The Besties - Returning to a Life of Crime in Saints Row

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

Crime. Crime never changes. But the perps do, so let's meet the new squad in the Saints Row reboot! Also, what games do we like that you probably despise? Games discussed: Saints Row, Fallout New Vegas, Madden, SimCity, Heavy Rain, Dark Souls 2, Multiversus, Dark Cloud 2, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Ultimate Chicken Horse 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!

Griff, what's the longest you've gone, Griffin, without growing a beard? Once you're a new beard guy like me, you just want everybody to be a beard guy in this itchy hill. Yeah. So I was curious, what's the longest you've gone? You remember me, college me, and how whenever you and me would go on our walks in the city, and people would point at the two of us and said, in the city and people would point at the two of us and said there's justin mcelroy from uh from joystick and that's his pervert brother that's usually the reception that that beard that that beard got well what's the how long

did you let it go that's that's the that's the beard thing yeah how long did you let it go college college i let it go i let it go college so and that seems like a a pretty good time yeah but maybe because i i did it i tried to do a college growth and it wasn't great so maybe your um i don't know hormones or things and. Could be a hormone thing. No, it's better now. As someone who has had a beard for much longer than any of you, you're thinking about it all

wrong. The beard is not about how it looks. That's what you think as a beard newcomer. The beard is really about the smell. You have to season it. Because a beard takes on all stink. Okay, this is a question of sillage.

I understand now. It's a scent question. Sillage I can fuck with. So, you know, if you eat a lot of spaghetti and meatballs, you're gonna carry a little bit of that you know, it's a me flavor. Yeah. If you eat a lot of, you know, like, yeah yeah some like Midwest hard tacos you know you're

gonna get some of that grocery store taco seasoning stink yeah it just in that is that's what people are you again they think they're looking at it but really what they're doing is they're connecting with you on a stank level people you know what people forget about too is seasoning you have to put like a tablespoon of oil in there and then get it super super hot so it's like smoking yeah and then it'll sort of like nothing will stick to it at that point it'll be it's amazing it's well worth the investment and then never wash it after that obviously to wash it after that. Obviously. My name is Justin McElroy,

and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I played a bunch of games this week. My name is Russ Frustick, and I know the best game of the week. Was that a baby sleeping, Russ Frustick? My name is Russ Frustick, or was that regular? He is actually sleeping at the moment, so yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He won't crank it. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Besties. It's a video game club. Just by listening, you are a member. We like to talk about new games, the hot new releases on this show, and we have one this week, a pretty big one, hotly anticipated and critically conflicted. It's Saints Row, but Chris Plant, there was already a Saints Row. Saints Row, the new one, the 2022 one, is a reboot of the franchise that ran for four entries and like a spinoff and a DLC bonus. It's kind of like a Rockstar, Grand Theft Auto game,

but you know, like, well, the old one was more spicy and the new one is less spicy. Less spicy. You'll hear all about that intriguing entry and more on this week's besties right after this. You know, it didn't occur to me until recently. Could it be saints row?

That's interesting. That's interesting. What a great point. What a salient and great point to start a discussion on. Could it be saints row? We're going to have a Saints Row. We're going to have a Saints Row about Saints Row here. Although I feel like I've been, you know, keeping up today on your social media output, y'all, and chatting about this.

I feel like we're, I don't know. Actually, Griffin is the one that I have not heard anything on. That is true. But let's, can we set it up first? Can I set it up real quick first? Okay, so Saints Row the first was a pretty bad ripoff of Grand Theft Auto. This came out in like 2005 or something like that.

Very long ago. It was like if you took Grand Theft Auto and you're like, what if Austin Powers wrote it? Saints Row the second was funny. They leaned into the humor, right? It was funnier and it worked better. And if you ask some people, it was like the real beginning of this franchise, right?

You don't see a lot of the DNA in the first Saints Row game. Saints Row the third, things got absolutely buck wild. They really leaned into being the silly one uh well and by silly you mean like you got a dildo bat yeah but also you have like dubstep yeah exactly it was like it was really goofy there was like a lot of puerile humor and stuff but it's it was its heart was in the right place if that may it wasn't mean spirited it was pretty goofy yeah well i think one started out max mean spirited and really really like offensive and trashy and like bad south park humor right and then they spent the rest of this version of the series trying to both rub off that grunge

and then replace it with like kind of this like millennial progressivism. Yes and that okay that gave birth to Saints Row 4 which was even bigger the scale was like absolutely off the rails

superpowers were a big part of you were the president of the united states you fought aliens there was like no limit to it the world blew up like in the first minute right yeah yeah yes and then the then there was gat out of hell which was dlc spinoff and then a real a real bummer a real i had to review this with polygon it's called agentsents of Mayhem. Yeah, I forgot that even happened. Yeah, you should. It's in the Saints Row universe, which is the same universe.

This is a Volition game. Volition is also notable for Red Faction, which is like an open world Mars action game. They are in the same universe. That's why you quit, right? You played that and you're like, you know what? I'm done. I played that.

That was like the last review I did. I was like, I actually can't do that. That was a terrible, I mean, truly charmless. Like I can remember few worse experiences. That one dead Island thing and everything on connect.

But here we are. Saints row has been absent for, I don't know what, six years, seven years, eight years. It's been a while, I don't know, what? Six years? Seven years? Eight years? It's been a while. I think almost 10 years since Saints Row 4.

