The Besties - The Best Game of 2017

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

In defiance of reason, good taste and the laws of both god and man, your pals The Besties sat down and recorded a two-hour-and-forty-five-minute battle royale to decide the best game of 2017. Get comfy, get hydrated.  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 cannot believe you chose this moment to eat a Clif Bar. We've been trying to get this going for 40 minutes. No, he should. He should eat a Clif Bar now. He should. Now is when we eat a Clif Bar, Griffin. Now. He should eat.

It is a wise decision. No, a wise decision would have been to eat in the last 40 minutes when we were trying to get this going. He's going to need so much energy, though. He's going to, he's going to war right now. Yeah, I guess it is. Smoking. No, he's up.

He's up. All that energy is peeing into him. He's also put on the mask. I hate the cliff part. Gave me joke energy. Let's do a podcast. Smokin'. Justin made me watch the Jim Carrey documentary.

It ruined my fucking life. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in sports pop culture news trivia HQ QH Masks some spooky new ones on the market this year. We're gonna talk about all the new masks on the market and We talked about Dating advice and stuff then video don't do it save your heart for marriage save your heart for marriage stuff than video games. Don't do it. Save your heart for marriage. Save your heart for marriage. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying

never be abstinent from dates? Yes. So Russ just said best game of the week. And I know that's like his fun catchphrase, but it did make me think about a time where we did this podcast on a weekly basis and it sent a literal ghostly shiver up my spine.

Haunting. This year we're talking about mainly focused on video games. You know, they've come in 2017. This is the year. What I can say is this year they have come into their own. They're not art, obviously. They're just toys for children. No, no, no.

That's paintings and stuff. But yeah. But they have come a long way since uh since pac-man um and i want to talk about the the greatest games of uh 2017 that's where we're here to settle we um i'd love to tell you we had a system we basically randomly assembled a bracket nigh randomly i'll be fair nigh randomly and before we get into those that's going to become immediately apparent once we reach what I'm going to

call the diarrhea round that we have in here you are going to know this was not scientific in any way I basically had a bunch of ping pong balls and a washing machine and I just threw them in there and I forgot to number them so as I was pulling them out I was numbering them then yeah and of course all the ping pong balls melted and

so what we're getting you is our plastic mistake uh so let's get this plastic mistake started first i want to talk about a couple things that we did not talk about previously which we were supposed to do last year but a couple things were like late late additions uh the first one i wanted to mention was goragoa i hope I'm pronouncing that correctly it's kind of intentionally challenging I think but Gora Goa is a Puzzle game that came out in sort of the middle of December and Gosh, it is hard to

Explain it so it's sort of a one-man show made by Jason Roberts He's been making it for I I think, over seven years. And it came out on iOS and Switch and Windows. It is a sort of a storybook puzzle game where the story and the game itself is presented to you in four panels in sort of a square orientation. four panels and sort of a square orientation. And you have the ability to zoom in on the panels, zoom out, and also sort of shift them to different places. So for instance, if you see a window in one of the frames you're looking at, you might be able to tap that window to sort of zoom in and change your perspective. And that could go several layers deep. You know, maybe you see something out the window and then you can zoom in on that thing.

And then by sort of the adjusting the scale like that, and also the positioning, you sort of create tablows that allow the two scenes to interact with each other. Very. Can you get, can you get this? Yeah.

So as an example, like there there's a you may be looking at a boy sitting at a dark desk trying to read something but you can zoom in on a darkened lantern and when you when you your perspective switches to that there's actually a hole in that frame of the picture where the lantern is and then you drag and drop it over another picture that has like a bunch of stars and one of the stars is very bright and where the hole is in that one picture you drop over that star and suddenly this light from the star is the light inside the lantern and then you zoom back out and the boy can see and the painting has changed and it's very is the boy confused at all that a star is now he's instantly immolated because the star is you know billions of degrees um but but it's it's what is so cool about it

that's just like one example of like what this game does and there's there's i played it for about a half hour and there were dozens of these cool little interactions it's so fluid though it's there's no like it's not like oh you beat the level it's just like okay the picture has changed and now there's a new picture and it tells this very like straight forward like fluid journey that this this one boy goes on but it doesn't uh it's it's not broken up in any conceivable way it's just constantly evolving the the interesting thing i think about gorgoa is that it does not necessarily test your puzzle solving skills as much as it tests your ability to sort of expand your perception and think abstractly. Trying things that you don't necessarily think make much sense,

and then seeing how those two things interact and overlap. It's obviously also very beautiful just to look at. Yeah, I just want to dig into that a little bit more because i don't enjoy uh most adventure games especially classic adventure games where you're spamming uh clicking around the room and it's like oh well of course a paper clip when combined with a hot dog is actually the key to the next place um where this it feels like one there's not that much space to spam if you play it on your phone um it doesn't it does a really nice thing where it illuminates the things that can be interacted with and you can turn that feature off if you want to be like fully immersed but there's

only ever like a couple of things that you can interact with it's not like you have this huge catalog of options available to you it's just trying to figure out how your limited options interact with each other yeah but then it reward like there is pleasure in that discovery the paperclip hot dog thing it's not like oh well that was a weird goof that the designer came up with and now i feel dumb for not putting it together it the game recognizes that you might not notice what the connection is that it's trying to make the reward or the pleasure is like what comes after it right um which is like i don't know it's kind of like an inversion of how i feel my relationship is with most adventure games it's

a fascinating game we we do need to move on but uh totally totally check it out on that same vein just sort of cerebral quiet um artistic smart people stuff is a game that santa claus came down chiming and brought to me for the christmas uh day of the christ's birth and that is drop mix the harmonics uh rhythm card game uh which i don't know i had read some like not great stuff about and i don't know who would not enjoy this game because it's fucking incredible. Basically, you have this deck, this board with five slots in it, and each one is sort of matched

to different instrument categories, kind of like amplitude. So there's like a guitar slot and a drum slot and like a vocal slot, and there's two hybrid slots where you could put an instrument or a drum or, you know, whatever. And you have these cards, and then you connect the whole board via Bluetooth to your phone,

and then your phone is like the screen and the speaker for everything. And then as you play cards in those slots, it adds components to songs. The cards have song fragments on them. Right. uh components the cards have song fragments on them right so call me maybe's vocals and uh maybe um god i'm blanking on everything that is in the weekend yeah i can't feel my face's drums and uh the mother we share by church's guitar and you blend all these together and there's like a freestyle mode where you can just drop all these um there are there are other game modes too that have more like rules and scoring and stuff like that um but then there are what are called wild cards and wild cards are

basically all components of a song uh so super freak by rick james uh or um uh down with the sickness uh and you play those and it changes the the sort of parameters of every other card that's on the board and it does that by uh you know usually playing a drop from whatever song that you've just played the wild card for but it also changes the key signature and tempo of all of the cards. And it shows you all of these. And in freestyle mode, you can switch between those as well. And I got kind of more into, like, music composition and stuff this year, and it sort of gave me a basic understanding of, like, how this works with loops and things like that.

And this is really fucking sophisticated technology because, like, all of it works. All of it works so well. Like, all of it works so well like all of it sounds so great together it always works it's sometimes you make a song where you're like i am not enjoying this very much but a lot of times just yeah but then but then you play the the op god card of skrillex's bangerang and it like you were just listening to you know a mix of short skirt long jacket and i I Will Survive. And then you drop this bangerang on there.

And then the song picks up and slowly speeds up. And you hear, bangerang bass. And suddenly the song is now bangerang. It is fucking excellent. We played it Christmas night for, like, a few hours with Justin's in-laws. Like, their whole family. And they're not like elite gamers like we are, but like,

and not even really music people. Like you don't need that understanding to, I think there was some trepidation, like, Oh, I'm going to be bad at this. You can't be bad at this. The game is going to figure it out for you.

Even shifts things. Griffin pointed this out. It's really fascinating. It shifts, it could shift like major key songs into minor keys. And that's like wild Like it changes the entire Yeah

Hearing the vocals to Call Me Maybe In a minor key signature is like Whoa alright It's fucking excellent The day after Christmas I went online and bought like $100 worth of more cards To it cause it's like All I want to do is play DropMix with my buds Which Plant hopefully will be able to do real soon yeah um drop mix is great it's also going to

be one of those things like dj hero where like next year you're going to be able to get it for a song and i cannot recommend that you do that strongly enough don't wait for that no do it do it now i mean do it do it now support support them because it's such a cool weird idea like all the things that Harmonix makes. It's also on sale on Amazon right now for $70 for a bunch of cards and the board. Yeah, you get the deck and 70 or so cards. It's really fun.

Also, let's all go buy DJ Hero. Dude, I already own DJ Hero. I picked that up at Target for $15, and that game owns bones. All right. Let's do this damn thing. Okay okay can we say something nice about each other before we get into it because i'm worried it's gonna get nasty you think so i don't know well let me preface this by saying i don't give a fuck who wins i honestly don't every single year

i don't care if you're a human being who uh cares what the game of the year was decided by a bunch of people you don't personally know. You shouldn't. It shouldn't bug you that much if it doesn't end up being the game. This is not for the journey, not the destination. That's exactly right. Journey is our number one game of the year. Again, I mean, nobody's made a better game than I love those little Jawas running around and doing their stuff. They got that cape.

They sing in their beautiful songs. I don't care. I do. And this is going to apply to everyone. I love spending time with you guys and talking about the games that we love. So that's what I get out of this. Also, this isn't Polygon's game of the year. Polygon already put up their game of the year list, and they more or less got it right.

We more or less got it right. So some weird choices, though. Chris, okay, let's get into this. Chris, Dirt 2 made it really high up on the list this year what happened how did that happen bud how much time did both do you spend playing dirt 2 none i'm a sane oh that's interesting that's that's really interesting i'm really excited to hear more of your opinions on it oh shit he got us in a trap just how are the puddle effects in dirt 2 because i feel like that's really stood out. The puddle effects don't matter. It's that feel of being on that bumpy, dirty road.

Being on a dirty car. All right, let's do it. Round one, let's do it. We have eight rounds, including one diarrhea round, and then we're going to get down to the next sort of cycle or whatever. Oh, my God. I think let's just do it. Round one.

Gravity Rush 2 versus Horizon Zero Dawn. Okay. do we want to talk about why we paired these two yeah i think i think any tryout would be good for us to like talk about why we paired these two they're open world games okay end of it and then uh how can they both star lady they both feature a lady yeah oh well sure also two big budget open world games were exclusive to one console yeah sure and they also both came out before march um yeah this was a really maybe maybe between like the the big rounds we should talk about the year in general because what a buck wild what a buck wild first quarter um i i want to talk a little bit about the rise uh yeah somebody somebody i think it's best if one person talks about one game and one person talks about another.

I'm going to talk about Gravity Rush 2. Gravity Rush 2 is charmingly artistic and beautiful and very cheery, by and large, even though there's large chunks that seem like they'd be depressing. The lead character of that game is very up and happy and eager to help people um the game it's like the overall campaign of it i found pretty tedious and not super cool but i thought the the side stuff they introduced specifically the stuff they added with like uh like scavenger hunt e stuff where you like are shown a photo and then you have to like find where that photo was taken is like really really cool um i thought they did a really neat job with like the photo sharing stuff so i think tonally i really loved it the side stuff i really dug uh the rest of the

game was like i know this is kind of your baby what did you what did you why did you because you fought pretty intensely to make sure this made the top 16. Yeah, I love both these games. I think both these games are great. I think, really quick, Horizon is like, it feels like a pinnacle of a type of game design that maybe we are hitting the end of. The Assassin's Creed open world, very meticulously designed game. I'm curious to hear why you think we're hitting

the i i agree with you because my my patience for the most part for like open world um character action games has kind of reached its limit yeah okay let's see what wins the game of the year this year no that's different no i i don't think i think that's exactly what i mean when i say we're hitting the end of it i i'm not saying open world games are done. I'm saying this. Hey, collect a thon. There are a thousand markers on the planet. Here's a story that the horizon story is good, but it is a good version of a kind of like, I don't know, weak construction that I'm not a huge fan of.

Yeah. And yeah, I think we're at the end of it because you can even these games are like pushing against it horizons combat obviously is a huge shift for this type of series yeah um they're getting away from like the cars and the parkour of gta and assassin's creed i think kind of dominated the formula i think assassin's creed changing its combat shows a pretty substantial shift for i mean for a series that has refused to do that for years um and then i think zelda which we'll get to in a second is essentially what happens when you break all this open and i think gravity rush is too i'm gravity rush is not a flawless game. It is not as polished as Horizon by any stretch of the imagination.

It is, without question, my least favorite first hour of the game this year. Yeah, it's a terrible first hour. It is horrible. It is first person, and you can't fly. So it's everything that the game is not. And very dark and sad. But it is just... The open world is uh incredible it's this it's kind of riffing on uh cuba in the 1950s 60s the story is goes like much cheaper than i thought it would

on the issues of income inequality and like basically like it does a lot of interesting things with wealth and what it means to be a robin hood character and how that is good and bad um but the thing that i loved the most was and this is like we're gonna get obviously some spoilers these games have been out for a while. But you start in an open world, and then you get a mission about, I don't know, seven hours in that is hundreds of meters below you, and you jump off the edge, and it turns out at any point,

you could have just jumped off the edge of the game, and rather than died, you would have fallen for a long time to another open world. And then later, it turns out there's another open world above everything. And that is such a playful and inventive way of exploring space. And it solves a thing that I always hate about open world games, which is, well, everything's on the same plane.

So to get anywhere can take forever. If you're at the far north end of a map and you want to get to the south, but you also want to not use fast travel it's a slog um but being able to control gravity and just essentially turn in like the universe itself into an elevator um it's just so fun um it also got rid of the uh like stupid like oh you can't go here because rockets are gonna blow you up for no reason like it's more well you never even it never even occurred to you that you could go there yeah and i also think just to wrap up my feelings on it there there are a handful of like icky like there's there's a essentially taking photos of women women around the world for a creepy man cool great um it does a few icky missions

but largely i think the story's so warm and compassionate um and i played there are a lot of great games this year but i didn't play a lot of games that gave me that kind of warm ooey gooey feeling yeah now that i think about like that's my that's my jam like my games of the year for the past couple years were like undertale and stardew valley which were very much like almost like loving games right like they were they were they were very uh compassionate and and nice and i mean we definitely got that in the form of like you could argue that like mario for instance uh gave gave that to you but like listen i love you guys so much we cannot spend this long on this right i think plant is eulogizing gravity rush 2 i feel like because well i mean i would put it

through but i don't think it's going to get through also you can wear a near costume so it's my god horizon zero dawn is uh i think the most impressive thing about horizon zero dawn is not just the polish of uh the the the fact that it's an open world game that seems to have like really considered a lot of the areas that you find yourself in i think the interesting thing about horizon zero dawn is that it actually has which so many open world games lack, the structure to support that open world. And by that, I mean, you have an amount of flexibility with your tool set. This is just for starters.

