The Besties - The Besties 74 - GD Ritzy's

Episode Date: October 12, 2013

Russ is gone. We know, we'd thought we'd be thrilled about it too, but damned if we don't miss the little guy. But hey, he'll be back next week, right? Until we're doing our best to cheer ourselves up with video games. Play the pain away. 4:13 - Best Board Game iPad Adaptation (Pandemic) 14:05 - Best Performance by a Supporting Willem Dafoe (Beyond: Two Souls) 24:08 - Halftime! 30:43 - Best Load Screen (GTA Online) 45:58 - 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!

I went to GD Ritzy's right before this, which is a pretty good name for a restaurant. Goddamn, Ritzy's! Goddamn, Ritzy's! Done it again! And got myself a vanilla diet Pepsi, and they always want to argue with me. Like, you know once you put the vanilla flavoring in, it's not diet- yeah, I know. Alright, if I was worried about my health, I wouldn't be eating at GD Ritzy's. Did you do a cheesy ketchup cocktail? Like Daddy taught so long ago no no cheesy gd ritzy's will sell you a little cup of cheese

for you to dip your angel hair fries into if you do it like that you're a sucker and a punk and i don't want to talk to you what the trick is you go up to one of the ketchup fountains and you splurge some of that into the cheese cup and you mix it all up what do you have hey what are you eating there cheesy ketchupesy ketchup stew. With fries, fries spoons. I don't understand the name. It's a ritzy, like GD, he's ritzy. Like there are no top hats. But it's possessive.

So there's a guy who's so GD ritzy. It's GD ritzy's. It's in a hollowed out Tiffany's. So, I mean the ritzyness is there. It's part of the atmosphere. And it's right across the street from the hospital and next to the podiatrist. Which is good.

There's a nice circular flow of traffic moving between those two buildings. There's actually a pretty bad problem. There's no traffic light there, so there's a pretty bad problem of people getting drilled on that stretch of street because they just see the ritzy's and they're like, oh, I gotta get it.

Gotta get that cheesy ketchup. But now they have to push past all the people who are smoking. It's a great site because the hospital is now a completely non-smoking campus. So outside the hospital, there's this row of people at all times with like IV bags and wheelchairs. Tumored hoodlums just loitering.

Loitering and smoking, loitering and smoking, back and forth. So you're saying it's not like people in like mink coats just sitting outside of GD's Red Seas. Right. You know, eating Fabergé eggs. Hunting the sick for sport. My name's Justin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the week.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best thing of the week. My name is Russ Frosch. And I'm dead. I'm dead. Why did you guys kill me? Isn't it obvious? Yeah, it's obvious. There are many reasons, but no, Russ Frosch isn't here. Where is he odd there are many reasons but no rest fresh dick isn't here where is he somewhere yeah oh this week's new york comic-con so um if you're in new york and

you want to catch an airborne pathogen holy god i went to new york comic-con last year just uh just on my own you know just as a spectator. And, oh, man, was it terrifying. What was so scary about it? It's just the throng. I mean, I've been to every gaming convention, and nothing prepared me for this. You ain't been to CGS. Okay, every gaming convention in America,

and nothing prepared me for this. Nothing. It was like wall to wall, just full on throng of people. If you lost someone in there, it's like, well, I guess I'll never see them again. You just have to learn to move on with it. Pick up the piece of your life and move on. It's part of the con, though. It's a hot swingers environment.

You lose your bow, and then you just swing on to the next one. And I say swing because you're dressed up like Spider-Man. then you just you just swing on to the next one and i say swing because you're dressed up like spider-man uh this week on the besties which is a program where we talk about the latest and greatest in tech sports web design stair design uh building design and all kinds of designs today we're going to talk about video game design and how to make them better if we were making them. Can I start with a critique of my own thing in terms of how to design a game better than how it was made? My thing this week is, oh, wait, I can't actually do that because my thing is the iOS adaptation of the board game Pandemic by Z-Man Games.