Yeah, we're not counting Agents of Mayhem. But here we are with a reboot. Okay, there we go. I did the setup. Good job. So the thing you're going to want to know right off the bat is that the game really dials back on the totally, totallylandish stuff but there is still a lot of outlandish stuff the degree of how outlandish gets is like on the level i would say of like

fast and the furious but it does not do the like fantasy outlandishness stuff so you're driving a tank on a runaway train but you're not you know flying through the air with superpowers you're driving a tank on a runaway train but you're not you know flying through the air with superpowers you're not growing to 100 feet tall and eating the train like a french fry exactly in the next game maybe but for right now no so that was the big they kind of like pulled back because i think they probably realized they wrote themselves into a corner of how outlandish it was but the other big change is that they excised i think a lot of the uh like very puerile like sex stuff i'll give you an example of like the stuff that is not in the game anymore two two examples one there was a wendy's knockoff in the original um saints row that was called freckle bitches it's just i didn't write it but that is in the game

that is now called here you say it is a real delight yeah it is now called fbs so that's just one example they're clearly pulling away from that another example there was a mode in saints row the third called i'm sorry for this it's called horde mode but it's spelled W-H-O-R-E-D, Horde Mode. Those are the sorts of jokes that are no longer in Saints Row. And quite honestly, I'm super cool with it. That's great. Yeah, that's just fine.

It's just that it wasn't funny. Like people are making this into like a culture war thing. Those are not funny jokes. It's just like boring. It's not funny. Stupid. But there is also it wasn't this is going to sound like a an apologist position for that shit which is

is not true there was another type of comedy that was present in the saints row games which was just absurdist sure stuff and and that's where you get into the, I forget the name of it, but there was like a television show that was basically like Marathon Man with this big cat guy. Ginky? Dr. Ginky?

Dr. Ginky, yeah. And so you could get like a big truck with Dr. Ginky's giant cat head on it that you would drive around and it was just like a rolling tank and it was completely ridiculous. Professor Genki's super ethical reality climax. Yeah, there's stuff like that.

And the stuff like, and I should also say I have not, maybe this stuff is in the Saints Row and I haven't gotten to it yet. Similar modes. Yeah, there are modes. Meditations on those themes. Yeah.

But they are not, it has been my experience so far with Saints Row that it has also lost a lot of that absurdist stuff, which in my opinion, when you peel that away from Saints Row, it kind of loses a lot of what made it memorable in my mind. It's there. It's just, I hate to say, it's not subtle. Like there's like a giant comb in the desert that's combing the desert.

And we love space balls around here like for sure yeah we're wild about i mean there's more it's more than that so there's also like uh this has been in the game since the since the original but there's a um uh insurance fraud mode where you basically curl yourselves at hurl your body into cars to like earn insurance money and if you do well in that mode you enter like a in i forget what it's called focus mode whatever it is where your body explodes off of cars and goes flying 50 feet in the air and you angle your body so that it lands on other cards which also explode so there is outrageousness in this game it is not a grounded game it is just slightly more grounded than it was previously if i could if i briefly as somebody who has like i'm a really big saints row fan i i really do love

this entire franchise i've played all of them yeah um i if i could talk real briefly i'd like to start with the things that i really love about this the things that i think are so smart first the the main thing that i think is genius about this is that in in the previous games games, it was always a little bit of a rags to riches thing. It would always be like somebody has messed up your shit so bad and you have to rebuild it or you have nothing and you're starting fresh, whatever. This is doing that, but those games would quickly sort of like lose touch with anything that you could sort of relate to, right? Because it's all like demigod, crime boss, run the city, all that stuff. What is so smart about this is that they make the boss and his – he has a core crew of three friends. They make the boss into – like are the scenes outside of the main gameplay stuff.

It's very domestic is the best way that I can describe it. And the boss is the character that you play as. Sorry, yeah, thanks, Playa. So you are forming this gang with your friends, but you never stop being friends. And there's really great interplay between Nina and DJ Kev and, help me. I'm spacing on his third friend.

Eli. Eli. Thank you. And they all have different areas of expertise, but the scenes between them are really kind and warmhearted and funny and never, and really helped to keep you connected to the core, like emotional beats. Like even when you're you know running the

city or whatever you still have to like stop and get donuts and there's scenes where you're like calling people to ask what you know what they want on their donuts and sometimes it's just like conversations about like stuff they grew up with like real human actual human exchanges and i would say just the stuff that like the game kicks off and the idea is that all through all four of you the boss and and your friends are in are basically like low on the on the rung of these various gangs so you're so you're all in different gangs but then you all share an apartment together so you go back to the apartment and you like complain oh you know your gang was a total pain in the ass today and that stuff is funny just because it feels like you would you know talk to roommates about how annoying your

boss was today at work exactly so it feels very grounded and like i you know i know some people disagree as to whether the writing lands from for me, I cared about all of those characters in ways that, quite honestly, Johnny Gat, even though he's very funny, it never really felt like a character to me. Yeah, I think there seems to be a big divide between people in our generation and younger folks. I'm curious if that has to do with like gen z versus millennial preferences because the resident gen z here i can speak to yeah sure well this this has like to me a

very um what's his name michael schur like parks and recreation vibe it's very positive the the humor comes from you know like, like all of these people, they don't really have conflicts with each other. They have conflicts externally, right? Right. And I get a sense from the reviews that I've read that are out there, especially from younger critics, is that like this is cringe, the writing is bad, that the whole game is out of touch, and then there's the issues with the mechanics and the bugs,

which are separate from that. But I don't think, I think that frustrates me only in that I don't think there's a world in which this writing is bad. Like, as writing. No. It's objectively good.

