The Besties - The Besties 67 - A wild Grant appears

Episode Date: August 9, 2013

This week there is no me. Yes, due to a mysterious stomach virus, I, your Besties poster was unable to attend the weekly podcast. But don't worry, because another, balder and smarter Chris filled the vacancy. This week, I hope you enjoy the silky smooth tones of Polygon Editor-in-Chief Chris Grant. 4:05 - The best use of consonants (Rymdkapsel) 15:25 - The best reason to not listen to Russ Frushtick (Earthbound) 24:40 - Halftime! 38:00 - The best career move (John Carmack becomes CTO of Oculus) 48:55 - The best single-player co-op game of the year (Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons) 58:00 - The winner is... Theme song by Ian Dorsch Get the show: Download MP3" Subscribe to the podcast (RSS) Subscribe on iTunes 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!

Chris Grant, I would have thought that you would have been, you know, King Podcast Supreme. I would have thought that you would know your way around a podcast. Do you know how they say you never forget how to ride a bicycle? Yeah. I just fell off a bike. Yeah. Well, you fell off the bike a long, long time ago. No, yeah.

And then you're like struggling to climb back onto the bike and it keeps rolling away from you. Is it one of those tall, like it's a penny farthing? I fell off the bike about two years ago and then i just i just laid down on the road bikes are different now it's like that scene in total recall where it's like he doesn't know how to use the shells is that total recall no here's what it is demolition man god i was on a schwarzenegger in total recall and then i went back to to be recalled again that's the that's the story and all of a sudden colin farrell's there and it's like what is going on start the reactor

I always knew that Ludwig was propping you guys up on that show you guys I'm a continued season podcast I didn't get off the bike I am the bike that means Chris was riding you two years ago felt like that sometimes. My name is justin mcroy and i know the best thing of the week my name is griffin mcroy and i know

the best thing of the week my um my name is not chris plan it's chris grant and i'm not sure if i know the best thing of the week but i'm gonna do my best and i'm gonna work really hard my name is russ rchig and I know the best game of the week. I know you don't listen to our podcast and I don't blame you, but he does that all the time. Every week people listen and they hear, oh, the besties have a substitute.

I hope it's Russ Froschig this time. And that intro just hits them. Substitute those lies for fact. What can I say? This is the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in art sandwiches sculpture music movies tv film and games uh this week we're we're focusing on games as we talk about the uh the latest and greatest in interactive entertainment uh guys it's not just it's not just pong anymore nope you know i heard that it seems like only yesterday that arcades started springing up miss pac-man i don't get what's so different from her from regular pac-man remember this

noise from your childhood donkey kong donkey kong donkey kong donkey gong well games have grown up now this one lets you fuck things what it's called fable guys i um so i brought my favorite arcade game of the week i should i'll show myself out sorry uh it's klax spoiler zaxon this is the 90s and it's time for klax um let's uh let's get right into it uh chris grant you're our guest our esteemed guest so maybe you um by the way uh chris plant has the he has diarrhea chris grant what's your best thing of the week pepto-bismol i use it preemptively yeah he drinks it like they do at the beginning of problem child i just want to make sure I don't ever have that problem. Yeah.

My best thing of the week. I'm going to pronounce this for you. Rimmed capsule. Reamed capsule. You want to spell it? Maybe that'll be easier. And people can just like, it'll be like a fun game for the home team where they can try and say it themselves. Guys, it's mostly full.

It's got like umlauts in it. I'm not even sure. This is the best use of consonants in a game title of 2015. I'm going to give them some credit, though, because their Google juice on this term has to be absolute. I mean, they must just be dominant. It's R-Y-M-D-K-A-P-S-E-L.

Okay, now close the window and spell it again r-y-m-d-s-k-a-p-s-e-l incorrect but it was a good try what's Rim Capsule Chris? so I haven't played a ton of it it is a mobile game it's for iOS and Android the android version is playstation

mobile compatible which means you can also get it on your vita if you want um it is a it's like a strategy puzzle game uh so it's kind of like strategy light would you call it a strut game no i wouldn't actually that sounds delicious yeah but um it's a it's like a it's like a strategy light although apparently it gets very complicated like i said i played a ton of it but um mixed with uh puzzles so it's like every level is like a kind of puzzle that you need to beat, but you beat it using the kind of mechanics of base building and resource management. And it

has these really kind of simple but elegant isometric flat graphics where you play as like little, you know, the characters are little not characters, the minions they call it your little resource guys are little pixels and it is a very unique aesthetic um it works really well

on touch um it's it's really simple to control and the fixed camera helps uh it's on ios it is a universal app so you can use it on your ipad and I found on the iPad it is way easier to control. The text is so small on the iPhone it's almost hard to read. So what is the motivating factor for these little pixel people? What do they want? Heroin?

You wouldn't understand. I mean, you know, you're not... Because all that you want, Russ, is heroin. So it's like beyond your comprehension that anybody would want anything else for any reason. Maybe they're sick of having their isometric plane attacked by red pixels. By a red baron?

And they want to defend themselves. Wait, plane? Well, they live on like a... It's like a space station. It's like a big plane. No, it's a... I've played some of it, and Chris isn't doing a traditionally good job describing it. But it's got wings, and it flies. It's a plane. I've played some of it and Chris isn't doing a traditionally good job describing it. But it's got wings and it flies.

It's a plane. No, it's a space station. And this has been another installment of homonym theater with your host, Russ Frusty. It's an isometric plane. So it's boring. No, it's pretty.

