The Besties - The Besties are picking the best games of March 2017

Episode Date: April 7, 2017

You probably guessed it already Just because you almost certainly know what game we picked as the best of March 2017, doesn’t mean you can’t listen and enjoy hearing about all the games that aren���t the best game of March 2017. It’s about the journey, folks. Not the destination. GAMES DISCUSSED: Mass Effect Andromeda, 1-2 Switch, Robo Recall, Nier Automata, Typeshift, Everything, Snipperclips, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Theme song by Ian Dorsch Download MP3" Subscribe? Sure, you can subscribe. 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 think it's safe to say it's been the best first three months of video games, maybe in my lifetime. And I'm worried that we're going to pay for it somehow, karmically speaking. And I don't know if that means just like October, November, December, all the big releases are going to be absolute dog shit or. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But do you believe that the way karma works is that if something nice happens to you, you have to be punished for it?

I think it does work that way as well. No, that's not. No, no, no. Listen, I've striven to be a good boy my whole life. And so as a good boy, I got Breath of the Wild. But there's lots of very bad boys that also played breath of the wild you know what i mean and so maybe that means that um whatever the fuck call call of duty 20 or whatever it's gonna be really bad it'll hurt you most of all it'll

hurt me most of all because i gotta get in there with my fucking my fucking bong buddies squad up squad up with my bong buddies and shoot all the guys in the prestige the hell out of that game case for better people in this world would mean just more better games that's all i'm saying just like get to get this is my whole thing as a gamer is like if we get together and we do it better the games will get better and that's just it yeah that's just it if you complain if you complain about games not being as good as when you were younger you have to take a long look in the mirror and say am i as good a person probably not if i was better collectively we would all be getting better video games games used to be so much better on the super nintendo yeah probably how would what's your

fucking story how cool have you been since middle school probably not i bet that you've taken some dark twists and turns i'm just saying look inside look inside especially if you've had yourself on the internet saying those words yeah look inside make that change make that change. Make that change. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I actually do know the best game of the month. That's not a joke. My name is Chris Plant, and I think we all know the best game of the month already.

My name is Russ Frostchick, and it's probably Zelda. Wow, spoilers. You didn't even let Justin finish the intro before you spoiled it for everybody. You didn't even let Justin finish the intro before you spoiled it for everybody. You didn't even let me finish the intro. Folks, video games have come a long way since Pac-Man, and we're here to check all of that out. You remember,

back in my day, we played a game called Legend of Zelda, Valerie. Do you remember this one? A little squirt wandering around outside in a forest. That was a video game in my day. He would get sick and he would eat fairies to get better. And he had a red drink that got

him all his hearts back. I loved it, Valerie. Loved this game. This old man gave him a sword, which seems a little reckless. He's just a kid. He would find these magic triangles and eat them for strength. So I love it. It was inspired by Shigeru Miyamoto's childhood spent exploring caves behind his

own this guy's really in the know this fictional character I'm a super plugged in a talking flower this is the best season we know what the best game is going to be this month already but we're going to go through the whole thing we're gonna do the whole stupid stupid thing we'll do that one last uh-huh i think i think let's

let's spend like the first half of this show doing the other three and then the back half talking about zeldo because i think we can go real long that makes sense um before we get to that any honorable mentions anybody played some stuff that we're not talking about It's almost like we're talking about honorable mentions for the first half of the show. So I don't necessarily know. Well, I mean, there's good games.

I mean, is this the part where we talk about mass effect? They, they might get that one, get that one to spin. I mean, I played it. I don't think it deserves an honorable mention.

Uh, let me, let's spend two minutes talking about mass effect. Why is it such a failure? Russ? Oh, look, I'm going to be straight with you I played for two hours so I am by no means an expert but I honestly believe if you play a game for two hours

and you're having no fun with it like I do not owe this game eight or ten hours to get into the groove I'm sorry it's um it just I was playing on a PS4 and it was running at like 15 frames a second and that that is inexcusable i'm sorry like there's no justification for that whatsoever i i i'm i'm on board with with i'm on board with you i'm certainly at a point now where

like my my gaming time is just like non-existent i get it i have to if i want to play uh persona i have to like stay up after my family has gone to sleep and like play it until I get too tired to be awake anymore. And that's like the only free kind of gaming hours I have. So I certainly don't have time to dedicate to playing a game that I'm not enjoying, especially one that this is not one like, um,

you know, final fantasy 13 or whatever. That's like after 20 hours, it gets good. I have not heard anything to that. If Arthur kind of half said that, but even Arthur was like, whatever that's like after 20 hours it gets good i have not heard anything to that effect arthur kind of half said that but even arthur was like like you really probably don't agree with me we haven't answered justin's we haven't answered justin's question i've been playing it on pc

which like doesn't have those frame rate issues but it it's it's it's such a disappointment for me like there's some there's some good like performances in there, but they are performing some really bad writing. Like really, really not, not good, very ham fisted writing. And everyone looks like mutants, even the people that are not meant to look like mutants.

And that's been like, I think there's a lot of folks who just kind of think that's like a meme or whatever it has. I can't fucking, I can't fucking like get into the game because it's it's astonishing how bad everybody looks it's really hard to like right well yes my favorite theory about why they look the way they look and this is coming this is wrong this is coming from a child's perspective on how games get made but when the when the characters kiss it looks really

good and so i think maybe they developed a good kissing technology and then tried to walk it backwards and that's why it looks like whenever anybody's trying to say a sentence like oh no my father when like their mouth is moving in a way that like a kiss is happening with an invisible ghost but like i don't know it's just like within the first 30 minutes, you're this pioneer hero of legend, and everybody calls you by your title, and you're putting together a team. It feels like the most Bioware-ass carbon copy shit ever. Man, I didn't enjoy a second of the time that I spent with it. I didn't enjoy it. I didn't enjoy a second of the time that I spent with it.

I was, I was done with it. I think Bioware does really well at small stories and they never lean into that except. So, so the only game that I think really best exemplifies this, there have been others, but I think Mass Effect two is a game I played a ton and the best stories Mass Effect two were the side stories where you go off and you have a little

moment with one other character and it's like interesting and like you learn backstory and you care about them um i mean i liked the old republic games those are still my favorite i think games that bioware has made the uh old republic mmo 10 years yeah i know the old republic mmo is also really good about this because and that was by virtue of the fact that it was an mmo so you aren't the one pathfinder hero of legend put together um and so like i don't know i feel like it benefited like that but i got it just like it just i don't it's just a mess and it's sad it's a mess i wish that game was going to be good because i really do like the mass fit games overall but man woof um boogers i want to take a moment to talk about um one two switch because okay really yeah wow really okay um i've been traveling a lot lately and it is a very cool it's i i i want to celebrate one

more it's like a proof of concept but it's a very cool idea that you can have a sort of like portable little party game that you could just pop out of your bag and play. Like we were kind of stuck in a hotel room a couple of times before our Portland show, and we decided to bust out one, two switch. And it was a very fun way to kill 20 minutes without having to like set up a tv and and all that garbage and like a lot of the games are not great in one two switch but a lot of them are pretty fun like we had a good time with it and it killed 20 minutes and it's like i feel like for the kind of the portable application of that that's really all it needs to do and there are many better applications right yet but i'm conceptually it's a very it feels very um different the ability to like have that experience on the go in your bag that you just pop it out and play it i got a lot more excited for like other

multiplayer games that are going to come out like i i agree with what you said that like as a proof of concept it's pretty sick like when uh jackbox the jackbox party pack has come into switch like that'll be fucking great totally get joust get them to get joust up in there overcooked and all those overcoating is gonna be amazing i think we already have what what made one to switch so starkly bad for me is that we already have exactly what you're talking about, which is a fantastic local party game. It's going to be one of the games that we bring as an actual entry.

