The Besties - The Besties Game of the Year special for 2015 is now available, you monster

Episode Date: December 28, 2015

Last year, we published a post called "The Final Besties Ever." We're sorry that we lied about that, but we're even sorrier for those of you who made it happen by constantly demanding that we do it. We can't imagine what dark hole is embedded in your heart that you require one of the most universally maligned video game podcasts in history in order for your year to be complete, but that's your cross to bear. True story: If Russ Frushtick's audio sounds odd during this episode, it's because he literally talked into the wrong side of his mic for the whole show, I shit you not. This is the podcast you demanded. This. This is on you. If you'd like to subscribe to The Besties, you still can, believe it or not. 7:00 - Honorable Mentions 31:20 - Round One 1:09:50 - Round Two 1:45:20 - Round Three 2:25:25 - Final Decision Theme song by Ian Dorsch Download MP3 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!

one two three four five six seven eight still got it better than any of the other times literally ever it's been fucking a calendar year did we do one last year uh if memory serves that was like our finale the very last ever episode oh it's so much for that right yeah i can't believe we're back in this dumb saddle i can't believe we're back in this dumb saddle. I can't believe we're back in this uncomfortable idiot saddle. Half of this podcast doesn't work for Polygon anymore. Is this even legal to have them as opinion representatives for Polygon? This is not bullshit. If we are including this part in the show, which I think we probably should, I, sitting here at this moment, hand to God, don't know how to get this onto the RSS feed.

I literally don't know how to publish this episode to, we were using some like dark magics before to get it on. It's a real backdoor shit. You know what? We might just want to cancel this right now because I just clicked through iTunes and I'm going to our podcast page and there's just an old wooden sign

hanging on the Bessie's podcast page and there's just an old wooden sign hanging on the besties podcast page that says closed for business. We could probably send it by telegraph. I think that would be fine. A tumbleweed just came out of my computer monitor. Yeah, I don't know what to do with it. We'll figure it out. Maybe we could just like personally

email it to the 14 people who give a fuck about besties. All 14? That seems like a lot of work. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the year. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best games of the year. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best games of the year. My name is Russ Rushing, and I'm the best guy to read. I have missed this. As if we never left, fam.

As if we never left. It's the besties, the worst podcast that people still love for some reason. What have we done? This is the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in fashion, food, movies, cars, trends. fashion food movies cars trends this year this year we're talking about uh this year we're talking about video games you know they're not just pac-man anymore you know what i you know what i'm just now realizing earlier this year this past thanksgiving uh justin travis and i launched a new podcast that we were all excited about because we thought the idea was so great and it was going to be the world's first annual podcast, little did I realize that the best he's done beat us to the punch.

We didn't really know at that point that it was now annual. And we don't even know that it is now either because doing it two years in a row does not make it annual. Here, we'll give you a guarantee of three a decade. That's the best we can do. Yeah, that's pretty good. If you guys had to guess, who would you think is going to tweet the most during this recording?

I think Justin. I'm at one. you're keeping it secret right though yeah i'm keeping it real secret and safe i'm telling people not to tell anybody about these tweets that i've got going um so this is the besties we are here to talk about the best games of the year we each have brought what did we do we just brought three games we i'm caveat up here at the front disclaimer this is not polygons top 10 i don't know when this is going to go up in relation to polygons top 10 it's also not a top 10 as a top 12 because it's a top 12 yeah regardless both this and the polygon top 10 are going to be bonkers because it was a totally bonkers year um and i'm excited to get my hands dirty so we've got 12 games that we're

gonna rank is that the way we're doing so here's here's how here's my idea we each brought three games and there are top three games of the year um ostensibly there was i think one crossover and so one person had to like drop the game and let the other person have it and get another one but 12 games i think we drop this quarterfinals bullshit that we usually get stuck in, that quack. I don't know. I think it was really well thought out and organized. Oh, my God.

Here's what I think we should do. I think we do three rounds where we each pit our threes against each other, our twos against each other, our ones against each other. Then we take those three, and then you're ready for this. This is the genius part.