You have an amount of flexibility with your tool set that makes you want to try different things in an open world. It doesn't force you to boil every encounter in this open world down to a sort of like regimented thing that you rely on. You, of course, are welcome to do that. And there were certain periods I had where I would lean on one tactic over another. But the variety in the animals you encounter and the variety in the world makes it so that like the the open world really does demand you use different tools and like sort of experiment with different things which i think is something that a lot of open world games lack it it forces you to use a huge

tool set it also has and i think a story that is good enough to support the explorer. It lifts up the exploration rather than feeling like tacked onto this open world. The story is engaging enough that you like actually want to keep moving through the world to find the next chunk of it. And it, the, the,

the backstory informs that world rather than just being grafted onto it. Yeah. Which I think is a, is a really huge accomplishment especially from the maker of popular bad game franchise yeah okay there are good missions in some killing song games but uh i i just remembered a thing that we've done in previous years which is uh largely talk about the game that we're going to kill um because the the game that is going to survive will go to another round um so i i what i what i'm saying is i recognize that gravity rush is

probably not going to survive so we should probably um save horizon for another thing but i i i want i want you to continue that thought when uh we inevitably get back to it justin because i think especially the stuff about the story, what it does with story, I agree, I think is really interesting. Let's talk more about it here in a second. Is everybody okay with cutting Gravity Rush 2? Yes.

All right. Go for it. Round two. Introduce Justin. Can I throw something out there? Yes. As long as it won't expand the length of this podcast by one second.

No, it's in the spirit of shortening things. So maybe for each round, we assign two people and each person gets a sentence expand the length of this podcast no no no it's in the in the spirit of shortening things so maybe for each round we assign two people and each person gets like a sentence to essentially say why this game should be their well juice and i'll tackle this one since you all tackled that one for the most part okay destiny 2 and pub g which one you want juice either way i will take destiny 2 and this is my pitch for it beating player unknowns battlegrounds is that correct yes sure no no it's just describing why you liked it because i think we're all going to land on the same page uh destiny 2 is um destiny 2 is the

second destiny game you got this no destiny 2 is the pinnacle of destiny's strength over the the the years since the first one was released by that i mean destiny 2 is the um best example yet of bungie's willingness to look at what works and what doesn't work about their game and have practically no religion about keeping things that are not working. And I think Destiny 2 shows a really remarkable ability to jettison things that don't make it more fun and more pleasurable to play, and really streamline it into the experience

that people who stayed with Destiny, even when they shouldn't have, the experience that they were trying to sell non-believers on, I think is really present from day one in Destiny 2. I've spent maybe 100 hours with it, I think, this year, and I was never grinding, which I think is fascinating to me like i never felt like i was doing a grind and in destiny one i felt like i was doing a grind a lot and uh you i think

destiny 2 you can make whatever arguments you want about its uh lack of compelling things to do in perpetuity i don't and i will make that argument i don't think it's the kind of game that see that's bogus though like it is it from the jump they have never they have never proclaimed destiny 2 to be a game you can play endlessly and i think that's what's so fascinating about it is that you play it for there's no other game like this for me yes where i play it for a while and then think you know what i'm gonna check back in on destiny 2 now that and like people move in waves back into it which i think is fascinating i i do think that they have sort of i think they're sort of fucked up by bifurcating the market uh with the pc version i think that i've seen much less engagement with the ps4 version and

that's not saying like there shouldn't be a PC version. Maybe they should just all only be a PC version. I don't know. But, um, that has certainly like robbed it of some of that power. But, um, I,

I still think it's a really, really, really smart, uh, maybe even too smart in some cases, what wearing away some of the, the mystery and magic that came with a game that was like kind of broken in the first destiny um but uh i think there was something charming about like oh no no you have to go to the moon and run around

for four hours to get this gun to be good destiny one was sort of like uh like dark souls or demon souls and destiny two is like dark souls three but you're playing it with like a prima guide like you know every secret because it's all presented more very clearly i this is what you get for doing this thing i do i do want to say i agree with what you're saying justin and and i think a lot about this the fact that destiny um occupies this sort of same space that like i think diablo is probably the closest um thing to it right because it's not like an mmorpg although people do definitely play it like that and expect that level of uh of of retention um but it's it's more in the vein

of like a diablo where you you i i think that people do want to play it infinitely and i think that speaks to how fucking fun the game is to play it's a really really fun game to play and it feels good to invest all of your time into your characters and stuff i spent about 200 hours playing it this year like maxed out everything got all the exotic weapons played it a ton and um i i would be lying if i said like i wasn't disappointed that um i don't feel this pull to play more of it because when i compare it to destiny one like like Destiny 1, I kept coming back to. Although, again, there was like a nine month break there where I didn't play because it was shitty until they started to make some some substantial changes to it.

But, yeah, I I it's weird because the conversation about Destiny 2 is so bad right now. Like people who are the biggest fans of it are really down on it there's this perception that um the things that they add to the game are really just ways of trying to funnel people into the paid marketplace the eververse economy and um i think that they have definitely made some mistakes there i definitely don't think the first dlc for the game is very good like um it needs to be it needs like uh they i think they i i like bungie a lot as a developer and i think they do great work and i think that they do know how to like save a game right they did it with destiny one um but i feel like they have a long sort of arduous road ahead of them because they gotta change some stuff they gotta add they gotta

add some stuff i feel like in a pretty major way because like i you you said that about dipping back in right juice but like you and i both got the dlc and played it have you been playing it a whole lot since the dlc i finished i just think it's not very good it's not very good content and yeah i i still have not seen the new raid stuff i i maybe i should dig back in on that i love again i have a deep and abiding love for everyone on this call we have made it through four of 16 games yeah i think i literally asked you to do one sentence so completely in your task i'm talking one sentence justin is what i asked you for and you went on for three hours so i'm just saying player knowns battlegrounds

is fucking incredible it's a genius game uh where every sort of mechanic in it every part of its design is built around creating like really remarkable uh memorable incredible moments that okay my favorite time i've ever had playing a shooter yeah here we go okay we will talk more about pub g in the next round because it's an important game. Round three, Prey versus Lone Echo. Lonely Space Games. I can do either of them. I can do Lone Echo.

I played, I mean, I finished it. I feel like I'm Lone Echo's biggest. Yeah, Griffin, you talked a lot about Lone Echo when we did the regular show. Why don't you let Russ talk about Lone Echo? Okay, fair enough. Because I'd like to hear it from another perspective. Okay, so Lone Echo, I did not play to the end fair warning i also get very motion sick um i vaguely remember talking about a very easily upset tummy as long as we're listing other things about russ

yes all all accurate about my tummy uh lone echo doesn't say mario right unquestionably unquestionably is the uh it's the most incredible vr experience i've ever had in my life no no question about it before that it was super hot vr it lone echo has taken it over for super hot vr um it is so convincing uh a facsimile of like you being a robot person in space that after i took the helmet off i was having legit like like cyber mind hacking like freak outs at my desk looking at my computer because it's such a convincing thorough representation of what it would be like to be a robot in space um i don't really know how else to sell it beyond that it's an it's an amazing amazing it accomplishes that because if not it accomplishes that by again

it's just like so smart and how it solves all of these like vr problems especially traversal and that you just move by grabbing onto the environment pushing yourself off and then using your weak weak thrusters to like change your trajectory. Yeah, you're really moving quite slowly for the most part. And that does, like I was able to play it for an hour without getting sick, which is really an accomplishment for me. And all the UI is tangible. There's not like a, you know, menu button that you press.

Right. And it like drops you out. It's all in the world. You're always looking at your hands, your robot hands, and like interacting with things using your actual robot hands and then so when you take the helmet off and you look down you don't have robot hands it is a total total mindfuck yeah it also does some really great character work because it just really focuses on these two characters like the whole game yeah it's well written and and and

great uh who's it ready at dawn made that game yeah? It's a very talented studio that I've always really enjoyed their work, except for maybe Order. But all the other games that they've made are quite good. It's a phenomenal VR game that I realize most people will not play because it's VR. But if you ever have the chance and you can only play one VR game, this is absolutely the one I would recommend. Who wants to do Prey? Prey. Go for it.

Someone. Prey? I didn't enjoy Prey, so somebody else should the one I would recommend. Who wants to do Prey? Prey. Go for it. Someone. Prey? I didn't enjoy Prey, so somebody else should go. I enjoyed it. I'll do it. I really liked it. Is anybody... Am I the only person who really liked this game? No, I liked it a lot. I liked it. I gave it... In my brain, I gave it like a solid

BB+. So that's where I am with Prey. Okay, I'm gonna talk about this game. I agree with... Dave Tack wrote a piece for our end of the year essays that is basically prey is essentially the culmination of all the lessons learned from this second wave of uh immersive sims that you know system shock 2 set the pace for for that era and then we get prey which takes just everything from all these games and constructs this ridiculously complicated um space station that really should be system shock 3 and there is like the rumor that it was going to be called that but they couldn't get the naming um and i i just think it is so playful in a way that these games have not been for me in the past

few years i think bioshock is an excellent game but it set this precedent of self-seriousness um that like to be an immersive sim you also had to have like some weird philosophy bent that you're going to uh push upon the player deus ex is the same way for me dishonored even gets a little bit into it but here is a game that i think we talked about it when we did it on the episode but that there's the a moment early on where you're exploring a lab and you're finding all these notes about this terrifying weapon um and then when you finally actually find the blueprint it has some you know spooky name and you create it and it ends up being a nerf gun um and then the nerf gun has touch capacity on the end of it and you can use it to open doors and and that that

just feels indicative of the entire game for me it is spooky and it's dark i mean there are dead bodies everywhere you're constantly looking for dead bodies the mimic in this game is probably my favorite monster of the year probably my favorite like shouldn't your favorite monster of the year be in any way pleasurable to combat in a fight? I would think that would be high on the list of video game enemy qualifications. I agree with Griffin. I like the mimic. I think that you can figure it out in time.

It's a great idea. I just, once they mimicked, they are the biggest pain in the ass of fucking combat. It's a part of why I didn't like the game. Combat doesn't feel good. Just like straight up. Like all of these ways of playing around with the game and exploring the spaces and finding all these solutions to the to the different problems the whole like immersive sim thing like um that that is all that is all great the act of shooting a gun at the monster is bad yeah i i agree ish but

i even then i still think the combat is more enjoyable than combat in its contemporaries like maybe i don't know that anybody's like really crushed it in in that in that particular and i don't think they will because i think this is probably the last one we're going to get for a very very long time on these i had i i just wanted to mention about prey my favorite thing about it is the the uh again like the character work it does despite the fact that like i did a tweet like you fall in love with these characters by finding all these little details in their world and it's not just audio logs it's like their dnd character sheets and you learn about the relationships like through little interactions like that in a way that i think is way more organic and way more fleshed out and just like

better than a lot of games that are just about that like we had takoma which i enjoyed on this list but prey even though it's this you know big shooty shoot action game i think that's a better job i think you also found dnd character sheets did you yeah they were like yeah they were character sheets oh yeah that's right i guess i guess that was a running theme to say i don't know i just i love the characters in the game despite the fact that like you did find them dead in a bathroom it like inevitably like they were kind of a recurring theme with games uh i include fire arch on this if you find somebody's dnd character sheet they're dead yeah they guaranteed yeah um i do i wouldn't say for me the reason that i would push towards

lone echo and not pray is because i think although praise a very good game it does very cool things i think the writing in the story which for in a lot of cases for these types of games propels me through it did not wasn't the i think the world creation writing like the character you know dnd character sheets stuff like that was good uh i think the overall story was not very good at all oh yeah i thought it was cool. I thought it was neat. But I would still say, even though I have not played Lone Echo, I would still push towards Lone Echo because of the enthusiasm I've heard for it.

It's like one of my favorite games ever. It is really astonishing. I'm fine with that. All right, Lone Echo goes to the next round. Prey, thank you for your participation. Congratulations, everybody. You made it to the diarrhea round. Oh, no.

This is what we call the wild card. I'm just going to list. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to list these 13 fucking games. And then everybody's going to. We need to mention what we're doing. We have 13 games that we didn't want to cut because I think we wanted to talk about them. So we put them in this round.

One winner will emerge. We have to move through it so quickly. Here's how I'm going to do it. Here's where I have a brilliant idea. I'm going to list all the games and then we're going to take turns cutting them and see if there's a fight deal that that'll be great that'll leave one winner perfect splatoon 2 steam world dig 2 metroid sandwich returns mario plus rabbits golf story dead cells what remains of edith finch snipper clips neo yakuza 0 wolfenstein 2 fire emblem heroes sexy brutal fuck it's been a good year for yeah it's been a good fucking like can we this could be a game of the year list in another year like this could be

a game of the year list um wolfenstein 2 is on here and i feel like that's gonna bum out a lot of people but please refer back to our october episode where we were all kind of lukewarm on it which is i think we are way outside the norm on that but whatever if it was if it was very fun to play i would i would it would be in the thing. Everything that is not playing the game is great. Did we just cut Wolfenstein 2? Griffin? Yeah, that'll be my first one.

That's Griffin's cut. Okay. I'm going to cut... God, I actually like a lot of these games. I would cut Splatoon 2. It is a good that's a good video game but i don't think it does enough past totally original splatoon great single player but i didn't actually play the multiplayer okay i'm gonna make some i'm gonna make some blood come

out right here metroid samus returns yep yeah i know you all hated it it's fine i let me just say before we cut it i actually like this game more than SteamWorld DigTube. I love both of those games, but I think this is an excellent, probably one of my favorites, if not my favorite 2D Metroid game. I didn't like the controls. I love it. If it was on Switch, I would probably have played the whole thing. It's not my favorite 2D Metroid game. I'll take that back.

Super Metroid sold that, but it's really fucking great. And Metroid Fusion. Okay. No. Fresh take. Okay. I would cut... I would cut Mario and Rabbids.

Wow. I really like this game. I reviewed it. I thought it was a lot of fun, but I don't think it goes beyond that. I think it's very clearly like a XCOM-like lift with more approachable controls and systems. But overall, I'm fine with it.

It's back up to me. Yeah. I'm going to cut. Is it bad if I cut either sense just because I never played it? Yes. Yeah, you shouldn't do that. Oh, man. Well, I like all these other games, though.

I will cut Sexy Br sexy brutal because i played the switch version it's not very good uh incorrect that's an incorrect assessment is when it is a bad port it's a very bad port oh you mean that the port is not very good the port's not good um i i i thought it was cool but that's a whack reason to cut it but thank you very much for i just i i it's i have played this game and looking at all the other games that i played on this list it's my least favorite of all of them there we go bye sexy butel

I'm gonna cut fire emblem heroes because no fire emblem game has ever been fun and fire emblem continues to be proud fire emblem continues to be proud the proud tradition of not being a good fire I have tried every fire emblems game for at least

90 minutes before i'm like oh this isn't fun so i'm getting fire emblem heroes follow-up question can you confirm that this was a revenge for payback for no i don't think any fire is good ever and we're gonna keep playing them until i find the one that i really like all right cut it okay fine best mobile game of the year though maybe wait i i thought we were able to push back on these yeah you can it's just you would be incorrect yeah delete it cut go next no okay can i give an actual uh was that are you actually gonna cut something was that the mobile one yeah yeah yeah if i need Rush Freshstick to lean over my shoulder and tell me how to be good at something,

then it is not an enjoyable game. Goodbye. Well, there's a difference between being a pro at it, like I am, and just being like a normal human being, like most people are. You can be a normal human being and play that game. No, no.

