The Besties - The Besties 80: Thanksgiving surprise

Episode Date: November 28, 2013

We couldn't let you brave the long trip home all alone. Earlier this week, The Besties recorded a special, pre-holiday episode. Thank goodness, because we'd missed a number of great games during launch month madness. There's so much left to hit before the end of the year! How have you kept up with the holiday releases? Or are you just hoarding a backlog for the long winter ahead? Give us some tips! 3:30 - Best sequel (The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds) 19:10 - Best/worst camera (Tearaway) 33:30 - Halftime! 38:00 - Best Mario game (Super Mario 3D World) 49:00 - Best collectibles (Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag) 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!

So sorry, you were saying something. Did you take a bath when you were in Bath? No, didn't have a bathtub. Did drink from the weird water there that is a... I didn't know that the whole reason the town is called Bath is because there's a Roman bath there. Yeah. That's like millennia old and it's like a natural hot spring.

And they let you drink the water. And you can swim in it, right? No, no, they don't let anybody swim in it. Can you imagine what the Romans thought back then when they were like, okay, we're going to make this awesome bathhouse, but in the future, only people will be able to drink from the bathwater.

They won't be able to wash themselves in it. Yeah, and then you're getting a little bit of Roman residual in there. I mean, a little bit of leftover, like, 800 BC detritus. Like, we all know that baths are not clean to begin with. No, God no. No, especially not when they're, like, a public facility.

Even the cleanest public facility has a little bit of Roman detritus on it. Yeah. I mean, that, like, on a worldwide basis. I mean, I didn't drink it yeah i did i mean okay yes i drank it what it tastes like um very sort of like a sulfury eggy sort of taste oh yum yum like egg water like kind of like farts i guess that roman that weird roman water kind of kind of a little bit do you you think that's like Jurassic Park?

Like a long time ago, the Romans farted in the water, and the water has sealed the farts for decades, if not centuries. Probably not. I don't think farts have much DNA in it either. Also, there are probably Romans that still exist, right? No. Not like the traditional sense, but people have a little bit of Roman left in them,

you know what I mean? Yeah, they still have some of that wolf blood, right? Isn't that where the Romans came from? Yeah, they came from... The scientists, in order to get them, they used wolf DNA and then spliced in the fart DNA to fill in the gaps.

I think a lot of what you're saying is largely not based in science. Sort of a fringe science. DNA is like a science thing that I've heard of before. And that's like the funny thing about science. Like, what is it? My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the week. I'm Griffin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the week. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best thing of the week.

My name is Russ Frosch, and I know the best game of the week my name is chris plant and i know the best thing of the week my name is russ crushing out of the best game of the week this is the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in humor pop culture news sports interviews reviews camcorders but camcorders uh walkmans root beer oakley's i got it all um and it's all waiting for you here on the Besties. But today we're gonna mix it up and we're gonna talk about video games. Uh, not just for- come along the way, Pac-Man. We should talk about the new Pac-Man on the show just to like, bridge that comedy gap that you've been building for so, so long.

It's certainly a gap. Um, wherein no comedy lives. lives uh so in that sense your nomenclature is accurate uh who wants to talk first about their uh their video game experience so many games i've got a big one there are so many games griffin's right uh and and this might be i wager to guess the strongest Besties week of the year. Probably, maybe of all time. Maybe of all time. The game police are coming to get us.

Here they come, game police. Yeah, I just shot a bunch of people with a bunch of games. So I'm going to bring my game, which was the best sequel of the week, I'm going to bring my game, which was the best sequel of the week, none other than Legend of Zelda, A Link Between Worlds. I don't know that I emphasized the right words when I said the title, but...

A Link Between Worlds. A Link Between Worlds. Dog, this is... So let me break it down. I have not loved, loved a Zelda game probably since Wind Waker. And even Wind Waker. HD? Because that just came out this year.

No, no, I'm talking old Wind Waker on GameCube. And I know... You didn't like Link's crossbow training? Yeah. So I have not loved a game since the original Wind Waker on GameCube. There's been good ones. There's been moments, certainly.

Like, I liked Phantom Hourglass. It wasn't awful. But none of them have, like, grabbed me. Phantom Hourglass is actually, I'm sorry, just a quick factual error. Phantom Hourglass is terrible. No, it isn't. It was not very good. They made you keep going back to that forced stealth dungeon

because i had more powers anyway uh didn't love it liked it this game though link between worlds is the bomb uh so big talk the bomb mom is this arrest for us takes official the bomb the bomb they have to resell the game to put that quote on the box. That's how bomb it is. Can you, can you just sort of touch on the broad strokes of why this game is so crazy? Absolutely. I was going to do that.

So, um, this game is a sequel to a came out in like 1994, a link to the past, which was the SNES Zelda game. And essentially this game takes place in the same world, essentially the same map

as that game, but like centuries in the future, I guess, some undiscernible amount of time. Yeah, that doesn't matter. A Link to the Past is actually, it was earlier than that, I think. What?

It was like 93 or 94, I think. It was 91. No. Yeah, 1991. For real. Dog, think. It was 91. No. Yeah, 1991. For real. Dog. That was a good game. Anyway, so that came out, and it's been a really long time

since there's been a really killer, top-down, traditional style Zelda game. And a few of the reasons why this game is boss. Number one, I think a lot of the... Is it boss or is it bomb? Is it boss or is it the bomb? I mean... Frederick didn't tell you at the beginning of the episode,

but he's recording this entire bit for my mom because he's worried that she wouldn't be able to understand it. Some are lingual. Yeah, so this game is pretty fly. It's fly. Jesus. Okay. What did the greasers say?