At the end of those three rounds, we'll have three games, and then the four of us will decide on those three games no more fucking stalemate unless unless we give two votes to one and two votes to the other and zero votes to the other but let's not worry about that right now it seems unlikely break the stalemate bullshit that we always get into where it's like well gone home or zelda and then we fight about it for 45 minutes and then nobody feels good about it do you think this is a voting blocks here i think it's a voting box i think we're gonna be strategic about it so can we do 13 games because i know this list and there's one that's still undecided

and i don't know which one we should talk about well it was you do you want to brought two games do you want yes well let me okay so what so we're just gonna take turns or we're gonna yeah well we'll do rounds and we'll each like pitch our threes against each other our twos um should we open up because like i can't stress this enough it was a wild year like looking at the pile like polygon staff voted on the top 10 usually you get like maybe 15 really great games that everybody kind of allots their votes for and then from those 15 you get a a tight 10 this year i feel like there's maybe like 30 to 40 games that that we're getting votes and i feel like they're like in us deciding on the 12 we're bringing to this

it was sort of a similar dilemma of there's just like a lot of stuff catering to a lot of different types of people who play games yeah we we had a uh we have the polygon voting on the game of the year list we've seen it we saw the top 10 and the top 20 and the top the 11 through 20 of the polygon list would be a very decent game of the year would be a very decent top 10 like i would not have been surprised if that had been our top 10 that's that's how many like really solid and not as solid, but really disparate experiences. Super different, not a lot,

I would say not even thematically much you could point to this year in terms of trends, right? And we've moved beyond the idea of the indie darling that everybody falls in love with and puts all their weight behind because this year there were like 30 Indie Darling. There were so many like really, really great games that like in my mind completely superseded the big like stuff that I was, you know, that I knew to look forward to at the beginning of the year.

Okay. So I'd like to let me let me suggest this because I because I couldn't decide on my on my games of the year, my top three. What if we started with a quick round of honorable mentions, ones that we didn't put in our top three, but would still like to sort of give a nod to? And this is going to be a little embarrassing, because I think there's going to be one game in this list that is like people are going to be like, what the hell is wrong? Well, no, that's going to turn out to show. That's going to happen no matter what. But this is a big one. And I am 100% guilty of this as well, which is to say, like, I played about an hour or two of this game and didn't get into it.

It's Witcher 3. We're talking about Witcher 3. So, like, let's talk about Witcher 3. This is our honorable honorable we didn't even like this enough to think about including it but like here's a game a lot of people know about honest to god here's why i didn't play very much witcher 3 and i i liked what i played all right but this was a it was hard for me to feel okay about investing a shitload of time in an open world game.

I did not get into hardly any open world games this year because there were other sort of experiences that I would rather funnel my free hours into. And to that point, like Fallout 4 4 which we are going to talk about later like i like that a whole lot but i didn't play it as much as i played skyrim which is to say you know 300 hours of uncovering every single thing because every hour that you spend doing that is an hour that you can't spend playing another video game and there was a lot of competition specifically games that are like you know a tight six hours that I need to stop saying tight when referring to games

because I'm making myself uncomfortable the issue for me for Witcher was like every second that I was playing was I felt guilty because I like didn't know who this white haired dude was that is another thing I did not play Witcher one or two and no I

read some pretty good lore wrap ups but I still felt like kind of lost. I played The Witcher 2, and I liked it. There was a... For me, the problem was this. I actually liked Witcher 3. I played a good number of hours of that. And then you get to this section

where you're looking for a friend of yours that has gone missing. And it is an extremely long, boring quest line where you're just hunting down this guy in one of the towns. It's been so long that I don't, I'm, I am apologizing because I do not remember the name of the, uh, uh, the, any of this, the,

the locations, the characters. Is this just the beginning of the game? No, this is about halfway through when you get to one of the main hubs. Um, you, uh,

you, you, you get into this really boring quest line where there's like a lot of like tracking down, um, uh, tracking down of, uh,