It may not click for you, but it's very well done. Yes. For a video game especially, there's like a level of craft here that I really like. And I think, I mean a level of craft here that I really like. And I think, I mean, this is the game that I feel like I wanted from Saints Row all along, which was a game that I was not incredibly embarrassed by,

and a game that was just kind of like a leisurely open world distraction. The only problem is I wanted that game like 10 years ago, and now it feels a little weird in 2022 because it's taken so long to get here um the other thing i will say also as i the writing the all that stuff i really love i also love that this game is bending over backwards to make sure that you're having a fun time any uh almost any time in the gameplay when when you could almost okay almost any time in the gameplay when like something could uh be annoying they kind of like skirt around the edges of it and in in and like vehicle physics are the ones that really spring to mind you you

cannot like i never wrecked a car it doesn't happen like your cars get blown up if like there are 50 tanks trying to blow you up otherwise you're basically playing with hot wheels like on your mom's carpet like it you are tearing through it doesn't matter your car every once in a while you'll flip in just the wrong way that the car lands on its roof and it's like okay this one's shot but But other than that, and you can call for a new car that appears instantly right there. It's very like, oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Here, let us fix that for you, sir. But a lot of this, the combat is like not that challenging. There's a lot of, you get a lot of skills, which is a fun idea of like skills you can map onto uh i think you hold right bumper and then press one of the face buttons but they're like you know skills that you charge through combat there's like a quick takedown that kind of stuff but it's very i think it's i find it to be very forgiving um and and really encouraging to like experimentation there's another little thing that i love by the way if there's a canister or something that can explode you just press a button and you shoot it rather than trying to target it

i stuff like that i think it's just really really smart yeah i i agree with all that i i also like the car combat there's like a shunt where you can basically hit x and push in the direction of another car and it like does damage to that other car uh which is very smart i think the yeah the minute to minute like when you're in gunplay doesn't really change all that much over the course of it um which can be frustrating i also for what it's worth played on easy because i play all volition games on easy because i enjoy like being a total god in these games and don't think that the combat has ever been particularly tight and not really the point, in my opinion. Right.

So I just wanted to say that. But I also wanted to mention, and Justin and Griffin, you guys, are certainly the experts on this. Serious question. Is there a better character creator that has ever been made than this character creator that's such a subjective i'm asking you two you two are experts i mean yes i believe what do you think is a better character like in terms of options what do you think is a better character

creator in terms of options yeah uh i mean i don't know. I think the FromSoft games have let you make them pretty nasty. But this game allows that too. You can make them. You also have to understand that Griffin and I have a very particular set of qualifications when it comes to character creators. We are not looking for necessarily beautiful realistic creations. No, I know.

But just scrolling through the user-made, you can make true horrible beasts of nature. These are not, you can do grounded realism, someone made Shaggy that looks exactly like Shaggy, but you can also do total freak of nature stuff, and you add that to the sheer number of clothing options, and you could change your skin into mirrors.

And like, it's, it's, it is outrageous how good this character creator is in my opinion, much smaller thing. Um, I, I really,

uh, I really appreciate that this game lets me, um, make a bigger character that who is, who is bigger physically. Yeah. I feel like St. Thoreau has, has usually been pretty good about that who is bigger physically. Yeah. I feel like Saints Row has usually been pretty good about that.

They are, yeah. That triangle physique slider thing. Yeah, it's very rare to find a character creator where I can actually see myself represented in a way that feels... I sent a picture of my dude to you guys. It's not that far off.

If you blur your eyes a little bit it looks like it looks like me in the game it's wild the first part of the video was you from behind and i immediately was like oh you're in the game which is wild that's just i've not even seen your face yeah it's also me off you you toss in the fact that like there are six fully voiced i'm sorry it might be eight actually fully voiced options for the main character which and i i did this the first uh i think it was a voice actor number two and the performance was spectacular i don't know about the other voices i can't speak to them but like voice number two uh was just like a stellar either masculine or feminine sounding it was a feminine

uh voice yeah that's i think actually the actress is named erica lindbeck i actually looked it up because i was like who is this person she's done a ton of uh uh anime and other voice acting work so i wasn't uh surprised that that she brought a lot of uh effort to it but you know across the board i think they spent a lot of time making sure that, like, the character you were making could in some way speak for who you are either in the game or in real life. Like, you could do something wacky or you could do, like, a grounded recreation of yourself, which is very, very cool. who have followed this game on the internet, like anywhere, are probably like, hey, this is interesting because the reviews have utterly buried this game.

Why? It's been pretty wild. Whose intro music is that? It's Griffin. Hey, everyone. I think this game's just kind of okay. I'm not as enamored with it as my three other co-hosts here.

Yeah, for what it's worth, I don't think it's a game of the year or anything like that, but go on, Griffin. It's just, I have problems with open world games that the only way that I get over it is with certain types of innovations that i have not seen in the genre before and like justin said this game very wisely smooths off a lot of the rough edges and that is fantastic to me uh but at the same time it is still a lot of driving around in the desert and then shooting at the same kind of gangs full of sort of spongy people uh a lot and i i i agree with a lot of the positive points you guys have said but for me that is just not nearly enough for me to want to continue playing it when i i am a few hours in and have already hit a point where it feels like awfully repetitive.

