpowder or uh herbs or um pipes that you can then use at crafting stations to create weapons and my stockpile was so buck wild by the end of the game that I basically had infinite ammo. So the tension was more or less gone at that point. But by that point, sort of the story grabs you

and pulls you through the last few chapters or so. Yeah, I don't think it's for everybody. I enjoy these games, and I think the length was just right. Finished it in about nine hours, 10 hours or so, which is about how much I want to spend in a world like this. And when it's that sort of condensed and that tight, I feel like they can get that, that power escalation just right. Um, and yeah, I, I, I was surprised by how much that I enjoyed it.

Not enough to go back and play the original Evil Within because, again, it looks so bad. They don't do that letterbox thing in Evil Within 2, which is great. Although, spoilers, I guess, when you finish the game, you can replay it with the letterbox on. Oh, terrific.

If you really want to. There's some really great, there's lots of flashback segments to the events of the first game. And whenever it does do those flashback segments, a lot of the times it cuts into the letterbox mode which is very it's very fun um yeah it's a good little game cool cool um i guess we should continue on to the next game yeah let's keep trucking uh wolfenstein 2 The New Colossus Which is a

Baffling 2 I mean it's just It's just the wildest 2 That I can conceive of It's not called Wolfenstein 2 though right It's just called Wolfenstein The New Colossus It is Wolfenstein 2 The New Colossus Look at some box art

Check it out it's Wolfenstein 2 The New Colossus What's wrong with the 2 the new colossus what's wrong with the two yeah because there's just no reality in which this is wolfenstein 2 it's just not yeah it's the wolfenstein like eight or something it's wolfenstein eight or nine like it's just not i mean like there is i mean it is a direct sequel to the other well it's not it wasn't a remake you know like they're all canon like all the wolfenstein games are within the same timeline yeah i guess that's fair um okay

wolfenstein 2 um if you played let's talk mechanically first if you played the last uh wolfenstein game um uh you you pretty much know what what to here. You're charging your way through stages and you are with a blend of stealth and just straight run and gun. Comically large amounts of violence. Yeah, two gun, huge violent, huge kills. And you have the option of stealth or going loud. And you have the option of stealth or going loud.

I think that the best blend is usually somewhere in between those. They have a really smart way of pivoting so that if you use stealth until you kill, each area has these commanders. And if you can stealth your way to killing a commander, then they can't call an alarm and bring down more people on you. So generally what feels best to me, and I think it's sort of like the most sensical way of approaching most areas, is stealthing your way to the commander, killing the commander, and then going loud, if you will. Were you successful in that a lot? I played the first Wolfenstein. I really enjoyed the blend of stealth and action and in this one it just felt like the enemies could see through fucking space and time and there was no there i just could not i could not sneak to save my life yeah it's it's it's tough you know you um more than a lot of

stealth games you don't have like vision cones or what have you, which I was really desperate for, or enemy highlights and that kind of thing through walls or whatever, which is realistic, I guess. But also a lot of the rooms are huge open spaces, and if there's an enemy on the other side of it without much cover to get you over to them, it feels like, well, I'm just, I'm going to get spotted here. So let's just start shooting. About midway through the game, you get some equipment that actually helps with that.

If you, if you choose, there's a, you're offered a choice after one story beat of sort of a stealth focused gear or battle focused gear or tactically focused gear. And what you choose actually opens up some gameplay opportunities that helped a lot with stealth in the later stages. But it's different from a lot of first-person shooters in that it does not reward you sort of like getting the high ground or getting to a good position and picking off people. You will get overwhelmed and killed pretty quickly.

The only thing that really works well if you're going to be, you know, going loud, if you will, is to just keep moving. You move very quickly, but you are fairly vulnerable. You're surprisingly vulnerable, I think. It's not helped that the game is very bad at communicating to you when you're taking damage. Thank you. Oh, my God.

It's just, oh, my number is low. What happened? Oh, I got shot a hundred times. Yeah, it is not. You start to get some visual and rumble feedback when you're very close to death. And by then, a lot of times it's too late. It's very bad at relating that information to you. The other sort of mechanical thing that really bothered me is the level design is...

The worst! So bad. And it is... It's weird in that... There's a couple problems with it. One of them is that gear that I mentioned, you have opportunities to get through levels depending on what gear you have.