like clues and, and, and stuff like that. Like things that are just not, um, the, the just aren't interesting to do. Dandelion is,

is the name of this friend and you are, uh, and it, and it's in Novigrad and there's just like, it's just a very boring section, but here's what happened for me. And, and it's in Novigrad, and it's just a very boring section. But here's what happened for me. So I tried to read The Brothers Karamazov a few years ago, and I got halfway through, and I got distracted by something,

and I tried to get back into it, and as dense and much stuff is in that book to keep track of, trying to go back into it was literally impossible. And that's how it was like literally impossible and that's how it was with witcher 3 like i got distracted by other games coming out and and because this dandelion quest line was so bad and then i i just couldn't get back it's not just the story like that that's the issue i had just being like away from it for a week the systems were so much and like learning like i i just had to rethink how i

used health and i know like all the uh projectiles or grenades or whatever you have to cook things crafting is like this thing that keeps me out of games at this point uh because to learn each individual system just slows things down yeah it makes things seem so tedious to me i got that same sort of feel from it and and i know that's what like a lot of people like about it like you have to be very strategic with the stuff that you bring into battle um but it that's just it just seemed like on top of the the me feeling overwhelmed by not understanding the lore that would just to add more layers of of of stuff. It was just,

I think that someday I will play Witcher three and, and get into it in a, in a slow period. I still want to like check it out. Cause I know so many people love it so much, but like that's a, that's a, that's a steep climb to, to get over.

That's a pretty big barrier of entry. This is the definition of playing a game wrong, as much as I hate that term. But I made it to some boss, like you had to go into a cave, and then you caught the big bad or some bad. And you had this boss fight, and this is early on, probably a few hours in. And I did not understand how health worked, that I would have to essentially restart, go back to the town, grind, get the money, get get some more health and then go try this again and i had already sunk so many hours into it that i refused to basically lose my progress through this cave mission uh and had to find a way to trap the enemy in the architecture and then just like stab it for hours until it went away and that like anytime a game is making me think like that like to essentially get past it like it becomes work man i that's how much destiny did you play this year yeah well that's true destiny was good

because uh that's later that's later the second i got to like having to worry about my light level uh yeah that destiny definitely lost its shimmer. We can't. We have too much shit. We can't talk about games that didn't make the list for 15 minutes. But we do care about that a little bit, right? Our honorable mention. No, we should. Just not 15 minutes dedicated to one game that we all just like,

everybody loves and we apparently hate, so fuck your taste. I'm glad we don't have an email address for this show anymore. Yeah, speaking of fuck my taste, how about Untel Dawn? dawn guys i just played the shit out of that game late late comer and i'm glad i played it like the day before our goatee votes had to go in and i'm so glad i did because it clocked in real real high for me boy that game is a treats a pizza i didn't play it because it's spooky and i don't do well with spooky games yeah i i uh i love the spooky games i love the spooky genre but i wouldn't say it's even terribly spooky there's some actually some really really really well executed jump scares like in terms of pacing and tension like i think it nails

it uh but in terms of like straight up schlock holy shit it's a slam dunk like and and and it's not just like i watched it i was like oh it's like a teen slasher thing yeah but it's also like uh there's a lot of uh like supernatural horror like a little bit of like lovecraftian stuff a little bit of saw like they touch on on a bunch of different genres and i really think they execute it so much better than uh than i assumed they were going to i ended up like loving the game i played it twice um trying to get that platinum did you i did not no i didn't kill everybody i have to kill everybody that's my last trophy and it's hard it's hard to kill everybody it's actually got it's also what helps us a lot is it's got like a really it's got a really good cast.