It's weird to me that I'd ever be in a scenario where I know that we have this other game that I know is like... You can just say its name. It's Snipperclips. Yeah, sure. The other good Switch game. It's better. yeah um uh one two switch has a wizard yeah one two switch should have been a pack-in game and like agree i don't want to get i don't want to get mired in like a conversation about like what things should cost but like this is this it is not historically speaking other even other nintendo consoles have been packed with

way way way way way better like proof of concept games like this that were what like light years better like well i think you can make you can make the argument you can make the argument i think that i i had the same initial thought but then after spending a lot of time with one two switch my current thought is um well maybe they didn't necessarily want everybody to check this one out maybe they didn't maybe this isn't the best show pony for uh for uh the one the old switch um because it definitely feels that way we all have that sense like uh this kind now that does not explain why it's not 20 in that well and also i would say like they made it the very first game during their switch presentation like it was the first thing they showed at that like big reveal that was they thought this was gonna be wii sports 2 and if they

didn't it wouldn't have been well wii sports 3 wii sports 3 yeah um i i want to give a shout out to Robo Recall. It's just a really, really, really fucking good shooter on Oculus Rift. Is that out? Like final version is out? Yeah, it's out and it's free if you own an Oculus. Cool. And it is like, it's good as hell. It's just like a really stylish shooter where you kind of use the stick to teleport around different spots. But there's not like set spots you teleport to.

So you're just like on a city street and there's rampaging robots all over and you have two holsters at your side and you can customize like what guns you keep in there and you can upgrade the guns and change them around uh and then you have two guns on uh back holsters so you have to like reach up over your shoulder and grab these like shotguns from out behind your back um and blast your way through these these waves of robots as you look around this city and there's like special challenges where like um a portal will appear and you have to shoot robots into the portal but the great thing about the game is you um don't have to use the guns you can like grab a robot with one arm like grab them by the chest and then grab their arm with another uh

all right with with one of your other hands it uses the the touch controllers and you like rip their arm off and then you can beat them apart with their arm and then throw it at somebody else um and like grab their gun it feels amazing it feels fucking great and you can do parts like if there's like drones flying around you can grab like you can tear their gun like arm off and then use that as like a weapon against other things you can um like grab an enemy like as somebody's shooting at you and block the bullet like with them and kill them like that there's tons and tons and tons it's it's kind of um super hot like and that like it's very tactile and everything feels like great and

if you can think of something like it probably works um it it's it's one of my favorite um rift games out right now it is so fucking slick yeah i think it's, it's one of my favorite, um, rift games out right now. It is so fucking slick. Yeah. I think it's more silly. I'm sorry. Did anybody play the John Wick thing on Vive? I have not yet. No, I don't.

I heard it was not good. Yeah. I kind of packed up my Vive. I really only have room for one virtual reality experience in my office. And, um, the rift had super hot. So nims the brakes and you can also can't you like hack the uh oculus to like play vive games though uh yes you can i i haven't but you can do that yeah i the other the other thing works too by the buyer um any other honorable mentions we should

mention you have to buy them i'm not a pirate near oh yeah yeah here is the game i wish i had more time with and also i think like the ultimate example of something we talked about i think last month about uh japanese developers uh all these like wild ideas that i think people were sour on finally clicking like, every near review I read was like, it takes a while to get into it, but it's great. And you have to play it like five times. And each time is great. There are invisible walls everywhere.

They're great invisible walls. It's all these things that people I thought hated, but in the world of this game, they seem to really dig. And I've played a bit of it. I wish I i played more but i've been busy with a game that we'll be talking about next month but can we not talk about that i loved we can we can talk about that game right we can talk about the first like i i don't know the first time it's persona stuff yeah we're gonna talk about persona 5 a lot next month

um i um wait before we move on I want to mention something about Nier. And apparently I heard that there's a Justin McElroy Easter egg in Nier. Oh, man. There is, technically speaking, from what I've heard. Do you want to talk about it? Do you want to clear the air? Squash the beef? One time I took an Omega dump on Nier and it was well-deserved.

Original Nier. We're laughing. It was spicy. One time I took an Omega dump on near and it was well-deserved. Um, we're laughing. Spicy. This is what I used to call him. You guys remember what I used to say? Welcome to another Justin McElroy spicy Omega dump. Yeah. We're having fun. We're having fun here,

but Justin's got, I would say a fair amount of shit from, uh, internet communities online because of this thing he did to near they had a garbage minigame and i said as much and it ruined the game for me because it was so fucking bad and i was right and anyone who says differently is wrong moving on um it was a fishing minigame that sucked the moon right out of the fucking sky and i made a video about how bad it sucked and it was right and true

and as an acknowledgement of how right and true it was the um in near there's fishing again it doesn't seem to have near near automata we've not said the full automata automata automata automata in near automata uh there's a fishing thing that doesn't do much good. But if you catch a mackerel and you eat it, it's like boots you back to the main screen, like kill you or kicks you back to the main screen or something. Because mackerel sounds like mackerel, which is also true and good. And I think everybody's right. Like, I was right to take a huge dump on Nears fishing because it was so garbage. And they were right to dump, re-dump back on me with the pretty good pun that McElroy does sound like mackerel in a very true way.

And the fact that they were able to tie that back into fishing, I think is very good and funny. But yeah, I guess that's in. I really want to play it it looks like my shit exactly i just literally did not have a free my backlog is like my backlog before we move on i have to put like a a ps on that that is going completely by hair here here hearsay yeah from other people like i it may be a coincidence and i which would be probably if i didn't allow for that that that bit of sunlight there and it would be the most embarrassing thing if like this game's talking about me and it's definitely not so i just want to allow for that like that may

be the case it may just be random i don't know but it seems it seems intentional which i think is hysterical um yeah no it's a real thing i'm looking at a video now there's an npc and the npc is named jackass and says so there's this thing called a mackerel and apparently eating it has a horrible effect on androids uh i'd love to see what it does so go ahead and chow down and then it gives you a mackerel and then i'm looking at this video and you eat it and instantly yeah it drops you right back to the having consumed the mackerel it didn't take long for the android's bodily fluids to congeal muscle rigidity and paralysis soon followed uh it was it was good though the android thought as consciousness faded

exquisite even no wonder humans used to eat them and then that's it shows you the credits really fast it shows you the whole game's credits in like a second i mean i will say that the waters are fairly muddy on this particular joke like i don't think but uh but i mean i don't know i think it's funny either way that's fucking really good stuff um i really want to play near automata i really want to play more neo there's like there's like five games that i just didn't have time to i want to play all the resident evil 7 dlc like i'm playing really really good games but i'm playing half of the really good games that i want to play and i don't know when i'm gonna have time to check all the of the yeah i guess sorry i'm gonna i'm just gonna name one other game really really quick that fast rmx on oh yeah it's like the cheapest game on switch it It's $19.99. And it is really, really, really good.