Yeah, there are, as you, I played some of it too so let me let me just because i played a lot um you your base has all the sort of basic components that you're you're used to with rts there's like um uh reactors that you use to gather an energy resource. There are these collection rooms that you have to attach to some sort of, I don't know, if it's a gas or something. It's like a floating resource that you grab. Yeah, a floating asteroid of some sort that you can mine to get

more stuff. But all the rooms have to be connected by corridors and it costs you energy to build more corridors and more rooms and with more quarters and more rooms you can uh build more rooms for minions you can make a garden to feed more minions that sort of thing uh but you're expanding your base out to try to reach these uh monoliths that are floating in space uh and if you reach them, you, uh, get an upgrade to your abilities.

So like your defensive capabilities increase or movement speed of your minions increase. Um, but you're constantly under threat of attack from these, these waves of red enemies. And you have actually a countdown timer on the screen. That's telling you how close you are to uh to to an attack stressful and your minions are actually the ones who have to do your base defense too so the game is sort of about expanding your base and exploration and trying to to reach

these monoliths while still balancing your need for security and how much can you expand or how long can you go without, you know, returning to your defensive positions to try to pick those off. And you also have to expand because you need more minions to defend against the stronger waves that keep coming. So it's, I mean, it's not like, in terms of structure, I mean, it's not reinventing the strategy wheel but to see it presented with like this minimally is really interesting and really clarifies it so it's just i mean it's just the base elements of of strategy as someone who hasn't played it it's uh remains very uh sort of amorphous and hard to wrap my head around is there sort of like an elevator pitch of like why someone should play this here's the elevator pitch for me remember this is a very short

elevator ride right it's going to be less than a floor yep okay fisher price my first strategy game okay okay it's got that's not exactly the best pitch so. So three-year-olds should be playing this strategy game. It's not that it's easy. It's that... It's actually pretty hard. Yeah, it's actually pretty hard. I mean, the joys are, I think, the same as a lot of strategy games. It's about expanding and the sort of enjoyment you get

from building stronger defenses and making yourself tougher and exploration which is really cool because you don't know what the the uh the monoliths do until you reach them uh so it's a little more goal driven than a lot of strategy games um which are typically a lot of times about just conquering enemies this is very much about exploring while you try to keep yourself alive. So that's an interesting sort of twist on what you normally get in a strategy case. So iPad or PlayStation Mobile? Because it's out on that PlayStation Vita I've heard so much about too.

So, well, here's an easy answer. What device do you have? Do you have both? Let's say both. I got it on ios because it worked on my iphone and my ipad and um and and the interface works really well on touch so it's like you know it's not a twin stick shooter that i think is really going to benefit from the vita and i think the vita even with its um improvements as a digital platform uh is still a pretty bad one compared to most phones even

you know most android phones you are such an xbot and like it's like not even like you're trying to disguise it like you're waving it like a proud banner now my my microsoft ipad is definitely here's the thing about the the vita for me number one it's a dollar more on vita which is a little weird that's the deal breaker ladies that's the buttons tax yeah but it's like guys i can play it on my ivad and my iphone for a dollar less on a way more popular marketplace cool good job you nailed it um also playstation mobile i mean my concern with with playstation vita digital titles and why i'm a little conservative about buying them is and and i'm a new playstation plus subscriber now so i have the now monthly angst and anxiety of having to determine which

of these new free games i want to download because i don't have enough room on my vita um what kind of card are you working with? I got a 16 gig card. That's plenty of room. It's not. That's like four games. That's like four games. It fills up real fast. Real fast.

Do you have fucking Skyrim and stuff? What are you talking about? I've got four gigabytes. I've got Metal Gear Solid. That's a big game there's a lot of voice i've got um i've got uncharted i've got persona i've got persona 3 oh well i don't think you need two persona games i've got no but here's the problem the act of managing your card on vita is so bad not anymore they added cloud saving cloud saving. Boop. But they added

cloud saving before. The problem is that in order to enable cloud saving, you had to manually backup your save games, like yourself, or you could manually toggle it off or on for each application. Don't live in the past. They fixed that. But they just updated.

Yeah. Just updated this week. I think Tuesday. It's way easier wasting all of our listeners time you live in the past it's good for them to know if they don't know jack trent is weeping shoe hay doesn't know how to deal with the fact that you are living in a dark dark age where cloud saving was a pain in the ass called last week here's the thing let me put it this way the way that they have it working today is still not as good as ios and ios's iCloud backup is considered to be horrible i think it's actually better than ios's iCloud backup how because you can see like when everything was date like when the last file was uploaded and like which one you want to replace

all i want all i don't want to see any of that all i want is for my save to always be available on vita right now if you go to delete a a game and you have not manually backed up your game or if you are not a PS Plus subscriber, it will delete your save game. Servers don't grow on trees, Chrissy. And if you're not a PS Plus subscriber, you have to manually back up your save game over a USB cable or Wi-Fi to your computer

or your PlayStation 3. Why are you... I've literally never done this in my life. What are you doing with your life that you have to fucking secure your saves every other day? Because if you're going to delete a game that you spent, if I'm going to delete Persona 4, I don't want to lose

my save file just because I want that three gigabytes back. Why are you deleting it before you finish it? But I'm saying, no, but I'm saying if I finished it. Stumped. Stumpers. You troll.