Hayden Panettiere is the lead character. Peter Stormare is in it. There's a doctor, Rami Malek, who's the lead in Mr. Robot. Brett Dalton, the guy from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., is in it. And they really helped. The material is cheesy, but it's pretty much pretty consistently like intentionally cheesy right um and it and it's nice to play a horror game speaking to what you said russ because it's spooky it's nice to play a horror game that like you're kind of okay

with no matter how it shakes out like this game will just keep on going if you get somebody killed like well right it has that heavy truck it has that heavy rain idea where even if somebody dies like the the story keeps going but what it does so much better than heavy rain is like everything everything first of all um the totem system i thought was really smart you can find these little objects on the ground that will show you uh one of five different sort of like types of messages. So it could be like a warning or it could show you a vision of your own death

or a vision of a friend's death or a decision you could make that will lead you to good fortune. And if you miss those, it's whatever. It's not that big a deal. If you find them, it helps you like inform your decisions later on to try and pick the less lethal or more lethal,

if that's the way you want to play it, option um i thought that was a really smart way of handling yeah i always get frustrated with this when it feels like you're making a choice randomly and there are choices that would feel like that in this game if you don't find the related totem so it kind of gives like an added layer of you know quote-unquote gameplay and even if you even if you find the totem it's not like the totem's like okay now when you get to this door don't open it it shows you like a little bit of the door and what happens afterwards and you have to like figure out the clue and figure out like where it is uh where where it means something spooky i have a i have a dumb thing to throw on this list of things that didn't make it uh There's no dumb games. It came in very late.

It's a silly thing to include on this list. I will confess up front. But the new Earth Defense Force on Vita is... When did that come out? Excellent. It came out like a week ago. Oh, really? And it's essentially a remake of, I think, like the one from two years ago. I don't know but the problem with these games uh other than their repetition uh is they take forever to load uh they're super fun but the

loading is a killer uh in this game it gets rid of that uh the loading is nothing there's actually good uh modern uh ui uh menus are helpful and you can fly so uh the kind of like traversal issues they fixed everything people who don't know earth depends force because a lot of people have not played it is an open world game series that has been around for essentially since the beginning of xbox 360 would you call it open world no i would not call it open no yeah it's just like a big map it's like you're in a arena it's it's imagine huge cities that are on it's like calling battlefield an open world game um no because there's not a direct line that you complete anything it's like multiplayer though yeah it's like okay maps that are like battlefields multiplayer maps yeah and everything is destructible like all the buildings

these giant skyscrapers come crashing down and you shoot like aliens and bugs that come from space and giant robots uh in the scale of it there's still that's the thing that like i feel like this has made it on some form of my list uh every year since it's come out yes because there's still, that's the thing that, like, I feel like this has made it on some form of my list every year since it's come out. Yes. Because there's still nothing that does the scale of this game. And I get that's because, like, it's okay having tons of bugs, well, like, issues, and, like, looking like crap. And also when you shoot a building, it looks like just, like, four cardboard boxes falling over. Which is hysterical to me.

Yes. But, like, it, and i had this a little bit we'll get to it there's another game that we're going to talk about later that griffin loves that reminds me of this in a weird way of not worrying about everything being perfect uh so long as you're able to do like this one big idea that you set out to do sure and i respect that ambition and i'm disappointed that like i still feel like i'm not seeing things as strange and as big as this game i'm looking forward to i'm hoping megaton rainfall will as bad as the title is i'm hoping that'll like pick up some of this slack which is basically pitched as like an edf game if you were a superhero and vr i played it at gdc and what if i do came super super close to vomiting right on this excellent excellent that's the kind of emotional reaction i want from my kids um i

want to burn through a couple just real quick yeah bring in one what the hell are you doing oh i thought we were just like banging out all the ones bang out what do you what do you got uh uh steam world heist just came out on 3ds it's like a 2d i XCOM. Oh, I love SteamWorld, and I saw this got good reviews. It's totally different from SteamWorld Dig. It's not like Minecraft. Is that code named Steam? No. Well, a little bit, kind of, except not shitty.