Grease. They talked, they explained why this Zelda game is so subversive. This game is super grease. Oh, God. I think one of the things that people have had issues with with Zelda games in the last, like, ten years is that they're super hand-holdy, and that sucks. Essentially, like, having a little fairy come out

or an elf or Tingle appear and be like, hey, dog, you gotta go to the Forest Temple. Hey, dog, you gotta go to the Water Temple now. Sucks. Even Ocarina of Time did that, to a certain extent. So certain games have done that more than others. Link

Between Worlds does not really do that at all. There's like three initial dungeons that you can do in any order you want, and that unlocks another light. You have to do the first one, and then the other two you can pick your order. Sorry, factual error. So you have to do the first one and the other two you can do in any order. But after you do those you essentially unlock you know big surprise there's two worlds in the game sort of right there in the title

and you unlock this other world and in that other world there are eight dungeons and for the first time i think since zelda one you you can go to any dungeon you want i mean some dungeons require certain items which we'll get to that's like a whole other thing but you can basically like go wherever you want and that's cool like you can tackle dungeons in any order you want um and why that's possible is the new item system i'm going to try to make this sound not super super dull but it's going to be hard uh essentially in previous all the games you'd unlock an item from a dungeon. People know how Zelda games work. If they're listening to this podcast,

just explain why it's different. Okay, so this time, you can basically unlock every single item right from the get-go, so long as you have enough money. There's a whole rental system where you can buy items for a lot more money, but you can just pick any item you like. So if you like the boomerang a ton,

you can buy that straight out. If you like the boomerang a ton, you can buy that straight out. If you like the fire rod a whole lot, you can buy that. So what that means is essentially you can buy items as you feel like, and then using those items, you can go in whatever order you want through the dungeons. You're skipping over one of the best things about that system, which is before you buy them, you can rent them. And you get to keep them when you rent them for as long as you want until you die yes so it adds this like crazy

penalty to when you die man you think it's annoying dying in a zelda game now wait till this well no no it's a shit head comes it's like i'll be taking these thank you before it wasn't injury it wasn't annoying at all to die in a zelda game yeah there was really wasn't like yeah there was there was basically no penalty to also if you're not carrying in fairies around like there's no reason for you to be dying in a zelda game but like it's it's insane for them to add this level of punishment to any nintendo franchise that has you know typically not been especially punishing yeah so what's interesting is that i only used the rental aspect of the game like at the very very beginning and then from there on out i only bought stuff i never rented stuff

so i would only buy stuff when i had enough money which is like tons and tons more money than a rental cost and that sort of than a rental cost. And that sort of introduced a different mechanic, which was hey, money actually means something in a Zelda game for maybe the first time ever. Like generally in Zelda games, you're like, oh, my wallet's full because I have fucking 70,000

rupees. I have no reason to spend them. But now money actually like has a value, and it was really rewarding to go through a side dungeon and get money instead of just getting a piece of a heart. That's the shit I love. Treasure feels valuable. There are all these little hidden treasure puzzle rooms

throughout the game that require you to use all these different mechanics in harmony to get like 100 rupees at the end of it. And like, you want to. The treasure is like super desirable to an extent that I don't think a Zelda game has ever been able to do before.

It sounds like climbing towers or something in the Assassin's Creed games where it takes something that is pretty, mechanical and a simple loop, but the reward is so nice that you actually enjoy it for the first time. Yeah, but not even that, because, like, a lot of those side dungeons are actually, like, really well-designed puzzle mechanics, whereas the towers are really just, like, climb this fucking tower again you know the the implication of the system is so it's like it's unbelievable that this game got made and typically when people say shit like that it's because the game is so terrible it it is so subversive to a formula that literally has barely barely changed yeah since since the first game came out in the 80s like it is insane how much it shakes it up it is it basically turns it into what amounts to an open world zelda game

one that doesn't rely on on gear gating there's still a little bit of that like you have to find this one glove in one of the the dark world dungeons before you can pick up big stones there's a there's a little bit of that but it's so minimal and you really do feel like you this one glove in one of the dark world dungeons before you can pick up big stones. There's a little bit of that, but it's so minimal. And you really do feel like you have control over where you go, which is good, A, not just because it shakes things up, but B, it gets rid of what is the actual biggest offender of Zelda games of late,

and that is the artificial padding out of the length of the game, which is like, up skyward sword was a pretty good game it was very nearly ruined by that shit there was there was 30 good hours to that game and maybe 15 really shitty hours to that game and because of this system it doesn't pad it out like okay now before you can do the forest dungeon, you have to go rescue all these cows. Like, no, you just go, you either have the thing or you don't, in which case, you know, go find some rupees, go

get some treasure, go buy it, and then go do the thing. Like, it's entirely up to you. It's as long as you want it to be between dungeons. Like, you don't have to take a break. I've been mainlining them. And it doesn't... Actually, it's really good about making dungeon length not uh part of the thing that i that kind of bugs me sometimes about zella games is when you get to a dungeon and it's just so gigantic you don't even it's like daunting

and you don't even know where to approach it and and where to start through it and the dungeons here are very um they're smaller they're manageable i'd say it's like they're much more manageable yeah the vertical element to the dungeons though is really is really something special that there's one dungeon uh that's one in that first set of three that you play that is i think just 13 floors which sounds menacing but it's just a straight column of rooms and you have to find a way to keep climbing them and your climb takes you like inside and outside of the tower like wrapping around it it's it's really really clever stuff that adds like a new dimension to to the game that carries through the entire all all of the dungeons yeah and we haven't even touched on

the whole like being able to press into walls thing, which I thought was going to be a total gimmick, but they use it... Oh, I thought that would be the most annoying. But they use it so cleverly, and it's like, what I thought it was going to be was like, oh, you know, it only works on glowing walls or shit like that, like a total cop-out,

but you can literally do it on basically every single wall in the game, and it ties into so many of the puzzles and just it feels like the most like thoughtful in terms of like requiring thought zelda game that i've played in a really long time because the 3d ones on the whole are like very combat centric this just feels like a totally different vibe. And to me, like for years, people have been wondering, like, is Nintendo listening to the complaints that people have had about Zelda games? You know, we've heard them say like, oh, the next console Zelda is going to be more like open and less guided. And I never really believed that that was going to be the case until I played this game. I played this game.