And the reason I can't critique it is because it is flawless. Wow. Big words. Griffin, tell us about Pandemic for folks that aren't down with the clown. Pandemic is, I would say, a fairly popular strategy board game. It is a cooperative board game, which, I don't know, I feel like there was a pretty big push for those over the past few years. People realized that the economics of competitive board games

involving two and a half hours of you and three other people playing only for three people to be really bummed out and one person to feel kind of guilty that they won didn't really make sense. It is a cooperative board game where you play as different uh different sort of classes of scientists for the cdc these centers for disease control now does that does the app realistically shut down now that the government is shut down you can't play it yeah i haven't been able to play it in like six days um so you play these

different classes and the basically the point of the game is you are looking at the world map and uh there are four diseases that you and your team have to cure before those diseases take over the world um so the way you win the game is by is by finding the cures for these four diseases which you do by drawing cards every turn. You have to find cards that match the same color. Once you get enough of those cards, you can use them to get a cure. Between

every single turn, though, after you draw those cards that you need to find the cures, you also have to draw cards that place diseases in cities around the world. And those are represented by little cubes. And once a city has more than three cubes in it, there is an outbreak in which they send diseases

to every city surrounding it. So you can imagine how quickly shit can go right off the rails, where if you have two cities with three cubes right next to each other and one has an outbreak, then they just basically cover the entire continent in filth. And there are things you do every turn. You can move. There are different ways you can sort of fly from city to city or just move around from city to city. You can treat diseases, basically removing those cubes from the board to try and manage things. The whole time you have to sort of stick around one another so you can pass cards back and forth and eventually try and find cures to these diseases

it is super super super fun super hectic it's one of those games that is weighted against the player you will lose it more times than you will win it but it feels so like satisfying to to win the game and to to work together with people the app aptation is is seriously amazing like the presentation of it is perfect it is uh to to just pass and play it it it works really really well it sort of internalizes all of the more complex rules of pandemic and presents them in a very user-friendly really beginner-friendly way um not only that because it's cooperative you can just as easily play it with four people as you can play it by yourself with a four-person you know team so you you control all four players since you know it's basically like you're you're you're moving

pawns around the board it's like a board game you can play by yourself on the lonely times there's so many lonely times it's kind of bummed me out a little bit yeah like how bad are the diseases are we talking like love sickness like broken funny bones like that um i think they have proper names whenever we play the board game we would always make up our own names for the diseases like butt worms um uh uh but but cold yeah sort of just just variations on a theme there um but it's it's the board game is like like, really intense. Because you can go the entire time with this amazing plan,

have three cures found, just need that last card, and then all of a sudden, like, you didn't pay close enough attention to South America, and then all of a sudden... Yeah, case of leaky butt. Yeah, you get a case... Spread like wildfire. You get butt fire that just ravages the entire continent, and you lose the game. you get a butt fire that just ravages the entire continent and you lose the game um it it it works really really well uh on a mobile platform there's nothing like uh i don't think there's asynchronous

like online multiplayer but honestly like the turns are so short that i don't really think it would work like that um but it's uh i think it or $6.99, and, uh, that is significantly, significantly cheaper than, than the board game. And it's really, really fun if you, if you have a crew that, or, or, you know, a fam that you play, you know, Monopoly or Scrabble on your iPad on maybe board game Sunday. This is a, this is a good one to add to the rotation. It's really very tremendous. I saw you and my bride playing it, and it was interesting because she needed a refresher when she started. And then, like, mid-game, you had to go get ready for our brother was getting married that day. So Griffin had to go get ready for the wedding and he passed it off to his fiancee rachel who sydney taught to play like as they were playing

the the rules are not are not complicated and you can really hop on there's it's which is surprising because it actually works a little bit better than the board game in that regard because you have basically four actions you can do on your turn and those actions are there's a lot right you can move from city to city you can take a charter flight a direct flight you can cure diseases you can build research stations like there's a lot of shit you can do and also every class has unique powers like the the nurse can remove all the diseases off a city in one go there's like all kinds of different things you can do and it's kind of hard to keep track of in your brain meat. But the game does all of that for

you and sort of presents it in a singular user interface. It's really slick. It's really, really, really well done. I'm happy to hear it's good, because I was really jazzed about the idea of board games on iPad basically once

it came out that seemed like kind of the thing to do. And then Rainer Knizia, I'm sorry if I butchered his name, but one of the great, you know, German board game makers made his stuff available to, I'm guessing, not very good companies or just companies that wanted to, you know, churn it out. And all these great games were appearing on the App Store, but they were almost unplayable. They didn't really explain the rules. They didn't make it easy if you didn't know the rules. And it seems like we're just getting back to a point

where people are like, oh yeah, this works. You just have to do it well. Yeah, there's been a glut, I feel like, of board games released recently that do a really good job of being accessible and not just trying to... You can't just recreate the board game digitally. You can't just do a one-to-one, like, here is a picture of the piece that you are supposed to be using. You have to make it a video game.