No normal human being. Chris and Russ, we need cuts for this round for you. Okay, so what would... SteamWorld Dig 2. Wow. Yeah, that's fine. It's pretty good, but it's like, so what would... SteamWorld Dig 2. Wow. Yeah, that's fine. It's pretty good, but it's like... God, I love SteamWorld Dig 2, though.

Justin, it's my turn. I got really bad diarrhea for like three days, and I played the whole thing during my convalescence. That's really tasty. It's really great. Justin, of these six games, which would make you the saddest to get cut? No, Russ, just do it.

No, it would be Snipperclips. I would be really sad. Yeah, you're a fucking liar. Okay, which would I cut be it would be snipper clips i would be a fucking liar okay which would i cut i would probably cut um i didn't play neo or yakuza we're at the point now where i think you have to cut i i think that's not a bad because we i i a lot of this i didn't play those games because we didn't play them so yeah um i have of the games that i played i can cut um edith finch okay so uh sorry back up to me uh so final five just to walk you in golf story dead cells snipper clips neo yakuza zero i played all these um i would cut i think yakuza zero oh no way yakuza zero is wildly better than golf story all right go ahead

and get all right well we know what chris's pick is gonna be but i just uh i just didn't uh i i think the like world of yakuza zero is really cool but like so many games that we've talked about and in this this list and cut like um i just didn't have a whole lot of fun like actually playing my own i actually really liked yakuza zero the only problem that i had with it is that i felt like i kind of had to play it with a guide uh to not miss stuff it was kind of the same issue i have with um deadly you better say five room heroes because you literally just complained about that a second ago deadly premonition um is one that like i always think i should get it like i think i would really love but every time i end up playing it with the game facts open uh yeah sure all right Justin Russ Chris get us down to the final one okay uh I'm gonna cut

I really I really liked all these this is so dumb probably uh I would probably Neo I really liked Neo very much but I think neo is building on oh my gosh what's wrong with you chris snipper clips is so obviously going to survive and it's the dumbest no golf story's gone so now it's down to fresh deciding between dead cells and snipper dead cells it gets advanced congratulations great great fucking game honestly absolutely i picked that out of those two i well too bad all right now this is these are the rules we did okay we just shit on snipper clips a lot in there it's my favorite co-op game of the year it is hysterically funny it's very very smart and a very good puzzle game it is the game where whenever i

have friends over and i want to show them what the Switch can do, I show them fucking Snipperclips because it is so easy to like fall in love with. Yeah, if I'm honest, the only thing, the thing that knocks Snipperclips for me is that that first like, I guess, half hour, I've done like a bunch and I don't think the fun necessarily extends beyond that half hour.

Oh, incorrect rachel and i played through all of this over the course of like a week and those final puzzles really really require you to get uh to get like really really good communication going yeah it's a well-designed game nintendo knows how to make this next one i love that this next pairing that's oh yeah we'll talk about that more here in a second it's fucking great uh round four resident evil 7 and obviously you've guessed what we're gonna pair that with uh super mario odyssey can i explain why i i like this yes chris please okay so i think both these games are essentially remixes slash i don't know reboots in some capacity of their franchises like resident evil 7 is from beginning

to end what would happen if we remade all of the resident evil games starting with resident evil 1 ending with the resident evil 6 inside of one game and i think super mario odyssey in a lot of ways is the same thing it's this look back on the entire history of super mario that's one way to put it i think if we want to pitch like uh two games that blew up their franchise for the better then breath of the wild would be up against resident evil 7 but yeah i agree i don't think breath of the wild like remakes the entire series like what are you talking about what are you fucking it's an open world like yeah less of a survey right sure okay yeah well like super mario odyssey is a hundred percent like here is everything the mario is this might be my most heartbreaking round because holy shit did i

fucking adore both of these games they were incredible i will say for resident evil 7 i i have not talked about pulling a franchise back from the brink i mean like just and and and in a really bold way like first person resident evil like i i think is a really it's not unprecedented obviously but like to envision a whole game that way i think is really smart and fascinating i think they made huge use of the the shift in perspective but also like just being really smart about how the world was created and making it feel real in a way that these games had not in a long time. My argument for if Resident Evil 7 throughout its entirety and maintain the promise of the first two thirds of the game, it would be actually a really hard decision for me to make. two-thirds of the game it would be actually a really hard decision for me to make but i think resident evil 7 loses its way uh in it so brutally once you get like basically a huge machine gun and nigh unlimited ammo i think it becomes like a much different game and not one that like

sustained the the tension or sense of place i think that the the rule of the game the rule of thumb is once you get on the boat it loses my vote can i oh my gosh i'm gonna i'm gonna give a counterpoint because i think we know where this round is gonna go i think resident evil 7 is fantastic beginning to end and i i love the boat section i i think that they made a game that starts out so slow and horrifying and builds again through the history of resident evil and is very compelling and the action at the end is so good i mean yeah it's a good version of what resident evil 6 could have been i it's you know i get that people like Resident Evil as that you know like spooky in a mansion thing but for what they set out to make which I think is you know action

sequences at the end of this game I think they're really really really really interesting and really spooky despite you having so much power. And just weird without getting lost. The problem that I feel like Capcom has made in the past with the action sequences is it's like, okay, well, you're in a spooky house. Oh, and by the way, now you're on a jet fighter. Oh, and you've landed on a volcano. Don't ask how those all fit together. All things that literally did happen in Resident. on a volcano um don't ask how those all things that literally did happen in resident yeah these games are all about like um these games try to recreate the things that do have it's a survival

horror game right and that's all about limited resources and things could jump out and kill you but horror movies are all about the like accumulation of power that the hero goes through ashes getting the chainsaw arm or you know the last survivor of the slasher fic like a flick building a trap that's going to kill the killer predator and and the past couple resident evil games have been like you start out as big burly military person with fucking two rocket launchers and it's like okay well I start out as ash with the chainsaw resident evil 7 my favorite in in the series before this was 4 because four did this really well i felt like and seven like you start with a fucking shitty knife and then by the end of it you're like all

right zombies let's go let's do this thing like i know i do think it does that really really skillfully it's such a cool idea of scale that you start out on this like small house at the beginning of the game i mean obviously the compound expands and then you end up on the boat the liner that is essentially responsible for the issues that are affecting the intimate like this family that it goes from you know micro to macro yeah and then all of it actually melds together there's a logic to it which i i just feel like there has not been an internal logic that has worked so well for the series maybe four but even then i think seven works i don't know wesker yeah how about that wesker storyline super mario super mario odyssey real quick is just like uh it's

it's i struggle with this because i think it might be my favorite mario game it is so it's just it's so fun to play they They have taken like every like maneuver that you've been able to do in a 3D Mario game before and sort of put them all together in a way that like really works and then allowed you to use all of those different maneuvers to explore these massive worlds that aren't just huge. They are also like dense as hell, where every time you see something out of the corner of your eye that looks like oh i could jump a weird way onto that you can and you'll be rewarded for it like it's it it that's what platformers are all about and i feel like i i cannot think of a platformer that um uh uses like every part of the the platforming buffalo quite as well as as super mario odyssey does

um it is excellent it is so good and the fact that i feel like also every switch game we talk about is it cheap to say like and also you can take it out of your tv and play this huge incredible game on the go like i don't think that's unfair to say like oh and by the way also it's uh it's portable and that is yeah it's interesting because we knock games for like well the platform doesn't like you know whatever pub g on xbox runs like dog shit and but like is that the xbox's fault but maybe it goes the other way which is to say like well the platform that it is on has all this added functionality and i think you gotta i'll be i'll be straight up with you i i um i love the the ps4 is like i was my favorite uh console for a long time i don't play it that much anymore unless there's like a console exclusive on it because and i i

think that's just because the switch has spoiled me in a way not that there's a lot of games that the that are crossovers between those two i just usually opt for the one that i as much as i travel that i can take with me on the go and that's why i have like my favorite games on the switch i have poured an enormous amount of time into and 100 at all of them um and and my ps4 doesn't get like quite as much use anymore i i yeah uh but yeah it's odyssey for me uh i'm gonna abstain really i didn't really play resident evil 7 because i was too scared that is don't abstain uh i'm you know what justin what what's your vote i would have to go Odyssey. I really like Resident Evil 7, but Odyssey is really a juggernaut, I think.

That's it, then. All right. You want to vote? I don't really want to vote. I told you. Y'all are cowards. This is going to be a hard round, and y'all didn't want to put in the work.

I get it. That's too scared. Round five. This is going to be a tough one too, man. Near Automata and Cuphead. They both have shoot-em-up segments. I will do Cuphead. How about that?

And I'm going to do it short. Visually, there is no game that looks like Cuphead anywhere ever. It's never been done it's it's going to be a very very very long time before anyone does it again in such an incredibly amazing crazy fucking way um cuphead is the best visually looking game of the year for well i don't know i love the visuals they're amazing revolutionary incredible and it was made by a very small team and it is really a triumph uh of that and presentation and just like love and care for the source material i played it long after we had talked

about it and i just want to say like the story that people talk about when they talk about this game is like oh it's so hard it's so punishing it's so um it's not as fun to play as it is to look at and i want to disagree with that like wholeheartedly i had a fucking ton of fun playing cuphead i thought it was i thought it was super fun i think that it boils down and condenses this idea of uh you know learning boss patterns and mastering those which is something that is implemented in all kinds of games megaman dark souls monster hunter um all of these games it condenses that down in a really genuinely brilliant way where i i felt like i was never just like bashing my head against these boss fights i was always always always learning and improving in a way that was so satisfying um i i adored cuphead i

thought it was i thought it was great cuphead's great they've also fixed a lot of the um parts that i feel weren't fair uh when it first launched there were a handful of spots that were bad um and even then they were kind of uh hesitant to agree that they were bad but i think after enough pushback happened with fans that they've since smoothed what what few rough edges remained that said plant how many plant how many iframes do you need to really be happy in life i i don't i'm not even going down this road. That said, congratulations, Cuphead. It was really nice that we got to talk about you. Oh, no, no, no.

I want to talk about Nier Automata. What? I want us to talk about Nier Automata. I don't want this to be one of those rounds where we just dump one of these in a fucking toilet. No, we can talk about it, but we're going to talk about it later. Nier Automata is the best game of the year, maybe. It is. Which part should i talk about should i talk about like the very like basic stuff that platinum games uh which is known for creating uh elaborate combat

mechanics partnered with a person who is known for big ideas and creative story but uh technically uh lacking video games and it was a marriage made in heaven it turns out that if you take somebody who has great ideas and pair them with people who have technical know-how that the end result is this game that in a lot of ways is the final draft of a game that has been made two or three times before this um i yeah i i think it is exceptional i think it does combat very well maybe not as well as cuphead because that's all cuphead is yeah i didn't really i didn't i i i this again this is another maybe this is the round of games that i played long after we had talked about them um i got like a couple of the endings and like that that shit is obviously very cool and the presentation is like unparalleled but i was left kind of cold by the combat i found it like

really repetitive and not super satisfying but how how many times did you like get to credits uh i mean i got some of the weird silly i got a lot of the weird silly ones but i got two of them i got two of the complete endings which i i know there's another one beyond that but i got two of them i got two of the complete endings which i know there's another one beyond that but i just i i found myself butting heads with i want to see all the cool stuff that i know this game has to show me um and it's so pretty to look at and listen to in the presentation again it's fantastic but i was butting my head up against the fact that like i want to see what else this game has tucked away what else this game has hidden i just don't want to go hack and slash and shoot the same stuff again because i'm kind of bored with that i just don't want to go hack and slash and shoot the same

stuff again because i'm kind of bored with that so you don't do that which is the good thing um because the the whole like repeating the game is a myth it's totally different games especially once you get to third fourth totally third fourth and fifth ending are literally different stories but you are still hacking. I feel what you're saying. I'm not saying you play through the same levels, but it's a different character. You're not Simon Belmont now going through the tower.

It's obviously like there's more to it than that, but it still felt kind of same. I know for me, it's Nier Automata, which I thought was brilliant. I'm having trouble keeping an argument in my head that just dismisses Cuphead out of hand because almost anything I would level it near automata like it's inspiring to see what they do like with mechanics. I guess the best thing I could say about near automata versus Cuphead is near. I am a total sucker for games that for a long time people use games to tell movie stories and and i think that's still a huge prevalent issue um that using game and there are some games that have sort of contorted

to service it like i think you've seen like call of duty twist itself up in knots trying to tell movie stories with uh video games as a medium um i'm a huge sucker for games. Some companies do it well. Like Naughty Dog does it well. Like Naughty Dog, very, very few can actually pull it off. But it can pull it off because you are straining the medium. And then there are games like,

I would say like Braid or- All the Zero Escape games. The Zero Escape games. Fucking crush it. Yeah, or even things like Her Story, I think that like, use what is strong about video games to to to tell a story very well suited to them and i think near is such a huge accomplishment in that the story of near does not work as a movie the story of near works as a video game

because it is using the strength of the medium to tell the best story possible and the weaknesses and the weaknesses thank you chris that's a great point yeah absolutely um all right let's let's vote because i think we're going to be talking more about near i i i'm not being contrarian i loved cuphead and i very much liked near but my vote would be cuphead but i think i'm probably in the minority here abstain no come on come on i'm done with that you get one round okay okay we get fucking sloppy here well here's what i'm gonna say i'm gonna i'm gonna vote based on the pitches because i really have not played enough near to really weigh in on that part but based on the enthusiasm i will vote near based because based

on the sheer tonnage of conversations about near automata we've had well in every episode this year it definitely says something granted it says something about fire emblem heroes that i talked about in every episode but it also says something about near so i think i gotta give it to near all right to be honest two more uh first rounds god i can take this is persona five for a way to say it persona five versus divisive jesus christ persona five versus divinity original sin 2 i'll take persona 5 because i when i put it on when we were putting it on the list people were like wait i thought this was a bad game um plant the plant did you play divinity uh i'm literally i'm just starting it i feel bad okay so no uh justin's played some right i didn't i didn't play okay well juice you talk you take divinity i'll start with persona 5 um

i uh persona 5 i felt like was never going to live up to my expectations uh persona 4 specifically persona 4 golden for the Vita, is my favorite game of all time. Not being hyperbolic, it is my favorite game of all time. And so Persona 5, as storied as its history was, where it was supposed to come out in fucking 2013, and then did not come out until spring of 2017, the hype cycle for that was pretty wild.