My point being is it's bizarre to me that I can't store my save game separately from the game on my 16 gig $8,000 PS Vita memory stick. So I tend to shy away from buying digital Vita games, especially if I don't have to. So for Rim Capsule, not only is it a dollar more but it's going to take up room on my super expensive storage medium on my vita probably like 130 megs yeah which is like 18 dollars in the in the ratio yeah point is like if i if i store it there it's a lot easier for me to store it on ios it's easy for me to delete and re-add on ios um yeah i never have to think about it whereas on vita it'd be it's like a it's a thing flip side flip side free games free games free games which is awesome

let's um let's move on to another thing so i'm gonna bring a game uh i know we talk about uh discussing the latest and greatest newest releases on the besties um but my best thing of the week is um the best game for a bunch of people that i actually hate and that game is earthbound because earthbound is awful and i hated it well why why are you bringing it then um you're obviously just doing this to upset our fans that's no actually it was mostly just to upset you griffin because i know how much earthbound is a part of your life yeah sure but only to the extent that i've never played it and i don't know what the fuck you're talking about that can't be true that's a hundred percent but you're either but your animal crossing town is named onet yeah it's just a nice name for a town.

You are lying. I swear to God. And to God. I've never played it. I played maybe like 10 minutes of it on like an emulator in high school. Wow, this is bad. I don't even know how to address this situation. I'm so thrown.

I have that news for you, Krusty. I have never been able to get into it, though. And I just confess that I've played only 10 minutes of it. But for me, when I pick up a classic role-playing game, and every interaction that you do goes through that check, talk, item, equip, magic menu, I'm fucking out. Game, you're going to be long enough as is. I don't need you giving me a menu every time i try to defend um earthbound which i i don't really want to do

but i will say this i thought you were here to all right uh i do want to say that um earthbound does have shortcuts for interaction so if you want to talk to someone it's just a one button press that being said um i think a lot of people love this game because it's sort of you know when it came out it was set in modern day um contrary to like a lot of rpgs uh of the era which were set in um fantasy or futuristic or whatever this is like oh it's just a regular town and you know quirky characters and story etc etc um hopping into it now i'd never played the game until just last week when or two weeks ago when it was uh released on wii u um i was so struck by how painful it is to get through because the game is structured around a few things one of

which is like really like obtuse ways to progress through the game like you're given an objective and if you don't select like the right dialogue choice from a guy for example or very early in the game you have to get into this garden that's guarded by thugs and the thugs are like do you want to join our club and i say yes to try to like sneak into the garden they're like well too bad go away and the only way I literally walked away for an hour and the only way to get into that garden was to say no and then that granted you magic access um so there's that and also just the combat oh my god it's just like so dry and grindy and dull and it really what goes to show like i think a lot of people probably have a lot

of fondness i know chris plant has a lot of fondness for earthbound but when you go back to it after 20 15 years when you when you go back to play old games like that it's it's for one of one of two reasons that i can think of and one is that it is still mechanically very fun to play or somehow the mechanics are almost like a niche like nobody makes games like that yeah I mean and there are plenty of old games that are still like Super Mario 1 is still a fun game to play sure Nintendo 64 is the fucking king of this right because every my favorite installments of all of Nintendo's games are more or less all on Nintendo 64. Like when I'm hanging out drinking with my friends, it's Mario Kart 64.

Or original Smash Brothers. Goldeneye. Goldeneye, sure. One, I guess. Although that one. It's bad. It has not aged well. But there are those games that are just like mechanically still either fun or unique in that nobody makes games like that anymore.

Yep. mechanically still either fun or unique in that nobody makes games like that anymore yeah um and then there is the nostalgia factor of just like being in love with sort of the world and the mood and the story and the characters of a game and i think earthbound is seated pretty securely in that second thing and not the first thing and the problem is like i'm actually kind of jealous of the people who do love earthbound because i some of my favorite games are the games that i have just like unerring nostalgia for uh and i don't have that for earthbound and so i doubt that i'll ever be able to get into it in the way that they do because when a game is not mechanically sound even when it does have the benefit of being like a nostalgic smorgasbord um i can't get into it i just can't i i have a

very very hard time so like people who are paying ten dollars to play this game again on wii u um and like loving the shit out of it i i i'm imagining that most of those people are you know devouts already yeah but i think a lot of those people are also people that maybe don't remember just how grindy it is. Like, you remember the, like, super memorable moment, like, when such and such sacrificed himself, blah

blah blah, but you don't remember the two, yeah, the two hours where you spent fighting ants in a cave over and over and over again until you were strong enough to beat the boss. And in a lot of ways, the game, the way it's structured, is made for children because there's no death punishment. When you die, you don't lose any progress or experience.

You just get sent back to a phone. And the idea is you could essentially just keep marching yourself into a dungeon, level up, level up, level up, until you're so powerful that you just crush everyone and then you beat the boss. And for a kid, that would be a satisfying way to spend an afternoon, because obviously you feel like you're getting more powerful. For people that play games to a certain extent

that require a little bit of skill and thought, that's not a satisfying way. You don't feel like you accomplished anything. You felt like you had a pulse, and that was the only reason you got through it. uh earthbound came out in 1995 yep i was 16 or so um you are old uh i don't remember playing earth but i never had it none of my friends ever had it it sold like 18 copies in the u.s which is why it's it came in that giant box kind of legendary status do you know what game i did play which came out a little later in 1995 i'm gonna guess

can i guess yeah guess chrono trigger no oh okay this game was by square okay so you're close it's secret of mana it's secret of evermore secret of evermore that game fucking rules though the same nostalgic criteria that people use to define earthbound which is man it was the first time i played a game you know jrpg or not you know in this case it was made in america but jrpg format um where it's like me right takes place in america you know secret well has the same i mean it's not really... I don't even think that one of the four ages that game is set in. It opens up in Podunk, USA, but it very quickly turns to, like, prehistoric past and then Roman ages.