It's a video game. It's a different beast. to be using, right? You have to make it a video game. It's a video game. It's a different beast. And if you try to just port it straight over with visual digital representations of the physical pieces, like it's just not gonna, it's just not gonna be that great. I'm actually doing a piece on this now I'm talking to Days of Wonder, who did Ticket to Ride, which is is really good on iPad. They also just released Small world 2 on ipad like there are a lot of companies that are getting it super right and it's it's heartening to see still waiting on uh flying frog to get on board get a last night on earth and some of those jams on there but

hopefully i got my fingers crossed um i i am excited to give it a shot um because i i'm a big fan i like the only thing i, and this is all these board games, I miss the sort of the tactile sense of moving cubes around. Sure, but the price you pay for that. I mean, one of those fucking Flying Frog games is like $60. I think Pandemic is like $35, $40 maybe at retail. It's nice to have like these totems, but a lot of people aren't going want to aren't gonna want to shell out for that you guys know what i got in the mail all this

person's whoever this pr person is gonna be so excited that i mentioned this thing that i thought i would never mention i got uh dice i don't even know what they're called but they're dice and they connect to your ipad via bluetooth oh, yeah, those smart dice things. Yeah, and you roll them, and I have not found use for them at all. The dice is not the part that I care about in the equation. Like, if I'm playing Hero Quest, I want the heroes. Oh, God.

When is that going to come to iPad? Now. It needs to come out now. There are a few games, actually, that I've tried to recreate it and create it there's a there's a game called dark quest that literally like i'm pretty sure they lifted some of the art um behind that game but it's like a single player version of hero quest um that's kind of a big angle i want to pursue and it's something i've been curious about a while and i've talked about it on the show i think like a dozen times this is why the fuck yeah dnd we're gonna quit we're gonna make our own dnd yeah they've tried right like they made that they i played a goddamn demo on the surface of a fourth edition it just never happens i know i know anyway you're not asking for the world here i'm not i'm i'm asking for a lot i think

who wants to go next? I will go next. I've been playing this game. Stop me if you've heard this one. It's called Beyond Two Souls. I read it. It sucks. I wouldn't say it sucks. I just read a lot of really nasty reviews about it.

So I did not enjoy, and I think this is putting it kindly, I did not enjoy and I think this is putting it kindly I did not enjoy Heavy Rain if you are a Heavy Rain defender I don't really get you I am but it's a bad a bad game I guess if you don't like experimental groundbreaking storytelling techniques

okay oh and jugs one would hope though that when the ground is broken, the story that emerges from it will not look like a mutilated fetus, which is what Heavy Rain is. Its story is terrible. The dialogue's all really bad, like it was written by...

Did you have to get so morbid? I know, right? And it's a little morbid. But Heavy Rain was a bad bad game so i went into beyond with some trepidation uh my award is best uh best willem dafoe in a game uh because man willem dafoe is so in this game now hold on did you did you weigh it against spider-man 2 or spider-man 1 that's not released this year, so it's not in competition. It's a yearly award.

Okay. Who took it last year? Last year, you know. Last year, it went to the trailer for the Boondock Saints that they showed off at South by Southwest. Can't wait for that one. Oh, can't wait for that bad boy to drop. Is that game really happening? Pins and Needles.

So Beyond has a lot of that mocap stuff that people seem to enjoy so much. It's got real actors in it. Ellen Page is in it. She plays the lead, Jodi, who is a gifted young lady. Did you mean Ellen Paget, the French actress who is attempting to be from Philadelphia for some reason? No, no, they have real Americans to play their Americans this time around. So that is a huge, huge plus. Willem Defoe.

I think Willem Defoe sounds as much like a French ass name as you're going to come by. Willem Defoe is a researcher that takes her in. And Jodi is this gifted young woman who is tied inexplicably to a spirit named Aiden, who you can switch to almost at will. Not always, but most of the time you can switch to Aiden with a button press and Aiden can float around and possess people and choke them and listen to conversations

and sometimes interact with objects in the environment, which is all very, very neat. The problem with that is that it's very regimented as to who you can interact with and what objects you can interact with. You almost always need them to progress in the story. So that kind of is frustrating because there's not a lot of experimentation.

I think the story is better than Heavy Rain. Obviously the performance is much better. It's weird to me that they just aren't good at writing dialogue and they're not good at character development and well i i feel like they've come as far as they can i mean you say the story's good literally what else is there well the story is the storytelling is better presentation is better the performances are better the narrative is better but like the dialogue and character development and the the other part is plotting which the plotting is better it makes more sense it doesn't have as many giant plot holes as heavy

rain did um but the controls are actually sort of an evolved version of heavy rain. These are very much like in the same vein, right? Like if you didn't like one because of how little control you had, you're not going to like beyond more, but they do do some in, right. Nice.