It's 2D. We should do a biggest disappointments part later on, because fuck me. Yeah. We definitely did a lot of planning before this episode. We did not do any at all. This is like loosey-goosey freeform i love it it's like 2d x-com it's like the a tactics game with real-time aiming um so you actually have

to like aim the attacks you do and you because it's 2d uh you can ricochet your bullets so like if somebody's hiding around cover uh you can either you know shoot their cover until it breaks or you can do like a dope ass like pool trick and bounce it off the ceiling and then the wall and hit them in the back with it. But there's also some really cool tactics. No, no, no, no. It's not. It's not, like, it's not physics-based at all. Okay.

There's also, like, really great unlocks. Like, there's a bunch of different weapons and different, like, pieces of equipment you can use. It's very, very XCOM-like in that sense, because you can find, like, a med kit or uh brass knuckles and then all of a sudden they can do like really strong melee attacks like there's a bunch of customization options that i really like and i'm looking forward to playing it during my my travels um i've got one yeah throw down uh and this is a game that feels like it's been out for four years but in actuality literally just released like a month ago or i guess a couple weeks ago is nuclear throne oh yeah uh you know it's been out for four years but in actuality literally just released like a month ago or i guess a couple weeks ago is nuclear throne oh yeah uh you know it's been in early access or whatever on steam since like 2013 or something uh finally came out and the it's great i've been

playing it on vita and it's just like perfect for that platform. I'm absolutely loving it. Uh, really cool. Unlock super difficult. It's like a really good community that supposed replays and crap like that. Um, definitely my favorite of Lambeer's games so far. So if you dig their stuff, you know,

I was thinking like it wasn't a great year for portable games. Really? Um, and I'm not, not phone games cause we. Not phone games, because that's in one of our top threes. But I don't actually know that that's fair, because there were a bunch of games

that I was really disappointed in, like Yo-Kai Watch and what was the Steam, the dumb code name Steam. But I played a bunch of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. That was the first Monster Hunter game I got into. That's a good game. And Persona 4, Dancing All Night. It's a good year for games that had the number

4 in them as a whole. I wanted to give a tip of the hat to Magic Circle, which I didn't put on my list because I didn't think enough people had played it on this call. I've played it. Chris, Russ, did you guys play it?

Okay. Magic Circle for me might be I've played it. Chris, Russ, did you guys play it? Okay. No, okay. So Magic Circle for me might be like, I talk a lot about, I think there's a difference between the best games of the year and your favorite things you played during the year. Magic Circle is the thing that I think sort of stuck with me the most. Yeah.

It is a game that is very much about video games and about the process of making them and the relationship between player and developer and sort of like pulling back the veil on what that division actually means. the central sort of like most pervasive mechanic, even though it switches up several times during the game, the central most pervasive one is you're basically a QA tester on this fantasy game that is, is incomplete. And it's in, it's in development hell, which is like the most interesting aspect about it.

It's been in development for, for forever and your QA testing it. And you can actually like take um behaviors in in and uh qualities of the creatures in the world are actually presented as like inventory items so the ability like if a a monster has the ability to fly for example that is uh an item that they have basically that is a behavior that belongs to them and you can at any point um freeze monsters and change their behaviors so you can like steal the behavior ability to fly and give it to one of your other animals you can change their allegiance so that

they love you and hate all certain other types of creatures or or whatever um there's a ton of flexibility there and it makes like the puzzles in the game whatever um there's a ton of flexibility there and it makes like the puzzles in the game uh are there are a ton of different solutions because it's it's however you sort of piece it together but that's the mechanical end of it and it's that not really the most interesting aspect it it raises some really good questions that i found it very hard to shake about playing video games and making video games and why we do that and what that means. And Griffin, I think, said, and I agree with him,

that it simultaneously made him want to make video games for the rest of his life and never play a video game again. Yeah, I brought up the point that it has the scariest final boss ever, maybe, in any video game ever, but from like an existential perspective like what the fuck are you doing with your life and like if that sounds like a preachy dumb sort of uh uh argument to make against playing video games but it it is actually very nuanced and it's also voiced by uh james urbaniak is that his name oh yeah from venture brothers venture brothers and um and uh the the voice cast is actually excellent sort of