But my point is it starts in Podunk, USA. You play as a kid, and you have a dog that follows you around, and it's not fantasy. You do reference, like, all these modern-day fictional pulp day fictional pulp movies which is god damn i love that fucking game that game is so good it uses the same combat roughly as secret of mana which holds up really well still it was like it's real time like zelda it's real time like zelda yeah but rpg mechanics in there like um you know you level up you have you have a dog you have a dog companion and everyone loves that who can shape shift earthbound technically had a dog too um but my

point is secret of evermore and earthbound are really similar it's straight up um you know armageddon and deep impact like these two games came out neither of them did well in north america this was um secret of evermore was by square enix north america i think they were called or square north america it wasn't squaring at that point um and it was their first title and it was like okay we're gonna make games in the west and appeal to that audience and it did horribly and then i think it was the last game they made too i played that nobody or at least most people but you know griffin and i are the only two remember that one that game's not out on virtual console when you put secret of evermore on virtual console for ten dollars i'm gonna freak out and buy it this is this is the thing though like the

love that we have for that game is the same as the love that people have for for earthbound and i imagine like people listened to the beginning of this segment and got like super pissed off like i am you should feel very very lucky that you that you feel pissed off because i feel like i didn't miss many like fucking name any game from the snes to playstation 1 role-playing game era and like man i will go toe-to-toe with you like illusion of gaia yeah sure let's fucking rap about it but i miss this one and so i don't get to i don't like none of us get to be a part of that yeah sadly the one person that could comment is i know it's not here but like that's good that's good to be a part of that yeah sadly the one person that could comment is but like that's good that's good to be part of that club and like see your game underrepresented and like when it does

come back it's like holy shit like i don't know to to have a reason to like celebrate the wii u right now like that that's genuinely exciting like i kind of regret that but if you never played it i'd strongly recommend not because you probably hate it as long as we're pointing out you know following the vita discussion on portable consoles i've been playing my 3ds a lot more lately um as it gets better games and you know as clumsy as it is it doesn't suffer the same storage problem because you can just put on sd cards they don't cost anything. You could swap them out. You know what I think is bizarre to me?

Especially if you're charging $10 for a ROM of a nearly 20-year-old game. Why I can't buy it on 3DS? It's completely inscrutable, the way they've gated virtual consoles. It makes no sense. The only thing I can think, like, in absence of an explanation, like, the only logical thing I can think is they want you to buy these fucking games twice.

Or I think they're using it to try and drive adoption of Wii U. Maybe. But there's no SNES games on 3DS, correct? Well, yeah, I think you're right. And that's bonkers to me. It doesn't make make sense to me yeah crazy i really would if i could buy this game no especially if i could buy it have it in a nintendo cloud locker and access it from my 3ds or access it from my wii u or wherever share the

same save even you know hey wink wink but even now like just the fact that it's ten dollars and i have to play it on my wii u which i live downtown in philadelphia i can't i can't go more i can't even go to my kitchen and have my wii u gamepad work properly i can't go upstairs so i have to play it on my couch um i just don't get it like i yeah i i would play earthbound i would buy it today if i could play it on my 3ds play it on the train. There's a ton of Super Metroid in a heartbeat, Link to the Past in a heartbeat. There's a ton of Super Nintendo games I would kill to have on 3DS. I will never understand what policies are in place.

Everybody needs money, right? I know there's always, with the nintendo stuff especially there's all these like old licenses and people sometimes don't even know like who has rights but not for super metroid yeah and also what's money no company if any company on the earth can make that excuse it's not fucking nintendo because all of their games that people want to play like most of them are first party right almost all of them were published by nintendo that aren't first party like yeah there's no rights issue here it's it's perplexing if everyone wasn't published by nintendo i don't think so it's square it has to be i mean it has to be them just wanting to leave

a clean playing field for some of their older games but that just that seems crazy to me too because this is like free money you already made this game but no you could play games already game boy games what what i would say i mean maybe this is a little accusatory what i would say nintendo apologists when i complain about their virtual console strategy which is i i think really i hesitate to even call it a strategy um people usually say oh well if they release them all they would all get drowned out and then nobody would know and they wouldn't be able to promote each game as it comes out and it's like my question is usually what came out this week if it's such if they're putting such a spotlight on it what

came out this week like nobody knows the reality is people are buying uyas to be emulation boxes because you can just download it and get a torrent full of every rom ever and for ten dollars for earthbound when it doesn't work on your 3ds when you can't save it and when i'm not even sure if it'll work on my wii u2 when that comes out in a year um because nintendo has never shown a willingness to allow you to move your software content from one device to another. So I legitimately... Well, not the virtual console shit, but I mean, they were actually pretty good about getting eShop games that I bought on my DS to transfer over to the 3DS, then 3DS to the 3DS XL, and same with the Wii to Wii U.

Well, Wii to Wii U, you pay. Yeah, there's an upgrade fee. They go over... Well, for virtual console games but not for e-shop games right i think so yeah i think for all those games it goes onto your wii u and if you want to if it becomes available on the wii u market or sorry it goes to the menu whatever it is there's no question that it's bonkers and like totally out of whack and you think to like what's that newell quote where he says piracy is a service issue and we need to yeah and we need to offer a better service nintendo is not

offering a good alternative to private privacy right now or piracy of the seas for that they're suing the shit out of everybody that hoves into their field of vision in terms of piracy yeah that's their their piracy strategy is not to make a better product or to compete it's just to sue anybody right fans that upload gameplay videos online sue them too right like it's crazy to me let's say i'm just taking all the money they make off of right you guys you fucking x-bots are like totally bringing down my nintendo train let's let's go to halftime. Halftime. Halftime. Oh, we didn't talk about this.