You like it? I really, really like it. The Hook is like, it's a Wipeout-style racing game. But the boost, there's boost boards all over the tracks. And they're different colors. And you have to switch to match the colors to be able to use the boost. Wait, you have to switch? You have to switch to match the colors to be able to use the boost. You have to switch? You have to switch.

I don't understand. It sounds like Wipeout, to be honest. Listen. It's fine if it's Wipeout. I just want to establish. But it's good. Is there split screen in that? I believe there is. There's definitely local multiplayer without wi-fi uh which i'm curious because i haven't i've yet to see a split screen switch

game and i'm really curious split switch and i'm really curious whether on that tiny tiny screen you could actually have a playable experience in a split-screen environment. Probably not. Maybe. You'd have to really be cozy. Alright, who wants to start? I'll start. Go for it, Plant. Okay, so the game that I am bringing is

I don't know if small is the right word, but it's like a small word puzzle game for mobile called Type Shift, and i have a feeling that you have played this game prashik am i correct i have played this game um so the way it works it is by zach age who has done a number of games that i think have appeared in old besties like spell tower um probably did ridiculous fishing bad chess we didn't do but bad chess would have probably if we were really bad chess i think i think we actually talked about really bad chess

in a previous vestiges this this year yeah yeah um but type shift the way it works is you have uh a row of columns uh it sounds weird but each one is like uh say one column is four letters uh a through z uh another one with five letters another one with three another one with however many and you there's a central line and you try to line up these columns to make a word it's really hard to describe i've played this game and that i mean i don't know that i could do better but that is like an impossible way to yeah i can't visualize it wait wait i can describe how to how how it works you know when you get the like uh the lock on a briefcase how you have to align up the numbers yeah or like in price is right with the big wheel no no that doesn't help anyone so like the numbers on the briefcase imagine that with uh

letters for each kind of thing that you adjust so you're lining up words and there are two ways you can play it one is just to find a series of words for the dollar or you could oh my gosh you're killing me so you can line up and find uh as many words as possible with each set of tiles or there's another one where kind of crossword-esque it gives you a clue like knock knock and then you would find the word jokes by lining up your tiles okay um it's really simple that is not what i find like the most interesting thing about the game the game is very fun it's like a good way to just poke at your phone in the past five minutes. But the really interesting thing is, as you're finding these words, you kind of surprise yourself in what you discover to actually be a word. And then at the end of each round, it shows you all the words that you found, and you click one, and it takes you to Merriam-Webster's website and shows you the definition of the word that you found.

And this is why it's just kind of brilliant in terms of marketing or business, is the project was actually done in collaboration with Merriam-Webster. Oh, shit. So they designed basically an addictive bubble-wrappy thing that is like a fine fine game that teaches you words and sends i imagine gobs of web traffic to their dictionary uh that's like insidious it's like more clever than i want dictionaries to be there yeah i mean it doesn't it doesn't force you to go to their website no it's just it you it it uses the curiosity gap to get you to do it, which is what makes it good also for learning because you're doing it voluntarily.

I think it's so smart. And I've definitely enjoyed much of my time trying to discover new random words and then going and looking up whatever these things can be. I enjoy it as a learning tool almost more than I enjoy it as a game. to discover new random words and then going and looking up whatever these things can be i i enjoy it as a learning tool almost more than i enjoy it as a game so uh here's what i'm gonna say like that's yeah i've done that too where i like look i don't know what this word means and stuff like that and you get a little kick out of that we're the reason i think this game is so special for me

is so there's as plant kind of described there's two modes there's the mode that's like anagrams essentially where you're moving the letters around and making as many words as you can out of this combination of letters and then there's um clue mode it's called which is essentially kind of a twist on a crossword puzzle that's what i just said you fool i understand you just said it but i think you poorly described it oh my god get him drag him drag nasty besties nasty besties clue mode is what i want to talk about for a second what makes this interesting and it does sort of apply to anagrams but i think it's more applicable to clue mode is because the it will remove letters that are fully used within a single crossword. So for example, if you know,

for the remaining clues, there's no R's at the beginning of the word, it'll just get rid of that R and there won't be an R anymore. So then you know, oh, all the rest of the words are only these possible three letters, for example. And by using that, you can use kind of like interesting word building techniques like, all right, I know the second to last letter is a Y for sure. I don't know what the last letter is, but how many letters could possibly follow a Y, for example. And some of this obviously is used in normal crossword puzzles, this sort of strategy. But because it is

literally telling you there are definitely no r's left it removes that kind of x factor of like do i have this wrong or do i have this right and it makes the clue puzzles feel like this really cool progression where you build momentum as you're solving stuff faster and faster as you remove all the variables i'm playing it right now and it's it's really good yeah it's great and i really dig it to build off your thing with a crossword well i think it's really fascinating about it is uh in like tech and boring startup things people talk all the time about hey how do we take this idea that existed on this one form so like you gotta disrupt paper right how do we make it how do we make it mobile it's usually like well it's

the same thing it just has a touch interface and i think what's fascinating about this is it does a lot of the same things with your brain as the crossword has a general generally similar idea but it feels like it could only exist on your phone. Yeah, and it's also, I think, probably the only iteration of a crossword-like game that you can play with one hand, which I know Griffin prioritizes with baby dealings. It's true. And yeah, I think it's terrific.

I've been playing it a ton as my Fire Emblem stamina recharges, I play that. Zach Gage's hit rate is also wild it's insane yeah that cat has made has made so many like excellent excellent games that i just like adore it's wild i think yeah i was gonna say i think he has the luxury of of the fact that one of his earlier games spell tower was so successful that he can be really careful with what he does. So like someone that needs to, you know, oh, I need to make rent this month, might need to put a game out,

but I think he can be really patient and prototype and try a bunch of different things. I actually remember seeing a prototype of this game like a year and a half or two years ago. It was garbage, you think, is what you're saying. Right, no. And so he can take his time, and I think that makes a big difference. I think the other thing with Zach is he started out as an artist,

and he is that rare person you meet who is brilliant as an artist, but I think kind of enjoys the idea of selling his things and like took on word puzzle games because they are mainstream and popular culture and I think he's fascinated with the idea of hey this is a thing that traditionally would not be seen as a work of art or especially creative how can I make it that and I I think that's admirable because there's, especially right now, there's kind of this weird AAA and indie are separated vibe that it's nice to see somebody, I think, that kind of splits