Uh, like in a, in an action sequence, of course, sometimes there's the button presses, but they also have this like sort of, for lack of a better term, times there's the button presses but they also have this like sort of for lack of a better term dragon's lair style system where you push the right stick in order of in the in the direction

of jody's body movement so if you see her punching to the left time will slow way down and you push the right stick to the left and you will continue the punch um so uh you know if you if you believe in this sort of game like if you believe in this method of telling stories like i i think that it's uh a little backwards because i i think that you know top loading game stories with um a lot of dialogue and exposition in that fashion is is maybe a little backwards but i think that it's much more refined than than heavy rain was uh but it's still like i i i'm going to play beyond um because i did like heavy rain i loved fahrenheit despite its its copious copious amounts of flaws um i'm gonna play because i i i like what quantic is doing i just feel like david cage's argument that like hey don't put a label on how narrative can be

developed in games like that shit held up when fahrenheit came out because that was really the the first 10 minutes of fahrenheit i will never forget, because it was, like, the first time I had played a game like that, that developed narrative in that way, but guess what, like, there are games telling way, way, way better stories in, maybe in ways that, that Chronic Dreams helped forge, but they have been so completely surpassed by Telltale and by fucking Gone Home, which doesn't even have much dialogue. There are better stories being told in better ways, it seems like. I don't really think that this is as pioneering as it once was.

No, absolutely not. I just feel like we're at kind of a split point where two different sides are both unwilling to do the heavy lifting of finding good ways to tell story in games. And one side is this David Cage style of, you know, we're just going to make a movie and we'll add some playable in there, and, you know, hopefully that's entertaining for you. And then the other side is the Naughty Dog side, which is, we're still going to make a game where you shoot people, but we're going to find a story in which it makes sense for you to do that. And I think that's why

the best storytelling in games have been associated with zombie games right now, right? why the best storytelling in games have been associated with zombie games right now, right? Because the story actually meshes with the action. And the tough part is finding an activity that isn't just shooting people that can be at the center of a story-driven video game. I want there to be... I want them to make a sequel to Fahrenheit. Only, I just want it to be the first 10 minutes of Fahrenheit where you discover that you've murdered somebody and you have to hide the body

while the cops are coming in it's like the best moment in that game and better than most games I want that until it turned out to be like a cyber Wiccan cult that was controlling you in the future I don't want that part I want the first part where

it's not about killing people. You already did the killing and you're just trying to deal with it, internalize it, come to terms with the guilt of it. Maybe that's a little too mature. Maybe that's a little too adult. Maybe we're not ready for that.

But that's the bold vision that I want to create. Also, my name is David Cage Jr. I'm David Cage's son and I'm taking up my daddy's torch. I doubt he'll want to relinquish it, but i'm sure he appreciates you pitching in and don't call it indigo prophecy that is my number one pet peeve it's fahrenheit like our french god intended um i i don't know beyond is better i i it's a refinement of heavy rain but i don't know. Beyond is better.

It's a refinement of Heavy Rain, but I don't see how much further they can push this sort of game until they find people who really know how to write well because they don't. And again, even though they have Americans playing the roles, there are these weird oversights. For instance, at one point, Jodi needs to escape on a motorcycle, and she sees a motorcycle across some fire, and she says, Sacre bleu! Sacre bleu!

Mon dieu! No, she says, if only I could get to that motorbike, that's exactly what I need. And it's like, no one in America has ever said, that right there was history making when I just said that out loud because no one has ever said that. And that just says to me, they didn't even have anyone from America

look at the script and say, yeah, well, American people sometimes might say that. It's just this really, there's a lot of that kind of thing that says to me that these guys are keeping a very controlled approach to their storytelling and not really bringing in outsiders. And,

and I think they need to do that in order to evolve there. You and I should offer our services to localize the next client training game, which will basically involve just like rubbing a thick layer of American butter sauce all over it. Just deep frying it. Basically. We need basically, we just want to deep fry your game. of American butter sauce all over it. Just deep frying it, basically. We just want to deep fry your game.

I don't think it's asking so much. Just deep fry it. Just deep fry it. Twerking. Where's the 15 minute long QTE twerking scene? It's a quick twerking event. Anything going on in your guy's life

uh i went to baltimore whoa philadelphia oh i should tell you about philadelphia i stayed with our boss you know chris grant got a pretty sweet loft he's got a pretty pretty sweet loft one problem uh he has adopted like freak cats off of the street. Well, there's a blind one, right? Oh, no, there's one with, like, really bad diabetes. Yeah, they're all freaks. Are you saying that having diabetes makes someone a freak? Because I'm sure there are a lot of our listeners. Well, it makes, like, some cat a freak. What do you mean?