Did something happen to anybody? Well, Des got her heart broken. Oh, wait. We talked about that last week. Well, we tried to. I missed that? Shit. We tried to, but we decided it was not probably something to talk about.

Talk about QuakeCon. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about QuakeCon. That'll transition into my thing nicely. I went to QuakeCon. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about QuakeCon. That'll transition into my thing nicely. I went to QuakeCon. Was it like balls hot? I mean, I'm from Austin. I drove up three hours.

It wasn't like... It went from like 106 degrees to 108 degrees. Are those serious numbers? Or are those like... It's 107 degrees in Austin. That's... Why? No no it's a dry heat it's a dry no shitting rust like i'll go sit outside in a beer garden right now like it's it's the driest heat you sweat for like three minutes and then you're totally over it yeah

because you're dead yeah because you die all the fluid leaves your body uh that's horrifying but the show was the show is the show fun to go to i love i love this show i love the show for a number of reasons one it's in the the hilton anatole which is like a pretty sweet hotel um no pun intended i guess because like sweets are things a hotel suite right i got it um i i didn't stay in a hotel suite um I didn't stay in a hotel suite. Yeah, it's great to, when you're a man of my work ethic, it is wonderful to poop where you eat and also where you work and sleep. I pooped and I ate and I worked and I slept all in the same building. And that was good for a person like me.

Yeah. Which is to say uh the human equivalent of a three-toed sloth so it's essentially like the ballrooms are taken up by the conference and your room is upstairs and that's pretty much my room is upstairs there's the there's there's one sort of um like mid-sized conference. It's not even comparable to an E3 or a PAX. There were only a couple of companies showing off actual games that weren't Bethesda,

although Bethesda was showing off quite a few games. So if you were to meet a John Romero cosplayer, you could take him right back to your room, right upstairs. And let me tell you, Chris, my first night there, and I don't want to get blue or bawdy on this podcast for children,

but I was, let's say, perturbed. Let's just say I was unable to go to sleep because of, let's call them, good vibrations. My bed was flush with the wall. my bed was flush with the wall and a little fragging going on next door there was some fragging

somebody had their fingers on wazd and were doing some major gibbage some blast processing there was a little bit of rocket jumping happening in the other room were there gibs everywhere? There were gibs everywhere.

It was, no joke. What is that? Agatextures? Hey, were they fucking? Damn it. My bed was literally like shaking. So furious was the sex that the people were having in the other room. 60 frames a second, maybe even.

Yeah, maybe. 60 pumps a second. 60 pumps a second maybe even. Yeah, maybe. 60 pumps a second. It was crazy and it lasted an hour, so kudos, I guess. Well done. So you should mention, though, you're not entirely sure that it was two people.

It could have just been one person in like an Oculus. And that special plug-in. Now, I mean, I didn't hear anything, so you have a good point. The pumping was erratic, so I know it wasn't some sort of piston. It wasn't pneumatic in nature.

Anyway, I'm grossed out continuing to talk about this. There's a lot of screaming down the hall. Did they have the John Carmack keynote playing in the background for mood music? I actually made that joke on Twitter, and somebody said that was just John Carmack keynote playing in the background for like mood music. I actually made that joke on Twitter. And somebody

said that was just John Carmack coding something. That talk went on almost three hours, which is shorter than usual. My computer did die. My MacBook Air, which traditionally has a pretty beefy battery. Carmack fucking killed it again. Do you think he saps energy from

nearby computer sources with his robot brain? No, the show is genuinely a lot of fun. And I'm not... I hope I don't sound demeaning or like oh, look at this nerd zoo. Because I'm being as genuine

as I possibly can. It is nice to be around a group of people who like playing video games this way so much and like this is it for them this is it this is this is their last vestige of a local multiplayer party of this scope well come on no it's not that you don't understand like you haven't been to quake on you don't really know how just just how much is it we're talking about an entire i think it's two ballrooms with the wall in the middle taken out with like thousands and thousands and thousands

of people who have brought their own computers all locally connected to play video games together and like the dedication and how just fucking psyched they are to be there is like intoxicating it's awesome um not only like just like walking around that room and like being reminded of old games and like seeing people play old games in multiplayer that you didn't know people were still fucking into like um oh god what was that one game justin that we played where it was two uh factions playing against each other and it was like kind of a fantasy stretch quest huh checks quest no it wasn't checks quest and like one person from each team was the commander and they could like oh oh savage savage maybe i saw like people i saw people playing

that and it's like who the fuck it is like this is the only time of year this person's gonna play this game and that's why they stay up for two straight days doing it. You know what's interesting this week in terms of end of an era. Well that's my that's actually the thing I'm bringing so if you wouldn't mind like not ruining it. No go into it.