And so thinking back about the episode of Besties we did, spring of 2017 uh the hype cycle for that was pretty pretty wild and so like um i i thinking back like about the episode of besties we did i where i was like pretty disappointed because it did not live up to those expectations i feel like it's kind of uh colored the conversation about it a little bit um but i mean it's been months and months now since i played it and i beat it all you know 80 100 80, 100 hours, whatever. And looking back, like I'm very positive on it because it is a very fucking good RPG that does a lot of the things that Persona does that that is like defines the series. It does it really well. The environment is like incredible i love spending time in like virtual representations

of of tokyo and this game's representation of tokyo is like really great um the characters are maybe not quite as vibrant and memorable as in persona 4 but they are still really fun and really great it's still a really cool idea for a story and for a game of living out this year in real time and going on these like exciting adventures with your friends who you become closer to in the downtime um all of that stuff is great and also it has really cool rpg systems like um i will say i didn't like it as much as persona 4 but like combat in this game and exploration throughout the the dungeons which are not randomized this time around they're like actual uh dungeons with puzzles you have to solve.

And things you have to do to get around them. Is like way more fun. And all that said. I think it's a really tremendous RPG. And is not you know. Is not maybe what I wanted. From the next Persona game. But I still love it for what it is.

So I think it's great. And I think that maybe I was, if I was too hard on it in the episode where we talked about it, it's because I just beaten it. And this game kind of falls apart in the last, like fifth of the game, but everything before that is, uh,

is money, baby. Uh, divinity. Original sin two is an open world, uh, RPG action RPG, I guess technically.

Yeah. No, it's not an action rpg what are you talking about okay so here's what here's the thing because i played it for a long time i went to the bathroom and when i came back divinity original sin 2 was on this list i have no explanation for that i think it is uh i can see a certain uh subset of people very much enjoying the divinity thing uh i have tried it now twice and uh for me there's just not enough sort of structure getting me from from a to b i feel lost a lot of the time playing these games um i think that there's still a time they feel like don't they feel like they're like the original like fallout like that era of crpg no no no no it doesn't because that's what they do no it's so much can you walk us through this please

god let me talk about that's a good thing i like the freedom it doesn't feel like an old school crpg it feels like the reason that it is on everybody's like lips this year except for ours apparently is that it is a fucking like genius refinement of of what those rpgs are like it is it it it the idea of a crpg is the name of the genre right i'm not getting that wrong okay it's a computer rpg is that really what crpg stands for i always thought that's what the c was uh yeah i guess so computer role-playing game okay so like right uh uh the original fallout right you have action points that you can use to move around and and then take actions on your turns or whatever and yes divinity original sin 2 does that also from this isometric view where you're going around and meeting characters and getting quests and all that rpg

shit but it does that and it layers it and divinity original sin 1 did this as well is it layers all these very physical uh systems on top of that, where you can throw, use your big burly character to throw a barrel of water on the ground and then use your magic user to electrify it or throw a, you know, a torch into a cloud of flammable gas that you've created around a bunch of enemies to nuke them that way. Like it does.

There's it break. And in doing that, it, it manages to break this RPG cycle of, okay, you've got to have a healer, got to have a wizard, got to have a thief and you got to have a tank. And now it's like, OK, well, now you have somebody who can shapeshift into, you know, a fucking shark or whatever. But they can also cast oil onto the ground which your ranger can shoot a flaming arrow onto like it it shatters the uh the thing that and and some rpgs have tried to do that say like okay you don't need the traditional party structure but at the end of the

day like that is still what works and divinity original sin 2 like it doesn't have to be like that there are so many different ways to to play it because because of how it has evolved the the genre i regularly got into situations in divinity original sin 2 including and i would level this at the first divinity where like things would go bad in a combat encounter and i would have like no idea why or fights would start with people that i did not want to begin or uh and the inventory management is a bear and a huge pain in the ass and like i i think the amount of flexibility they're giving people is great i just like the loss the lack of structure just left me feeling like bewildered a lot of the time and not really enthused to like when you get into a fight and like all of a sudden just like

all your characters are dead and it's like not it's just not enjoyable i don't know but i i i and that's just complicated and i will i will give you that but i think you're being a little bit hyperbolic in that like there's probably not a situation where you start a fight and all of your characters are like uh yeah you want me to load my save up grip because i guarantee that there is a situation where i went to break somebody out of jail or something and like the the different situations can play out in very different ways and i think that's laudable but it also makes it feel to me like i a lot of times like i didn't have a great idea of where i was supposed to be going or what i was supposed to be doing and i just would like a little bit more structure and that probably

comes down to personal taste because a lot of people really love uh this game series i and i that was the connection i was trying to make with like fallout 1 and 2 on pc is the lack of guidance is like very exciting for a lot of people in the way that the lack of guidance in skyrim and and those games is very exciting is that you feel like you can go anywhere and wow i found this side quest that i didn't know it was even here and i did some cool shit that i wasn't expecting and i think a lot of people do like that but it's also very intimidating because you it's worth mentioning i think at this point and it's something that people don't talk about a lot and like i think for for people and it obviously doesn't extend to everybody on this call but for people who um uh do write about games

and talk about games for a living i constantly feel a pressure of like there are always six other things that i need to play to like keep abreast of stuff and i do not as a rule extend a lot of patience to games that demand me to really invest a ton of time before i really like grok the entire thing like i i am looking for that preference has to be there first in order for you to, it's a question of, I talked about this, I think during Absolver and that like I played Absolver and I was like, this is cool.

But I know that if I want to get good at it, I'm going to have to invest a lot of time into it. And I don't trust this game enough based on where I'm at to do that. And so I walk away and that's that, I feel like happens a lot with CRPGs and I'm like, this is cool, but I also know it's going to be a couple hundred hours of just wandering around and finding my own way through the world.

And do you have that trust while you're playing it to, to make that. That I think is what, is what broke divinity for me is that I know the bulk, I know the size of the experience that I'm undertaking. And if I felt sort of like not propelled from the beginning, uh, and I, I didn't feel that way in, in this game.

I didn't feel like I just have to see the next thing that happens because I wasn't clear a lot of times on what that would be or where that would be. If I was feeling a little bit lost in the beginning, I just didn't have the, uh, trust, I think is a good word for it that like it was something i i wanted to continue to like sink a bunch of time into we have talked about both of these for way too long crpgs are i i sort of now lump them into like the same category as like fighting games and dirt 2 where it's just like this is a these are genres that are i feel like very um esoteric in a way where you if you're if you are into them it's your favorite shit and you celebrate uh every and this is like monster

hunter and i'm not being i'm not trying to diminish them in any way because i think divinity original sin 2 is a really great game but i did stop playing it after the first act for pretty much the same reason where i was like okay that was really fun and very cool but i i i i it's not my like exact jam and it would kind of have to be in order for me to sink all of the the time into it that would be required to see it through i'm calling i think it's worth saying that this is the besties is the best game is from the four of us the best so like divinity original sin 2 could be number one on a lot of lists um unfortunately for us i have a feeling it's persona 5 hell yeah before we cut divinity original sin entirely i do want to ask you guys one question which has the worst title divinity original sin 2 or player

unknowns battlegrounds they're both pretty bad man They're both very bad titles, but I will say congrats to Persona 5. All right. Last round of these initial offerings is, and we're titling this round, Apologies to Bennett Foddy. The Slaughter. Yeah. This is as close to a Sacrificial Lamb

as we get in this one. Breath of the Wild versus Getting Over It. Somebody talked about getting over um yeah plant you you're pretty prolific about okay i'll talk about why these two are going up against each other um because they're both climbing simulators it is the idea you spend so much time in breath of the wild climbing climbing climbing your little heart out trying to get over uh you know little mountains trying to get over it and then getting over it is an actual climbing simulator and that you are you are a

nude i can't decide if you are um what's the thing you don't have underwear on inside that cauldron well there's so who's the creator of the witness uh jonathan blow jonathan you're the top half of jonathan blow with a goatee and then like your guts and a cauldron or your giant bombs alex navarro i can't decide who you are you're both you're both at the same time yes um you're a fusion and you use a sledgehammer to climb up all sorts of stuff um while bennett foddy really guides you along what I like about getting over it is that it people who don't have to who don't write about video games for a living haven't had the experience of playing a video game with the person who created it and sometimes that can

be not great but every once in a while you have these moments where you're with somebody especially on smaller games where they so deeply love the game and they're providing all these insights um while you're playing it about like oh here's actually why we did exactly that thing um here's the game that i was playing when i made this uh oh hey you you fell down don't worry you're doing the right thing just keep going it's a really interesting experience and i think bennett made that into a game the game knows what you're doing it it has a sense of he he has curated so perfectly that he knows where the mistakes will be and then when you make those mistakes audio cues come over to inspire you uh and motivate you to keep going and

i really like that because i think so many massacore games um they really pride themselves in this i don't know almost like uh antagonizing the player well i think bennett likes that that the challenge is valuable not the meanness or the rudeness that the beauty of the game is that you will overcome this thing and he is here to help you and he's built a world that is totally fair it's challenging but you can do this and he he is there to keep reminding you that that's possible i would play an infinite number of these types of um like developers commentary baked in i loved the the beginner's guide for this same reason and it's such a i mean is there another game in this genre like i don't i'm having trouble obviously this game's the

developer's commentary uh magic circle is magic circle yeah a game like a game about game development although that one obviously had a era of fiction but Magic Circle is a fucking game but I would also say about getting over it like I think you can play it without that and it's still like an incredibly well designed

interesting game the way I think of of getting over it is almost closer to like a turn-based strategy game than it is what is a climbing sim literally yeah insofar as the way it's designed is that for a lot of it you can really really think about i'm gonna do this and then this and then this and there's this build-up almost like you're standing on the edge of a cliff and you're trying to like gut yourself into jumping off into water safely. But essentially it's like, I'm going to do this,

but let me think this through first. And you think through all the steps and then what was a turn-based strategy game becomes an action adventure game almost where you have to then execute on that very specific plan. And if you don't, you're probably going to fail. and i love how predictable it is and also how uh punishing it is because it all the fault is your own like you know why you fucked up because you didn't do that that exact thing that you wanted to do while you were fucking around um and yes it's brilliant i love it

it's not gonna be for a little while real quick because we're gonna talk about a lot is uh the best game that was released in 2017 ad i yeah i just so last night actually it's funny i i started playing it again when the dlc came out i started over completely started playing through master mode um which is really fucking great. Can't recommend it enough. Uh, I just got the final shrine. I, I won a hundred percent of the game, uh, last night. And, uh,

I think it is, I think it's so brilliant. And I think the thing that I, I like, I struggle with talking about this game because it feels very, uh, I feel like I am reductive when I talk about it and that I say like, oh,

it's just great. Like it's just per like, it's fucking incredible. Um, but what I, what I feel like is tangible, just great like it's just like it's fucking incredible um but what I what I feel like is tangible like the tangible thing about it why I think it is the the game of the year is that it took this genre of open world games that I was just kind of done with I bounced off of I've bounced off of so many open world games over the past like forever uh Horizon Zero Dawn was

one this year I was just like okay it's just open open world and i feel kind of exhausted by it breath of the wild takes uh an open world game with a massive really truly remarkable open world and fills it with stuff to do and every time you do that stuff it never feels like repetitive it breaks this like cycle that open world games have which is just like okay go and then level up and then you know whatever ways that you play the game you specialize in those a little bit more and then all of a sudden your melee attacks are a little bit stronger your fire magic is a little bit stronger breath of the wild doesn't do that you get like really i mean obviously you get better weapons and stuff like that but um you have like six powers that you get in the first hour of the game.

That's pretty much it. And then it's up to you to figure out a way to make those work. And each of like the shrines has like really clever ways of, you know, forcing you to think about those different powers. It feels so like everything you find in the world feels exciting. And I don't know that I can say that about like I adore Skyrim. It's one of my favorite games of all time. But at the end of the day, like you're just getting stronger spells and attacks and stuff like that,

that you can use to solve, you know, problems and breath of the wild is, is not about that. It's, it's about more finding dynamic solutions with a much more limited and much more static kind of power set. Uh, okay. So there there's so that's it right

breath of wild yeah obviously so back up to the top we have four rounds here of these eight games that we're going to winnow down and we're going to try to move a little more quickly i think in these rounds uh round one horizon zero dawn versus player unknowns battlegrounds do we want to take a half time to hear from one of russ's beloved guys absolutely not no one was really i didn't invite anyone like i don't see why anyone would come by well and then do they usually wait for an invitation these wonderful creations that you've got sort of kicking around up there in russ's world i mean they tend to be pretty polite on that front like they usually just come by when these wonderful creations that you've got sort of kicking around up there in russ's world i mean they tend to be pretty polite on that front like they usually just come by when they're

invited so it's hello is somebody at the door somebody's at the table i think that's not my house though that's that's someone else's house is somebody under your table right now and wants to come say hi, Russ? It's not my table. Someone else was knocking. I guess nobody. Are we really after all that fucking buildup? We're not. Who's knocking?

One of you guys might have a person in your house. So Horizon Zero Dawn versus. Jesus Christ. What a terror. I can't. No, I refuse. i will not participate in the rest of the podcast people are gonna get so angry if we do all that and one of russ's beloved creations doesn't show up one of his wonderful jeff dunham like head creations please i need honestly like if they were here i'd say. It sounded like there was some knocking somewhere else,

but I don't know where that was. So, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds versus Horizon Zero Dawn. What a- Ayo, it's me, New York Giraffe. I'm in Texas. What up? Wait, oh, shit. He's in here with me, guys.

Oh, my God. I've never had to look at him before. This is horrible. Griffin, talk to me for a second. Yeah. Am I wearing this hat properly? is this the way you wear this hat uh you are actually wearing a jamiroquai right hat right now yes correct and you have it on your giraffe wiener and so no could you mind if i fix it yeah please fix it whoa whoa watch yourself no watch yourself this is all this is all unacceptable and i'm gonna

pull your pants up for you because i know you have trouble with that with the hooves well there's also it's two pairs of pants that are connected by a belt that goes across my waist which is quite large okay i'm glad that we've solved the how would a giraffe wear pants uh meme it took me at least a few weeks to figure that one part out. Alright, now I'm gonna put that on your head, on top of these two weird antlers. You just described assless chaps. You talked about stockings. That's what you're

wearing? Well, it's two large pairs of jeans. I got a bunch of denim at Costco in bulk, and then I sewed those up on each leg. There's basically two pairs so two you know one pair of pants per two legs and then there's a long belt around the center justin just left justin don't want no part of new york you have no i fully have muted my microphone i'm just like

going through email and stuff just whatever to distract me from what's happening here. Well, honestly, Justin, if you have any advice hat-wise or belt-wise, I'm open to it. But personally, the Jamiroquai hat was why I came, because I wasn't 100% sure that this is how people dressed in Texas. I was told big hats are a big deal, and also moving floors in rooms. You came to Texas to find out if it's okay to wear a Jamiroquai hat. Not okay. No, no, no, no, no.

Not okay. I want to fit in. I want to be a local. I don't want to look like a tourist when I'm cruising around Austin Street. Well, let me just tell you, I think you look great. Yee-haw! Is this Texarkana? It's Texas giraffe, your long-lost brother.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I didn't know. Wait, we're related? Yeah, buddy. You want some barbecue eucalyptus leaves or whatever the fuck we eat? It's weird because I'm used to wishing that Rush Frushtick will have an early and hilarious death, but it's not common for me to feel this way about my own flesh and blood.