the difference. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely. Let's move on to the next one. Yes. I'll go. My game is called Everything. It's a game made by a gentleman named David O'Reilly. You might know his work from a game called Mountain, where there was a mountain and it spun around

and you could do things to the mountain. I did not care for Mountain. I know a lot of people are into Mountain, but I got it and I was like, I don't get you, Mountain. I don't. I was kind of expecting the same thing with Everything, which is to say we see a lot of artsy games mountain but i've got it and i was like i don't get you mountain i don't i was kind of expecting the same thing with everything which is to say like we see a lot of artsy games and they're like yeah you know i get the idea it's interesting can you use maybe

a narrower brush there pal at least fucking artsy games with all the art in them no but you know what i mean like something that wouldn't like a painting poignant as shit fuck yeah i'm bored though how much three dollars what the fuck if you're gonna make a game like that i think it should engage emotionally and a lot of these games don't land for me uh they end up being like a lot of pretty colors and that's about it um everything i was fully expecting to be that case which is like here's the premise you can play as everything from an oxygen molecule to a galaxy to a llama to a landmass you can be everything and that sounds very ambitious and not necessarily super fun or interesting.

It's just like kind of an interesting experiment, like something Molyneux might say in an interview. And you'd be like, yeah, Molyneux, you're a jerk. And then it would never come about. Shut up, jerk. Shut up, jerk. But there's something that clicks with this game. And I'm not 100% sure what it is. But I think what it is but i think what it is so that the i think what the

game is trying to impart and it does this pretty directly by having quotes from this philosopher named alan watts um talking about the scale of the universe and how the universe is kind of like unfathomably large to the point where you don't really know, like, like the size of a speck of dirt versus the size of a galaxy. Like it's hard to sort of wrap your head around that. And this game really perfectly kind of encapsulates that concept in an interactive way, which is really impressive. And I,

I don't know. I, after I played it for like two hours, just like playing, like hands-on playing it. And I was like, wow, this is like kind of clicking with me and I get why it was made

and why it's interesting. And then we did an experiment at work because I found out after I completed what's known as the tutorial, but it really like takes you from, you know, the building blocks of life to the end of the universe, essentially. And then once you get there,

it says the tutorial completed, and it's very funny. But once you beat that, it unlocks this autoplay mode where you can basically customize all of the settings in the game. Okay, I was wondering what that stream we did was all about. Yeah, so basically you can customize all the settings so that the game plays itself, but you can decide like, okay, I want to be able to like, the AI will like change characters every three seconds or change this feature or change, you know, be able to scale and size as big as you want or as small as you want and it kind of just goes to the point where we left the game running for 24 hours and you can see there's a four-hour stream on our facebook if you want to watch it it

is surprisingly interesting to the point where for those four hours where we weren't we were not touching the game at all i think we were around like a thousand concurrent viewers for most of those four hours um just because is fascinating. Like it's jumping from suddenly you're like a crayfish, but you're the size of a galaxy and like a star system like flows into you and then you jump through time and space.

And it just like, it feels like you're watching like a really bizarre documentary or like a Philip Glass movie where you don't, you don't know exactly what's going on but it is super like visually engaging um the way they animate mammals walking around is they like turn like um i guess like dice they turn like 90 degrees yeah at a time and like kind of roll. Yeah. And you can, there's a setting that like allows certain animals to like group up. So at one point during the stream,

it was like herds of llama, like 30 or 60 llama spinning through like a desert and then doing like a big dance together. And I mean, it's hard to like really sell it, but, um, it, I honestly considered like the next time I have a party at my house,

I would probably just put that on the TV. And then passing out the LSD and just like, just look at the screen, guys. It's super engaging and really cool. Yeah. Going off your Peter Molyneux thing, I think what I really dig about this game and uh his work in general is it reminds me more of and this is not meant as an insult to the game or his work but peter molyneux that whole yes scene of uh coming up with a single tweet that is a game

design like riffing on the absurdity of molyneux's over promising and what what works so well here is it feels so precise and concise it i feel like there was like one idea which it was a very big idea but he went out and created that thing like i mean it lands it lands really well yeah it is everything and how do i do that uh i'm gonna i'm sorry should we can we do you guys mind if we move on to yeah no that's the next one whatever's next um yeah i want to talk about my game which is snipper clips it's the other good switch game when you finish zelda you play snipper clips and that is a switch when you own a switch you do zelda until the zelda runs out and then you do snipper clips or sometimes you do them side by side it's up to you a lot of people are saying blaster master and okay

but snipper clips is the second master master is good and and binding is good uh but you're right i've bought binding isaac on like 18 different things yeah um snipper clips is a game it is meant to be played with two people you can play with one person don't do that oh my god four people don't do that either just two people you and a loved one um i i i've been looking forward to this game for a long time because i watched a um i watched a treehouse presentation where some people played it and it looked fucking hysterical and uh it was and so i was looking forward to it i made sure i was like before i even played zelda well uh when i brought my switch home like i got this one and i got uh what else i got shovel

knight treasure chest which is good i hadn't played the extra shovel knight shit and it's pretty pretty sick um in it uh you and a co-op partner play as these little uh paper characters who are what's the best way to describe their shape they're sort of they are used without the gap in the middle yeah they're like an oval with a flat top right um and the controls for the game are you can run around you can jump you can squat and you can sort of raise you stand on your tippy toes um and the other thing you can do is press a button and you will cut out whatever you are overlapping on your partner so um this is another god this is like us trying to describe abstract like geographical or geometrical concepts um over an audio medium it's not great but just imagine

that like you sort of run your round end of your u-shape like right into the middle of of the other player and you press this and you press the snip button family show buy me dinner uh if you yeah uh if you do that and then you press the snip button then you will like cut whatever part of yourself that is overlapping with them so you could have them like lowered down and you just put like your whole body over them and snip and you can cut them very very short or you can cut them into narrow strips and a lot of the game is based around like figuring out how to cut them into the right shape there's a lot of stuff that a lot of puzzles that are just like fill this shape with your bodies and so you have to figure out like okay well there's just a circle in this how do

we cut a perfect circle using our our two bodies how do we like do i have to cut something into you and then we use that negative space to cut the other shape into me. And, um, but the best puzzles in the game are, um, like physical. Um, so there's one where you have to like figure out how to jump in this body of water and scoop up this, uh,

the right fish and then drop it into a basket that the other person's trying to hold open or trying to figure out how to catch a bowling ball as it falls through the ceiling. Um, and then use your, whatever shape you have cut into you to like bring it to a basketball hoop and get it in the hoop. Or one where there's slime coming down from the ceiling and there's like this little mouse trying to run from one side of the screen to the other. But it'll turn around if it gets slime on it.