So there's like stilts that can raise you up and there's a weird torso armor that compresses you and lets you squeeze through tubes. And there's a harness that lets you ram through walls. And usually the way it shakes out is you'll get to a point where you see a tube and there's some bricks on the wall and there's a high point you can climb to. It's like, well, I guess I'll just use whichever one of those I got.

All right, well, you're the to say i want to say really quickly because i feel like i've never been so more on the other side of history about a game than i do about this one because i think it's bad like i think it's a bad game and it's the level design shit that is unforgivable to me in a way where i just can't i thought i just was not having a good i played about half the game and would never had a good time it's an unsanitable thing especially if you're like us and are not game designers but I very very very often in Wolfenstein if you play a Valve game for instance I think they're probably the best at this other people are very good but if you play like Half-Life you are being subtly guided from A to B without like a gross blinking arrow you're just like the world shows you where to go and that yeah like the door is lit and you can see exactly right this game does give you a

blinking area it gives you a button you can press to make a waypoint appear and even that's not enough to show you like where in these labyrinthine poorly sort of uh uh poorly pathed levels you're supposed to play in and i wanted to do a quick anecdote i gave up on the game halfway through but the story is so cool that i wanted to watch the rest of it so i watched a youtube sort of compilation of all the cut scenes and at the end of the game that i won't spoil it but there's a bit where you're supposed to sort of sneak through a a crowd and you're supposed to like crouch down and go through some bleachers and then go up like this ladder and now you're on some catwalks and it but also there's like other pathways you can go down and there's like a stack of boxes that maybe it looks like you can get over but you can't

actually jump over it and then there's another hallway and you get to the end of it and all the doors are locked and so i was watching this thing like trying to watch the ending of the game because i knew i'm never gonna go back and finish this and the person playing it got stuck at that part like the the climactic part of the game for like four minutes because they kept trying to jump over the boxes they kept trying to fucking i had the exact same and it's like this is the climactic ending of the game and it's it's you are you are robbing it of power because you put this it sucks like the pathing sucks. It sucks so bad. I actually got stuck in that moment trying to find my way through and got

glitched on the environment. I had to reload the checkpoint. It's like, how's the end of your fucking video game? It's, it's mind boggling to me. Uh, narratively though,

I, it is so, so far ahead of most games in this genre that it is it is i think it's like almost embarrassing to them the writing is like uniformly great the performances are really really good the themes of the game are like very deftly handled in a way that sort of the overarching thing, if I were to point to like one sort of main thematic idea that keeps getting resurfaced is that the Nazis are in America and not everybody is like against the Nazis. There are people for whom the Nazi way of life is working out pretty good.

And you get to see that and you get working out pretty good and you get to see that and you get to see their logic and you get to see americans sort of like subscribing to the to nazism to keep their way of life does it go into the birth of eugenics in america or does it act like germany is where this all started i mean mean, it's alternate timeline. So like it does not from what I say, and maybe there's like news clippings or whatever that touch on this. It does not talk about the fact that like eugenics was sort of got a lot of German inspiration.

And also that would have been, you know, 15 years or 20 years before this game took place. So it's not something that necessarily would be in the in the topic of this game. But it does it. It shows what like America under Nazi control would look like and how people either fight back against that and kind of at the cost of everything or are complacent and that's the that's the that's another form of true evil yeah exactly what pat sort of mentioned was and this is obviously a very touchy subject but basically he he was explaining pat has played a lot of it and done a lot of interviews with this the developers stuff like that and he was talking about how basically it highlights just how close america was at that time with like a slight nudge

into just like this being becoming the norm now obviously this is a very fantastical game but you know this was you know pre-civil rights and all that stuff and and you know this was a very dodgy time and it seems like the game really highlights it does it does highlight that while still including some of the most video game ass video game shit it i like some of the beats and you probably hear people will will sort of obliquely mention this stuff, and it's really something you have to, like, see for yourself to keep from it being spoiled, but, like, because it would have zero impact with me just, like, saying the shit that happens, but it is full of, like, beats that are like, wait, they're not actually gonna, wow, okay, that's what we're doing.