It's weird. I don't know what you're talking about. Griffin's right here. I'm right here. It's not me. It's not me, him. It's getting a little crowded, I gotta be honest, in this house. Particularly in the Sealdon area, because of her long, long, long necks.

Yeah, what is your name, by the way? Texas Giraffe. And how are you related to him? You're called Texas Giraffe. We are one. I have a mind, I guess. Texas Giraffe, let me ask you something. If you were playing, like, PUBG,

how do you recommend I get into the plane? Well, that's a ridiculous question. Because honestly, I've thought about it a lot, to be honest. Yes. And I think the only way you could do it is fit two giraffes side by side and then have the necks go down the plane by bending them down. But honestly, that doesn't seem very comfortable for the several hours you might be on the plane. My friend, it's a virtual world. You're too deep into the simulation.

Texas Traff, I have an important question for you. Yes? Cough twice if you had been locked in Griffin's house for the past four years of us doing this show. Well, I tell you, I've been hiding out in here, actually. Oh, you've been hiding. Is there a basement? I've been hiding out in here. There's not a basement in the Alamo.

It's a fun Pee Wee Herman joke. But I'll tell you what, people want to get my neck meat for the barbecue. What? They put giraffe meat in the barbecue. Yeah, it's a real epidemic going around right now. And I'll tell you a buddy of mine who can tell you all about it.

It's a close friend of mine, also part of the sort of symbiote. And that's my good buddy, West Virginia Giraffe. Oh, hey, West Virginia Giraffe. What's going on? Oh, he's shy. Oh, West Virginia Giraffe, you ain't got to be shy. Just chip on in on the podcast people listen to. He must not be related. I've been cooking up a lot of great racist stuff to say,

and I'm not going to edit any of it out, because that decision will lie with Justin. Nah, here we go. Y'all wanted it. Here we go. No, hold on. I got another friend here on the podcast. No, hold on.

I just want to tell you one thing is that we don't espouse that sort of thing around here isn't that right other texas giraffe wait there's another texas giraffe yes it's gonna be four giraffes podcasts and then we got a special y'all okay we got so nice of you to invite me to the show, y'all. Is that East Texas? Where is that? I come from a place deep in Texas. Deep Texas. We'll keep it real slow.

Horizon Zero Dawn is interesting because... The night goes on all day and the day goes on all night. Hey, everybody. This is Jeffrey, the Toys R Us draft. Thank you for having me on the guest on this week's episode. because all day in the day goes on all night hey everybody this is uh jeffrey the toys are us draft thank you for having me all the guests on this week's episode of yeah it's a big get and you know i've only got a few minutes so anything you want to ask me jeffrey the toys are us giraffe and um and i gotta jeffrey are the toys free for me you just get as many toys as you want or do you have to like pay like a percentage how want or do you have to pay a percentage?

How does that work? I have to pay double. Yeah, because I have to hire somebody to play with them for me. I just have these four silly hooves. Have you tried using your mouth for playing? Believe me, I have. Didn't work out. If you know what I mean.

Oh yes, I know. didn't work out if you know what i mean oh yes i know hi anything you want to say battle beasts who can forget that infamous hasbro toy line uh hey quick question uh any of you guys want some hollywood cocaine got it from uh it's uh no it's not a big you can say no if you want. It's, you know, more for me, but. Wait, is that Hollywood Giraffe? No, this is still Jeffrey. Oh, that's Jeffrey. You live in Hollywood now? It is Hollywood Giraffe.

Yeah, you know, after I was selling out all the kids catalogs and doing all the great commercials, they've sort of retired me, I guess, because Griffin doesn't seem to be around as much anymore. But now I'm in Hollywood with all my favorite other animal celebs air bud the dog from the target commercials grumpy cat who actually gave me this hollywood cocaine and um hello i am another giraffe whoa which one is he i'm a robotic one from horizon zero dawn the first game that we've got in the running for the next round of the besties. Horizon Zero Dawn. I'm going to step out and do some blows.

I got us out! I got us out! Russ! Hey, this is Griffin again. I'm going to deploy a neurotoxin that kills all giraffes. Just inject it into the air. Can I just do this blow first real quick? No.

This is a drug-free podcast. Straight edge besties. Poof. Okay, they're all dead. What's our first game of the second round? Horizon Zero Dawn versus PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Yeah, so... Shit.

I mean, how do we want to structure this? Because we can't just talk about how great these games are i think we have to talk about why one beats the other right and for me like player knowns battlegrounds is uh can i can i talk about player nuns yeah please because it's been a while but i did very recently talk about it in an essay so it's sort of fresh in mind uh it's not been a while since i played it i play it every week as we all know but in terms of talking about on the podcast uh player on the battlegrounds we talked plant earlier talked about horizon sort of uh summing up and uh the you know open world style of play and perfecting it and making it really great but like we've all seen that game before pub g um feels like a brand

new generation of shooters and obviously there they were progenitors to this with the mods and stuff like that but for the most part like as a standout solely like existing game this is the first this pub g feels like the first game in this generation um that is like exploring this brand new way to play a shooter and i 100 believe that three years down the road every triple a shooter company will be trying to copy pub g it is that influential yeah and that much of a shift from how shooters have been played so much so that like five years ago if you asked me like where shooters are going i couldn't have told you because this is so different from anything i would have possibly let's enjoy this honeymoon by the way before all of those clones do come out

and shooter franchises that are not built from the ground up for these sort of battle royale experiences try to do them and will not be very good i don't i i disagree and i would like to make my just so we have it here's my good faith uh argument for horizon zero dawn uh ahead of player in his battlegrounds and again please understand that i'm participating in in a debate style format and this is not necessarily like the belief that i hold true in my heart. But the argument that I would make is that PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds made a very, very, very strong basis, a very strong skeleton.

And then from where I sit, has made just as many sort of bad or inert decisions about that that very good bones um throughout the year that it has been extremely popular i feel like in the hands of a more skilled experienced um maybe even staffed i don't i have no insight into that uh developer this very very very strong premise based concept based ideas could be executed in a way that is uh much friendlier to new players much more accessible much more thrilling much more uh um easy to sort of find your way into and have a pleasurable experience every time um and i am very much looking forward to that because i think that player in its battlegrounds completely has coasted in this last year on the strength of its core premise and has not done anywhere near enough to uh uh continue to evolve it in this year and that

is i'm it probably sounds like i'm laying a fault at the feet of Bluehole. And I'm not necessarily, I think that they were sort of caught off guard by what a big thing this became and spent a lot of time trying to play catch up. But as great of a core idea as it is, I think that like even stuff you're seeing with like there's a good version of the game that Or I should say a much improved version The end and once you see like how far even like that the small changes in that Take the game. I think I'm at once I time at 1.0. It's a man playing and all that. Yeah Yeah, I think there's huge room for improvement here, and I think that like a lot more could have been done On that end and I on the flip side of that I think that like a lot more could have been done, um,

uh, on that end. And I, on the flip side of that, I think that horizon zero dawn has, is building on an established structure, but has made so many great gameplay decisions to really refine that into something that is like so fluid and so engaging and, um,

uh, really sweeps you from from beginning to end um and that is my best that is my best argument yeah i would say to counter that like i the the pub g succeeds because it is finely tuned like pub pub g succeeds i i disagree that there are these big broad things that they could do to change the experience or make it more inviting which i would disagree with that also because it is inviting i don't play these fucking games at all i don't play uh you know military sim pc shooters like this and yet this year i have spent like 250 hours playing this nonsense if you jumped into pub g never having watched anything or have someone to guide you through uh playing it initially

you would have a miserable time okay okay but but not nonsense it's literally what i did i saw that's disingenuous like this is you didn't do any sort like okay so you didn't read anything you didn't watch any videos you didn't have anybody talk to you about how to get better at the game yeah all i knew was the idea of how the game worked it's it's and i spent the first uh my first match of pub g was literally hiding in a closet in the same building for 15 minutes and it was like scary as shit and then i was like oh no i need to run also i didn't understand the blue circle that's a weird argument to leverage against the game it's i just want to hop on everything that justin talked about because i think everything justin said is totally fair but i think also speaks to like his personal taste and this is the thing that we kind of touched on

with divinity like horizon is a fantastic game that will hold your hand through large chunks of it and you never feel lost it is very very very very very polished maybe more so than graphically speaking any other game this year um and pub g is the opposite it is in in development through most of this time i i don't agree with the word coasting because i don't think i think uh the game coming out is is the object that is not only that they were releasing a patch every week yeah horizon is coasting because they just didn't keep updating it um i i don't fully agree with that but i i think we're really talking about basically the the old school style making a game which is hey we know this formula works we can polish it in these directions we will release it it will be a complete product when it ships versus the new

school style which is here's a wild idea we've experimented with it a while we're going to put it out into the world and we're going to hone it it's like kind of amazing that these two games are going up against each other because they i don't know if we could have found two better ends of that same spectrum okay hi my name is justin mccroy i play a character called justin mccroy who thinks that player in his battlegrounds is not should should lose in this round horizon zero dot this is my favorite character yeah it's a weird character. I hope I've played it well. I was just trying to

generate conversation. I obviously think PlayerUnknown's is fucking genius. Yeah, it's fucking awesome. And anytime I talk about it, I just want to go play it. And I do not feel that way about Horizon Zero Dawn,

which I think is an exceptional game. But I think we should pick through. Horizon Zero Dawn's not even the best open world game that came out this year. Okay, let's just go ahead and pass it on over. Thank you, Horizon Zero Dawn, for coming by. i do feel like we have not had a round yet where

we talk about player unknowns battlegrounds and what's cool and what is i think it's gonna have i think it'll happen in the last yeah i actually wish these were you know what can i make a suggestion uh and i'm just gonna like if if you all are okay with this i'm gonna do this i'm not really used to us changing the rules midway through so i don with this i'm gonna do this i'm not really used to us changing the rules midway through so i don't know i'm just changing the order of these to make the seating well i wanted to put off this next round as long as we possibly could because it's gonna get it's every okay every round from now on except maybe round three here is gonna be absolutely a bloodbath but let's let's do round two which is super Super Mario Odyssey versus Nier Automata.

Oh, man. Oh, God. Wait, can we do, I'm going to do a flash poll. Just flash poll right now around the table. Super Mario Odyssey. Mario. Nier. Nier.

Okay, yeah, see, this is going to be it. I don't know how we solve this one, because, again again it's two completely different games that succeed in different ways can we talk can we do this because that i don't like how that last round played out let's talk about what makes these games good and not dunk on the other one so that yours wins um because i i just think super mario odyssey is um it i talked about in the first round how it like succeeds by doing all the things that the series has ever done well and combining it into one very, very cool package. But I,

I think that that, um, is, is also kind of reductive because I think there's also a lot of very cool stuff going on here as well. well, let me, a serious question as speaking as someone that did not play a ton of near,

I started it. I tried a little bit, didn't play a ton of it. You know, I've heard a lot from people like Christopher Plant over the years complain about games that require you to play a lot before you get to the real juice of the matter. And what I've heard a lot from you guys, and please defend this because I'm genuinely curious, what I've heard a lot from you guys, and please defend this, because I'm genuinely curious,

what I've heard a lot is, oh, you didn't play ending four, you clearly didn't see the best part. And that, to me, is a big, big fucking problem. I can take that. Is that okay by you, Justin? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so what I would say is, yes, that is true. That is a complaint

I have often. That's usually with games that I find insufferable until like hour 50. I think there are certain RPGs that are there. There essentially is no game. You're just reading. You are learning systems that you will not use for a very long time. And then the game starts and the game is fun. I would say the pleasure of Nier.

And I think, Justin, you and i had a kind of a similar reaction to this and it's why we kept bringing it up month to month is you play the first push through it and you're like this is a good game this is a solid competent action game i get why people like it um it does a few interesting things and then you start the next round and it starts to call into question lots of what of why and how that game worked it does the thing that like i usually don't like which is the spec ops line thing where uh what if you're bad the whole time can you believe you did that yeah but it doesn't that's not what it ultimately ends up committing to that is it ends up calling into question that idea a lot of the game is a criticism

of what we enjoy about games but also why people make games to begin with yeah and what it means to like what is it you know we play video games and there's like the idea of violence hey we're playing a game and we're shooting people and like oh that's training us to shoot people but the question this game gets at which is deeper is we're creating artificial ideas or entities with some form of intelligence anyway what does it mean that we design these things to then kill them and what does it mean to be creators and to be stewards of the art that we create and the artificial intelligence that we create and what does it mean to ultimately leave behind all of human civilization for whatever

this kind of intelligence will be that maybe one day will west world near automata doesn't shame you for for like it lets you fight a bunch of robots in in the style of like uh so many games it lets you fight and kill a bunch of robots but it doesn't shame you for for fighting those robots like without really questioning it what it does is it raises the question and and i think it doesn't provide like easy answers but it raises the question of like was that okay why why did you do that and i think it's content to like have you stew on those questions rather than position itself as something that has all the answers like it which would have been i think a much easier thing to do is like to humanize

these robots and on a later playthrough and then force you to feel terrible about it like it continues to push the question like okay but what if it is bad what if they are what if they are what if this artificial intelligence is trying to wipe out humanity is it then okay like or is it is it cool then and what does it even mean to like give them artificial intelligence? One of my favorite parts is I won't get into hyper specifics, but near the end of the game, one of the characters gives these robots, uh,

an ability to kind of comprehend fear, um, and anxiety. And it goes great. It goes really well. It goes. Yeah. Well, yeah, it goes goes it goes in a number of directions but yeah it keeps getting you to the point of you coming to your own conclusion of like oh actually i feel this way about you know artificial intelligence now and then as if it kind of like we talked about with uh fadi in uh getting over it right after that it raises another

question that makes you think oh actually it's not actually that simple so by the time that the game ends you you're living in the gray muck of all of it while also not feeling like totally beaten down somehow the game is not just gobsmackingly depressing i i i don't want to detract anything from mario because i think mario is fucking genius like not there's not a moment of mario that is not that is ill considered the entire thing is so thoughtful and so i think generous to the player. But what I would say is in the end for me, like Mario is a very, very, very, very fun game that is inherently, if you're talking about its place in like the canon of art, if you want to say it that way, is basically a distraction. It's basically an an opiate and like i think that that's so that can be so valuable and important and useful and um not as easy to make as people like like to say but i think that like in the in the time period that we are living

in a something that is able to use the medium of video games to raise important questions and make you think and leave you with not just like a fun experience, but like insights into the human condition and like the state of the world and like leave you with questions and things that you continue to gnaw on is so laudable. And I think the exact sort of thing that should be honored when we're talking about discussions like this. Same premise, but counterpoint to that, it was a fucking dog shit year. And I think there's something to be said for a game that is as joyous as,