So you have to figure out a way to like capture all this slime or one where you have to like cut a hook into yourself and then jump up like into the sky. Oh, and you can stand on your partner's head as long as they have like a head, like a flat end to stand on. So like you get to you have to be cut into a hook and then stand on your partner's head. And then both of you jump up in the air to try and hook this balloon and pull it down while your partner who you've cut into a sharp shape can like pop it. to a sharp shape can like pop it like it's so it's it's it's hysterical trying to communicate your geometric desires to the other person um yeah it's very it's it does require like a lot of vocal interaction with the other person because there's a lot of there's a lot of puzzles where like one more example there's one where you guys have to put both both of you have to pull a cactus up out of the ground and it's a cactus with just like spikes at random intervals and so you have to build a shape that can kind of hook onto those spikes and hold the shape up but if at any point one of you isn't holding the spike the

cactus will fall all the way back down into the ground so you have to like pull it up and up and up and up and a lot of those puzzles are built around that conceit where if you fuck up for a second you restart completely and like rachel and i played uh through snipper clips and like we had so many of those instances where like just one of us would fuck up and we'd lose all of this progress we'd put into this puzzle and it was like really fucking funny every time like oh what a what a disaster it basically is the closest experience i don't know if you guys ever did like trust fall or training exercises where like you have to like lift someone through the spider web of ropes and you can only go through so many times or like that sort of like physics-based puzzle that happens in the real world where you're like trust fall type things.

And that feels the same here where you, you really have to like plan out what you're doing, but invariably there's one person like fucking around and like taking chunks out of you, which was usually my wife. And, but like as in, in terms of like having a game that you have with you at all times, comes with two controllers because there's two controllers on the Switch. It's brilliant, yeah.

And you can just, like, use that kickstand and just, like, put it on a table in an airport. It's perfect. It's perfect. It's so good. I don't want to go too long talking about it because, frankly, I want to talk about the other stuff we have to talk about. But, like, it's a great game. My only disappointment, I think Rachel and I beat it over like two or three relatively short sessions.

There's like only really three batches of levels. I think there are more levels for four players as well. Okay. Well, I don't know how much more they could like squeeze out of this idea, but I think that they could have gotten just a little bit more. Like when it ended, I was like,

oh, really? That's it? And really the only reason I felt that way is because i enjoyed my time with it so very very much so if you have a switch and somebody else to play with again you can play by yourself and the way you do that is you like press a button to switch bodies and like it's not fucking fun at all um but as a co-op game it's like really cute and funny and good, and you'll like it. Totally. Nice. I know I said I wanted to talk about Destiny 2 during the break, but I don't know.

I just don't know if I want to. I don't even know. They announced Destiny 2 today. Did you all see? Yes. I mean, I think it's funny. Speaking as someone who's a fan of Destiny, I think it's funny all the time they spend on that logo Which is like hey it's the old logo

But there's a giant fucking 2 behind it What is the why don't you all Since I haven't heard it why don't you all just give me the That's it that's it I think that's all we know Yeah I got Yeah I got super I got scooped huh

I saw that ad somebody leaked I guess I got scooped I got really, um, scooped, huh? So I saw that, that ad somebody leaked, I guess they got scooped. Yeah. It was a game stop thing. I got really like hyphy on Twitter and I got, I, I made a mistake, which was stating a video game opinion while it was still breaking news on

Twitter, which like, if I ever do that again, like Justin, I just need to send you my Twitter password. And then you just maybe take my account away from me for a little while because like now just all day I've been dealing with folks, but like, I saw so many, so many so many like uh so many like games people a lot of critics a lot

of like developers who like were reacting to this announcement and like the basis of their goof was like destiny lol uh as as if to say like i think there's a lot of people who think of destiny as just like a joke because it was this big like uber hyped up game that didn't really deliver when it first came out and i i don't know it kind of bums me out that that is what like that that is the that's your that's your thinking on destiny like That's your hot take on Destiny is what a joke. But that's, I mean, again, speaking as someone who's a fan of this game, I've played a ton of it.

I fully understand why that is the general takeaway about Destiny because generally you only get one shot to get an audience and the vast majority of people who heard about destiny initially when it first launched heard about how it was kind of not great yeah and i would agree with that it was not very good at launch and you you can you can go listen to another besties episode where russ is trying to defend it as his game of the year as we all um tear him mock tear him down um but i fucking i really liked what destiny turned into um partially well mostly because of

like them listening to feedback like i don't want to fucking fly around the moon i don't want 90 percent of my time with the game be me flying around the moon looking for helium filament it's like yeah um and i think destiny turned into like this really interesting very very good game and i i don't know it just like bummed me out that i just saw a lot of folks who were just like destiny 2 huh what a joke and it's like well no that game did get really very very very good and i also saw a lot of people and this is a fair criticism of like i don't want to spend a bunch of money on expansion packs to like for a game to get good and i i i totally feel that i don't want to get into like a cost benefit analysis of of destiny or whatever but i i also think that that is a i wonder if they will go a subscription-based model

and i know they won't but i really think it would help like fix a lot of their problems because like i didn't think there was any problem with spending 40 bucks every year for this huge chunk of new content that i would play for 200 hours instead of paying like 15 bucks a month to for for a similarly updated experience yeah i i think what's a little bit of a bummer but it's just again the nature of humanity and especially the games community if destiny 2 comes out and gets like nines and tens and great reviews and everyone loves it, there will still be this. To the same extent, like last year's Call of Duty game was pretty damn good. But I think people decided very early on that they hated space.

Yeah. And they hated a lot of things and they made a judgment for themselves. And that judgment gets locked in and defines who you are and what your tastes are and stuff like that. that judgment gets locked in and defines who you are and what your tastes are and stuff like that so when they hear someone saying hey this is good it runs against what they're what they believe in and that's why they react so negatively i think what rubbed me the wrong way is like a lot of the like criticism of of this like completely insubstantial announcement so like really all you're criticizing is your thoughts on destiny one um first of all i did see a lot of people like i can't believe they called destiny two ha ha ha it's like what the

fuck else were they gonna call it um but like i i i think there's i think there's a really fucking shitty habit and it's not just i'm not saying that this is like all games press people or or whatever i think this sentiment goes branches like way out way way way out to like anybody who plays and consumes games um and i think there was probably a time in my life where i kind of fell prey to it too but like i think there's a lot of people who just like get psyched when a big game does bad like i think there's a lot of people who like are psyched out of their minds when call of duty is bad just for the like schadenfreude of it like well and it's also like well screw those people like i didn't spend

my money i was a smart guy and i'm going to talk about how smart i was for not spending my money like that's what it comes down to i honestly i think there's i think there's a lot of people who feel that way about mass effect andromeda but a lot of that is conflation with folks like identifying bioware's games as having like sorry for this terminology but like well no progressive progressive sort of views on on certain things and that always rubs people the wrong way which is awesome and cool and so there's a lot of people who celebrate when a game like that does isn't isn't uh especially great for uh nefarious reasons but i think there's also like a lot of people are just like oh this big major triple a game is bad ha ha ha cool i think with

bioshock or not bioshock mass effect goes a little closer to destiny also because you have mass effect 3 being a huge disappointment for a number of people who i think now it feels like justification like see i was right the whole time yeah yeah it was a bad game. Yeah, and I think that is kind of similar to this thing that's happening with Destiny of, well, I was right, it was bad, it was good that I didn't play any more of it after that first year, and this is going to be terrible too. I do think, though, I think this is a pretty small group of people. I think this is like a really, really loud group of people i think it's like a really really loud group of people on twitter well then a hundred a hundred percent of them tweeted at me there's a ton of people who think

like um you had to pay you know 200 bucks for destiny to get good and it's like well that's not really how it worked you paid fucking what 40 for the taken king a year after the game came out and then you played that for a year and then you know eight months later or whatever the next expansion came out and you paid 40 bucks for that and it's like first of all that's how every expansion pack model has ever worked and yeah it's more expensive but like this is a this is a different game than like another any other shooter here right like i i a lot of people like a lot of people like well i'm not gonna play. I'm too busy. I'm still gonna be too busy playing overwatch. And it's like, that's fine. That's your tendencies.