Apparently this is happening. gonna wow okay that's what we're doing apparently this is happening and that happens um and and it feels earned like it it doesn't fit like the world all credit to them the world that they've built is one that can facilitate these sorts of like classic sci-fi imagining the american psyche through a different lens to highlight things in our america can can do that and also like robot dogs on venus like that kind of crap um you know it it is it is fascinating and the the the story stuff and all the characters and and a lot of the beats and even like it even has like quieter moments that work better than most games that are mainly quieter moments um it's just like so well done um that that it it makes me a little sad that like i so was not in love

with the rest of it and i had a better time than griffin um i i think that uh once you get um i especially enjoyed it once you get you what the stealth gear thing the thing that like lets you go through tubes has a perk on it called terror billy which is what the germans have um labeled you uh and it gives you like a two second grace period when you get spotted that lets you like hide back or take somebody out with a silenced gun or whatever. Um, and I started enjoying things a lot more after I got that. what, what I don't understand is that something,

something changed, something went wrong between Wolfenstein one and Wolfenstein two or between new order and new Colossus. Cause I thought new order felt fucking fantastic. I thought the, I even had problems with the gunplay and Wolfenstein two, um, where I felt like all, a lot of the guns felt like really weak. I felt like problems with the gunplay in Wolfenstein 2, where I felt like a lot of the guns felt really weak.

I felt like, to use a more, I guess, Destiny or Call of Duty-style term, the time to kill on a lot of the weapons felt kind of bad, and you really start to notice it in these sections where you get ambushed, and now there's like 30 Nazis pouring in to attack you, and each one takes like a little bit longer than you think it should take but that adds up a lot over time

it also seemed like and and i only played it very briefly i was playing it on a stream with pat uh it seems like the auto aim is like almost non-existent no that's interesting i i felt i felt the opposite i felt like the auto really maybe you had it turned off but when if it's turned on it's bad to the point of you are aiming at the enemy 10 yards behind the enemy. Who's right. The fuck in front of you. Oh,

got it. And, and, and Justin mentioned it in passing, but like the no feedback when you're getting hit, like at all is really. Really. It's,

it's really, uh, it's a, it's a fart in the face every time that you get killed because you didn't know oh there was an enemy down the hallway that did have line of sight on me that was hitting me with bullets and i wasn't paying attention to my hud at the bottom of the screen and now i'm dead so good i'm having a lot of fun it's it's i i love the cut scenes and everything justin said about the story and the acting and everything was yep totally on point and i think

the rest of the game is really disappointing that's interesting yeah i haven't really played very much of it but obviously the general consensus does seem to be way more positive than that so i am surprised there's people i'm you i'm never this guy but there's people are giving this game a fucking perfect score and it's like there's so much that that's kind of a video game thing you know like i i i don't want to completely say that i don't believe in other people's opinions yada yada yada but a big but like holy cow do people in video games often really want video games to be great movies and you get something with like a little bit of ambition and a little bit better of a story the david cage bump yeah everything becomes like all but forgiving i think david's i think david's lost the lost the goodwill for that

bump um we should uh we're running out of time so i think we're probably time for that final one okay i feel like every i don't know why russ gets to do this one because i've played the game that russ is about to talk about more than maybe any other game this year tough shit it's a me so so i'm very negative about our other games this month it's kind of funny i was disappointed in a lot of the game i played a little bit of shadow war i thought it was pretty pretty bad play wolfstein didn't like it play a little assassin's creed didn't like it and i was all psyched for October 26th. I got good news. It was supposed to be the second coming but I don't know. Justin, good news. This is going to be a posi one. Yeah.

The final game is Super Mario Odyssey. And I pretty much played until the point where Mario gets his hat destroyed by Bowser and then so you guys should probably fill in the rest. No. So Super Mario Odyssey.

In my mind, it's essentially the first really new Super Mario game since Galaxy 2. I guess you could guard. Are you Galaxy? What are you talking about? Like 3D Mario. I know what you mean. 3D Mario. No, no, no, no.

These are great games but i would say super mario land a super mario 3d land and 3d world do not reinvent what a mario game can be the multiplayer code super mario 3d world is a fucking master mario 2 griffin they did it okay what didn't that have co-op what uh no i guess it didn't what are you talking about multiple? You just had multiple characters. Anyway, sorry. Here's what I'm going to say. It's a Super Mario Odyssey. I think, in my opinion, is a big departure in a lot of ways from, you know, the Mario formula. Obviously, a lot of the similarities are there.