like in the same way that Nier Automata raises these important questions, right, about humanity and about, I think this game's exploration of humanity is much more like interesting than its exploration of the repercussions of artificial intelligence, because it is a game about what artificial intelligence and robots and the things that humanity made think of us. robots and the things that humanity made think of us um and so like yes that those questions are all very cool and it's an important time for those questions to be happening but it's also an important time for a game that is so i i resent the idea that it is a distraction that mario is a distraction i think it's a masterfully made like very happy joyous extremely like fun uh fleshed out experience that from a well it doesn't raise like these uh philosophical questions necessarily um it takes game mechanics that are as old as the uh the the medium itself and polishes them and refines them to new degrees. And I don't think it's fair to sort of dismiss that

just because it doesn't do, this is why I was not looking forward to this. I'm not dismissing anything. There's been no dismission. I know, I know. I wasn't looking forward to this round because it is a question of like, what are we rewarding? Cause if you wanna be like snide about it, it it's like well do you want to do the artsy game or do you want to do like the fun polished nintendo game um and i i want to i want to avoid that because like

i think there's a deeper conversation to be to be had here which is just like it is this is and maybe this is just going to be split when you frame it like this but just like what game meant more to you this year and the you know solid month or so that i spent 100%ing super mario odyssey and you know spending time in these these worlds and finding hours and hours and hours of, of levity and light and joy is just as important to me as a game that made me, you know, think about things, think about existence, uh, in a way that, that, you know, games maybe haven't necessarily focused so much on anymore. Like, I think that that, that, um, escape is the wrong word that, cause it wasn't like I was escaping from

the world i was like just experiencing a a type of joy from this from this um this medium that is like my go-to way of experiencing joy through art i i also don't think escape or distraction should i think they're very much the right words i think the problem is that we feel guilty about it like there's a need like that is what like mario does not demand that you think about anything other than the pleasure of playing mario i think that's like fair to say that is an escape from the world into whatever that joy is but i i just don't think there's anything wrong with that i'm not even yeah i'm not that i let me let me offer an uh an off-ramp to this and and chris please let me know if this seems fair to you as much as uh as warmly as i think about near and like the things it is

doing and as brilliant as i think it is it is structured in such a way that a lot of people that I have talked to about it, I think it does interesting things from the beginning, but the real meat of what we're talking about, it is structured in such a way that a lot of people just didn't feel inspired to get to that point. And I think that if we're considering like meditations in the nature of humanity to be the medicine of this then the the the the sweet that goes with it has to be sort of like above reproach so that like you everybody gets the stuff that like is the most valuable about it and i think that like the structure of near makes it so that a lot of people

won't get that. And, um, I think that that, even if you want it, like I, this is everything that I've felt secretly very jealous the entire year, because what you are describing is,

you know, me like that's absolutely my fucking jam. Um, I just, I just, is you know me like that's absolutely my fucking jam um i just i just i had a hard time getting through the shell to the sweet sweet oyster inside and i did i i eventually got to at least some of that meat but i was always sort of doing it in a way that i wish i enjoyed a little bit more than i was to its credit and i'm sort of undermining myself here but to its credit it does give you the option like literally like automate combat right and i did the stuff like you can get the important stuff but you have to

understand that that is also not a very satisfying no no that's a bad sign fair i i i i hear you i just want to completely disagree with it because i think like the idea that like art should for somehow for it to approach excellence should be uh ultimately accessible by everybody from the very beginning because people are impatient yes is like not on board with that the combat and the the exploration the traversal like these things that we talk about as like game mechanics that's also like it or not like that's part of the art that is part of the art of the game it is part of the presentation it is the the structure within which this incredible needs to succeed as much as anything this gets to the conversation that we had like around the pubg review me

personally i just don't give much of a shit about perfect polish when a game is striving to do more and i think like this is i i think we should just like let mario win this round because i think i i agree i agree with what you're saying but it just i i yeah well sorry just let me finish yeah sure but polish i think it's like why horizon would um you pass gravity rush right where i there is this games take risks but the games that get rewarded tend to be games that are pleasurable are joyful and are super polished and i think like if the beginning of this game is somehow not polished enough that speaks to like it is more polished than 95 of things that get made um but it is not like nintendo polished um so i i get it i here. It, I also just am not like super here for it because I think it,

I think the beginning of the game is strong. Um, and I think it just gets better. And I think the beginning of the game needs to be what it is for the rest of the game to click. Like, but yeah, I get,

I, I totally understand. I don't think that polish, I don't think polish is the right. I totally understand what you're saying. And I totally agree with the nut of what you're saying but i don't know if polish is necessarily the right word because this is not this is not like there was a a problem with the presentation of it or the it's not like there were rough rough edges the thing that was there i feel like was

actually extremely polished it just wasn't like it it wasn a polish of structure it's it like mario second to second is like pleasurable right right there's no second of mario that is not giving you the dopamine kick and this is a game that like there are stretches that are not fun the beginning of the game it is a slog to get around the world i think ultimately there's a reason for that, but like that definitely does not make it an easy game to pick up and play the first time. I, I, yeah,

I don't feel good about it. Like I wish it was any game besides Mario, but I, I think for me, if you're gonna, the, the fact that you to really understand the game you have to play it multiple times even though obviously that's not what we're talking about true also i think critics really

screwed this game over like all of the language around this game is like total garbage of what how you actually play it it's just one game that you play straight through yeah but there but structurally you are repeating sections and it is not the most i don't play games the second time after i finished them my instinct had i not heard like no no no to really get it you need to do the other endings the other playthroughs like i would not what chris is saying is that it's not a repetition of the same thing necessarily, although I would argue that some of it is. One and two mirror each other pretty heavily, but three, four, and five are.

That's a big ask, though. That's a lot of five. Yeah, I agree. Like I said, I think Mario wins. I just think it really does come down to what you favor, and I think for me, I just am all... I think Justin and I have been this way since we started doing Besties. Like, we love a really good Broken Puppy.

Yeah. And this is maybe the king of Broken Puppies. It's heartbroken we don't have enough, like, broken Eastern European games represented on here. I think this one's just going to be 50-50 for everybody. Because these two are polar opposite. Couldn't be more different. Great games. But we have a lot more to do here.

Lone, round three of this. This is a weird one. Super round. Yeah, it's weird. Lone Echo versus Dead Cells. So Lone Echo, can we? I haven't played Lone Echo. We did not talk about Dead Cells at all. Yeah, we haven't touched on Dead Cells.

Juice, why don't you talk about, or somebody talk about Dead Cells. Juice introduced me to Dead Cells, so why don't you go for it, Juice? Dead Cells is sort of a fusing of Castlevania and the roguelike structure that has started becoming injected into a lot of games. I think the best comparison is probably rogue legacy but where dead cells i think for me succeeds is it has tons of different weapons and tons of different

uh approaches you can take to the game and every single one of them feels one different and two very good you can go from a round where you have a sword that does huge damage if your health is very low to a round where it so it makes for this like thrilling like you're always on the verge of death uh but you're just like mowing through people to around where you have a rapier that does extra damage if you roll past enemies that turns it into this like very fluid uh kinetic experience of you know rolling around and backstabbing people um the entire can i just comment on that yeah please before you move on the i play a fuck ton of roguelike games like it is unquestionably my favorite genre uh if you look at my time played on my switch binding of isaac is over 100 hours uh enter the gun shooting which

just came out like two weeks ago is that about 35 or 40 hours i never played it on pc i'm fucking stoked but here's what i'm gonna say all those games that i absolutely loved the combat is generally the weakest part of them the reason i love those games is because i find it interesting to abuse the combinations that the developers have included in the game to make myself overpowered and feel super strong and like nail that part of it. And what Dead Cells does is does all that other stuff with the interesting combinations

and interesting like ways to build your character and makes the combat super fucking satisfying and fun. I almost wish that this and Mario Odyssey were up against each other because whereas Mario Odyssey is in my opinion the best feeling 3d game of the year dead cells is like the best feeling 2d game and that's probably maybe the best feeling maybe this and um the the metroid game that came out this year could go up because this this everything feels so fucking good uh to to to do in this game.

Like I played it a lot, a lot, a lot. Even after runs, there would be runs where in a lesser Metroidvania or a lesser roguelike game that went so poorly or had so much promise and then just like fucking fell apart in a way that was super frustrating that I would have walked away, but I didn't because this game is so extremely fun to play my only criticism of it is that it um uh it's it's not quite done yet and i know that please wait because i'm not saying that like early access games have no place in this conversation because that will be used against me and the next time we talk about player unknowns battlegrounds um the the game kind of culminates

in this boss fight as it is right now i do not know if they've updated it in the past few months um that is kind of shitty and really only works if you have built your character in one of a few kind of specific ways or to be more precise there are a lot of ways that you can build your character where just that final boss fight you just can't beat it and that is the that is the worst i made it that. Because it's a hard fucking game. And after beating my head against it a lot and unlocking a bunch of stuff and upgrading a bunch of stuff, which, by the way, please, if you're making a roguelite game, have some sort of connective tissue between the runs where you can feel a little bit more powerful run to run because this game does it really, really well and it's the best. um i finally made it to the boss and got destroyed because this build that had helped me make my way through the rest of the game that i felt very rewarded by was just determined to be insufficient um and that was kind of disappointing for me and i think is uh a factor of the game not quite being

complete yet which i think next year like this game is going to be a fucking juggernaut that everybody's going to talk about i i see i i disagree i i feel like i'm worried it's a moment may have passed like the the buzz around it when it launched i think was really good i don't think that so barring like a huge leap forward two words it's going to re-enter the conversation two words nintendo switch version yeah like switch version of this game and when it's done is fucking hello that's happening like is it have they said it's it would be it has not been confirmed it would be buck wild if they didn't though because that is a this is this is a this is the best metroidvania game of the year and it would fucking annihilate on switch once it's once it's like done and complete and i don't i'm not dismissing the

rest of the game because again i played it a lot and i think it's exceptional and very very fun but there's something about playing a roguelike game and feeling this like i'm gonna fucking make it i'm gonna make it i'm gonna reach the top of the mountain you reach the top of the mountain and then there's a dude like your pants are wrong and he kicks you back down the mountain that is literally what getting uh over it is but um but lone echo i think is is uh i for me it'sone Echo just because like it's the best best VR game ever and is a very, very special, very special game that came out at a time of year where like there wasn't a whole lot out, which I don't know that I would have given Lone Echo a chance because I don't like I had to plug all my shit in. Yeah, it's a big pan.

Yes, but it came out in a time of the year where there wasn't a lot of like special experiences coming coming down the pipe. And it was, it just blew my, blew my hair back. Yeah. I would probably go with lone echo as well. A lot of the reasons that Griffin said,

which is to say last I played dead cells, it wasn't wholly there. And that ending does really matter to make for a satisfying experience. And also just lone echo, like executes so fucking well on every single weird creative innovative thing that they try that like it's it's spectacular and it's you guys should really play it i can't believe lone echo has made it this far well wait i'm assuming it's plant and justin what do you think uh i didn't play Lone Echo. I have a Vive,

and I know there's a sneaky backdoor way of doing it, but I just haven't had my VR stuff hooked up. So I've not played Lone Echo, but I think the KC I'll make for it seems very strong, but everybody should play Dead Cells. Yep. Very fun. Plant, do you have any opinion?

Great. Have you played either of these games? Did you play Dead Cells at all? I, no. I played like 10 minutes. Okay. I want to play more, but no. Man, that Switch version.

Yeah. Isn't that, the conversation this year is about how great the Switch is, right? And the Switch is great, and there's a lot of great games. There's a, I would say, generous handful of great like exclusive games all mostly first party um with a couple other weirdos thrown in there as well but mostly it's a lot of ports and I at any other time like I would feel weird about sort of uh saying how great that is but again as somebody who travels non-stop to have all of these incredible games, which are some of my favorite games ever. And,

and the developers of these games to their credit are so smart. Cause they're like, Oh yeah, this is going to be very, very good. If I put it on switch, like stardew Valley, like,

Oh yeah, this'll destroy the world. If I put this on switch, I've been really smart. And y'all like, I've had it for 10 months now. It came out in February and I have about 40 games. I want to say on the switch,

which is unheard of um is that is that is that weird to give it that much credit for ports and stuff like that it's it's great it's great it's also uh an hour and 45 minutes into this podcast please for the love of jesus pick a bet pick a best game between persona 5 and breath of the wild it's breath of the wild congratulations breath of the wild griffin what do you want to say to close out Persona 5? Because there's no fucking way I'm letting it go through. It's a great game. I hope they make Persona 5 gold and then fix a lot of stuff

and make it portable. And put it on Switch. Turn down the entire final act. Turn down the entire final act and also change the entire emphasis. Because that's no spoilers, but this is a game about rebelling against adults who are trying to fucking ruin the world, which again, hey, pretty timely story being presented there. And it does a pretty good job of at least focusing on that and telling a pretty cool story about it.

And then in the final act, it does like the usual persona shit of just like, but what if it's actually whatever? I'm not going to spoil it. Make Yusuke romanceable spoil it make yusuke romanceable how is yusuke not romanceable uh charging on through to the next round semifinals four games left in the semifinals lone echo versus breath of the wild versus mario odyssey round one do we want to say anything else about lone echo before it gets booted i don't know like this is not a great argument for a game but it's there's something to be said for it's the best it is the it's the best vr game ever it's the best if vr and and i don't know if vr is going to be something

that sticks around i don't know if vr is going to be something that becomes as commercially viable as you know the the traditional game releases that we that we know about but if it does like this is going to be the fucking i or it should be at the very least the fucking rosetta stone of being clever about how you solve for all of these these problems in vr because i've seen a lot of um in a like uh a clumsy try solutions for this take like skyrim vr of just like you teleport forward six inches at a time in in trying to solve those problems like lone echo uh it's not it's not a clumsy fix for anything like it is the whole point of the fucking game and is so genius and i don't think that's necessarily a great pitch for why it should be the game of the year. But I think it is like definitely a standout.

But Breath of the Wild is probably the best game ever made. So let's move on to the next thing. All right. Round two. This one's a little trickier. PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds versus Super Mario Odyssey. Do we want to do a straw vote at the beginning? Yeah, sure.

PUBG. PUBG. Odyssey. straw vote at the beginning yeah sure uh pub g pub g uh odyssey i mean i yeah for me it's odyssey but it doesn't sound like it's gonna be much of a is any could anybody be swayed one way or the other tell us why it's odyssey okay well i've already i'm not gonna dunk on player nuns battleknown's Battlegrounds anymore because I do think it's genius and I've talked about my problems with it. For me, Mario Odyssey is in many ways an evolution and a continuation of the franchise that has existed for several decades. It's sort of a logical conclusion for that. But what else?