Yeah. And this game is proof that they are actually listening to the complaints that people have and have totally shaken a franchise, a major, major franchise, to its core, to the point, like, it's just amazing.

It's also fucking cool to be back in Link to the Past Hyrule again. Like, there's so much stuff that looks and feels the same, but when you actually get up close, it's different. There's so much stuff that looks and feels the same, but when you actually get up close, it's different. There's nothing rehashed except for the map breakdown, where things are in the world.

The dungeons aren't the same as they were in Link to the Past. It feels so nostalgic and new at the same time. I have a question. Yo. Is it true that it looks like Pooh? No. I've seen so many people say it. I've seen that all over the place, and I don't know. I haven't played it.

I don't get that at all. is it takes the way Link to the Past looked, which is the best video game that has been made. It takes the way that game looks and makes it resemble the way you remember it looking. Yeah. That is the best way I can describe it. It looks like you remember Link to the Past looking. I think it's the character design of Link that makes people say that.

Because he is like this squat, kind of funny looking dude. And his tunic has never looked sillier than it looks in this game. Because that's how it looked in Link to the Past. And that's how they have adapted it over. Everyone's gotten used to this fucking Batman suit Link that he was in Twilight Princess. That's just not...

He actually looks like he did in the instruction manual. For the original. I saw somebody compare it to the Wand of Gamelon. That's horrible. Those games. That is not a good comparison. I think part of the issue also might be the fact that compare it to like the wand of gamelan like those that's those games and it's like that's a fucking that is not a good comparison i think part of the issue also might be the fact that like a lot of

the people commenting probably are looking at screenshots whereas you know i mean the 3ds runs at like a paltry resolution so if you look at a blown up screenshot it's gonna look pretty crappy but in motion it looks stellar on the screen like yeah i'm on an xl so it's blown up a little bit and it just looks so good oh and the music is i mean i could go on and on about this game it really is uh by far the best 3ds game i've ever played easily one of the best zelda games i've ever played probably top five if not top three and uh like if you have a 3ds dude if you don't like this is a reason to buy one it is that zelda bundle god damn that thing looks tight yeah that's awesome it is really nice as someone who has been a sort of nintendo detractor of late uh to to get such

a good reminder of like why these games are as good as they are and why nintendo is it has this wonderful sense of fun to it that i don't i think has been less prevalent it's got a wonderful sense of like play and gets back to you know shigeru maimato used to talk about how he got started making the zelda games was playing uh in the woods behind his house. That's crap. He just had an acid trip and just imagined wizards and shit. He tells you that forest story. He took the acid in the forest, though. Yeah.

Right. He got 10-year-old acid as a young boy. No, but he talks about that was the inspiration for the Zelda games, and this, I think, more than any recent Zelda game, has that feeling of, like, exploration and looking for, you know,

actually having a reason to go exploring and looking for adventure around every corner. Let's move on, because that was a rock block, a Zelda talk. You want to finish up this Nintendo talk? Want to hit the rest of it? Or I could segue to more portable talk. Sure, that's talk sure it depends on which direction we want to take this portable

okay i want to talk about my game uh it is the game with the best slash worst camera of the year and that game is tear away which is a tremendous little psvita title from Media Molecule, makers of fine titles like LittleBigPlanet and LittleBigPlanet 2. It is a PlayStation Vita exclusive platformer where everything is made out of paper. It is a papercraft platformer. And when I say that, I I mean people listening have probably seen the game so they know what it is but

it's not the first paper game ever made like Paper Mario 5. Well when you say that it sounds like LittleBigPlanet like describing it that way just sounds like. Yeah I guess that's true it's I mean it's a 3D platformer so it's not that 2.5D that LittleBigPlanet had

it takes a lot of the things that I loved about LittleBigPlanet, like the incorporation of user-generated content, and that nobody makes games as charming as Media Molecule does. Their games have a definitive style. The LittleBigPlanet series this like quirky style and really hit music and really terrific art design that is unlike anything that anybody else is doing. And I think that Tearaway cements them as being the masters of whatever that

style is because the world made out of paper, they, they didn't cheat on anything like there's no like everything's out of made out of paper except for this lake is made out of water like everything every every single piece of the world every particle effect every aspect of the user interface is entirely made out of paper and it doesn't look shitty like they they have put so much detail into that world um it seems like they got this game out relatively quickly i don't actually know how long it took them to develop it um but it was announced at last gamescom right

it was gamescom gamescom a year and a half ago? Or maybe it was 2011. I'm not actually sure. But it looks incredible. It's one of the best looking Vita games I've ever seen. And it's just that illusion of jumping into water and then the splash particle effects that come up are little scraps of paper that curl away from you. This is going to seem weird. So I started playing it last night. I hadn't played it before. And I feel media molecule where they succeed is in making some of the most realistic games around that seems like a weird thing to say when you

have living puppets running around but when i say that i mean like everything that they make in their games and especially the case in tearaway feels like you could literally reach in and like grab it out of the screen it's like that level yeah because it's not it tearaway what what is so great is it's not just the design it's the way that like when iota or a twa um who are the the male and female protagonist of the game respectively whenever you like whenever they like run over a piece of paper, it smushes down beneath them. When the player touches things on the screen, they sort of fold and crease and sound like paper actually behaves. And they incorporate the player as a full-blown character in the game that they call a you you are a you um and you live in the sun pissed by the way huh nintendo must be pissed oh yeah your face is in the sun