I'm not, like, judging, like, people, but, like people but like you're saying cat beat us is yeah like cat beat us needs that just shows that you like you have an unwillingness to control what you eat you have a you know a love for sweets that maybe you should learn to you know put in its place you should be a grown-up cat not kitten. I think you're dropping some pretty gross misconceptions about the nature of Betis. Anyway, here's the problem with the house. I'm, like, very allergic to these cats, and they waited until I went to sleep, and I was on the couch, perfectly, you know, perfectly asleep, minus the L train, the elevated train that goes through his backyard and wakes you up every 20 minutes. In one of the cats, it mounted itself on my face by grabbing its claws into each side of the sofa that I was sleeping on.

So I couldn't pull it off. And it just kind of pushed its stomach into my mouth. So I was just getting hair all pushed its stomach into my mouth so i just was like just getting hair and all over my nose and my mouth and then i tried to yank it off which made it push harder like you're going like i'm gonna suffocate you with my tummy pillow uh and then finally i got it off i like run to the bathroom i'm like washing my face and you know i'm already like crying see yeah oh tears everywhere and then i go back to bed the cat's gone i'm like washing my face and you know i'm already like crying see yeah oh tears everywhere and then i go back to bed the cat's gone i'm like where's that cat like he's gonna come back he's sitting

at the top of the stairwell staring at me and like scratching one of his claws along it like like stroking it yeah like a warning he put his he put his evil inside you yeah but my my question is like is it the cat or is it the owner who makes the cat the cat you know like is it maybe the plant who who doesn't enjoy kitty bellies no i'm allergic i love cats but i don't want to die right but i mean you know like you just you just dropped some you just dropped some heat bombs on our Beatus listeners saying it's their own fault they can't control their candy cravings. I'm saying that this is a Chris Plant problem. A human Beatus. I love it.

Tom Hanks has human Beatus. And, like, who doesn't love the Hanks? I love Tom Hanks. There, it's out. It's out there. I'm tired of him getting a bum rap. Everybody's always been dragging his name through the mud what an asshole tom hanks is i'm like hold up i'm second here did you

didn't talk about chris's loft's best feature which is the dog the size the dog that is bigger than any piece of furniture in the house so i slept on his couch once and i woke up and yuki was like just just sitting there like face level as soon as I woke up. Like, what's up? I'm the size of an armoire. How's that treat you? Did you like that? Yeah, I mean, I love dogs.

You can pet it. Chris Grant, who is, I think, seven and a half feet tall, can pet that dog standing up. Yeah, well, like, if you think about it, like, Grant is like Paul Bunyan, and then the dog is like his babe, the blue ox. Mm-hmm. Like, that makes sense. It does make sense. How did you like Philadelphia, though?

Pretty shitty, right? You know, it was better than I thought it would be, except for, like, we went to a football game, right? Philly Eagles? I'm going to use some swear words. Are you going to be ready to bleep these? Yeah. I'm ready. Okay. So we go to a football game, right? I'm going to use some swear words. Are you going to be ready to bleep these? I'm ready. We go to this football game.

We don't bleep swear words anymore, but thanks for listening to the past 30 episodes. We go to this football game and this 19-year-old is sitting in front of me and he's totally drunk. I'm not wearing my Kansas City Chiefs Is this an NFL game? It was the Eagles versus the Kansas City Chiefs pair of pants. Was this an NFL game? Was this the Eagles?

It was the Eagles versus the Kansas City Chiefs. My team versus the Eagles. I'm just wearing a black shirt. I went neutral. I didn't want to get murdered. I'm cool like that. And then halfway through the game, this drunk 19-year-old who's been screaming, he turns around and he's like, you're a Chiefs fan,

aren't you? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah I am. And he's like, you're a Chiefs fan, aren't you? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am. And he's like, oh, well, you're a fucking pussy. What? And Chiefs fans are, you know, C-words and other C-words. My, my, my, my, my. This 19-year-old is hustling me. Yeah.

And so I grab him. So you beat the shit out of him. Yeah. No, what I do is I grab his right shoulder. And I'm like, hey, hey, how long have you been an Eagles fan? He's like, well, actually, that's funny. I was born in Rochester. I was like, oh, yeah?

I live in New York. I don't know a lot of Eagles fans from Rochester. He's like, well, I don't know. I just always liked the Eagles. I liked them before my dad did. I was like, oh, how is that possible? He's like, oh, well, I didn't meet my dad until much later in life. And I'm like, oh, yeah?

And he's like, actually, he's right here. And then his dad was like, oh, hey. And he's like, yeah, this guy's a pussy, right? And his dad's like, no, man, he likes the Chiefs. They're doing well. Respect that. And he's like, oh, yeah, well, if dad likes you, that's cool. And I was like, whoa, this just got weird.