This is a Polygon exclusive. It's the last mark this is a there's a polygon exclusive it's the last mario game mario i okay if it was that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world because i think the the thing about mario odyssey that to me is very is is laudable and worthy of uh praise here is that which is what laudable means fuck me um so anyway mario odyssey when you see something in mario odyssey anything it was put there for a reason like there is no experience that i can think of like in video games that is on this level of i i i think a lot about the idea of the hand of the designer in in game design like your ability to feel i i think we talked about this i talked about this with getting over it like the ability to feel that the game designer has considered what you are doing and has allowed

for it to happen and i think with mario odyssey it is staggering to me that like i get a dumb idea to hop up on a ledge that i probably shouldn't be able to but maybe if i finesse it just this way i might be able to and i'm kind of cheating the system and when you get up there there's some coins and miyamoto's like i saw you coming i knew you were gonna come up here so i should get miyamoto got up here first and i put these coins here um it's just so generous in that sense from from the beginning and so like uh in love with the player and I think that like in and and I'm it's funny because I'm making sort of a the the the evil parallel dimension argument for where I was talking about near but I think like in in the world as it stands

now I think a game that with zero sort of meanness in its heart and zero sort of like cruelty is able to create an experience that just hugs the player and elevates them and makes them feel good and smart and rewarded and cares about literally every second of their like recognizes that time is the most precious resource we have and recognizes that every second that is invested into your game is a gift and Mario is one of the few games that I think really exemplifies the gravity of that and I think that like it never it doesn't take for granted any second that you give to it and i think that that is honestly kind of beautiful um and and i think a lovely sort of uh gift to give people you're swaying me a bit because i i agree with

you and and that uh you hear developers talk about that as being an important focus for the game right like this this this game values your time. I think that was a big thing that Jonathan Blow hit on when he was talking about Braid, when Braid was first coming out. And I agree. I think it's the most important sort of facet of game design is respect for the player's time. Because I'm a dad now and i have basically two jobs and my time is fairly limited and so nothing turns me off faster than well you have to repeat this thing and there's not really a great reason to do so but where modest mario

odyssey is such an outlier is that it does follow that sort of uh design mandate in a fucking enormous it's it's not like we respect your time so here's an hour and a half long experience like this is a this is a fucking huge huge huge game that if you want to really go at it and 100 it is going to take you dozens and dozens of hours each second of which is valued i think that's i don't know that there's ever been a game necessarily that has pulled that off quite as quite as well um i okay i'm gonna be a little bit negative on mario just because even though i absolutely adore the game and i think that it is 100 the like as consistent in my opinion as consistent as people make it out to be i think there are chunks of the game that don't feel as amazingly fantastic like what um certain like boss fights for example a lot of the boss fights are like

not fun due to the camera or what have you. Some of them are great, but some of them are really not fun. And there's a boss rush mode, and I found it to be pretty miserable. I don't want to focus on the negative because I really, again, adored this game, but I'm just trying to rationalize

the flip side of that. here's the fact of the matter player knowns battlegrounds in three years will be remembered in the way that doom like the first doom will will be remembered in that yes extremely important but like man do i want to go back and play it probably not i do want it's a little hard to like imagine the return like wolfenstein 3d right now uh and you go back to it and try to play it it's like man this really opens so many doors and and and everything but like mario odyssey in 10 years if you fire that up it is still going to be an absolute landmark yeah like i just i want to put out i want to put out a counter argument here because i i'm

genuinely torn um i talked about how i liked mario odyssey better than near automata because it was this joyful game that made me feel this emotion of joy if you want to talk about like pound for pound the game that has elicited the most emotions from me during this year it is player knowns battlegrounds because i love that i love that moment of beating that boss in dark souls or cuphead this year that like you pound your fucking head against and then you finally do it. And it's like, fuck, yeah, I did that. I put in the work. I cranked that out. I can't believe that I finally did it. And I don't like this is not an argument. It is a fact. fact the moment that gave me the most elation and happiness um and satisfaction this year uh that that a video game gave me was the first win i got in player unknowns battlegrounds like i will i will never forget that and this but and it's not just the first it's all of them it's the first win that me and russ and simone uh and somebody else pulled out in uh the first episode of awful

squad that we won a game of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds while we were streaming. It was this moment, it was this culmination of, and I view a lot of my positive experiences with PUBG through Awful Squad because it's been so much fucking fun to make that series. But the first time we won, it completed this narrative arc of us being dumbasses who suck at the game to like,

we did it, like we did it together yeah um i i've spent so much time playing it and a lot of it has been uh in in squads or duos um i reconnected with some some folks some like x polygon xbox people that has it's been really great to keep up with them through playing this game which i thought destiny 2 was going to be and i don't think it necessarily necessarily provided me this great social experience. But PUBG definitely, definitely has. And all of that is to say, like, if you want to talk about, you know, video games being these things that can inspire emotional responses from the player, PUBG is like designed for

that and did so for me like so very very very well like so so nicely and uh yeah and i and i also think like the a lot of the issue is that well i don't know the the point you made about pub g not necessarily being super playable in three to five to ten years is valid i think that's kind of a nature of shooters in general but i also think it's going to be because you're going to see every again every developer on the sun basically take aim at this format which is obviously very easily copied um we've already seen fortnite and other developers like not copied well i think it's gonna be really fucking hard to copy it well yes not copy it's not easy to copy something well but the the bones of it are

very easily copied and so you see like like once we have extremely like the entire world of the development community pouring their heart and soul into like how do i make this better yeah people are going to improve on it and the way that that, like, how much of the original Super Mario Bros. can I play? Like, you know, I'll play a half hour for nostalgia's sake, but I'm not going to, like, sink a ton of time into it. And I think that first thing that pushes everything else forward needs to be applauded and celebrated.

Yeah, absolutely. Because we can't talk about this thing and future proof it this is the game we have now and it's a game that i've spent uh 10 earth days playing and have fucking there there have certainly been moments in there of of frustration and um exhaustion with the thing um but there have also been these incredibly high highs that um as much as i love as much as i love mario odyssey and again it did give me a lot of uh a lot of happiness uh i i think that if you want to talk about like my peak moment of happiness this year was when i finally fucking conquered the machine when i finally conquered 99 other jerks to to prove that like i was capable of

doing this thing that if you'd asked me last year like hey do you think you're ever going to get in this hardcore military shooter and win in a you know game against 99 other people i would say like no that's not my that's not my thing but this game proved that i could do it and that that brought me so much so much happiness on and not only that on one fucking map on one map one very good we've been playing one map that effectively most of the map looks almost identical to most of the rest of the other map there's a few landmarks but like you know gun to my head i probably couldn't pick it out the fact that it has been this buggy weird laggy sometimes hackers sometimes like it is a very imperfect experience and the fact that it's still

as impactful as it is is a testament to how fucking good it is and it really and i think mario is a great game but i also think 50 of mario is a mario that we've experienced before i would disagree with that but feel very new. I am, however, willing to, I'm willing to see it. I think it's interesting because it's, in much the same way as Mario vs. Nier, it's a question of like, what do we want to reward?

And I think that there's like, I think it's worth rewarding innovation as well as like overall excellence. I can divorce it from that conversation because for me now it's like a, I loved both of these games. For me, it's a very personal decision of just like which one did I enjoy the most?

Which will stick with you. Right, and I think that's how I think of it. And I think Mario is- Well, it's interesting though. It's an interesting inversion in that I think that the experience of playing Mario Odyssey will stick with people who played it the most. I think that the things that PlayerUnknown's Battleground has built will actually have

more effect on the face of gaming in the next decade. I think that in that sense, it's more important than Mario, I think, is a fair thing to say strap in by the way for this exact same conversation in the final round of Let's please Chris. Are you okay with Chris? Are you okay with pub G? Yeah. Yeah, of course. Okay breath of the final round for the besties game of 2017 the Legend of Zelda and Zelda's the boy by the way a lot people get that legend of Zelda, and Zelda's the boy, by the way. A lot of people get that confused. Legend of Zelda, a boy, versus PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild versus PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. This would be a weird conversation to have if Breath of the Wild came out in November.

I mean, it would not be a weird conversation. I feel like it would be a very fast conversation. Don't you think? If it was this fresh and this exciting, and i'm saying it's good like the that we don't necessarily have the recency bias sort of uh tinging the conversation but i'll i'll take the against zelda on this um go for pub g okay yeah well i mean not even necessarily that just some some flaws in zelda okay um one it can be extremely boring um two it can be obtuse in ways that don't always benefit it it's its strengths can sometimes be its weaknesses um it can set you out and give you the illusion of freedom uh one of the things that

actually stopped me midway through the game for i don't know months was i had got it in my head that i was going to um get the very a very very fancy type of armor and i had done two of the main bosses and then i got to lava land and then it became very clear that my potions were not as useful as i had thought they were. And I needed to spend a lot of my money on that armor instead. And it was such a disappointment that it felt like, okay, I had worked, I had grinded. I had done all these things to get this thing that I was really covetous of. And now I'm going to have to move on in the game. to get this thing that I was really covetous of and now I'm gonna have to to move on in the game I'm gonna have to just sink it into this thing that really is just an artificial way of letting

me move in this new space that I need to be in I'm sure there is some other way that I could have navigated it that is also one of the joys of the game is that you can game it that it is so open-ended but at the same time i off not often but i sometimes found myself very frustrated by its freedom uh i think the horses are another are another huge weakness of the game yeah that's the reason it doesn't win game of the year is because of the horses hey hey why what's your problem with the horses it's a big open world game and i find them uh i i find learning how to use them very very very frustrating it's got a motor yeah the horses are stupid now yeah the motorcycle is fucking great yeah um again i think i think it's a very very very good game i i do think it is not a flawless game as some people like to describe it i think it is a game with a number of

flaws but i think those flaws kind of like what i've said about near are products of the risks it takes i i'm not sure you could take the risks that it does with open world um with its uh it's basically refusal to hold your hand in certain points without also having some of these kind of headaches. Can we mention the DLC real quick? Which this should not factor into the conversation, right? Because I feel like that's kind of a bogus precedent to set maybe. But we just never really dived into the DLC before. This should have gone in maybe the honorable mentions thing at the beginning of the episode.

But I didn't really play DLC 1 because I was waiting for like two to come out and I knew I was just going to replay the whole thing again. And they add some stuff that really make the experience of going around the world like so much better. Uh, the first DLC adds a warp token that you can just drop anywhere. And now it counts as a warp point that you can warp back to at any point. You can move it around the world wherever you want it, which is like that. I, if that, and also I, I want to make sure we call out a total game changer that should be in every

open world game ever from now on if the technology allows it i don't know what they call it heroes path path yeah heroes path which shows you the last 300 hours of gameplay where you walked on the map cool and it's seriously like i still haven't gotten 120 shrines because i refuse to look up where the remaining shrines are i think i'm missing like five and all i do whenever i get some free time in the game is i'll be like oh i have not gone here ever i'm gonna walk over there and the number of times that i've maybe not found a shrine but i found like a new area that looks completely different from any other area i've seen is like crazy to me and awesome. And it was just a genius.

So the DLC also has the motorcycle, which I can't stress enough. Like it is so fucking fun to explore. There's a jump button while you're on the motorcycle. So you like go up a mountain and you hit the top and you jump off of it. And now all of a sudden you're flying through the air on a motorcycle, like fucking evil Knievel. And then you can leap off of that.

And now all of a sudden you're parasailing off of it. It also adds, I think it's called the ancient bridle that you can put on any horse and then you press a button and your horse is instantly no matter where you are where your horse is in the world it instantly appears right next to you you can be on top of a tower which is which i think fixes the horse problem pretty pretty much a lot i think it does too but it requires deals and also the uh the uh the guard or what is it the champion song uh like story dlc is fucking oh champion's ballad is really really great and it adds more sort of character building cut scenes and stuff that i found very enticing but anyway here i do want to

say i'm gonna play devil's advocate i still am not 100 sure what i'm gonna land on because i'm really vacillating pretty hard for both someone on this podcast defend the experience of rain in breath of the wild um i can defend it in this way uh rain in breath of the wild is a big pain in the ass especially if there is a lightning a thunderstorm because then you can't actually think that's cool because like you can't have any metal yeah that doesn't bother me Or also get electrocuted. Um, the only time that rain really works is the first time you're making your way into the Zora world.

And it basically limits you from trivializing this like kind of cool path of, um, monsters that you have to find your way through and fight your way through. Because if you could just climb over a mountain and just be done with it, then you could just do that. Um, and so in that sense it makes sense um they needed some way to make it they gave you infinite ability to climb wherever you want which is uh like we shouldn't

trivialize that is fucking groundbreaking and really remarkable and i do not it is going to be something that is going to be a pain point for every other open world game i play where i don't have that level of freedom of exploration um and when you it's raining you are slipping and sliding and it makes it much much harder to to climb up things which can be kind of annoying sometimes also i'm not the first person to say this but i think it's really cool that it it takes the world in makes it antagonistic against you like so many i mean this is the ability to climb everything in the game anyway but so many open world games uh are static boxes uh fresh and i have talked about this with my love of red faction gorilla and you while you can't destroy everything in this game everything is um it has a purpose it can be climbed it you can engage with

it and i think that they found a way to somehow make it so it's not just an object that benefits you but that it can also be turned against you and I think the same thing with Rain, with Lightning. I think it's really interesting that they found a way in the story that seems natural to turn the entire world against you in a way that isn't just more enemies. And in terms of scale, you cannot beat this game, I don't think, in terms of how it deals with scale, because you have that first moment of stepping out of the shrine of resurrection and looking over the world and that moment which i

almost wish they hadn't i don't know how you don't put this in a trailer is so breathtaking like the first time you you you play the game um and and it's constantly all of these like incredible vistas the world is so like um it looks like a really good studio ghibli movie like it has such a unique sort of uh artistic style that is not just like everything's all high res and gorgeous it is painterly in in a way in most of the places that you're at but then you get to kakariko village and it's in this valley and it feels much more closed in and there's all these um thatched roof, uh, cottages with these fires inside where people are keeping warm from the storm outside, or every time you go into a shrine

and now all of a sudden you are not in this open world where you are the master and commander of the, you know, the, the elements and can go anywhere. Now you are, are, are limited and you have to figure out this, you know, clever, this clever puzzle that you're in. And it's a completely different type of experience. And that's what Zelda, like 3D Zelda games

and in a way 2D Zelda games have been about in that they've all been open world to an extent where you can go around and find different sort of pathways to empower yourself and then go into a dungeon

where it's like, all right, let's see if you're tough enough. This game does that 120 times plus change like i i think is yeah i would also say like if you think back to ocarina or um major even major's mask and other games like they feel linear in comparison to how open this game is like you are really moved down very specific paths through towns through through whatever. I mean, granted, they are open world to a certain extent, but for the most part, they're pretty linear and small as hell compared to this game.