There's also, there's some technical issues that we kind of glossed over. Yeah, no, we were gonna dive in. Just a quick list. Sometimes the music stops. Sometimes the sound effects stop. Sometimes those two things happen at the same time. Sometimes your control of the character stops. You're just in a shootout

and then it's like this big bombastic action scene and then there's no sound whatsoever sometimes like full mechanics stop working oh you know the fun one i had i have any time that i get into a helicopter my view this is gonna be really hard to explain but my view uh becomes the view uh from the bottom of the helicopter zoomed to the ground, like looking at the ground from the helicopter's point of view. So all I see is like eight pixels of like the ground below me.

And then there are missions where you have I did a mission where I had to pick up a car with the helicopter and smash it into stuff and I was literally like using the mini map to figure out where i was it took me a half hour is miserable if there's an actual mission in the like like toward later on that's gonna require that i'm gonna be absolutely sunk i don't know what i'll

do so i played it on xbox series x because i was running to issues on the epic game store pc version um i weirdly and i read a lot of reviews and watched a lot of video the number of bugs that i saw mentioned or captured on film i never ran into and i think i know why is because the only way that i was able to run the game at a steady 60 frames a second was by playing in 1080p mode which is unfortunate for running on a next-gen console. You shouldn't have to run the game in 1080p because it does look, like, not great. But I feel like maybe when people, like, went up to 1440 or even 4K, like, all sorts of other issues started cropping up because the memory was whatever it was so even though i didn't run into a

lot of issues it is definitely a drag that i'm playing on a next gen console and can only run it at 1080p it's wild you start getting weird ones like yeah half of my life bar would disappear and not like one end or the other but like every other every other bar of it like uh there's a lot there's a lot a lot i don't know i mean justin uh if you felt this way but like when cyberpunk launched it was just like the gameplay was kind of miserable and also the bugs made it even more miserable and here i don't i mean the gameplay is fine like i enjoy it so it wasn't wasn't like a stopping point for me even if some weird shit happened occasionally is that how you felt it wasn't i mean that one that i played which was mission critical yeah it was almost that no sure almost

that for me yeah uh it didn't quite get there because i was able to figure it out but like there is enough where i i mean it's tough right are they gonna put the resources in to fixing it i don't i don't yeah no if it's gonna be a big enough hit to where they can justify spending the time but there is a i mean there is a lot most of them are it kind of in the spirit of the thing right it's a like cafe like yeah that's funny like the the bug happened or whatever but some of them are like really very frustrating yeah it is pretty funny game is not funny this is the second time that you have yeah exactly right yeah no nothing is funny the seventh time you hear it yeah except for when that guy hits the other guy and says oh

fuck i can't believe you've done this that's funny i it the uh the graphics are also like great okay the poppin were you not having issues with pretty righteous poppin because anytime i got a vehicle that went over 60 miles an hour it it felt it felt pretty rough i did not i was actually uh i actually, this is one of the few games that I like turning the HUD off and just like cruising around because the city life is super dynamic. There's lots going on. It's really interesting. The lighting effects are great. I don't know. I am playing on a fairly new computer, so I don't know what you were enjoying it on, but that is definitely, that was my experience is that i really love the look i agree the lighting i agree is gorgeous my experience was the city was felt very empty and i yes griff and i ran into the pop-in with other cars but also the fact that like very few pedestrians on the street and i went back and played sans for the third just as a point of comparison and it definitely feels much more dense in terms of cars pedestrians etc and so yeah i mean i i agree uh you know it the issues the technical issues especially feel pretty inexcusable especially when you're charging

60 for a game uh and trying to like relaunch a thing it's also worth noting this game was delayed by six months so god knows what it looked like six months before the delay yeah and yet all of that stuff which bothered me i still like i beat the game i actually like and i had no reason to beat the game and i it it got me to beat the game for i don't know what it was but it something carried me through this game i feel like i maybe messed up the balance of the side activities real quick i'd like to touch on because there's like a bajillion of them yeah um you get criminal ventures and then each of the criminal ventures is like a side quest i guess you'd call it businesses

that you're opening up around town exactly right so you need to uh there is one that's like a city wide uh larp basically where they give you nerf weapons and you have to do battle against other clans and this big role-playing type thing that i think is probably the highlight for me i think that that was like the funniest and best realized yeah i agree with that some of them are are uh pretty there's a lot of these ventures that are dependent on you driving well like there's a lot of them that are dependent on like drive to this place and then you know do this thing or like drive over here and then take this guy's stuff and then drive away and like it's it I not a lot that are built around like actually on foot stuff that you can accomplish um

which I I was not you know wild about there were a couple that I thought were interesting there was one where you were given these like weird clues and to like find a piece of broken glass in a swimming pool and when you found that it like unlocked like, unlocked a wild, like, texture that you could use for any of your clothing or skin or whatever it was. So some of them are weird. Some of them are, like, dull, and they're just like, steal this car and drive it back. So they are a very hit or miss. I agree with that. It is nice to have that, like, passive income where, like, eventually you get to a point where you're earning a million dollars an hour

and money ceases to mean anything. You just buy everything. There's none that you're forced to do. That's not true. You do need to do, I think, six of them to complete the game. You have to finish the whole thing? I think you do need to do about half of them.