I can't believe. I am sitting here in disbelief that you touched an aggressive stranger. I wouldn't touch a non-aggressive stranger at a sports event. You had one that was straight. He was in your grill, it sounded like. He was. And you still touched him. Well, you know what?

That's what I think scary people need they need a little bit of love you know you know the other thing this guy did he saw tom our video guy uh this is before all this he turns around to tom and he's like i know you and tom's like what he's like yeah i fucking know you you were our waiter at hard rock tonight you did great no i wasn't and he's like no you were do you think this guy might be hosting some sort of punk style program and he's just really bad at it like like they come up with the most benign pranks they can think of hey hey you you look like my waiter think about it Chris Plant what do you got I got Grand Theft auto online not to be confused with grand theft auto 5

it's a separate game it's no it's not except for it isn't a separate game except for it is and it isn't i don't know it changes like every week it it hit it like this whole pitch of it being a separate game like just stinks of them having these aspirations of it being like a microtransactional paradise right like it seems like a thing that they can leverage lots and lots of money off of long after the wave of initial gta5 purchases has died down except that it takes place entirely inside gta5 like it just doesn't it's the same fucking game it's set in the same fucking world and like has all the same game parts yeah what's the distinction i think the distinction is it's of such a a lower quality that you could you could reason that it wasn't made by some of the same

people it's it's not very good like i haven't much fun playing it I've played it a bunch It's also just the small stuff The UI Things that I associate With Rockstar doing well Are just really hideous I mean like really ugly And hard to use

And unreliable It's not a comfortable experience In any way The idea behind a lot of that stuff is good it's the implementations that's that's horrible like getting from one mission to the next and a playlist because if you find people that you like playing with by some fucking miracle uh you can stay with them by like once a mission or a race or deathmatch whatever ends you can they're like brings up the clunkiest worst menu ever to decide what you guys are going to do next. And it takes, like, five uninterrupted minutes

to get from one game type to the next. Like, it's... I don't know. But why don't we talk more broad strokes? Yeah, I've never touched it. So, yeah, the way it works is you design a character. It can be male or female. The way you do it is the the way it works is you uh you design a character can be male or female the way you do it is the worst way imaginable you choose your grandparents who are represented by like five pixel by five pixel photographs i did do this part i did do the character creation and i

could not believe i thought it was a joke yeah like the pictures are so tiny and it doesn't like the only way i could change my character's appearance was just by hitting randomize over and over again because i could not for the life of me like he just went from one monstrous golem to the next with like actually not that much variation between them yeah it's it's rough and then you you do a race which isn't, and then you get some cutscenes, and then after that, a ton of little black pop-up windows appear

that tell you how to play the game right away, and they just flash by, and you're like, what happened? And then somebody shoots you, and you die, and you're like, what? And then it's like, do you want to turn on passive mode? And you're like, yeah, I do. I don't want to get shot by these people. So then they run you over, and then you're like what and then it's like do you want to turn on passive mode you're like yeah i do i don't want to get shot by these people so then they run you over and then you're like why why am i here what what god put me on this hellhole it's a good i mean there are some

elements that are great like it's a great edgy game for like if you wanted to learn more slurs for the homosexual community sure it's got that in spades You pointed this out in a review update, and I don't know if it's especially fair to hold this against a game or not, but it really is the worst human beings I've ever played video games with in my life. Well, I think, I wouldn't have put it in the review if I didn't think the game

encouraged awful behavior. And I think it does in, like, a lot of ways. Well, I mean, it also, it offers a good behavior bonus. I mean, it specifically does the opposite to false in that here here's why i i think that's uh baloney is uh it kept kicking me out of games and no one warned you about you tell me that i was being you know i was going to get punished on the flip side there is all these motivations to shoot people and to make them mad and steal their money. But two, there's the whole stealing mechanic of holding up a gas station. The way you make that process go faster is by screaming at these gas station owners into your mic, and it makes it go a little faster.

These very racially and culturally diverse gas station owners sure and the the weird thing is everyone is uh starts out uh hearing each other so you will enter a game and you'll just hear people screaming the worst imaginable things like which again over and over indicative like you don't have to you can just go ah jelly beans jelly beans jelly beans jelly beans jelly beans and you will still get the money fast people do not elect to follow that option and instead go for the most accurate depiction of hate speech in a stick-up environment that one could possibly simulate yeah yeah um it's it's just it's really rough. And there are like moments of, uh, greatness. Or at least what you can see could be great. They are emergent and they are accidental.