But what makes it, I mean, it's an excellent game. It's really just a tremendously good game from the visual design of all of the kingdom kingdoms they're called yeah um and and just like just being charmed your way through you know collecting all the moons and talking to people and stuff like that i think what what blows me away way more so uh about the game is just that they managed to one-up Super Mario 64 when it comes to showing how to make 3D world traversals super fun and interesting. looked at every movement that mario makes and gave him a level of momentum and fluidity that we really have not seen anywhere near the level that they do in this game it really just it's

because this is a best of in a lot of ways of the different sort of traversal techniques from crouch jumping in 64 all the way up to uh you know the the butt stop stomp jump and the the spinning jump in like everything that mario has ever been able to do in a mario game he is able to do in in odyssey and in addition to that you have the element of the hat which becomes like a huge traversal element where you're using it as a portable springboard and and all that stuff so i think like that for me is what grabbed me initially like having seen the trailers i was like yeah i'm excited it's gonna be great and then the second i started playing i

was like holy shit this is like a mind-blowingly fun game to just fuck around in and just like roll down uh sand dunes and like just screw around in the world it's like insanely fun in the way that like destiny works because the guns feel really good to fire and it's a very hard thing to put your finger on exactly how they pulled that off and why it works same thing here in terms of movement i don't think there's another game out there ever that has nailed 3d movement as good as it's the best feeling platformer of of all time and what's really great about it is while you're dicking around on a sand dune you'll roll into a cactus and then a moon will jump out of it and you're like oh fuck yeah like the world is so dense with things to find and it gives you so many different

avenues to find those things that you that you are on this reward loop that hits you up with dopamine every 20 seconds from and i played this game for probably about 40 hours in maybe the course of a week a lot of late nights playing it and it doesn't stop it just it does not stop with that loop it is constantly constantly constantly rewarding you just for having fun and playing around in this world and seeing like what's around the next corner and it goes even further. Sorry I was just going to say. It goes further than even the like. Oh you roll around in the world and hit the cactus.

The thing that I was so impressed to see. That I guess has been a thing with Mario. From the very beginning. Is it knows that people like to break the game. And it rewards you for doing it. And it's also so quality assured beyond any other game that you can break there are moves that people figure out pretty quickly about how to get to a place that would be otherwise out of reach because of the ways you can manipulate

the jumps and you will get above a stage and while you're walking around on top of the stage you'll find coins because they understood that oh somebody's gonna figure out a way to break it to get up here so let's like reward them for it miyamoto was here first nice try i'm already up here i'm dropping coins laughing and we haven't even talked about the um capture mechanic which i think there is at least for me there are moments when i'm playing a mario game especially the really really big ones like galaxy where you know it sometimes i get like a little burnt out because essentially your move set is pretty standard you you know obviously can get power

of you know like a fire flower or something like that but for the most part using the same moves and so by introducing the capture mechanic of being able to throw your hat onto most of the creatures in the game or at least a lot of them it's constantly being like a it's letting you do things you couldn't do before whether that's running really fast or swimming underwater without dying or whatever it is i mean those are you've just mentioned two of the most uninspired like how about turning it turning into a tank where you can shoot fucking rockets at stuff or turning into a worm where you can extend your body like huge links and wrap around corners and so right so so it's doing all those things but it's also introducing a level of surprise where you know

after you've gotten your first leaf you know what the leaf's gonna do you know what after you've gotten your first leaf, you know what the leaf's going to do. You know what your powers are. But if you walk up to a caterpillar in the middle of the jungle and you throw your hat on him, you have no fucking clue what it's going to do. But you do know it's like a new language or it's a new lens through which to view this world because every time I found a new capture,

you just know there's going to be 30 little moons or 30 secrets or 30 challenge rooms where I'm going to be using this mechanic and new like they exhaust every possible use of every possible ability in the game to some extent or another where you will find a room with this enemy in it. And you're like, oh, oh, oh, I'm supposed to use the worm this way. I didn't even know I could use it that way but okay great yeah and and and just from like a game design standpoint like this is where nintendo shines is like introducing you to a basic mechanic and then just like totally making it like turn on its head um but there are just so many of those creatures that feel as good to control as mario does my favorite in the game is probably this bird yeah what's his name i think it's pickpock or pock pock or pick pick or something like pick

pick whatever he's like this little bird he's got little legs and he runs really slowly but he's got a nose that you can extend it's like a like a giant wooden nose like a pinocchio nose that you can extend and you can use you can use that to poke enemies to kill them or like shoot bombs off in different directions like deflect bombs you can also run up to most walls and extend it and you basically shoved your nose into the wall and then you can flick yourself up to like a different part of the wall and it feels so fucking good anywhere anytime there's flicking in this game sorry that sounds dirty but it feels so fucking good. Anywhere, anytime there's flicking in this game, sorry, that sounds dirty, but it feels fucking spectacular.