You do need to open them. You need to become the boss. You don't need the money, but it's and then you i mean you need the money you know you don't need the money but it's nice to have it if you're gonna be playing there's so many good things to buy in the game there are so many items in the game it is i mean justin you said the city felt dynamic i agree with that and that there are fewer people fewer vehicles but where people are is more interesting so there's like way more shops. The type of shops that you come across are like,

you know, there might be the traditional like guns and ammo store, but then there'll be like an art school and you can go buy, you know, personalized t-shirts from this booth on like the quad. I made like 12 or 13 different outfits that just like using the variety of things that you could get and i would like switch depending on how i felt it like honestly was one of the motivating factors for me it was just like oh wow new clothing and i'm gonna see how this works um we have quite a

bit of stuff to talk about on the other side but i i think the consensus here is, hey, some of us enjoy this game a bit more than the rest of the world might. Whatever the case, though, it is really buggy right now. Yes. I would recommend even people who are interested to wait a month or two. You'll probably get the game for cheaper at that point anyway and hold off until then. Just because there are so many good games out right now it's a really tough thing to ask people to play a game where they could run into like a game busting bug i agree yeah that part is that is tough the the bugs are the the

one thing where i really feel like this is um oh if I could say one of the things I do like about it, they've switched out some of the gangs in this one. And one of the three like main gangs is actually a, a PMC, which I think is kind of an interesting idea. It really makes it make a lot more sense that they're showing up to like fight against it in the previous games. It started to feel weird when you're like shooting electricity from your

fingertips and a guy shows up in a volvo with a pistol and he's like i'm gonna put a stop to this and i don't think you are this is not very well balanced but like the pmc has like you know a uh huge tanks they have hover bikes a lot of hover bikes and hoverboards and uh footballs that blow you like can can blow you away stuff like that but um yeah i don't know i really like it's hard is really in the right place it's just really uh, footballs that blow you like can, can blow you away, stuff like that. But, um, yeah, I don't know. I really like it's hard is really in the right place. It's just really the,

the, the bugs are, are, and you know what I will say also, I think it could have used a bit of editing. I think, and not in terms of the, the,

the script wise, but like in terms of the activities in the world, I feel like there could have been more done to make the fewer better like missions rather than and all the missions are actually pretty good. But like the ventures and stuff, I wish those have been a bit more rewarding and, you know, have fewer of them. Yeah. I don't know. We'll talk more about bad games that we like right after this. Well,

fellas, this, we used to talk about Justin McElroy games when I worked at Polygon. People used to call them, you know, wounded puppy games. A lot of them would happen to come out of Eastern Europe. Things are deeply flawed that had a lot of heart in them,

a lot of passion, a lot of interesting choices. And we want to talk about games that we felt that way about. What's the worst game you've ever loved? Yeah, well, the game that jumped to my mind, what reminded me of this moment with Saints Row was Fallout New Vegas, which if you've been following the internet,

the fact that Fallout Newgas is still relevant today really goes to show you how um beloved and well crafted it is but when it came out it was totally shredded because rightfully it was a total technical mess it crashed it had bugs all over the place you know it was an open world bethesda published rpg uh so not a total shock but it would always kind of viewed at least at launch as like oh this side offshoot uh game uh but in hindsight it actually i think is probably the best of the uh 3d fallout games and uh the writing is spectacular the like number of options you have are spectacular but again if you go back and look at the reviews i i haven't looked at metacritic recently but i would imagine

those earlier reviews were consistently negative because of all the technical issues um but man that game totally rocks i have a lot of unpopular, I would say, Final Fantasy thoughts. Like Final Fantasy XII is one of my favorites, and that's kind of the black sheep for a lot of folks who have played this series. That's the one where you set up tactics and everything happened in real time. A lot of people didn't even fucking- It was like an MMO, right? It had that feel a little bit more. Yeah.

Oh, right. It had that feel a little bit more. Yeah. And I love Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Advance 2, which a lot of people see as just kid, dumbed-down versions of the original Final Fantasy Tactics. The one that really came to mind was a game that I think we probably got early, and I played, and i was like this fucking rules i can't put this game down and then reviews dropped for it and just tore it apart with sim

city the i forget what year oh the always online version the always online one which like for sure i think a lot of this was when like uh drm and like consumer uh rights were kind of in this in the spotlight more so than even than they are now and sim city came out and was the first sort of major game i can think of like this that was like you have to have an internet connection in order to play it so so intense as the drm and i think a lot of that colored the the reception to it but also like there were certain annoying things about that game as your city scaled up that did that were not streamlined uh but as somebody who like didn't have a lot of experience with city builder games like this in the past uh i thought it was so fucking rad and

i could not get enough of you know micromanaging my city and seeing what kind of you know what kind of city it could grow into whether it's like a futuristic metropolis or a dumpy garbage town uh i i i could not put that game down and then reviews dropped for it and were so bad. And that was the first time where I felt like, whoa, I'm out of touch. Well, the other issue, if I recall,

was that the servers were like totally fucked at launch. Yeah. The fact that you had to be always online basically prevented people from being able to play it. Yeah, that was one of those things that also made you feel like the game itself

was gaslighting you because it wasn't an issue before the game was out and only like, you know, the people with review code were playing it. And then- That was the first one we ever shifted the score on at Polygon. Yeah, that's right because- And then it introduced the sort of like review bumping

up and down, like that was the first one that we did that for. And it was a the sort of like review bumping up and down like that was the first one that we did that for and god it was such a mess it was such a mess and people were like did you see polygon change review score and it's like well yeah because the core experience of the game is different than it was when we were playing it as it turns out once you have more than a dozen people playing this game, it doesn't fucking work anymore. So like, yeah, the, the, the game changes,

the score changes. That didn't seem so outrageous, but it was a, it was a big, a big to do, but yeah, man, I really liked Sim City.