I'm just saying do it. So my story this week that I'm bringing the best thing, because I think at the end of the day it is a good thing, John Carmack is going to become the CTO, the Chief Technology Officer, the Chief Techno Orifice of Oculus 3D for the Oculus Rift. And what would you say that is the best of products

um best career move i don't know man um it's so covering quake con um and i've only done it two years now and i again i really do like the show but it is kind of an exercise in futility when it comes to like getting anything on doom because nobody really wants to talk about it which is perplexing right like in the absence of any official information beyond uh pete hines from bethesda did confirm that they rebooted the game in 2011 um which if you didn't read that that kataka report uh that cited a few sources working on the game anonymously, like, shit is not great with Doom 4. Like, the development has been troubled, to say the least. And instead of, like, coming out and being transparent and, like, giving updates to sort of try and convince the community

that is stuck by the Doom franchise all these years that everything's going okay, it's just been like, here's the perfect, perfect example of sort of their strategy. Nobody said the words Doom or Doom 4 to me the entire weekend. Like if I asked them about Doom 4, they would talk about their current project. And like, you know it's not not Doom 4

because last year all they talked about was we are not doing anything else but Doom 4. Like they scrapped their mobile game initiatives. They said like we're focusing. We are all hands. So they say. So you ask a question about Doom 4 and they're like, well, with our current project. Right.

Which has to be Doom 4. It's not fucking Voldemort. Like you can say the name of the game. Like, we're not gonna... I don't understand the strategy of, like, being so... You know what it might be? This is the only thing I can think of, and it's bonkers. But maybe by doing it that way,

you essentially, when it does, like, eventually reappear, which presumably it will, it becomes more of a to-do because essentially no one's like officially talked about it for the last three years yeah it's the only thing i can think like they're trying to put the genie back yeah exactly as it were but here's the thing karmak is was the technology chief chief robot is his chief is chief robot for id software he was building he's building id tech 5 um which is going it was parts of it were in doom 3 bfg edition but it is like fully powering doom

4 it's fully powering wolfenstein the new rage it also powered rage it also powered rage and in a lot of ways i think one of the reasons i think karmak left is is he's no longer building right he said uh during his talk when somebody asked how work was going on in EdTech 5, he basically characterized what they were doing as optimization because they just delayed Wolfenstein a couple months. It's going into 2014.

But that game's getting pretty close. It's too far along now for them to make any super substantial changes to EdTech 5 i i would assume yeah um for them to sort of incorporate those changes into development because like what i played seemed pretty like it was short but it seemed pretty i don't know yeah i would be curious to see how much uh how much the response to rage has shaped sort of the what do you what do you mean by the response for the

response to it well why rage was not well liked universally not yeah not the world on fire okay i wouldn't i wouldn't characterize its its critical response as being like it's got like an 80 81 on on metacritic like critically it was pretty well received commercially is where the the wheels fell off the fucking we could have a discussion about the Like, critically, it was pretty well received. Commercially, it's where the wheels fell off the fucking line. We could have a discussion about the merits of its critical response. It was not a great game. It was a good game. It was not a great game. And I think if you're going to sink that kind of time and resources into the kind

of games that it makes, like, it has to be... You know, I think it would be similar to if, like, Bethesda put up one of their big open-world games. It's very much like each one is not only a massive investment of um time resources energy and money it's also very much a statement of like here is where our company where this is our company this is where we're at right now if skyrim got an eight out of ten on average that would be a massive failure but

we're kind of and i'm wondering if they're second-guessing, because by and large, the response to Rage, which was like, this is where we are as a company, this is who we are, this is where we want to go, the response was very much like, huh, well... We're kind of getting away from the thing, but the reason that Bethesda is not releasing a game this year, I think, is because they learned their lesson

from the past couple of years when they released Rage. But I mean, they're also building this IP catalog, which like other than Dishonored almost across the board has not been a winning strategy for them. They had Rogue Warrior, they had Wet,

they had Brink. Like it, it, that strategy is not paying big dividends. So I think that next year when they do release wolfenstein and elder scrolls online um which is another segue within a segue looking pretty fucking good um i would not by the way characterize wet rogue warrior and whatever as part of the same initiative that brought dishonored to us that was very much a play to like,

let's try to buy our way into being an actual publisher as cheaply as we possibly can. Right, but I think that there's some crossover between those. What I'm saying is that their strategy now is we can't become a better publisher and we can't build this respected ip library by just like releasing games in new intellectual property like as quickly as we possibly can because like i think their strategy now is it's it's simple the old strategy was make some good internal games and publish

whatever you can get your hands on cheap their new strategy is owned and operated like everything they're doing is owned and operated pray failed externally at human head i would not be surprised to see pray to rebooted inside of a studio like arcane or inside of it um anyway all of that is completely unrelated to john carmack i think, I think ultimately you guys are right. I think John Carmack just wasn't fucking doing. But he didn't leave. Let's be clear. He didn't leave.

No, despite the fact that like so many people who reported this story said that he was leaving, which like to, to in their defense, I think even the, the press release that announced his due position said that he formerly of id Software, which is not true. He's very much still there, but, like, he in a tweet said that his breakdown of time is now mostly Oculus Rift, second id Software, third Armadillo, aerospace, billions of dollars that i'm flushing down the

toilet give me the first man on john carmack's rocket explosion slush fund um but ultimately like i think it's a good thing i've only met carmack once um i actually kind of what i mean i want to be john carmack's okay, John, let's make this down. You've got a pretty good chunk of dough coming in for making all these great games. And you have a line item here in your budget for just burning money. And it's not burning so much as you're putting in a rocket and blowing it up.