The core game shit of like, the balance of the game is non-fucking-existent. Case in point, the very, very, very worst thing about the, about the online mode of the game is that there is still lock-on targeting. Um, but not when you're in a car so when you're in a car and you're going after somebody not in a car that person is going to shoot you to death a hundred percent of the time garren fucking teed no doubt about it if you are in like a car chase there are these missions where you uh are on a team racing against another team to get this objective and take it back to your base and it's the worst if they are the worst least fun um partially because if you lose you don't get

anything you don't get experience cash or anything which i thought pretty much every game had figured out at this point that you kick the losers at least a little bit so they don't feel like they just wasted 20 goddamn minutes um but not only that like all you have to do is get out of your car auto lock on to the drivers of the other cars and fucking mowing down when you're in the car you're just a moving helpless target you can shoot but like good luck lining up the pixel with the other pixel that makes the other people die when they can just auto lock onto you like it's it's fucked like it's just i it incentivizes not being in a car. It's just super, super not fun.

It's a supremely rock star thing to do, to say, well, we've never made an online game, but I bet we can figure it out. You've done two, except they've done two. Which, what? Grand Theft Auto 4 online? Red Dead Redemption online was great. No, I mean at the scale that this is at. I'm going to still say bullshit. I loved Red Dead Redemption's online, and I had way more fun with that.

I liked leveling up through that and unlocking new shit. Grand Theft Auto Online also penalizes you for everything. Like, you lose so much when you die, and it's so, so slow to earn it back. You have an ammo reserve that you have to spend a shit ton of money to refill, and also you use that ammo every time you do a mission or a death match so like doing a death match is kind of a costly thing like it doesn't make any fucking sense whatsoever i think the problem is it it it backpedals on all the great uh ideas it had with g 5. What I liked about GTA 5 is it felt like it was just rewarding fun. Like, GTA 4 did not. You know,

it took a lot to have fun, and I had to spend money to have fun, and I was, like, punished for having fun, and GTA 5 is not that at all. There's all sorts of crazy things I can do with minimal punishment. And here, it's just, you're right, right like to get anything that you want to do to get cool weapons you have to spend a lot of money to get a car you have to

spend money and the car might be taken away or it might be destroyed so you have to get insurance like there are so many steps that are clearly there to either I I guess, stunt progression or, and here's the cynical view, to get you to spend money on, you know, in-game bucks. You either do one thing or the other. You either have microtransactions in the game to really do what you said, which is for people who want to do this a little bit faster than

go nuts, or you have, you know, or you make it easier to get through those things. When you have both, the easy conclusion to come to is, oh, you make it so easy to lose this shit and you make it so hard to get new shit that you just want me to go ahead and pony up for it. Which brings me back to the point of this kind of just seems like the way they have pitched it and positioned it and released it kind of seems like a second source of constant income. Yeah. Which is just like, I don't know. It's not fun.

My hopes were so, so high. And honestly, I've had fun maybe five minutes of the five hours that I've put into it so far. I think the way the, I don't know, in-app purchasing system or whatever you want to call it should have been was, the i don't know in that purchasing system or whatever you want to call it should have been was okay you can increase xp a lot easier and that will unlock your ability to get some of these cool things but once you have them they're yours like don't you don't have to worry about spending a lot of money on ammo or weapons or cars if you've hit a certain level you are just automatically cooler you know instead of this like weird dull sense of process where like do you want to spend that money on an apartment cool don't plan on using any cars or

weapons for the next five hours of grinding it is a hundred percent grind it is a hundred percent grind i do the missions and i wait in the fucking lobbies for eternity because you get so much more money when you play with more people than you would when you play by yourself or with one other person um specifically so i can raise the money and like all my goal has been has been to raise money to a certain point so i can afford this one shitty apartment yeah like it's it that that doesn't sound like a game at that point dog dog. It sounds like fucking life. I would have been so much happier if I hit level 20, and it's like, great, you hit level 20.