I, I, you know, didn't stick with it terribly long, but I, I, I was sort of shocked at how much people hated that game when when review scores started to drop my taste is like impeccable you know what i mean like i'm always right yeah i mean i can't

think of any i keep going back to fresh six fallout new vegas thing because like i just wonder how i could hope to evaluate the worth of fallout new vegas a full price game that's practically identical both graphically and mechanically to another game that was released two years ago how could i tell you whether or not it's an insult that you're being asked to pay 60 for a game that's so technically deficient that it scarcely feels past the beta stage luckily now who's whose review are you putting on blast right now this is just a macaroy baby okay that's what that's what was it which one seven out of ten seven out of ten count it sorry todd you should have showed up to the office a bit more my friend ducked in on your pals see how obsidian was doing with that one matthew perry

was in it need i say more okay um that's the opposite of what we're talking about it is uh that's yeah i don't know were you into like uh like a like a deadly premonition wasn't that nope don't like this justin all of your fmv games yeah no one likes like everything you like issue that's a taste issue yeah that's just a taste issue that we're running it you know what i will say actually this one is one i you know you do this a long time i i've been reading video game magazines since i was you know since they existed i've i worked in video games for you know i started in like 2000 when i was 16 so it was like a long long time ago um younger 13 a baby boy thank you i've been doing this for a very long time this is the first one not the first but one of the the few that really really really

surprised like i really did not expect the critical reaction that this guy's got it's sitting at a 63 right now on on metacritic for whatever value yeah i was expecting like a low b it felt yeah that's what it feels like a low b it does feel i i'd be interested to see where it goes from here right like this kind of feels like the one bite at the apple that you get on rebooting this franchise correct i mean yeah i mean embracer does have a lot of money but they also lost an astonishing amount of market cap on the day this launched all the reviews dropped so this might be it for saints row yeah i would not which is really sad for me because there aren't a lot of open world games that aren't like

totally nihilistic and depressing and like oh this guy's dying of cholera let's play that for 20 hours like that bums me out that there isn't necessarily a waiting in the wings a quote fun open world game right i my my very quick critically patented game is just madden every year and i and it's like it's so toxic that even saying it here i know that there are people who are listening who are like, ugh, like immediately just anger. It brings out such a rage in people. And I think it's like, part of it is the sports ball mentality.

I think part of it is like, yeah, it really struggles to be a different game every year. There is so many reasons not to like Madden. But the fact is, I love football. I love watching football. And I love football. I love watching football. And I love now that I can play Madden on my Steam Deck.

It just about is the happiest I can be. Like watching a game and playing some Madden. It's nice. That's why it sells a gajillion copies because it's still very fun. It just, yeah, it could be better. I'm also going to say, and this one's going to really lower my stock. Most David Cage games I'll fuck with.

And we can say what we want to say. Beyond Two Souls was the only one where I was like, this is irredeemably bad. The only one? Oh my God, Griffin. Are you serious? We might need to end the podcast. But Heavy Rain? Sure.

Heavy Rain was a miserable slob. Sign me up for more Heavy Rain. No, what was it? I gotta know. What about Heavy Rain? Grab pure attention. I thought it was neat. I thought it was neat.

You like making eggs? Was that it? So the first time, when we played Indigo Prophecy, aka Fahrenheit, when that first came out, not a great game, but it starts you out in a bathroom where you have just murdered somebody and you have to hide the crime before a cop comes in.

Like those games, while the execution is bad, the ideas are very cool. Yeah, they need someone. I always felt like David Cage was missing his like. Writer? He was missing his. Conscience? No, his John Carmack.

You know what I mean? He was missing the person that could push against his interesting ideas to help him figure out. It's so bananas how many swings this cat keeps getting. He has gotten a lot. Did y'all see the Detroit Become Human Naked Gun mashup? Yeah, it's very good. Somebody spent a ton of time cutting Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun

into Detroit Become Human, which I cannot imagine in 2022 why you would do that and yet leslie nielsen and national delight i mean really really good stuff i have never replayed one of those games but i will always play them just to see what the like what the i what the ideas are and what kind of like set pieces that they have like the very first first scene in Detroit where you're like the cyber detective who's trying to like talk the android down from the ledge and there's like a million different ways that it can go. Like that is a really neat and memorable setup

and the execution is flawed, is extraordinarily flawed and the behind the scenes stuff happening at what is the name of that? Oh, Quantic Dream. Also bad, but like i also very bad also very bad but i chris chris do you remember when we were in john do you remember that year that we were on the bomb cast at e3 and it was like you and me and austin i think i was there too yeah and, and Griffin. And there was several other very funny people. And we all got talking about David Cage and his like all doing our best wildly, wildly terrible David Cage impressions.

Those are good times. Have videos on the internet. Go watch that. Did we talk about my heavy rain demo in the shower scene? Have we not talked about this on the show? This is probably one of those like i keep it quiet because it's not great i so when i first saw heavy rain i saw it with um my my buddy tracy john who no longer works in the games industry and you'll understand why in about five seconds and we go into this like boardroom in Soho in New York, like the least video game preview event place you could go. And it's literally the two of us sitting at the opposite ends of this like very, very long table with a ton of PR people who are like, we're about to show you the future.