Like what is the Richard Garriott accountant? He's very, he talked about, right. Except Gary, it made it to fucking space on someone else's rocket. Gary, of people don't know that once Garriott made it to space he actually took his shit on a picture of John Carvack a lot of people don't know that but it's true he wiped his ass Carvack talked during his keynote about how like he's basically out of the

aeronautics game for a while because like he basically had to run it by his wife like hey I I know we're super rich i'm gonna take a couple mil and it'll be johnny's fun money and then he built a lot of exploding rockets with that um he killed he killed a lot of space dogs and then uh i'm just kidding i can't confirm or deny if there were dogs like it anyway i like i like carmack because i've always been a guy that follows and the reason i like this news and it kind of like um you'll remember a lot of you that the oculus rift lost its its last sort of like big big thinker when he was killed in a sort of very random hit and i shouldn't say big thinker i i say that just because I don't recall his,

his, his technical. He's one of the co-founders, right? One of the co-founders of the company lost him in a, in a sort of tragic, very bizarre hit and run, uh,

during a police chase. Um, so I do wonder if there's a sense of, of, you know, trying to help remedy that, that has led Carmack into this new gig. Honest to God.

It's just, honestly, I think it is not them acquiring karmak i think it is like when i met karmak uh it was during a doom 3 bfg edition demo on oculus rift it was my first time meeting karmak and my first time playing oculus rift and it was like the most exciting thing um because he was so fucking excited about it like he he was like overjoyed to be the person to sort of introduce this to the press because at this time last year like oculus wasn't nearly at the level where it is now where like a lot of people have played it at events um he's just like very very enthusiastic about about what they're doing and i think uh think the sort of tide of press towards Oculus Rift has changed over the past year from being like,

look at this oddity. Like, look at this crazy VR thing that is sort of going to become like this boutique piece of hardware to like, and I think Carmax joining the company gives it legitimacy to like this is the fucking future like this is this is a thing that a lot of us are going to own and play games on and it's going to provide an experience that we cannot get with any other device on the market right now keep in mind 3ds keep in mind with carmac and Oculus, the first time when we were still publishing under the Verge, we did a report. We had one of the first stories on the Rift, and it was not Oculus Rift showing us this device.

It was John Carmack showing it to us in his lab. Carmack consulted on it early on. I guess the story is that Palmer Luckey built it and reached out to to people like karmak and karmak basically told him like you did it like right you know nobody else has figured out you did it this is the real deal karmak's been an advocate for this thing forever some of the first demos we ever saw of oculus rift were from id so like you know he's had a long history with him he loves the thing um and to me it definitely seems like him following his his gut you know and it also seems like if karmak just fucking loves disclosure that's why he does a three hour long keynote speech every year at

quakecon he just likes talking about his ideas and like the things he's working on and trends that he sees in, in the technology space that like nobody else is really doing in the entire games industry, at least not, not with the intellect that, that Carmack is putting forward. So like he's now going from a company where he's not allowed to talk about anything.

Right. His three hour keynote, I timed it out. He talked for seven seconds about Doom 4 and he said, I asked and they said, I couldn't talk about anything right he would his three hour keynote i timed it out he talked for seven seconds about doom 4 and he said i asked and they said i couldn't talk about doom 4 so like now he's going from a place where he can't talk about like there's this inexplicable gag order about the the project he's he's most closely working on to a company where he can like do fucking daily blog posts talking about the latency and and i don't know like i'm excited for him it's so much like grokking like you could get so deep

into like how how to make a cool oculus game and there's so much like nitty-gritty technical and like feel stuff that he could just go nuts over and um i think it's great news for everyone uh i'm super excited uh that he uh is uh over there and i love the oculus i want to i want to use it more although uh i will say that dear esther made me want to vomit for about three hours after playing but other than that i thought it was amazing let's uh let's get to it i want to yeah i want to talk about my thing my special thing um uh my best single player co-op game of the year last wait wait wait wait single player what single player co-op okay so brothers okay a tale of two brothers. It is a game, the new game from Starbreeze.

It's on XBLA right now and it's coming to PC and PS3, I think September 3rd, somewhere in there. So in Brothers is a fantasy, I guess, puzzle platformer, for lack of a better term uh you control two brothers just named little and big they're never uh there's no names there's actually no dialogue that's spoken in the cat um no no no no relation uh is is how he's referred to in the ui which is really the only referral we get uh in brothers you are controlling both of them simultaneously um big brother is on the left thumbstick and little brother is on the right thumbstick and since you can't press any buttons as a result all the interaction is with the triggers so um anytime you want to interact with something be it like lift someone up a cliff or pick something up or call for your brother to point something out to him, you do it with the trigger.

Which is actually a really, beyond the sort of central controls conceit, which is super interesting, is also a great testament to how over complicated we've made a lot of um uh control schemes this is all super contextual uh and it all and it all works great but what's a little challenging at first is trying to control two characters uh with two different hands which is not like intuitive at least at first um but and i talked about this in my review by learning to control both of them together and getting better at it it is actually sort of an interesting mechanical stand-in for the relationship between the two of them so you as your brain puts together those two parts that are controlling both of them um i started to at least feel a little bit more of a connection between uh the brothers um you said it's like because they're they're as you are learning to make them work

together they are learning to work together like that's sort of yeah exactly and i mean and a lot of that's just implied i mean it's it's implied through some of the stuff that happens in the game but it's largely implied just through your own experiences with them. I've really hesitated to, and I'm going to continue to here, I don't want to talk about almost anything because it's so great about introducing interesting gameplay ideas and then moving on once it has, uh, you know, introduced and run its course and, and I'm running its course.

It's like it, they almost always leave you wanting more like, Oh, that was neat. I'm glad I didn't get tired of that before they stopped doing it. Um, but the game actually has some really interesting things to say. And I think important things to say,

and it says them all through mechanics um i was completely unprepared for the game i was not like i first heard of it like literally when arthur sent me yeah i had never i did was it like shown to d3 i don't even know i think it was it's a 505 game like that's who's publishing it. So it's like not a big publisher behind it, um, which is part of it, but I, it's the first number of arcade games.