Like super fucking good. There's even a boss fight that you fight as that bird and it's so, it's so good. And it's so smart because it helps them to break out of the sort of classic, like a lot of bosses in Mario games, you sort of know the language. They can only change the language of it so much because you know what the sort of vocabulary of the fight is going to be. You know, you have jump and you have ground pound and you have maybe fireballs or whatever. But when they introduce these like boss fight, there's at least two I can think of off the top of my head where boss fights as an animal that you a creature you've captured like you have no idea you're going in completely blind

because like who knows how it's going to take advantage of the of the the new mechanics yeah the other thing i really like about it um is the way it handles the game flow the first time you get through the game so going from level one to the essentially the final kingdom so to speak is really smart because basically they what they do is they're like okay you just got into this new kingdom you need seven moons and once you find seven moons and you kill the boss of this kingdom you can move on and a lot of times in these sorts of games what you'll get is like well you found seven moons moons there's 40 more um and although the game does show you via a list that there are 40 more the game doesn't like shame you into that at least

the first time you're going through the game you're just sort of like experiencing the world and like digesting it but i didn't feel that level of guilt of like okay i'm moving on to a new level but i haven't found everything yet once you you beat the game- That's because you're filled with genuine excitement to see what the next kingdom is going to be. Totally. I cannot, like, every single kingdom is like a total present, wrapped. I just wish it was communicated a little bit better

that you are not even able to get everything sort of your first time through. Yeah. Because I think that that left me with a sort of frustrating, I like to make sure I'm done with a place before I move on. That's sort of my approach to these things normally.

Yeah, sure. And I wish it had been communicated to me that like, that's not even, like you're not going to be able to finish this. So you probably shouldn't do your like, I'm going to try to get everything level, like find tooth comb exploration until you've already finished the game and come back

which people tell you if you ask them that people have played but the game itself doesn't communicate it yeah it doesn't do a great job there's there are a number of moons that are like poorly listed if you're a completionist like you're trying to get all the moons they'll be like well you need to find a hint in this other world and then you can go back to this older world but the moon is listed in the initial world. So there's some weirdness there, if you're a completionist. But the fact that once you beat the game,

and this has become kind of a Mario staple, but this game in particular is definitely to the extreme, you're 50% of the way through, essentially. Because there's so much shit that gets unlocked after you beat the game whether it's like brand new dungeons that you couldn't accept access before you know totally new challenges and almost universally that post game stuff is much harder than the stuff the first time around and like playing the game the first time around was amazing and i loved it it was my favorite time one of my favorite times playing games this year but it was kind of easy and then the post-game stuff uh shows you that you are a child

and this is this is actually what what you know the real shit is culminating in sort of a a final bonus level that you can unlock that is really fucking hard but then when you beat it you feel like the you know the the emperor of video games yeah uh yeah i've not gotten there yet um but it is great um i want to complain about i'm gonna not complain about motion controls oh yeah okay that's that is a fair complaint go for it justin there are really cool moves that are done via motion controls that you don't have like that you just can't do without them there's a cool like throw your hat around in a circle and well that one you can't do without motion controls how do you do that much controls you can actually spin if you use the left analog stick and run it in a circle you can start to spin mario and while he's spinning if you hit

the throw hat button it'll do the circle throw are you kidding like what yeah so you spin mark anyway you can't do it without motion control and so you basically can't there are moves you can't and there's a throw your hat up in the air straight up in the air kind of move yeah that one i can't do that much motion controls and it just it's it's so wild to me one because there are two really good face buttons that are basically just mirrors of the other two and that could have helped with this effort there's no reason it can't all be matched uh put on motion controls it seems so strange to me that one that this information was continuing to be surfaced when I played the only way I played this game and I finished it. And the only way, I mean, I, I finished the first thing I'm digging in for like more moves