which they simulate through the the psv to front facing camera which is absolutely amazing every single time that it happens like every time it happened i made a face at my video game that i was playing which i've never done before i feel like the baby in teletubbies every time that it happens, like every time it happened, I made a face at my video game that I was playing, which I've never done before. I feel like the baby in Teletubbies every time that happens. It is kind of like that. Yeah. But it's not again, it's not just like a visual gimmick thing. Like it is a very holistic approach at like a god game almost like you feel like you have this entire world inside the playstation vita that you're looking down on and they show you looking down on it and

then you use your the the two touch uh inputs of the ps vita to just move stuff around to your godly whim um like when they first announced it i was i was hesitant because they showed that thing where you stick your finger through the back of the screen at certain parts and then your finger pops into the game um and you can move it around and squash stuff uh and i thought that that was going to be like a huge like the only thing that the game had in it and it's really just a small small piece of the pie yeah i i absolutely despise back touch like pretty much every game that implements it i'm like uh because like they use it really really well here i think yeah totally i i totally agree like that's

the thing is like certain games will do it like throughout the entire game here it's used in very specific circumstances so you have to worry about like accidentally touching it at the wrong time and stuff like that um and that like illusion of seeing your fingers poke through the world is like weirdly super impactful like i had like an emotional reaction to seeing that i had a lot of emotional reactions to the way that the game incorporated me like it sounds like super silly you have all these opportunities to customize stuff so you can customize iota at any time by like you can buy little facial features that you can basically just like tear off his face and stick onto his face in any way that you want people are doing like really crazy stuff with it somebody made a batman uh somebody made a link um has anybody made world one one yet on his face

i don't i don't know um but it's not just those preset things that you can buy and stick onto his face you can all there's also this um system for creating user-generated content which is literally like 10 different scrap sheets of construction paper with different colors you pull them onto your working field and then you draw a shape onto it and you click the cut button and it cuts that shape out and then you can layer those different shapes to create basically anything that you want and then you save that design and then you can stick it on him at certain opportunities you'll be able to stick it onto other people sometimes it'll ask you to like take a picture of something using the vita camera and then it'll reskin like a moose using whatever you take a picture of it gives you dozens and dozens of opportunities to do that and then by the end of the game like it just feels like you have made this entire world

it feels like the world is is like something of your creation and it really is like it's impactful like it feels i i felt like i had such a strong connection of the game because it made me feel like i was a character in its world um the reason i say it has best slash worst camera and i'm being awfully hyperbolic there um it has all these moments where you are platforming and the platforming controls are you know they're good they're not uh floaty like a lot of people had complaints about little big planet banget being. They're good. And the coolest parts of the levels are like when you have to fold and unfold parts of the level like a pop-up book to create the ramp or platform that you need to jump up to. In order to get that illusion, the camera is fixed most of the time, meaning you have no control over it.

Only sometimes when you're in like big open fields, you have no control over it only sometimes when you're in like big open fields you do have control over it and there's like nothing more frustrating in a platformer than going to adjust the camera that you thought you had control over and then not having that control over the camera like it's a deal breaker in most games here it's not as big of a problem because um the camera angles are never like shitty it's just sometimes you're like looking for that one collectible you're trying to find and not being able to look around for it is kind of a pain in the ass. The best camera is that you have an in-game camera that you can buy Instagram filters and lenses for.

It's fucking great. It's great. And there's like really well integrated Twitter and Facebook functionality in it. So you can share that stuff. That's funny that you you so when you said that your thing was the best and worst camera i thought the best was predictable like you have the camera in the game that made sense i thought the worst might have been like every once in a while you have to look at your like my gamer face is like not oh shit it's brutal so it'll be like

i poorly lit pale scaly looking dude just appearing in this happy land yeah i had one session where i um i was really sick and so i couldn't i couldn't sleep one night and so i just stayed up and and played some of the game and then like there's this beautiful sunrise scene where uh the sun hasn't come out for a while and you've been in these dark awful caverns and you're like oh wait where's the sun and then it rises over the cliff and there's my like putrid like tallowy skin just like oozing off my bones like hey hey what's up buddy come hey buddy you see my child um yeah it's brutal but man what a fucking good game super fun game part fun yeah the game is really fun i know it looks cool it's it's i was sold instantly it's not like the core platforming stuff is kind of unexceptional

when tied in with like the physical controls and just the overall atmosphere of the game and the storytelling and the presentation and just everything it it creates like a holistic amazing package but like combat is not not that exciting right like the the the platforming stuff is not like the rayman legends-esque, like intense millisecond to millisecond. Like it's not like that. That sounds like an excuse, but it genuinely is true in this case. That's just not the platformer it's trying to be. It's trying to be a more like narrative platformer experience.

Yeah. Also, I would say, you mentioned the LittleBigPlanet physics before. I hate, like part of the reason I really can't play those games is because of the physics. And it really is much more tolerable here. Like, they do not do the, like, floaty half-jump crap that LittleBigPlanet does. Which, like, that's another example. Like, I would make the same defense argument for LittleBigPlanet in that that stuff was part of the holistic package of LittleBigPlanet in that most of the user-generated content levels where you had complete control over the tools. If you didn't have that sort of physical floaty, like almost analog jumps,

it wouldn't, it wouldn't have worked quite as well. But, but in this case, like it's, it's inoffensive. It's, it's just,

you know, it's not super exciting. And, and in terms of the character, the content creation stuff, like I was over always super overwhelmed by little big planet and all the tools that were in there and here you're literally talking about cutting shit into paper like make a crown for a squirrel do you think you're gonna handle that i could so yeah it's great so what's been going on in

your guys life that isn't video games anything anything to report getting married next week but i don't think that's like especially fun to talk about on the show i got back i was in england yeah we did that how was that that's uh it's like a whole other country yeah um have you been to england before uh yeah i went there for my honeymoon i went to england and uh ireland for my honeymoon in this we went to uh we went to England and Ireland for my honeymoon. We went to England, and then we went to Cardiff, Wales for a day. The best thing that happened to me is I went to the Doctor Who convention, and that was like a celebration, I should say, for the 50th anniversary. And I saw so many people dressed up like dr who uh that it was