across the board but yeah it brings up like a the question of like what you're doing when you're playing a video game also a lot of hard hitters uh heavy hitters behind the scenes like the people responsible for that are credited jordan thomas yeah uh with bioshock uh i mean yeah bioshock bioshock 2 and bioshock and it's it's ken levine is actually in the game yeah hr rep um it's really excellent and and i i just can i piggyback on here and also recommend i should say by the way that it is not an ant it not, even though it sounds like that, it's not necessarily an anti-video game game. It's more about, like, I think it does a valuable thing in forcing you to sort of, like, stare that question in the face. Like, it was bracing, I would say.

But it has actually, like, been useful because I think after playing it, I actually, for at least a little while, I don't know if I would say it's still something I think about a lot. But I was more judicious about how I was more aware of if my time was being wasted by a certain game or not. And I think it's a really interesting, cool question to raise. I just want to piggyback on that and also recommend The Beginner's Guide. I don't know if any of you guys played that. No. Yeah, I did. It's fantastic.

It's from Davey reading the guy who made the, oh, shit. Stanley Parable. The Stanley Parable, yeah. He has another new game, too. He does. Yeah, he's cranking them out, which is surprising because Beginner's Guide seemed like the kind of game that you as a independent game developer put out and then just sort of back off for a while uh because it is a game that he made that is actually

a uh a a very it's like a short story collection almost like a compilation of these games and demos that were made by a developer friend of his named Coda, who had a really interesting sort of artistic vision for like what what his idea of what games were. And there's there's a lot of like really interesting themes that sort of pervade all of the different stories. Like there's a lot of like this this this Coda guy was interested in making prisons. The games are almost all like unbeatable like they just like get you trapped in a prison at some point your character just stops moving um and they're all really uh interesting and kind of sad like they're all about sort of this this person's isolation and like he never published his games he never wants to put them out in front of anybody um and yet that is exactly what davy

was doing in this collection but the the interesting thing is that there's never like a there's never a clarification about like what is fictional and what is not if coda is even real or not um uh and it is so open to interpretation but it's all about like creating stuff for other people and like what that means to you as a creator it's about like being too over reliant on uh you know feedback from from people for the things you make instead of just sort of making stuff in a vacuum for yourself if that's even possible uh in games like there's some really really interesting stuff that it does um and and uh i would recommend that everybody who likes games and has ever thought about making games should should play it because it's

very similar to magic circle like it brings up a lot of really cool questions cool uh yeah go cool you guys got anything else you want to add a quick shout out to invisible ink i really like that game and that one i don't know that one it's a turn-based spy game from oh invisible right okay yeah turn-based spy game from clay they made don't starve and it's like uh really tactical x-commy but with like cool um character development and uh upgrades and yeah really good name and the uh the over like the overwatch mechanic where you can like be the computer and like give access to your computer AI companion to like hack other, other stuff in the facility. I thought that was really neat. Yeah.

The difficulty scales. It's really interesting how it scales. I dig it a lot. Uh, Oh, can I mention one more? Let's just, yeah. Bang, bang them out. Uh, Jess, anybody here play lifeline? No.

Uh, I, I've been playing it on your recommendation i'm enjoying it uh was that this year yeah earlier in uh i think it was march apple watch right yeah uh lifeline 2 came out uh this year as well um griff help me out because it's a little i i don't know it's hard to explain in a way that that makes the compelling parts compelling the fiction of the game is that there's a young uh student uh who is also an astronaut who's been crash landed on a moon um and since he is a student he doesn't have a lot of the survival techniques or or things that he would need to sort of stay alive um the one thing he does have is a communicator that can only reach your phone. So the game itself is really just receiving messages from this stranded astronaut

and him presenting you with sort of A-B choices as to his situation and what you think he should do in any given moment. They're really cool. So similar to the best way to describe is if you saw the martian or read the martian it would be like being the person that was on the other end of that like communicating in that in that fashion that sort of scenario the really neat thing about it is that the game runs in real time so uh you know if he asks you do you think i should you know walk through this crater or or take the slow way and walk around it a little safer. He'll, you know, you tell him what you think and he'll say, okay, well, I'm going to