and stuff, but, um, I finished it without ever using the motion controls once. Uh, and I, I continued to get that information surface to me, even though I clearly was like not playing that way. And you could theoretically do the motions with your $300 not always in stores console if you want to start shaking that bad boy around, throwing it hither and yon, even that it's like extremely imprecise. You are meant to be doing it with detached Joy-Cons,

which is my number one least favorite way to play the Switch period forever and ever who likes that it's unfathomable to me um but it's really frustrating to that they like it's all so kind and so considered in a way that like literally every other game that we're talking about this month um with the exception of wolfenstein which i think is just has problems but is not necessarily like mean spirited but a lot of the other games we've talked about this month um with the exception of Wolfenstein which I think is just has problems but is not necessarily like mean spirited but a lot of the other games that we've talked about this month where you it's trying to like wring some extra cash out of you in really gross ways like it's such a generous game it's like it only wants to please you it wants to make sure you're

having fun it is thought about everything that you there's not a ledge that is put there for no reason. Like it's all so lovingly made. And then to have like some of the game forced into motion controls just feels like so is so incongruous. They needed you to know what this game was made by Nintendo. There was no half-baked online infrastructure they needed you to know somehow hey nintendo did make this one it just feels very incompatible with the idea of the switch which seems to be like i don't know play it how you want do you want to play it

as a portable game console like go for it and if you look at the stats that came out um about 50 percent of people like the majority of people i should say not 50 the majority of people, I should say not 50%, the majority of people are using it about 50-50. They're using it like some in the dock, some out. And then like 30% of people are using it just out of the dock and just in the dock. So like everybody's using it differently. I don't know why Nintendo felt compelled to sort of impose this mechanic onto you, like to force you to play this this way it seems very strange to me um the other thing i kind of want to talk about may i don't know if this belongs do we want to

talk about you know this probably belongs in our game of the year discussion never mind what is it i'm sorry i'm sorry i was gonna say do we want to start talking? Just, we all appreciate a good mystery. Well, I, okay. I want to, I was going to say, do we want to start talking about this and Zelda?

I'm actually very, very curious to talk about it. Cause a lot of the buzz since this game came out is what I, and I love it. This is the discussion taking place. Which Nintendo switch exclusive is going to be the game of the year is Zelda or Mario. Cause I really,

I feel like it's going to be one of those cake or pie Elvis or Beatles like dichotomies. Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait. Elvis or Beatles? This doesn't belong here. Yeah. No that's never been said. You're the first person in literally the history of the world. I'm not the first person. I'm literally

not the first person to say that. Elvis or Beatles. Rolling Stone or Beatles. Maybe. Elvis or Beatles? I mean it Beatles? Maybe. Elvis or Beatles? I guess you're asking at that point, are you very old? Are you a very old person? I mean, there are a lot of slate articles about Elvis Presley or the Beatles. Who is

better? Okay, so I still think Elvis is one of the best games ever made. But we shouldn't do this here. But I do think this is better. We're not going to do it here. This is better than Destiny 2. Yes. Absolutely. Right? I do want to knock one more very small thing is that as i'm going through now and trying to get 500 moons which unlocks essentially the last kingdom of the game 500 yeah i know settle down griffin i still have unanswered emails from me like what are you doing with your life oh collecting all the moons okay great some of the like post-game moon collection stuff can feel a little not super magical um i'll give you an example there's like five of the moons that use this kind of lame um

uh what is it called a slot machine mechanic that just like shouldn't be in the game it takes fucking 10 seconds to do it takes 10 seconds it should i shouldn't be doing it it's not magical i shouldn't be doing it it's very pointless i would say they are awesome yeah I would just say they are they are those are few and far between but it can feel a little grindy at times yeah otherwise I think it's I think it's an excellent game also New Donk City is the best fucking area that's

ever been in a Mario game come at me it is I would play a whole Mario game just in New Donk City don't fucking try to step up. It's the best ever, and I don't want to hear any of your shit. But in Super Mario Sunshine, I really... No, New Donk City's the best. It has real human people, and they're just all around.