But do understand these are two fucking completely different games. I think that destiny has suffered because there isn't this clear delineation of it is an MMO shooter. So there's people who like group it in with their inter favorite shooter here. And the fact that destiny does this more MMO model shit, they're like, fuck that. And so like this idea that,

Oh, you have to keep paying money for this game to keep playing it. No way. It's like, wow, you must get angry. Anytime any MMO is announced fucking ever. Well,

those MMOs are kind of like going by the wayside. Like there are not many subscription based MMOs left. So I don't think people have that frame of reference anymore. There is also, you could point to almost no video games that are AAA video games specifically, where if you pay the full retail price for them at launch, they consistently get better over the course of several years. It just doesn't happen.

No game gets support. Those expansion packs paid for the main vanilla game over the course of several years it just doesn't happen yeah no game gets support those expansion packs paid for the main vanilla game to get improved on yeah which doesn't ever happen and like maybe it should have been better at launch but they were also doing something pretty audacious and it's not even like you miss because there's no wasn't a monthly fee so like right i don't know i but a person's response to that is like well i shouldn't have to pay i already paid my 60 dollars i had to pay my 60 dollars so it shouldn't have to one thing is like a lot of the upgrades to destiny that like

the the um what's the word i'm looking for of uh quality of life upgrades were free like those didn't come in the expansion packs now and i don't space stuff like that i don't want to i don't want to like completely defend destiny because i think it did make some bad calls for instance there were some expansion packs that when they dropped um if you didn't own them like you didn't have access to the random playlists anymore which like a lot of people that was their like main way of playing it and like that sucks that's gross i'm not defending destiny and i'm also saying like if you played vanilla destiny you're like i don't want to invest more time into this for it to get good or any more money that's fine too that wasn't what i was trying to say like all i was trying to say is there's so many fucking snide motherfuckers who are just like

destiny lol and it's like that was maybe my one of my favorite like some of my favorite times playing games in the past decade has been like playing with you chuckle fucks and like the the like doing the doing the raids and like i don't know i played that game so much and i enjoyed a lot of the time that i spent with it and there's a lot of people who i think just think like well that was that game was a disappointment for everybody who played it huh like no that game did some really interesting shit i think and i don't know i thought i thought more about destiny than any other guy like over over a period of time like no game consistently like hooked and then re-hooked me yeah like destiny did um it was great it's also the most fun i think i've ever had

playing an online multiplayer game like i played a lot of wow and i and a lot of like ever quest and like none of that none of that even comes close to stacking up to like the the stuff i did in destiny yeah um so i is it time yeah it's time uh the legend of zelda breath of the wild is a very good enjoyable video game um i'm somebody who i have sort of a weird history with zelda where there have been a couple that I just have bailed on. Even after trying a couple of times, they just didn't hook me. Like what? I don't want to say because then it's like a whole thing. But Wind Waker.

Skyward Sword. Skyward Sword I finished. Wind Waker. No, Skyward Sword I didn't finish. Wind Waker I didn't finish. Twilight Princess? I used to disparage Majora's mask a lot uh because i hadn't finished it and but eventually i played on 3ds and that was like a great great place for it super good

super good game but breath of the wild is the problem with zelda which is both it's like well no i'm just gonna i was gonna say curse and it's boon but it is just a curse the game is is all it's all been variations on a theme like i would say specifically since link to the past i think is where you i think ocarina of time is a much more like yeah link to the past is like there's a link to the past is better actually i like mine better i think of orc o ocarina time is more link to the past is much closer to what the hell is going on no like link to the past sets up the dungeon boss get the weapon to beat the boss eight basic things that you have to do that was in the first game that was in legend of zelda on nes but it's it the i for me link to the the Past is structurally a better comparison.

It's one of my favorites. I like it more than Ocarina, so I don't disagree with you. That's buck wild. I think the, no, Link to the Past is the best computer game ever made. Anywho, it's all been meditations on that theme. And there have been some, like like it's weird because it has been twisted up like it's been mixed up like uh link could turn into a fucking wolf sometimes i guess or that train game on ds don't bring up the ds games and it and it has been mixed up okay but

it's like weirdly belligerently like has felt like it could not upset the basic structure of the thing right like somewhere down below that meat there's the basic skeleton that has been the same for decades to the to the point like to a ridiculous level where it's like all right grass temple first then fire place and then water place and then right like it's it's some of that shit is so like incontrovertible it is and you're like when am i gonna get the hook shot already when am i yeah blah blah where's the bow and arrow right so for legend of zelda breath of the wild though um so that's all out the window you it it's a real actual open world game and it's an open world game that succeeds in the in ways that other open world games have failed. Like, let me start there.

It is my biggest pet peeve. Ah, in open world games and pretty much everyone does it where you see a hill and they always tell you this, like, you see that hill. You could just climb up there if you want to. Like that. They said that in destiny when leading up to destiny's release, they make like a huge deal about that. See down there, that planet you could jump off. Yeah. You'll die.

I mean, you'll die instantly. You'll be killed. Yeah. You'll be killed by the architects. Thanks. Nice try. Thanks. But it,

but the actual truth of the matter is as you start running up the hill, at some point you're not, you can't go up anymore. So actually you're going to slide back down the hill. And that you're not you can't go up anymore so actually you're going to slide back down the hill and that wasn't that fun didn't everyone enjoy themselves maybe if you go with just the right angle and mess with the geometry you know in the legend of zelda breath of the wild if you see something and and it gets too steep you just start climbing it and you burn stamina to do this but like you just start climbing it and that's everything pretty much everything in the game that is a natural surface there's some you know smooth

you know uh manufactured i should say surfaces that are not climbable but pretty much everything in the world is like you could just we'll just let you climb it and that's goes beyond that's not just like oh that's sweet nintendo you made a shot at you you made sort of like your fun cute version of an open world game like no you actually made the most open ass open world game um possible it does the same thing with weapons and and probably the biggest one of the the things that has been the most interesting thing about breath of the wild is making my peace with things that don't feel immediately good or right to me um so for example uh weapons when you get weapons in the game every weapon you get is breakable and not breakable in