kind of kind of surreal did you see the real dr who though yeah uh i saw the real dr who uh he came to save us from some aliens or some shit i don't know i don't watch the show that close but the uh the best thing that happened to me was I was leaving I was leaving one of the panels, actually it was sort of like the big main panel that had the current Doctor Who, Matt Smith and current showrunner Stephen Moffat and Clara

and a few other people, so I'm leaving the Doctor Who celebration and there's a guy next to me dressed like the current Doctor, Matt Smith, and Sidney and I are in this massive crowd of people. I mean, it is a throng. I would say it's a full-on throng of people trying to get herded up this escalator,

all of varying degrees of hygiene. And there's this gentleman next to me dressed up like Matt Smith and he has his cell phone out and he loudly announces on the cell phone, Hello, my impossible girl. This is me, a madman in a box. And you're my impossible girl because I'm here today and you're coming tomorrow. And I think he was talking to a lady friend on the phone. But this conversation continued.

This was an unironic conversation this gentleman was having, almost entirely consisting of memes from the show Doctor Who. There was a person on the other end of the phone, presumably a female person. Yeah. And the conversation, the half of it that I heard was almost enough to kill me. If I had heard both halves of it,

I think that I probably would have turned into a miniature sun and burned everyone in the building into a crisp. Do you think she was on the other end like, I'm sorry, I won't be there. I know I said I'd be there at 10, but it'll actually be closer to noon because I'm running a bit tardis.

Oh my god. Probably. I mean, it might just be her sitting at a bar holding her cell phone up as her friends listen to him talking or like it went straight to voicemail those are two viable options speaking with jenna colman who plays the current companion on doctor who i also overheard this snippet uh while i was sitting waiting for a panel to begin uh a gentleman sitting behind me uh said uh yeah i got jenna

colman to sign a a Christmas card to me. They said you could have her sign one thing, so I wrote a Christmas card out to myself and had her sign it. And it just talked about her undying love for me and her hoping that I had a great holiday. And then she signed it, and it was fine. Now, the second thing she probably did,

she would have probably put on there herself. Yeah, probably. The first thing is maybe not as of a lock. But then after I heard both these things. Can I ask you something, though, Dr. Judge? Tell me. Before you judge anymore. How much money did you spend to travel to another fucking continent to go to Doctor Who Day?

It just happened to be going on. How much? I was going to go there anyway. How many dollars? How many dollars, please, Carmine? Didn't you hear me talk about the Roman baths? How many dollars, Dr. Judge? Don't use Vogon dollars either.

At least three Gs. Put your judging cap away. So wouldn't you rather people like that... I went to Stonehenge, wouldn't you rather, like, people like that... I went to Stonehenge. Wouldn't you rather people like that, like, have an outlet that they can, like, be excited about? This is the thing. People like that, he spent $3,000. He spent 36 hours in the sky away from his belongings and his house to go celebrate the life of Doctor Who.

Like, he's not standing in the rafters watching look at the nerds you're deep down in there i'm not judging though i know it sounds that way it does but it makes me it makes me incredibly happy i'm glad that to see people it sort of reminded me of pax where people are just allowed to be themselves and themselves happens to be very exuberant and i feed off earnestness now that i'm in my early 30s i need people to continue to be unironically excited about things because the only place i can draw strength um and and i was i was extremely excited that everybody there had had an outlet and had this great thing they could rally around it was also really fun to see like i don't think the video game scene is at this place yet but the doctor who scene to see like people who are obviously fans of the new series and then you

see these like old embittered like men that just love old Doctor Who. And really could give a damn about the new kids running up on their thing. But my guess is that they only care about Tom Baker, Doctor Who, and the rest of the Doctor Whos.

No one seems to give a shit about the rest of the Doctor Whos. I like the Doctor Who that was in the movie. That guy. I thought that guy was a real guy that you clearly have a big attempt to like there is an amazing post going around tumblr right now i've seen it pop up like five or six times in the past week from different people uh and it is a it's a it's an audiophile and then following that audiophile is a huge threat of people complaining about how moffat has ruined the show how a new generation will never appreciate Doctor Who, how it is this bastardization of everything they've ever known and loved

about the series, how they're taking it in a direction they hate, all because of the new theme song that will come with The Next Doctor. And the audio file at the top of the post that everybody has been commenting on is the opening theme to Seinfeld. And these people did not know that fact

and thought that it was the new, oh, Jesus Christ, it's good. Oh, that's fantastic. That's delicious. Well, it sounds like a lovely trip you had. It was a lot of fun. And I was not, I promise, I was not as judgy as it sounded.

I just, I think it's awesome that people still get excited about stuff. It makes you really happy. I'm excited to hear about our next game. Whatever it may be. What is it? I don't know. I want some plant.

I don't feel like I'm going to get much plant today. And I need my fix. It's okay. Can someone pot up the plant mix, please? I'm here. Don't worry. We're going to talk about Super Mario 3D World, the latest Mario game from Mario Company.

The last Mario game. Isn't that what they're saying? That's the headline. The last great Mario game. Because Nintendo clearly doesn't want to make more money. They're just going to stop right here. It's great. You can play with friends, uh four of them ideally uh and you

walk around with mario and toad and peach and what you said you can play with friends four of oh crap three of them i was counting yourself as you know a friend of yourself yeah sure um sure yeah and what's special about this one is it's made by the same people who made Super Mario Galaxy, which was the last great Mario game. The last one that people said there would never be a good Mario game. Actually, I think Edge just named Mario Galaxy the best game of this generation. And the end of that piece says there will never be a great Mario game. Mario Galaxy 2? Yeah, well, they'll never do Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 again.