And we're like, oh, wow, great. I mean, the future sounds great. That's kind of, you know, what we love to write about. And're like okay here it is it's called heavy rain and the lights go down and they turn on the tv and it's a woman taking a shower and that's what they open up with that scene that they oh that is the preview and that is the entirety of the preview it ends and they're like okay great and they're like yeah somebody questions somebody's gonna come and get her right and we're like yeah i i i mean i guess that i guess it's kind of going for that horror movie vibe and they're like great so before you go let's do it

one more time and they turn the lights down and they make us do it all over again oh my god it was utterly bizarre it was so weird it was so uncomfortable so completely uncomfortable they're like notice the skin and how the skin dimples i would really rather not hard pass for me thank you yeah big no anyway griffin's favorite game moving's uh uh hey we asked um the listeners you know what is their game that the reviews uh thrashed and you know what pretty consistent answer across the board cyberpunk 2077 a lot of folks uh and said cyberpunk 2077 i'll read one. This one's from Jesse. Cyberpunk, granted, I played it a year late on a high-end gaming PC, so bugs were minimal.

That is a huge caveat, but okay. Removing it from what was promised and hyped and just immersing into the world to experience the story puts it much higher on my list. I understand the flack it caught, but it's solid now. I hear that from a number of people that it is better yeah it's definitely better i i replayed it uh you know after they did that relaunch and the writing was never terrible like the especially the performances were quite good at launch um it

was just the core gameplay was like pure misery and it was full of bugs so there's not a lot of ways to redeem that but since then it's pretty redeem that. But since then, it's pretty good now. It's not great, but it's pretty good. Yeah, I agree. Okay, honorable mentions time. Let's do it. Yes. So I've started playing.

I've been promising this for a while, but it has begun. I've started playing Dark Souls 2, which I have never really played very much of. I played a tiny bit when it first came out. How did that happen? What. How did that happen? What? How did that happen?

Why did I not play it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was before Dark Souls games had clicked for me. So if they haven't clicked for you yet, like for all the people that panned Demon's Souls when it was like this new thing and there were many, if it hasn't clicked for you yet, you just don't get it. So I didn't get it so i

didn't get it and now that i understand the language of dark souls having played one and three and bloodborne and sekiro and elden ring i can easily go back and play dark souls 2 and enjoy myself a lot and i have been there is a problem though i don't know if you guys are aware the servers on the pc version of dark souls one through three are off they have been turned off because apparently someone figured out some hack where i don't know sending a note to someone or invading them would allow you access to their like kernel mainframe system on their computer and it was like an extremely bad hack so namco bandai while they were releasing elderdom was like we're just gonna turn the servers off and they haven't gone on they haven't been turned on yet which means i have to play through dark souls 2 with no notes and no summons

and no help that is not the fucking game where you want it that game is so obtuse it took me a good 15 minutes to even understand where to go like i got to manjulo which is like the hub town and i went like kept walking down corridors looking for like where are there guys that i should be fighting and it took me like 15 to 20 minutes to find anyone so uh that was interesting but i'm i'm sticking with it i'm gonna go through it i might occasionally look up guides here and there because i don't have those notes but i will say this it looks gorgeous and runs gorgeous on the steam deck yeah it is just a bummer because it searches for the servers for 30 seconds every time you log on and again when you go to quit well you can turn airplane mode

on yeah i'm just gonna do it yeah it'll i because i tried doing the same thing it was met with a similar uh surprise of not being but i'm very excited it you know there aren't that many dark souls games and uh this is one that i have not really touched at all so i'm pretty pumped it is my least favorite from soft game yeah but it is still like pretty good and i think that it's gotta be your least favorite miss born i mean they don't mean what your least but it is still pretty good. And I think that that is a testament to how good. It's gotta be your least favorite Mistborn game. I mean, I don't mean your least favorite. It's my least favorite game from the Mistborn books, I would say.

No, like, not Mistborn, but Soulsborne. Soulsborne. That's the genre that we all agreed on, right? Yeah, that's what we agreed on. Mistborn is Brandon Sanderson's incredible fantasy world. Yeah. Which, don't get me wrong, a game would be fucking rad. Hey, listen, they've been rumoring for a while.

It never really came together, though. Oh, man, can you imagine? Give that license to Sucker Punch or somebody who has... Oh, God. Yeah. Oh, God. Right? I just fixed it.

I just solved it. Let me get an EP credit on that one. I have been playing... It looks very similar on the page but i've been playing dark cloud 2 uh i just got this uh this this emulator handheld that i uh ordered on indiegogo or something like that like six months ago uh called the uh odin pro uh from a company i think called aya neo or something like that um i i ordered it a long time ago because like review units had gone out to like the different emulator places that i follow and they were talking about how it is the hottest shit ever and uh mine finally came in this week and it is in fact very, very good. Really nice profile.

It feels a lot like Switch Lite in terms of size and weight and layout and stuff like that. And it is the first handheld like this that I have played that runs GameCube and even Wii and Dreamcast and PlayStation 2, like pretty butter smooth. Yeah. So I have Dark Cloud 2.

I tried to replay it on like one of those flat PS2s, one of those late model PS2s, and did not stick with it, mostly because of like load times and how annoying those still are. But man man what a cool fucking game it got me looking at uh level fives like history and what they've said about like a future dark cloud game uh like a dark cloud 3 which apparently is not going to happen they made some game called rogue galaxy i believe which was a PS2 sort of action RPG in the same vein that apparently is the successor that I've actually never played.