go do that. And he'll just leave for hours. And it's like, you can't just pick him and play it whenever you want. He messages you. Most of it comes in through, like the big part of the game is notifications, like getting a notification that, hey, he needs you or he needs to talk to you or whatever. And it's not like a Tamagotchi or whatever, like getting a notification that, hey, he needs you or he needs to talk to you or whatever. It's not like a Tamagotchi or whatever, like you don't have to check right away, but it is really neat to sort of forget that you're playing the game

and then be at the DMV and get a text message from an astronaut saying like, hey, I need to go do, what do you think I should, how do you think I should approach this? It's really neat. I think, oh, Guitar here live's very good too we don't have to talk about that though let's fight cool let's get into it i'll start whatever who cares i mean i care so we're doing number threes put up

our threes in basketball terminology drain those buckets gentlemen i want to see a good game out there when we're deep in the paint. Three of these. No punching and no under the belt stuff. What about over the belt? Over the belt, absolutely. And through the woods to grandmother's house we're going. Little belly button action. In besties b-ball terms, though, the three is bad.

The one is better than the three. Golfing, basically. Who knows? Because the three winner could beat the one winner. We don't know. Yeah, it's kind of strategic. You might want to drop something here. I still don't understand how we're doing this. Voting box. Alright, let's do it. Okay, my number three

is Destiny the Taken King. Hell yeah it is. I'm so curious. Let's take a little trip back in time. The year is 2014. The time, sometime in December when we recorded this last dumb podcast. The topic.

Holy shit. You guys making fun of me for like a half hour about how dumb Destiny is. Not just that, Rustifer. Not just that. It was a battle between Destiny and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. That was what we were competing with. By the way, in this year, my number three is going to be Black Ops 3. So it's going to be a really close call.

I actually did really like Black Ops 3, but ignoring that. Taken King. It's the first one I haven't played, by the way, in like since Call of Duty ever. Probably ever. Actually ever. ever probably ever actually ever uh since that epic battle happened between two fps juggernauts all people on this call have actually played destiny a lot quite a bit of it horrifying amount griffin and i've played a fucking lot of destiny and even plant played a little bit and he's like too much and he played like 30 hours is a little bit of Destiny.

That's a joke. That's how much my kid played. Griffin's non-existent kid played for 30 hours. Destiny got really good this year. It did. And really what I think it did was just realize what it did well, which is to say like rating and like not just rating, but like more interesting story missions and like an actual

story and an actual characters and and it just sort of refined those things to the point where it's like much more approachable for people that have never played it before whereas before it was like you need to i mean it was essentially a dark souls game like you needed to be reading the destiny subreddit and wikis to understand what the hell a mode of light is and why you need it. Right. You needed to read. You needed to do a deep research dive to understand, like, what the fuck you were even supposed to be doing. Not even how to do it.

But just like, okay, I've hit max level. Like, what do I even do now? Like, what activities are there left for me? It is so unclear or it was and the crazy thing is that it's still super unclear but compared to where it was before it's much better like plant if you if i hadn't been telling you you should do this or you should do that what would have happened when you finished the story yeah this this all sounds silly to me because i still think i had to rely on the internet a lot. I understand that it wasn't nearly as much.

Like when you were telling me about like collecting materials and stuff, once I got to that point, I was like, no. And to know that it was worse than what it is now is unthinkable. I call it duty deserved to win last year. Yeah, that's true. Man, that game sucked. But yeah, I mean, I think there is a tendency amongst the hardcore Destiny fan to overstate some of these things. The story...