And that's not a knock, necessarily, just a different experience. It's so fascinating how this is such a, and we haven't really talked about this, is such an enormous departure from what zelda is it is right it is this is a fucking huge open world game and there's no like um there there have been there have been no uh things cut cut out of that experience in making it this new thing and while it is like in my opinion like one of the best open world games ever made and something that fixes so many of the problems that i have with open world games it's kind of incredible how much zelda dna is still in it like it's it's not like uh okay we just made an open world game because we're nintendo and we wanted to make an open world game but we'll call it zelda so we'll make your life be represented in hearts and there's rupees and stuff like it's i mean it feels like zelda one like a a next-gen

version of zelda one which is to say no guidance you can go wherever the fuck you want you get creamed by most enemies because you don't know who you're fighting or where items are or anything um and but it obviously has been modernized with physics and fucking chemistry and that stuff like all sorts of crazy shit really shines in master mode i am so glad that i i went back and played the game again partially because like i'd kind of forgotten what i loved so much about it and in like writing my game of the year video for polygon i was like what the fuck do i say about breath of the wild it was really good and really polished really well made and then playing in a master mode like you really have to use all of that like clever physics

discovery based stuff or else you'll die especially early on in the game when you have nothing and the enemies you're fighting are these god killers uh you you have to use that stuff and it really makes you appreciate like how much work went into making it feel like this new thing all right we have talked about both of these games a lot where is everybody at i mean breath of the wild i know it's i i the only reason i would not pick breath of the wild is if i wanted our pick to be more interesting and that's not to say that pub g is uh not a good game because obviously i think it's incredible but like i i think breath of the wild is a fucking masterpiece yeah i wonder if like

plant are you no pub plant are you leaning towards pub g uh no so the weird thing about breath of the wild is you can play it uh wherever you want because it's a portable game that's huge that's huge i i i i know that's like kind of become like the empty thing of the year but while y'all were talking yeah while you were talking i that is the thing i kept thinking about is man i can't discount that like usually this type of game it feels like if nintendo or any other company had made this console this would be the game that would come out four years in and he'd be like oh now they've now they've really figured it out but this came out like they want just yeah it just was there um and i i think that's that's pretty incredible so yeah i'm probably leaning zelda russell yeah yeah um

yeah i what i was gonna say real quick is that pub g i think if 1.0 pubg had come out like six months ago and we had experienced like a right now the game runs like a hell of a lot better looks a lot better lighting gorgeous two maps maybe i would feel differently but the fact that you know we spent a year playing like a very awesome amazing fantastic earth shatteringly different game but still a game that had a lot of problems performance etc whereas fucking zelda was just like such a joy and like i don't i don't want it to boil down to like it was the more polished game though because i think we're no no no no no beyond that what i'm saying is what i'm saying was like it's you know there are things

that are keeping pub g from its full potential like and have and that has been the state and i think they're starting really starting just now like this month to address those things but it's happening so late in the year where zelda was fucking at peak position day one and i'm not just talking about polish i'm talking about like certain design things and like uh you know like all that stuff matters and um i don't know i think i'm probably yeah i'm leaning towards zelda i was gonna say pub g but whatever you guys think oh were you really are you just trying to be hip uh you know the more we've talked about Public J

the thing that is hard for me to get past and I think we're probably going to end up on Zelda but the thing that is hard for me to get past is like the it probably seems like I'm have a

split personality here, but I, it really is just thinking about each question, uh, as it comes up, uh, in, in each of these rounds.

But it is hard for me to deny the like absolute, like we built a video series. Empire. A video empire. Thank you. No, like this game like has brought us so much like fun and joy in in this year and like it certainly there were conversations that i had

with people about zelda about like how great it is but it was still pretty much an insular experience and like there's something huge to me about the fact that like this game is something that managed to like bring in the way that i've kind of felt about destiny one actually like that it managed to bring so many people together and just like give you a a sort of space to have fun with a bunch of people in a way that like no other game really i think has achieved and not on this level of like uh not on this scale certainly and and i think the scale of the game is certainly what what lends itself to that but like the countless hours of of joy and pleasure that we like as a collective have derived from public g makes it sort of hard to dismiss for me. It doesn't feel close to tapped.

Even if 1.0 hadn't come out, this new map hadn't come out, and all this new stuff hadn't happened, I spent 250 or so hours playing the early access version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and I still feel like I could have played it another thousand hours, player knowns battlegrounds and i still feel like i could have played it another thousand hours and each game would have been different in some in some meaningful way i i to play devil's advocate again to the only thing i would say is i agree with everything justin said i think if pub g if we didn't have custom game access i don't know that's a good awful squad would have

had the legs uh in addition to a shout out to uh awful squad junior which is like a very good community that has supported uh awful squad and joins us for streams and plays with us like i think most people who do not have 100 people that could just jump into a custom server and fuck around for an hour though because awful squad junior exists because of pubg like that that community would not have popped up around another video series that we had done with a different game yes 100 so they made the possibility for that i just i wonder how much i need to knock the game for the fact that like most people will not ever have that experience i mean it's our it's our goofy list we can do whatever we want yeah no i mean that's true and if you want to talk about like important stuff on a personal level this is a new genre of games

really a new platform i don't play like pc shooters just because i i decided to play destiny 2 on console instead of pc because i knew the PC crowd was going to be way more hardcore. Like I've shied away purposefully from PC shooters and especially from hardcore shooters and military sim shooters, which I think given the amount of like technical shit, bullet drop and scope zeroing and all that garbage that exists in PUBG, I think you could classify it as that. It's not a way that I, it's not a a genre i tapped into before and now i find much more approachable um but if you want to talk about things that this game made approachable for me

i watched a lot of streaming of pub g this year which is never aside from uh you know games done quick and the speed running circuit which i i tap into from time to time um i never really got the experience of watching other people play video games sort of uh with a uh a mind towards fandom which is not to dismiss that it's just like personally speaking like i never really got into it until this and now like i do a lot like i spent some some nights watching uh uh jake lear uh awful squad guests and and former voxer uh just playing pub g because it's really fucking fun to watch other people play this game i watched the uh the big tournament that they did uh which was a little bit of a mess but it was still really fucking fun to watch this game uh being played at the highest levels of mastery.

Like it sort of gave me a new way to enjoy video games, which is not a new way for everybody else, but it was certainly a new way for me. Man, I don't fucking know now. The thing that I know I made comments about accessibility, and I guess I should have refined that a little bit to say that like, I think it needs to do a better job of getting people who are new to the game into firefight situations repeatedly or like at least like practice with weapons or like a shooting range or something to help. I mean, you have the load in the load in area, I think, supposed to be that. But it does not do a good job. It needs a way.

It needs a way to help you, like, grow your skill in the firefight segments that don't pop up enough until you've sunk a lot of hours into it and that is what i mean by accessibility and that like getting better at this game really does require a big time commitment because there's a big part at the beginning where you're not doing the stuff you have to do to close the deal but what i will say is that from the other side of that accessibility token is i think that pub g takes makes like huge multiplayer shooters it divorces the fun of those from skill for a large chunk of it and what i mean by that is really i think with the state of most first-person shooters to really have a fun time you need to be really good at the game and i first-person shooters, to really have a fun time, you need

to be really good at the game. And I mean, I think Call of Duty is a great example of this, where it's usually fun to play a new Call of Duty game for the first week, because not everybody's great at it. And then after that, you get outclassed pretty quickly by people who are playing it hardcore. And I would say with PUBG, you can have a good time by being smart and like making good choices and like that's really cool like that's really a huge sort of like step forward i think for for the shooter genre and like an absolutely necessary shot in the arm i could go either way gang i really don't know while we're talking about this all i can think is Nintendo if you wouldn't

mind using the Breath of the Wild engine to make a Four Swords Adventures with online play can you fucking imagine how amazing I mean it'd be people knocking each other over with big metal boxes probably non-stop totally fine with me that would be amazing can we do a quick another sort of

gut check maybe not the final vote but like I'm curious as if things have changed because I really do not know. I'd still say PUBG. Chris? I don't. How about Frosh?

I think I'm sticking with Zelda. Man. this is... I think PUBG is, in a lot of ways, our sad, broken puppy of the year, right? Like, it's a game that is... There's a lot of things that are fucked up about it that we all love so, so, so much. It really comes down to a coin flip for me.

No, that's not a good way to do it. I know, but, like, sometimes life hands you coin flips. No, that's just like a dumb. I know, but like sometimes life hands you coin flips. No, it doesn't. You have two children that you love. You know what? You know what? If it is a tie,

we, we already have someone to soft. No, God, we're not doing it that way again. No, fuck no. I'll quit the podcast.

This will be the last episode of the besties. This is a, this is a show where we make dumb arguments. Don't take that in front of me unless you mean it. Um, I, I, I still think it's Zelda for me. I think that PUBG is a very important game, but it's not just like,

that's not why I think it deserves to maybe be game of the year. I think it is also like a deeply fucking fun, brilliantly designed game. But as a whole package, I do think think yes i recognize that it is it has some flaws but it is let me ask you this as close to perfect a game as i've played in a long time i'm asking everybody this but like we've been sitting here on this boring uh conversation for what feels like three hours and it's definitely getting there um when you've certainly got the

itch to go like play a video game instead of have to do this anymore. The, the thing that I have, the thought that has occurred to me the most during this discussion is like, man, I wish I could go play some PUBG. That's a very fun video game.

And like, it's been out for a grip. It's been out for a while and I've played a lot of it and I still am in that mindset. And like, I'm looking forward to the next year of this game in a way that like I don't know that I've ever felt about a uh a game um and that for me is sort of what tears is like Zelda I actually tried to get back into it for the for the champion's ballad

and like I instantly was like and I had the same problem with Horizon like what do any of these buttons do why do I have why do I have so many fucking bows? Like, what is happening here? And I don't feel that way with PUBG. I think that I could hop on whenever and play around with it, and I think that that's really cool. If that's the way we're going, then I would go with Zelda because I literally did just replay the same game twice, the same huge game twice in the same year.

I'm prepared to make the final decision. Well, for you or for all of us? No, because I have a deciding vote if I want it. He does. The winner is Nir. Congratulations, Nir. No one expected this. We gotta do this.

I think it's gonna come down to a tie again. No. If I vote PUBG, it will come down to a forever tie. Interesting. I love them both for very, very different reasons. I really... I can't bring myself to say either of them is better.

But that's what we do here. We make bad decisions that we feel terrible about we can't do it we can't do a time we can't do a new york giraffe fucking deciding it for us say say i say pub g what's what's our solution yeah where do we go from there we keep fucking we're just gonna go on we keep going going it's like a filibuster oh my gosh i'm gonna start reading the newspaper uh what what haven't we considered what haven't we considered there's gotta be something pub g's not portable so that's that's a point in zelda's direction um i i so i'll address uh justin's point justin when you were playing zelda like in the heart of zelda when you were like just had played it um didn't you feel that like i want to stop podcasting and

go play zelda oh yeah absolutely totally and and and to knock on some parts of it there are some parts of it i was like man it's raining or man this heat thing is annoying boy i'm tired of messing with that uh there there were certainly lulls in zelda where i'm not saying i wasn't compelled to like hurdle forward to to address your point specifically comparing it to pub g i think the reason that pub g is a game that you can jump into very eagerly out of nowhere is because there's no baggage which is to say every game starts from scratch and it doesn't matter if you're geared up or you don't have to like reboot necessarily you just need to remember the buttons um and i

don't think that that's not a bad thing i actually part of the reason recall though russ i'm talking about the potential of the thing like the the the fact, the fact that it is, has been here, it's been out for a while and has like with a pretty threadbare offering has managed to like sustain everybody's interest for so long. And then like the, the fact that like the, it's about to double in size, like realistically about to double, like, and about sure double like and and i cannot wait to see what else that brings like in the next year um i feel the same thing i don't i don't know that we can uh rule on potentialities because because i also think that champions

ballad expanded breath of the wild in a really very cool meaningful surprisingly substantial way um so i don't i and god willing they'll just update it please god like yeah that would be incredible yeah but i i don't feel comfortable being like well there's probably going to be three more maps by next fall and a bunch of new weapons and a new mode and blah blah blah like i don't like even though that does excite me too i don't want to rule they could just as easily fuck it up like i said the same thing about destiny 2 which again like i enjoyed the time i spent with destiny 2 but i also had this sort of apologetic like well i know there's some problems but i'm sure they're gonna fix it and i think that bungie's actually made some kind of bad decisions and how they so like odds are pub g could you know not go in a great

direction you that is the nature of sort of these live games um is that you just is that you just don't know i also wonder like how much of this is like my affinity for zelda as a franchise which is to say like i love zelda i've played every zelda installment this is my favorite zelda game ever not even a question i loved link to the past that was before this that was my favorite this is better than link to the past it is fucking fantastic the door to that discussion i'll give you five american dollar paypal you right now if we could not so what i'm saying is i don't know like like whether it's getting points in my brain because it is conquering what I thought was uncommon.

I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to put an end to this. Oh, I also have another thing. Well, okay. Then I definitely want to put it into it.

Let me do my thing. Let me do my thing. Let me do my thing. Let me just try my thing. I've got to be so bad. Please. I'll do it. Okay. Do your thing in a paragraph. No've got to be so bad. Please. I'll do it. Okay.

Do your thing in a paragraph. No breath of the wild is a very good game. Right. And we've touched on this a lot during these 12 hours of recordings that we've done, uh, in that it's like a, a, a portable game. Right. And a lot of the time that's been sort of joking, like, oh, and by the way, you can take it with you.

Um, but there is something to be said for the fact that like, I play games in kind of a specific way now where usually I'm also doing something else. I'm on the couch, you know, watching TV with Rachel or I'm, you know, I'm on the go or whatever. And this was the year where that sort of habit or that way that i play video games became like the only way i play games just because of the nature of where i am at in life and i genuinely think if it weren't for the switch i would have had a much different year of playing games which is to say i just would not have played nearly as many of them because i wouldn't have this, this avenue available to me. And to me, like Zelda is the game that, that started all of that. Like PUBG, I agree is groundbreaking in this way where it introduces a incredibly fun genre

in a really sort of, we talked about how it's the sad broken puppy, but it is actually, you know, it's a very technically polished game that not many developers, maybe no other developers could have made. But in the same way, I think that there is something to be said for the way that you play a game is just as important. And to me, this was what the Switch accomplished this year. And there was no greater accomplishment on the Switch than Zelda. and so for for that reason i think it is i'm pretty solid in my choice of of it being zelda all right great i'll give it up to zelda uh zelda congratulations just like that yeah just like that what was your thing it was just this except then i put the bit in about how you convinced me. No, I think that if you were to lock these two games into Amber

and you were to get both of them on a DVD, then that you would put into your computer system, it probably wouldn't fit on either one of those, so let's call it a Blu-ray. I think that at this exact point in which you're recording Zelda is the bigger accomplishment and ultimately the, by a hair's breadth, the better thing. Because a lot of my excitement about PUBG has to do with our experience and also the

future of it. Could we put an asterisk and say that we'll give it to Zelda, but next year we will also consider PUBG in the game? No, no, no. Seriously, I think it's worth talking about. we will also consider pub g and no no seriously i think it's worth talking about 2018 december 2018 we do this episode and i think we bring back pub g just to see if it fucking has stood up to the test of time and if it actually has become this like huge fleshed out experience that we all really want it to be because if so like maybe they'll win next year okay well yeah we'll talk

about that in 2018 but for now thank you for listening to this incredibly lengthy episode of the besties maybe people love that shit by the point we release it it's hard to say uh but thanks for listening thanks for listening to us all year um congratulations to the legend of zelda breath of the wild uh the second zelda game to ever win wow sheesh she should be okay great so anyway that's for the besties. Be sure to join us again next year for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!