But Dark Cloud 2 is just so neat. It's like an action RPG where you have to rebuild the world. Rogue Galaxy looks like a game you'd like, Griffin. I think so, too. I've got it on the Odin Pro, and we'll get to it next. But it's got like a photography mode and there's a golf mini game that you can play in every dungeon that you go into that like unlocks it it's so great also uh been looking for more stuff to play with henry uh and just got him turned on to the

world of light single player mode in smash brothers ultimate uh which when you turn the difficulty down enough on that one and you play with like all the super powerful spirits that you unlocked in your first playthrough of the world of light uh it's fucking great to watch and you can play through that co-op entirely right i don't know i've never actually i haven't played it co-op at all i we just unlocked the uh the me sword fighter so we made a henry me sword fighter character who is all he plays as now and he just like it's just him in a cyber suit with a cat helmet just going through and just like fucking up infinite jiggly puffs it's it is uh we are having a very good time with it. I have two real quick.

One is a quick older game that I played on Switch, but it's been around for, I think, like five or six years. It's called Ultimate Chicken Horse. Y'all ever play that? I have not, but my niece loves it, so I get it. It's a really good... Griffin, this is one that you would love playing with Henry because I tried it with my kids and they were wild about it.

But it's basically a platformer that starts out with just like a beginning and an end goal. And before each round of the game, each player is presented with a grab bag full of items that they can place into the level. So there's like a flamethrower, a platform, some sticky glue, some, you know, a fan, a bomb, you know, whatever. Gold coins, what have you. And each of you get to place one to two items in the level. And then you make a run at completing the level at the same time. That's fine. And then after the next, then the next round starts and you place more things into the level.

And then try to complete the level. And you score by completing the level when the other person can't so it's like sort of like a live mario maker you know what i mean you're like doing on the fly uh and it's really funny and silly um i thought it was very cool i got i played it on switch but it's on lots of stuff the other thing real quick i want to say is i watched a movie called charlie varick yesterday uh because i've been brushing up on some heist movies i've been in the mood to watch a heist movie and uh charlie varick is not a very popular movie uh but it does star walter mathau as a bank robber who accidentally robs from the mafia and then spends the entire movie faking his own death i

love it and it is great i mean mathal come on wait chris point have you not seen this movie no oh it's it's great man it's on i watched it yesterday it is a hoot and walter walter math i will also say uh at the beginning this movie is from like early 70s like i want to say 73 right so walter mathal is still a relatively young man who does look like he's 80 uh and he wears old man makeup at the beginning of the movie for a heist and he looks 100 percent like Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace it is like photocopying how he looks in the film Dennis the Menace it is un unbelievable it is like Mr. Wilson robbing a bank. It's fantastic. That's awesome. Yeah, this looks good. I just Google image

searched it. It's great. Wow. We'll share an image of that on Twitter. Hey, it's Morty season. Morty from the Rick and the Morty is on multiverse. I didn't even realize. I always forget to update my calendar. I know.

I noticed that when I emailed you and I didn't get the, hey, it's Morty season. I'll be away for a few days message. Morty's in multiverses. Morty's OP as fresh chicken. I keep texting each other. Multiverses just rules.

I continue to just be utterly smitten with this game. It defies all reason. I'm not a huge smash brothers person um uh but the characters are so inventive and i i i can't believe that they say that they're balancing this game because nothing about it ever feels balanced it feels like complete chaos i can't even describe the moves like morty has an up attack that just makes a giant huge ass ufo go up to the sky which can just carry people out of the world instantly it's very weird it's wonderful i hope more people play this game actually i don't even need to say that this game is doing extremely yeah i think they're doing okay the first game to

like pass elden ring all year maybe i i mean it is free to play so that not totally shocking no no i i mean in terms of sales not downloads um just like revenue yeah yeah yeah i mean it's also free to play pricing so that doesn't yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah for sure um but yeah it's a it's a delight and i hope uh people try it out um i think i i don't know which characters are you right now but i think what braun is just just back off of it so which is a plant do you want people to try it out. I think, I don't know which characters are for you right now, but I think LeBron is. Just back off of it. So which is a plant? Do you want people to try it, or is it fine without them?

You know what? Both. Whoa. Wow. Cool. Okay, well, I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. We have BMGIA, we'll go with,

El Albeli, Gort munch man and wreck your shit with math thank you for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcast thank you to everyone else who has shared the show and talked about it and done all sorts of cool stuff plant what do we talk about today uh today we talked about saints row john maddenden Football, Fallout New Vegas, SimCity, the new-ish one, David Cage Ouvra, Dark Souls 2, Multiverses,

Dark Cloud 2, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate World of Light, Ultimate Chicken Horse in the film Charlie Farrick. Where can people stream Charlie Farrick? I watched it on I think I just got it on Apple like the store, the Apple, what do you call that?

It's a video on demand. Yeah. The O.D. Yeah. It's not on Apple TV Plus. But it's on the Apple store. I don't know. It's hard to man, there's so many films from the 70s that you just like can't watch. It doesn't matter if you want to watch it.

When you mentioned it, I thought it was that Charlie, the movie with Robert Downey Jr. where he's the teacher and there's the precocious child. Yeah. Oh my God. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah. It was before the Robert Downey Jr. reclamation project, I think.

Anyway. Charlie Bartlett. Charlie Bartlett. Well done. What are we talking about next week we don't super know yeah Anton Yelchin played the yes he was really good

we don't know what we're totally doing next week because we're not sure if we're going to be able to get Last of Us Part 1 the remake early enough so it might be that or it might be something totally different. We'll see. We'll see.

That is going to do it for us. Thank you so much for listening to our show. Be sure to join us again next week for the besties, because shouldn't the world best friends pick the world's best games. Besties!