the way that some games do it we're like maybe after a few hours it'll break no a lot of the weapons in this game are pretty fragile to a almost comical degree i would say there's some very bad sword craft going on in hyrule um but you would think they'd be built to last but like at first it felt really bad because i wanted to get a new when i got the boomerang the first time you get the boomerang you're like oh what's up zelda is back and then the first time you throw the boomerang you're like oh what's up zelda is back and then the first time you throw the boomerang and it falls on a mountain lands in a river and it's like no boomerang no you actually have to catch it which i thought was fantastic you have to press a button to catch it out of the air but also oh like it feels so good when you actually catch it like when you actually time it outright and you catch it midair like

it feels awesome and by it's only found those moments because it's willing to throw out all the the the pre-existing structure that has been in these games for so long and there's um thematically there's things that are familiar there's a lot of like character names that are that you're you know seeing again and well the whole world yeah the whole world has like spots named after shit from the entire zelda canon like yeah right stuff pulled from twilight princess and tingles yeah tingles island and mount laney rue and yeah uh farron woods like um a lot of that was pulled from twilight princess like yeah it pulls from it pulls from everything i felt the same way about weapons i i'm very i've talked about this on this podcast before like i'm very precious when like

with my consumables in a game i'll reach the end of the game and have like a billion potions and strength upgrades and like do like because i am i don't want to spend that stuff i'm very afraid that i will be ill-equipped and so i worry about that but um you're always finding new shit and it makes you adapt and i also really uh you can upgrade how many weapon like slots you have and to me that was a good way of feeling like i was increasing like my my martial prowess like i didn't sweat it so much if i broke a spear when i knew i had like 15 other weapons in the in the reservoir um yeah i just real quick about the climbing i know justin you mentioned the climbing earlier so we've seen climbing in a ton of games uh you know assassin's creed orarted, they've been in everything.

Why the climbing here I find so much more interesting is because before I start climbing a cliff, and I never used to do this in those other games, I would take a second and I'd look up the cliff and be like, all right, based on my stamina right now, I should be able to make it to that little outcropping. and then i'll chill for a second regain stamina and like continue my ascent so by the time you actually make it to the top of the mountain it's like an actual accomplishment yes not you just hit x a bunch of times and you made it it like feels like you climbed this mountain there's a real verisimilitude to the realization like oh i'm stuck in this canyon and it's raining

right now which makes climbing nigh impossible so i guess i'm just gonna see what is in this canyon because i can't get out right now um and it is the one of the very few games that because of that when i see something in the distance there really is a part of me it's like i wonder what's over there i wonder what it is i wonder what that is that's that's that's the story of this game and it's every time like i tweet about this game i get 10 tweets from people who say the same thing which is like i go to this place i see a tower in the distance i'm like i'm gonna go to that tower and get the fast travel point and see see where everything is on this map and on my way to that tower or maybe i don't make it to that fucking tower because i get pulled away by like 30 things i see a shrine there and i grab it and i see a weird thing that is definitely a korok that i

run over to the koroks are by the way some of the best fucking video game collectibles in the history of video games all time all time all time um there's 900 of them there's so many of them there's 120 of the shrines and each of the shrines well most of the shrines are like really sick little puzzles that are just the perfect the pacing of this game is perfect and it's a lot of it is because it's you do it at your own pace the pace is what you make it um but none of these shrines like overstay their welcome they're all like little little brain teasers that use the mechanics of the game really really really well um and the korok seeds a lot of them are sort of the same way um one thing that we haven't really talked about yet is how you can do like any way that you can imagine combining any two systems in this game

um will probably almost certainly work and you can use it to great or at least hilarious effect um my favorite example of this is did you see the video that nick put up on twitter of how he solved this one there's one temple where you have to get this electricity from um these two batteries to these two nodes on opposite ends of this big gate um and you do this by using your magnesis power to pick up these big metal crates to complete the circuit. And there was one like metal ball or whatever that he couldn't find. And so what he did is he dropped all of his metal equipment. He dropped all his metal swords and metal bows and metal shields,

and then used magnesis to line them up from one, um, like one of the powered nodes. And he used the, um, he used all his metal gear, metal gear to form a bridge from that node to the unpowered node. And it worked the electricity traveled through his swords and boomerangs and bows and shields to, to complete the circuit. Yeah. It's amazing. I mean, you know, I've seen catapapults there's like a crazy bunch of catapult videos um i'm constantly blown away that like a game like that was always the complaint about

zelda for a very long time is like games like skyward sword or games like ocarina are like very boxed in in terms of what you can actually do shy of like if you're a speed runner and you're beating the game in an hour and using hacks but like for if you're playing it normally like you know oh i can do this or oh i can't do that but it's a very it's a pretty narrow box in terms of what your options are and this game completely blows that out of the water to the point where you can think of things like their physical properties and you just you need campfires to um you can use them to roast things not cook them you need a a cooking service for that but you use the roast things you can also use in a past time by sitting at them and if you can't find one in the wild here's how

you make one you take some wood in your hands and some flint and you drop them on the ground and you hit the flint with one of your metal weapons and that creates a spark that sets the wood on fire and then it's a campfire are you kidding me yeah zelda are you kidding me that's in the zelda game the best shit is that metal attracts uh lightning um so if you're out during a storm and you're wearing metal equipment you have to take it off and so it's like a weird like um it's like a weird debuff where if you're if you're out in a storm you have to only use wood gear and you're gonna be like probably without a shield and um it sort of puts you at a disadvantage or you can take that metal long sword you have and hold it

out like the fucking highlander about to experience the quickening. And then right before the lightning strikes you, you fucking throw it at an enemy's feet and watch as they just get vaporized by light. Like, I can tell you a thousand things like this that just, like, work. It all just works. And it's astonishing. And sometimes you have to use it. Like, it's not just, like, goof around Easter egg shit. Like, sometimes you have to use it like it's not just like goof around easter egg shit like sometimes you have to use stuff like that so like sometimes you have to cut down a tree

and set the log on fire and roll it down a hill burning up like a big grassy field full of moblins who will otherwise tear you apart because that's another thing this game will kill the shit out of you yeah starting out very hard if you get sloppy even a little bit it will it will bust your ass even later on you know i think the game does a very good job populating the world as you get stronger and get more heart containers stuff like that the game populates the world with these like elite tier enemies that get populated within the low tier enemies so even if you go to the starting area there's like a silver goblin that chills with like the normal goblins and he has like a thousand health and so it makes exploring the world still

engaging even if you're like totally overpowered i i want to mention one other zelda game because i think there's a tendency when talking about this game to act like it just kind of came out of nowhere and zelda was as rigid as it was during the uh gamecube and uh we era but i think there's a debt owed to a link between worlds which came out on 3ds sure what four years ago three or four years ago uh i would say three two but i think it was our last it won game of the year on besties whatever year that was and beat out gone home so 2013 i think um so yeah i i think obviously this game goes much further in every which way possible especially in terms of like allowing for creativity and play but what i think that game did do was it broke away from the kind of traditional zelda

thing that had taken shape around modern zelda games of like okay it's an open world game but not really and go here and do this and do it in this order and everything needs to cloud exactly the same way and there's not really any sense of risk and and exploration and link between worlds the whole idea was you got dropped into this big open world it was closer to the original zelda a little bit like the snes one too but there was also not just that exploration to be able to go and take on the dungeons in whatever order you wanted but you had to buy weapons at that shop and unless you had gobs of money you had to rent them and it essentially had breakable items because if you died you lost your weapon yeah and i i think they i don't again it's not like one for one but i think a lot of the kind of qa-ing of this game

of seeing okay are our fans going to be okay with the idea that your weapons are not permanent are they gonna be okay with an open world game where you're not directed and it's not all about the story and that game obviously got tons of great reviews i mean it got the most important award of the year what i'm saying is i think this is how it happened. I think they were making a different Breath of the Wild. They saw our, we gave A Link Between Worlds the best award. They said, stop, stop, stop. We're going the wrong direction. This is the way of the future.