So, you know, hopefully it's getting a push there, but it's a fascinating, like wonderful game. That's short and you don't want it spoiled for you. So one of the things that I go buy it, it's like three hours long.

I can't remember if I read it in your review or somewhere else but one of the things that i i read about it that like blew my mind was in in terms of like using controls to tell and basically only controls to tell a story is the character development inherent in just using the left and right thumbsticks because your left hand is so used to um controlling the movement of characters in a 3d space so the big brother moves around sort of confidently and in the direction you want them to go while the little brother is mapped to the right thumbstick which you're not used to moving characters in space um with so so he's like almost always clumsier like clumsier and like moving in in errant directions and getting lost and like

that sort of says something about the characters then that's that's a great like example of i didn't point that out specifically in my review and that's a great point um it didn't even occur to me really when i was playing but there's there's all kinds of little things like that like um if you there's this one bit that i talked about in the review, but if you, oh, oh, I know. I'll use a different one because there are many. You come across this guy playing a harp. And if you walk up to the guy with little brother and pull the interaction trigger, he, like, takes a shot at it and plays, like, a little tune.

And the guy playing it applauds for him. If you try it with Big Brother, he's clumsier and not good at it and gets kind of embarrassed for trying. And that's a tiny thing that you can run right by. All the achievements are actually tied to moments like that, seeking stuff like that out and just finding neat little moments

that have no effect on the gameplay or the outcome of the game they're just there for you to discover um the whole game's beautiful which helps like you want to seek out these these vistas because they're like gorgeous but uh it's interesting though because of the because the controls are so simple um that lends itself to a lot of mystery because essentially like you don't know what hitting the interaction button is going to do when you're standing next to someone. Um,

and you wouldn't get that if you're playing like an Assassin's Creed where like, you know what jump is, you know what climb is. Um, there's, yeah, you never get a prompt or anything like that.

I mean, a lot of times that's part of the, the challenge of the game. It's not a hard game, but there are moments where you're like, not sure what to do. And largely it's experiment. It comes down to experimentation. I mean, trying to figure out, okay, I wonder if they'll do this. If I pull the trigger, game but there are moments where you're like not sure what to do and largely it's experiment it

comes down to experimentation i mean trying to figure out okay i wonder if they'll do this if i pull the trigger um which helps i think build a sense of an independent character for them too because uh a lot of times what they do is uh seems to be decided on their own recognizance um rather than you saying like okay shoot the rocket launcher now. The rocket launcher edition late game is super weird and kind of imbalances the whole thing. Can you get prestige and do a gold skin on it? Yeah. Okay, cool.

Similar to Journey. Awesome. There's a hidden gold cape. It's marvelous. I can't recommend it enough. And seriously, if you wait too long, it's going to be one of those things that people are going to be dying to talk about. i don't want it to be ruined for you so try to stay dark on it

at least until you know september if you have to wait for those platforms uh because it is great it's a great game you should buy it right now cool and take your time with it don't rush through it because you really could i'm surprised i haven't heard more gripes about the length. Sounds like it's about as long as Limbo. The Limbo is a good parallel. What's the price on it? What's the price on this bad boy? It's going to get you 15 bucks.

Oofies. Oofies. I mean, that's like two movie tickets. Yeah. But it's not the length of two movies. Hold on, hold on. That's two Austin, Texas movie tickets. Yeah, exactly.

That is one New York movie ticket. Literally one movie ticket. Actually, not as much as a 3D movie ticket. Cheaper than a 3D movie. This is the horror I live in. Why are you seeing movies ever? Let's just ignore the bread basket, I guess. Let's just explore the middle basket i guess let's just explore like the middle working class that's that's perfect a perfect end to a perfect episode

uh now i despite my heart of recommendation i understand that nobody on this call has played it yet um i'm not sure anybody else on staff has um which makes me wonder how much has played it and he loved it okay thank god at God. At least there's Jimmy. Do you think it's designed for people who have brothers, and it's very affecting? I mean, no joke, that probably... I have a brother. Helps. Like, it... I think that because I have more of a connection like that, it got me more than...

Well, here's the thing, Griffin. It might further people's... Justin was all like, I'm big brother. I'm confident. Look how boldly I move. I move with purpose. and then little brother's all like i'm an idiot i can't do well he probably he probably actually visualized travis which is which is fine there's three of us and there's only two players in the in the game so like that's that's totally understandable yeah um but go bye brothers right now and uh that's gonna do it for us here on the besties let's pick the best

what was the best thing i really liked uh that john carver news oh i kind of want to vote for brothers to be honest because it's it's the one thing that like i'm most pumped about especially after seeing reading your review and doing seeing the video review it was so poetic and i'm not even being facetious i actually thought you did an amazing yeah go read the review and watch the video it's so i would vote for brother brothers all right i did it for once i haven't i didn't vote no one cares you don't need to okay you don't need to your guest uh that's gonna do it for us this week on the besties thank you so much again for listening thank you to our special guest chris grant uh if you want to get more video game content uh more video game content. More video game media. Just content. You always want words with images.

Open up your trawl and let the content fall in. Polygon.com. At Polygon on Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. Polygon.com. Tumblr.com. We have many avenues for you to explore.

Google. Google.com. Polygon dot com forward slash plus polygon. Polygon to polygon is a new one. Yeah, there's so much. And thank you for listening to our show. Please share it with a friend if you can. Give us a review on iTunes and make sure you join us again next Friday for the besties. Shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best things? Besties!