So I guess 3D World doesn't count. I thought they were saying that Mario Galaxy 1 was better than Galaxy 2, which is not true. I think people just count them as the same project, which is kind of weird. It is weird. But whatever. But the point is it's a very fun

Mario game. It's nice to actually want to play uh co-op in a mario game which i i've always like thought oh i i do that in plenty of mario games but then i realized that's not true that's always like mario kart or uh mario party or something else it's not usually the main mario games where i actually want to play with other people it's just not much fun in the new super mario brother like i know that's the main Mario games where I actually want to play with other people. It's just not much fun in the new Super Mario Brother. Like, I know that's the main hook, and it might be sacrilege to say that, but it's just, in 2D, it's just so fucking busy. Like, it's just a bunch of people growing all over each other.

You're always on top of people. Yeah. Yeah. But also, what I really like about this is the new power is the cat powers, and you become a folk singer, and you run a little there, and it's wonderful. I liked it. And then you damn Salman Rushdie.

Yeah. No, you turn into a cat, and it looks dopey as all hell, but it allows you to climb up walls, which seems like the most obvious power to add to a game that's all about getting over walls. It's all about jumping and climbing uh and it really does actually change up the way you play the game uh and it also looks adorable and it just breaks arthur gies's itty bitty heart um and i like anything that has that ability my favorite thing about the co-op is that it's there's a secret vein of competitiveness that happens below the surface i don't think it's below the surface it's pretty there's a secret vein of competitiveness that happens below the surface.

I don't think it's below the surface. There's a fucking crown for Christ's sake. There's a fucking crown. Okay, so if you get the highest score on a level, when you start the next level, you have this crown on your head, and it'll fall off if you take any damage, and someone else can run in and scoop it up

and dethrone you and be the unjust king or queen of the Mushroom Kingdom for a level. Win or you die. It's delightful. My favorite part is whenever I play with three friends, we work together and we're talking to each other during a level, which is crazy. Coming up with all these different strategies, because sometimes you have to. Sometimes there are these platforms that will move in a direction

depending on which end of it you're standing on. So everybody has to be on their game on the same page no matter what and we like we're so proud of ourselves for making it to the end of the level and then as soon as you see that flagpole like all bets are off and it's just like i'll pick somebody up and throw them into a piranha plants a gaping mouth and to be a person who gets on top of that flagpole because whoever gets on top of that flagpole because whoever gets on top gets the gets the flag yeah it's it's crazy that it doesn't fucking matter but it is like i want it i want it so bad and i'm so angry when i don't get it and you just wear a crown is that the whole bit yeah you wear a crown you it glows and you're special yeah uh it's you're like

special to human nature. Yeah. Wanting crowns and such. Everybody wants to rule the world. So I played this game with Plant. I played through like the first two worlds, I guess. And then decided that it wasn't good because you played through two worlds. No, I didn't say it wasn't good. I just, I'm not quite as enamored with the game as everyone else seems to be.

Having played none of it. What are you talking about? You did the exact same thing that Solentrop did. We talked with Chris Solentrop, who did the review for the New York Times, and he played, like, about as much as Russ had. And he was like, I don't know. And then was glowing about it once he, you know,

put in a whopping 15 minutes into the game. That's a lie. Truth. So what changes? So, like, the first levels that i played were like pretty typical mario situations so the way a mario game works is you learn how to play it the first few levels and then they add in new details that make it more fun he's not he's not like it there really is from world to world really once you do get past that part that

that you said you you played um it really does start throwing stuff in like those, those platforms that have almost like a sense of democracy to like which direction they move. Um, and like a lot of that stuff have these like emergent mechanics layered over it. So like, for example, using those platforms as an example, they're on rails, right? So we had all four players on those rails, and then there are these big spiky guys that roll down those rails that you have to jump over while still staying on these platforms, making sure you land on the right side so you don't just roll right back into those guys,

while also jumping up and hitting switches to change the track so that you make sure you don't fall off the edge and die, while also making sure that when you move from track to track that those spiky guys don't follow you and fall right on top of your head. Like you are balancing six or seven different plates with four people all at the same time. And so when somebody fucks up, it's like hilarious almost how bad they screw everybody else over. Like it's just, it's a party game. I'm playing with people who don't play many video games, all things considered.

Like, my fiance played through Rayman Legends with me controlling the screen while I controlled the platforming, but she didn't get so much into the platforming. And, like, there's not a lot of stuff. There's not, like, a lot of complex controls. It's mostly keeping the rules of the game. I think what makes it difficult to describe, like, why one Mario game is better than the others

is all of them have essentially the same moves, right? It's like the duck, the jump, the butt stomp. What is special about any of them is the weird instances that they incorporate into the game to make you use those things. And it's such a game of these tiny moments, one after the other after the other, that like say why i think this one is better than uh you know many of the others is like i just like those moments but i think there's more creativity on a consistent basis in this than there is you know in the last bundle of new super mario brothers

yeah i mean i think it's i mean i would agree with the detractors on mario games specifically on 2d mario games it does feel like they've really hit a wall in terms of creativity and like the limit to what you can do in a 2d mario like level generation standpoint like it seems like they've like really, really been repeating themselves. Whereas with these 3D games, obviously, there's a lot more freedom. And I'll also say, like, in defense of what Chris said earlier, when I was playing Super Mario 3D Land, which was the 3DS one, I really didn't get sucked into the game until, like, pretty deep into it. Specifically, like, when you go back and replay a lot of the levels with

very different mechanics. I think there's a whole new eight worlds. And so that might be the case here as well. I think also you've got to play it with four people. I don't think two really gets it across because it... I don't know. I've only played it with four

people. It's so antic. It's so crazy with four people, but in a completely like manageable way, when you screw up, it's not because the game got too busy. It's just because you lost focus for a second. I've been playing it with Steffi and it is maybe my favorite, the game of the year now,