They listened to what we had to say from that. They took notes. They took some notes. they expanded on the ideas they created artificial versions of us to debate games for all the time that we had off knowing we would come back together for this episode and that's why they're releasing ninten boys next year for the 3ds and it's just four boys you get to pick one of us and you take care of um how just how wild is it though that like in their first real major departure i agree with what you said about link between worlds but like they they took that lesson and like magnified it a thousand percent here like their first huge huge departure from their formula was this open

world game and during this departure they made in my opinion maybe the best open world game ever made like they didn't just like walk away from this formula they've been using for two decades or whatever they made the best game in this like i think i think it's the best i think it's the best zelda game i think it's better than Link to the Past, which was previously my favorite Zelda game. I think it's the best Zelda game. And... What? I just...

Sorry, I just want to say this. The Wii U would go down as the console that had the best Nintendo games developed for it. What? No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What are you talking about?

In the amount of time it was around, it created the best new franchise right of splatoon that was like the first good you know i have to go in like five minutes and you start this stinker room of an argument i'll make it really quick they made super mario maker which is a very good deconstruction of the two games they made super mario 3d world they Super Smash Bros., which I think is the best Smash Bros. in a long, long time. But basically an upgrade from the last one. They made Mario Kart 8, which was

without question the best Mario Kart since what? Mario Kart 64. And they made the new Zelda. The new Zelda was made for the Wii U. It came out on the Switch, and that's great. It's very important. The new Zelda was made for the Wii U. It came out on the Switch, and that's great.

It's very important. The game was straight up made for the Wii U. The Wii U is the reason it's a launch Switch game, because there's no way this would have been a launch game if it was. We didn't even talk about the portability. I finished Zelda on a flight, a four-hour flight to Portland, and that's pretty buck wild.

It's the best portable game I've, I've ever played. It's going to be so hard to talk about switch shit because like, if this game had come out on 3ds or like, I'll obviously wouldn't do this, but like on Vita, it'd be like, wow, I can't believe the scope and scale of this portable game. But like, it is a portable game and i bring it on the subway like 100 and it's this the core the wild thing about it is that and this is where i would push back against the it was developed with wii u in mind is that the pacing is very friendly

to mobile gaming yeah it's very friendly shrines You can bust out in five minutes. Um, dungeons that are a lot more, um, what's the word I'm looking for? The chunkable, like they're, they're much more like a dungeon will take you a half hour at most. Whereas before break down into components, like in a way that like the more labyrinthine dungeons in the past,

uh, I don't think that's a portable thing as much as nintendo realizes that like griffin the world does not have time to like sink three hours into a game at all right right right we got time for captain toad treasure tracker another we you hit um so i think our game this week is gonna be snipper clips it's just so cute uh this month and i think it's zelda um yeah it's i mean it's definitely zelda and i i'm i i think it's so much better than horizon zero dawn like yeah i think it's way way better yeah that was that's our current that's our current reigning champion it dethroned re7 which i disagreed with and i just i i think this game is so much better than

horizon zero dawn because i think it does a lot of the stuff like a lot of my complaints with horizon zero dawn is just like i didn't feel pulled along by the game like i i didn't feel much um i didn't feel like i was getting much more powerful as i like got the upgrades and i didn't really like care about like oh i need to get all the blue components so that i can get the purple bow and then i'll spend all my money on that and then get a better purple bow at the next fit as opposed to like if i get um uh i need bomb arrows so i can like solve this one puzzle or like um i need this tunic that can help me survive in the desert so that i can go to this whole other other area like i always felt like i was getting more powerful as i played breath of

the wild and i felt like each upgrade was like a little key to a door and behind that door was like more fucking cool stuff to to explore it's so wild i don't want to take too much more time but to dwell on this but it is wild that this is a month where a new zelda and a new mass effect were released and the fact that the new mass effect was such a footnote like that's heartbreaking i i love that franchise like what a what a god that stinks it just stinks i'm greedy. We had a new franchise also launch and it was great. Snipper clips. I think Horizon's your...

I agree. I think this is better is a silly word to use even though that's the whole point of our show. I would say it should be our bestie. I think they are... They look very similar and they have similar stories in their open worlds but i think

otherwise horizon and zelda are just completely different ideas of how to make this type of game sure yeah no i i think like it's it's really hard for me to compare them because i instinctually want to because they have so much in common visually and about their weird like nature is reclaimed earth after technology was king worlds but yeah i ultimately i remember is better in horizon zero dawn and the story is better in horizon zero dawn graphics i think are about a wash if we want to get laid down no come on what are we gonna do talk about the fucking fun factor no i'm just no i'm just making the case that it's not quite the trouncing i would say that i don't think it's a trouncing but i think zelda is like game of the decade like best game of all time like it might be my favorite game ever like there were maybe 30 times while playing it where i did something completely like random with

like throwing a flaming boomerang at a cuckoo, which like knocked off this chain of reaction that like killed another thing. Or I was like, this might be my favorite game ever made. It's spectacular. Um, yeah. Uh,

next month though, Oh, it's going to come out and it's going to be, yeah. Russ is going to have to read what she hates. I hate reading. Um, Anything else next month that we're Excited about There's no way for there to be time

You're going to be playing all 5 million hours of Persona We won't know that all the games happen I really am dreading I don't have that space in my life anymore Have y'all been doing much of the Vita Play does that work for you It's all I do is remote play

yeah it works great um ukulele comes out ukulele is next month too and snake pass is at the very end of this month but we'll go all right bullet storm full clip um merry heart deluxe comes out like the original bullet storm no the original book was good it was a good game um i need to go get my eyes checked out before they won't let me in the front door. Because of how late I am for my eye appointment. And I know you guys care about my good vision and so

maybe we should wrap up? Yes. That's going to do it for us this month. I hope you like the show. And do we say our names? I can never remember this month. I hope you like the show. And, uh... Do we say our names? I can never remember this part. We don't go a year between recording these anymore, right?

I'm just asking for a yes or a no. Not a lot of commentary. Just do we say our names? Generally, no, but I don't want to paint you in a box. Okay, so, my name is Justin McElroy and these other people are... don't get to say their names. And for all of them, and me,

be sure to join us again next month for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games besties