Which of these four apartments do you want? Keep your money. Here's a reward. You did well. But instead, it's just, ugh. There's just so many design choices that make zero sense. I'm hoping a lot of that can be fixed if they just tweak how much money it takes to get shit don't make me pay fucking five thousand dollars to unlock a silencer for my pistol like eleven thousand dollars for car insurance on a crappy car right like just just

make that shit a little bit easier to get i don't know what to do with the auto aiming shit like because the other solution is turning it off and that won't be good at all well that's deathmatch that's like oh no deathmatch you can still auto lock on really when i was doing it i my aim was nothing no i played a deathmatch game where i found a pretty long range smg and i just like chilled on a roof and just like picked off fools just as soon as they hoped in my field of vision just pip pip pip pip it's a pretty intense pretty high stakes thrilling experience well that's that's that game oh if people are wondering what the best was it's the best loading screen because while reviewing it i spent about three days looking at it it's really bad i mean that's the other thing right we didn't even touch on the fact that it's unstable as fuck people people did what I did which is like grind for days saving up money to afford like

that high-rise apartment in the sky and they fucking lost connectivity to the cloud servers or some shit and lost it all oh yeah the saving is oh my gosh also that to save you have to exit the game yeah which by the, I've never done. So you're basically gambling with your time the longer you decide to not exit your play session. I've never done that, and you know why I've never done that, Plant? Because you've never made it that far? No, because they never fucking say, hey, make sure to do this thing before you...

They did it, there's a warning message telling you to do it now that appears on every loading screen, which is great. You get a little sliver of ineptitude every time you finish a mission like by the way we fucked up and you could lose everything if you don't follow these steps like just just make sure to save your game like fucking zelda 2 told you to do that on the nes like you can't program that shit in ahead of time it's just this shit pisses me off so much because it's just hubris because you think oh we don't need to beta that shit you definitely definitely definitely need to beta that shit

you definitely need to beta that shit you gots to please can it be i mean couldn't you make the argument that this is i mean chris made the point in his review that just labeling it a beta like would that change anything for you if that's what they called it no no because stick with me here this is like ultimate um ultimate privilege but like i'm imagining there are a ton of people that bought gta 5 that that sale was pushed along by the fact that they were like by the way it's gonna have this dope gta online that comes along with it check it out you gotta've got to purchase it. So it coming out not only on the same day as the game coming out and sucking, but like two fucking weeks after the game came out? Like, no.

You've got to do that shit ahead of time before people pay for it. It's not just like a freebie little bonus. That's kind of a shitty way to think about it. I would almost prefer they waited much longer than two weeks. Give it too much. I mean, I know they're trying to increase retention of the disc, so it would have kind of defeated the purpose there. But it's counterintuitive, right?

Because I've had such negative fun with it that I'm probably not going to play it again, at least until they get their fucking act together. Boom. Yeah. Truth hurts. The big bummer is I don't want to play gta5 now either because if i'm going to be in that world i want to be basically grinding and earning stuff like yeah that's the real bummer is i i probably would have kept playing gta5 just for kicks but now when i'm in that world i'm like i should if

i'm gonna be here i should be like increasing my stats and that's a horrible way of thinking about it in the game it's this bizarre psychology of i was so looking forward to gta online because i i think i talked about this on the show like i found that the three character progression is so disjointed and fucked up like don't make me manage manage three different bank accounts and three different like sets of properties and three different equipment sets and three different clothing options. Like, don't make me do that. Just let me have the one that would be so much better.

And then they're like, by the way, you can do that in GTA Online. I was like, oh, sweet. I'm going to level up that guy. I'm going to get so many bucks. I'm going to buy so much sweet shit. And then, like, oh, but that process kind of sucks, too. Just, just, ugh. It makes me so so i'm so like crushed i'm disappointed as fuck i i i wish i could say that i was like shocked i wish i could

say that this was more surprising that it was unenjoyable but i was so sort of like muted on gta5 i can't say that i was like I can't say that my hope was too high the only reason it's shocking for me is because Red Dead Redemption is online it was so much fun and this is a major step backwards I don't think I ever talked into it anyway that's going to do it for us here on the besties

we hope you've had fun just like us if you want to read more about any of these games you can head over to Polygon.com and read about them. Follow us on Twitter at Polygon. Facebook slash Polygon. YouTube slash Polygon. Polygon.com. Tumblr.com. Just type in Polygon somewhere, and you'll

get something we make, probably. You know, we're chatting about next week, though. Oh, we're gonna catch them all. We are gonna catch so many of them. I could have talked about it, the review embargo's up But there's some shit that Is still under embargo until the game comes out It's fucked up

So we'll dive so deep next week This is my first Pokemon since Red, guys Saturday morning Saturday morning, plant, make sure you check out my Hot, hot tips post, it's gonna be full of Essential tips for trainers like you lapsed trainers um who haven't even come close to catching them all um this this post is for you can i catch them all like would i have to go back and play all the games to catch them all uh i i'm not sure i

mean there's a lot of familiar faces i haven't spent the thousand hours required to even see them all got it um so i don't know if they all live in Pokemon X and Y or not. Cool. Then how dare you write a review, sir? How dare you? And that's going to do it for us here on the Besties. Make sure to join us again next Friday for the Besties.

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