just because of how weird the experience is because she had, she doesn't play video games at all. I mean, she played dance central uh she would i had to teach her how to walk in a straight line in mario which sounds absurd but like she could not walk left to right but she was drunk at the time so it's she was also absolutely hammered um but but she like gradually figured it out but now what playing that game is is basically trying to get through these complicated worlds while like not not like carrying her from one to the next but if like she's going off the edge running and grabbing her character and then like throwing her back on to the platforms like

it's like having yeah it's like having a trying to get through spunky with a one of those ai controlled characters like you have no idea which way it's going to go and you're just trying your best to keep it alive and then every once in a while she'll do some like amazing feat yeah that's the best part how did you do that she's like oh i just hit all the buttons we had a boss that that the four of us just could not handle and we just couldn't figure out how to like get up the right set of platforms to jump on its head um and and then a friend of mine who is like definitely not like super game experienced figured out like oh i'm just gonna start picking people up and then jumping as high as i possibly can and then

tossing them on their head like there's some sort of coconut or something like that and then weaponized the three other people in the level and beat the boss it was like i can't believe that like that's some heavy ass game logic right there that you just came up with on the fly like it's i don't know it does have this potential to be a a good stepping stone towards more complex punishing um platformers and games in general i guess yeah for sure um so not not a solo experience though because that's how i normally play games i don't think i don't think it would be a bad solo experience i just think there's so much in it that is great as a multiplayer game that it would you know you wouldn't be taking advantage of it i'll

go back and probably play it some to collect like the stars and stamps and other collectible things that that we missed while we like just burned through the level trying not to die. But I don't know if it'll be... It definitely won't be as fun as the four-player stuff. I'd like to talk about my game, if I can. My best of the week is the best collectibles in an Assassin's Creed game yet. I can't believe we haven't talked about this game yet.

I know. I wanted to wait to play it until I could play it on a next generation console. And I'm playing it on the PlayStation 4. That's right, haters. Sorry, didn't get it on the Xbox One. I'm a Sony crony now. I'm playing it on that PS4, too. Me, too.

You have the PS4, too? Mm-hmm. And it's twice as good. It's twice as big and half as powerful and it's caused twice as much why did you do that why would you buy an 800 game console so assassin's creed 4 is i'm i was hesitant uh i wasn't actually that upset about waiting um because i was so three was such a shit pie it bing bing bing bing bing yeah assassin's creed 3 was not good uh not a good game if you thought it was a good game you're wrong unless you really liked it for reasons that i did not grok because i did not

think it was good at all but so i was like a little lukewarm i am shocked at how much I'm enjoying Assassin's Creed 4. I am so deep into every little dumb mechanic that it throws at me. Everything, every stupid little side path. And, like, to give you an example of how sweet Assassin's Creed 4 is, to use my technical game critic terminology here, you spend a lot of time in your sweet pirate ship just coasting around. And every once in a while, you'll see a giant animal. Maybe it's a shark. Maybe it's a whale.

And what do you do when that happens? Well, that's right. You get in a little, I'm just going to call it a skiff. It's basically a skiff. And you take your goddamn shirt off and you go throw a harpoon into it and let it drag you around the ocean while you throw more harpoons into it. And that's like such a tiny, like little facet that you could completely skip if you wanted to. But like, there's all kinds of sweet things like that like i jumped on an iguana from a tree it was amazing um there's a

loop i feel like that this game was built around and it was sieging another ship in your sweet ass pirate ship doing the battle which is fucking rad and then setting it on fire, and then pulling up alongside of it while your dudes are singing this awesome shanty and shooting grappling hooks over to it, and then you kick this sweet lever and shoot up the sail of your own ship and then swing out on a rope and then fly 40 feet downwards

and then sky assassinate the captain. That was such a thrill the first time I went to go take a ship and I see the ship next to me and I think, God, I wish it was a good way to get over there. And then I look next to the cannon I have to fire at the guys. Right next to the cannon is a rope. Just grab the rope

and swing out because that would be the coolest thing you could possibly do. And you do that and it's fantastic. And that loop is great. Even when I don't need to take a ship I'm like I want to take that ship I take every ship my travels from one town to another

is basically a perfect chain of like there's a boat while that boat next to me is sinking like gotta get that other boat I just like spider-man swing from ship to ship ah it's so so it's funny that we haven't we've talked about all these awesome things but we haven't talked about the most awesome thing

which is the limited touch of desmond and all his modern day bullshit that comes into this game i'm maybe i've been playing for maybe eight hours and i i mean you it takes you into abstergo for like entertainment which is a thin metaphor for ubisoft really uh which is insane but then i mean you don't it does not infringe on your experience you can drop back at any time right you can exit the animus yeah if you want to why the hell would you do that you're playing a pirate game where you stab whales and i'm sure it'll take me back into there they wouldn't build a whole first-person engine just for that little segment. Well, they built that for Revelations. Let's not forget that great 3D world.

Oh, my God. But my number one favorite thing, my favorite collectible of any Assassin's Creed game is in Assassin's Creed 4, we alluded to it a moment ago, but you can collect shanties. Now, what does that mean? Well, while you're running around town, you'll see like a scrap of paper and that'll fly away from you.

In true Bart's Nightmare fashion. There was another Assassin's Creed game where there was like floating pieces of paper. It wasn't like pieces of the Declaration of Independence. No, no. Some National Treasure bullshit. But you see these sea shanties and you chase after them and you grab them

and then when you get them your crew will sing a new song and they're great. Some of them have actually been stuck in my head uh uh to to a pretty irritating uh there's that one that's like that one that's like motor and what's your price that one uh that that is not one that i'm uh aware of but it's dlc you have to have a Uplay passport. Ah, that makes sense. But it's such a dumb... I mean, it's like...