You can step on their fucking heads. The only problem I have with New Donk City is it didn't have 15 uninterrupted minutes of Mario just like, What? What? Who? How? like what what who how and poor pauline who's like this is a day walker halfway between the mario and human being aesthetic oh yeah i didn't think about that that she does not really visually coincide with everyone else that lives there so wait this might be this is a new quarter right

october november december is the fourth quarter of the year so this does not unseat d2 i guess this is destiny 2 lives on the question that we have currently and it's gonna be tough in november and december to unseat mario uh the question currently for game of the year is mario player in its battlegrounds legend of zelda and destiny destiny destiny too and if you wanted to get snippy about it player knowns battlegrounds should realistically be up against mario in this quarter because it's technically coming out in december like if you want the 1.0 bullshit we can do whatever we want so it'll it'll maintain its position so but is that that's right right those are the four yeah but there we will also see we shouldn't we should mention it's not just going to be four games in the game of the year

thing we will bring back a bunch stupid favorites like persona 5 um but uh so i'm looking ahead to the rest of the year to kind of see i don't know i don't know what we have going on it's a little it's a little it's i'm excited for uh pokemon ultra sun ultra moon because that the pokemon sun and moon came out right when my baby was born and so i barely played it at all so i'm excited for that amazing so call of duty yeah yeah i already reviewed that one okay but we'll talk about it next month call of duty octodad's coming to the switch that's fun that's what's going on with november november used to be the shit and i guess everybody's just moved on the battlefront is a big game yeah star wars for speed i can't believe i didn't even realize there was a need

for speed i can't believe i'm saying this out loud, but L.A. Noire is coming out this month. HD remix. It's pretty good. Coming to Switch. L.A. Noire. Man, okay. I hope they're testing the waters, because that would be hysterical.

Did they make that better, or is it just still kind of a bad game in a lot of ways? I do kind of want to know how it looks in hd it was good technology yeah like battlefront and call of duty i look to be about it um that's rough it's gonna be a rough rough november and then december like rocket league on switch i mean yeah ports on port i mean animal we're gonna talk about animal crossing next month at length yeah um you know they are still in, so there's really no telling. I feel kind of guilty for dumping on it because they could still fix this shit.

I'm also mostly salty just because I haven't been able to open my friends list, and it's a sort of very social online game, and it's like, oh, is that? Are you going to say mine? Because I tried to get too many friends. It's your fault. It's your fault. Skyrim, also. I'd love to bring the Skyrim yeah skyrim vr or skyrim switch which you know i'm gonna get into that yeah i mean i know i am too uh and pokemon sure we can get we're getting

november together december still like no no no no dead rising 4 frank's big package a real game that's coming out oh no edf5 apparently chris plant uh what about that um while we're talking about this horizon zero dawn is that is that the dlc you just reviewed that didn't it is that next month you can read it on polygon.com is that out now here's here's the great thing about this DLC. Maybe this is just for Griffin. He was a sad, mean boy who gave up on the game too early. If you haven't played the game, the DLC is, I think, fantastic. It slots into the game as part of the story. And I don't know.

It kind of digs into something that I think is interesting about the story. And I don't know, it kind of digs into something that I think is interesting about the story. Unfortunately, if you have finished the game, it doesn't slot in well at all. And it's basically a lot of the things that were frustrating about the game all in one spot. And you have to go back and learn how to play it, which maybe Griffin, this is I don't know if this is why you bounced off. back and learn how to play it which maybe griffin this is i don't know if this is why you bounced off but it is talk about games that are complicated and have annoying menus uh it's this game the inventory system stinks yeah that was my main rub yeah and having like if i like had a full inventory system and you come back and have to you can't remember what to get rid of. So it's just a headache. The most annoying thing is they clearly know this stinks.

So they made one of the ability upgrades expanding your inventory by 20%. Unfortunately, you have to earn, I think, like six, five or six ability unlocks before you can even do that. So at that point, it's like well great now i'm near the end of this uh i'm glad i have this ability that i guess would be great if i was you know playing through the rest of the game but having finished everything this ability is essentially useless for me when i need it most uh yeah but wow very pretty uh the story and writing in those games is great ashley birch's

performance is like a real standout and a scene where i don't feel like there are a ton of standout voice performances for the main characters i think they tend to be a little dull with everybody around them being interesting it honestly sounds like this is a good reason for me to go give it a second chance and me alone because i didn't play a lot of it. Why are we talking about this? It comes out in November and we don't have games. Oh, no, I'm sorry. We should go. I did bad. You're killing me.

All right. So anyway, that's going to do it for the besties. Be sure to join us again next month for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!