To my... As far as I know, there's not a gameplay advantage for this. Except for the fact that when you're sailing through a storm and cresting over a massive rogue wave while all your fucking pirate crew is singing a shanty it's the most incredible

moment of like any game i've played this year and then by the way that is an actual mechanic of rogue waves that you have to turn into and take straight on or your ship gets damaged that's amazing i don't know how this was made by the same people like in assassin's creed 3 they forgot everything that is good and pure in this world and fill the game with utter nonsense and assassin's creed 4 is filled with so many fun dumb diversions oh what a difference a release of far cry 3 makes do you remember last year when far cry 3 came out and people bought three billion copies of it and you're like oh well let's just make far cry 3 into all of our games let's just do that in all our games from now on that's like it does feel like like a lot of like all the crafting stuff is like super direct like oh i need three lizard skins to make a bigger pouch for my ammo like it's super obvious what

you need to do to get upgrades um and yeah it does really feel like the far cry 3 of assassin's creed they just took out all the like horrible cargo uh there actually might still be cargo stuff but like there was so many like obscure bullshit parts of ac3 and the fact that the story was like so weighted down with added bullshit that this feels like hey i'm a fucking pirate like that's all the game is it's like being speaking to piracy the inclusion of islands is actually really great because you first off it is so much more fun to use your assassin abilities to assault like a small fort in the middle of an island rather than like finding one i've always kind of hated that when you're like trying to get one guy in the city and then the guard sees you from the rooftop and

all this nonsense uh because it's so crowded and cramped with when you're on an island uh like you can really plan how you're gonna make your attack there's all kinds of like greenery and trees and forests that you can work with to uh to hide your approach and and and yeah exactly and it makes it super fluid do you remember that was that was what was so good about brotherhood was when you had the horse and you went out into the open land and you had those assassinations like on farms and you you could you like planned how you're going to make the assassination it also makes uh collectibles a lot more approachable i think because there you know exactly how many there are on an island and most islands are smaller so it's like

manageable there's two yeah there's two treasure chests and there's three you know there's one shanty and there's three little collectibles like this and you think well okay i'm gonna take 20 minutes and just clear this island out and that's a very satisfying feeling to know that you're saying like you're not gonna have to come back and find some dumb thing. You know, you can clean the island out and get everything that it has to offer in one pass.

Can we talk about something about this game that literally nobody has talked about, I think, so far? Sure. The multiplayer is terrific. It's the same multiplayer, like, formula that they've been doing since, God, I don't even know when they first added in the Manhunt shit.

I mean, I think that was AC Brotherhood was the first one. I think it was one of the two trilogy or whatever. It's really, really fun. I didn't play it in AC3. I didn't play it. I did play it in the first whatever iteration that it had. But a lot of the mechanics of that sort of spy party Turing test, figuring out who's a robot and who's not have been refined a lot.

And I've actually been having a ton of fun with it. I've, I've missed it more than I realized because I tried to get into ghosts multiplayer on PS4 and I just fucking, I played it for maybe an hour and just cannot do it anymore and this is the basically the exact opposite of ghosts in that it rewards and incentivizes patience and and guile and um focus as opposed to just go get the guy like it's it's the opposite of that and it's really good it's really good stuff yeah the one thing that i wish it had um is like so there's like this weird thing where you're

picking like from eight or whatever different character models and i kind of wish and i think watchdogs is planning on having this whenever the hell it comes out but i like the idea of like pretending you're an npc which you you know sort of do but like someone's playing the single player campaign and you like are just like pretending you're an npc walking around and then you like mess with them and that's yeah watch dogs definitely has that yeah that's that is watch dogs like main multiplayer offering yeah so i would like to see something similar to that in assassin's creed given the fact that like

crowds are such a big part of this game and like it'd be really cool to like not know who's real and who isn't but yeah maybe but like the fact that it's a discrete multiplayer offering allows for that system of like loadouts um and and rankings that you can level up through yeah i guess it just feels like a little bit overwhelming the ac multiplayer has always felt like like there's so many different powers and like side abilities and stuff like that and all i want to do is like i mean it's just like any other multiplayer competitive game like you unlock that stuff as you level up through it it's not like you start yeah but it's it's harder to understand like what the abilities are when it's not just like oh you reload faster there's

like a lot of complexity and like learning that system so i mean it's yeah there's also a weird microtransaction system where the stuff unlocks and you buy it with currency that you earn by playing the multiplayer mode right um or you can pay real money to get a second form of currency with which you can buy anything you want at any level. Weird. I don't know why anybody would ever do that unless it's like there's something gated for level 50 that you absolutely have to have right now, but it's not super obtrusive, at least not in my experience.

Super sword. No, there's no, like, super sword, but, like, the sword that you would unlock it. It's a super sword. Assassin's Creed 4 is great. Everybody should get it and play it. Will you guys play multiplayer? I haven't touched the multiplayer.

I think there's a clan system that we could dive deep into. I'll play the cube. Yeah, I'd play that. Alright, let's do it. Word. It's going to do it for us here this week on the besties. We hope you've had

as much fun as we have. We actually had good games to talk about this week, which does wonders for our mood. If you want to read more about any of these games, we've got reviews for all of them on Polygon.com as well as reviews for the consoles and all that did you guys do a show last week while i wasn't here no you skipped it

huh skipped it yeah it's a little disappointing anyway uh but actually if you missed if the audience missed any of the 24 hours of live programming that we put up in the last two weeks uh it's all available uh both ongon and on our livestream.com, Polygon's livestream page. So you can go back and check out those gems. 24 hours of live coverage. That was a lot of live coverage. Yeah, there's too much there, really.

It's obscene. Yeah. And make sure you join us again next Friday for the besties. Until then, I'm Justin McElroy. I'm Griffin McElroy. Sorry, it's just... What? It's still new to me.

I'm Chris Bland. What? No, this is not how we do it. We're the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best things besties