Well, Chris, you came to it new this year. What was your take on it? How was it? It's very fun. They're very good at the shooting like the moment to moment uh of that game is excellent which is great because it's gonna have a lot of grinding once you get past the uh the the initial stuff and having the moment to moment be so strong i think helps with the grinding uh i think the missions were fine

they were like as good as halo missions which i've always found to be kind of um colorless and dull yeah i don't think there's anything to write home about yeah but but but still enjoyable um i thought it was a very strange thing to always be to be perpetually behind all of my friends for them not to have a solution for that i think is except to play play more right to play over well really i i don't know i never got to that point but at least 40 to 50 hours before you're fully caught up with your friends um and that's a that's a really big ask um even that even that even when you are caught up. There's always more. I always felt like there was, I never played with Russ where I didn't feel like there was some aspect of charity to it.

But I don't think any of that's bad. Yeah, it is, to criticize it for that seems also unfair because it can't please everybody. And in some ways, I like it that it can't please everybody, that it's not trying to be everything for everyone, that it really does feel like a game made for people who are going to become obsessed with it. But what's striking about The Taken King and the reason that it made my top ten list, I think it has redeemed itself so much is because it with with taking king not so much the two other expansions that came out this year actually dark below came out last december but yeah um it finally did become a a game that sort of catered to everybody

because you had those missions if you just want to play the missions that's fine uh the pvp got really good with trials of osiris like that that stuff was really fun uh but but the like trickiest needle to thread is for the people who are like that top five percent people who are so deep in the metagame what do you do for them besides just like throw enemies with more health at them and they got so smart about like the secret shit like the secret stuff there was a good month or so there where i had finished taking king i had hit like the max light level and i really enjoyed what i played but there was no like sort of direct path forward other than you know grinding for the exotics i didn't have yet uh and then they did the black spindle which is still like one of my most memorable gaming moments of the year like waking

up and finding out hey there's this baller like hyper powerful weapon out there that somebody just discovered that they didn't like announce or anything somebody just found it and then me and russ did you help me get it no no i i did it i think it was me jake and d's like two two other polygon dudes uh or vox dudes like just like bashed our head against it for like three hours trying to get that thing, which is in the grand scheme of things is actually not a lot of time to spend trying to get the black spindle because damn, that shit was hard. But then like every week it felt like there was like a new discovery being made and the discoveries and stuff were cool and the new weapons were cool

and the challenges to do them were cool. But more than that, it was this excitement of like oh shit this has been a game that within hours of the of each expansion launching you knew every single thing about it and that's just not true anymore like there could be infinite without knowing how much secret stuff there was in the game the game all of a sudden becomes infinite and that was so exciting and that and that it was pretty impressive because that lasted about a month, maybe a month and a half, I would say. And unfortunately, they sort of hit this point now where everyone is like really clamoring for that feeling again. And like I can't really blame them because let's face it, I probably dropped 200 hours into Taken King. And like I was very engaged with it.

So the fact that I have essentially run out of content that's going to keep me interested is not that much of a fault. But that's the big complaint with it now, and that's why everyone's super hardcore about it. The secret to that is you have to know that Destiny is not an MMO in the sense that World of Warcraft, where you are owed something new to do constantly. You're not paying $15 a month. You're not paying $15 a month. You pay $160 fee. Figure it out. You will enjoy... I told... Griffin helped me get my exotic

sword in Destiny, and I told him after I got it, I said, I'll just beat Destiny, and I literally never touched it again. I did all the stuff that I wanted to do. I got all the neat crap I wanted to get, and I saw all the things, and I was done. And I got my money's right that's fine that's i i've talked to so many people who are just like yeah i really like destiny earlier this year but i don't really

play it anymore so i don't know if i'm gonna like i don't know if it's gonna make my top 10 list like if we're going based on hours played destiny beats the fuck out of everything else on my list by a factor of like 10 like i played 10 times as much destiny as any other video game this year which is crazy because i know earlier on when i was talking about the witcher 3 talking about like how i didn't want to do that spoiler alert it's because i was already doing that with destiny but like i i looking back on it i got i got definitely my money's worth out of destiny a hundred times over it's it's fun it's great to like get back into the sparrow racing league stuff it's like oh it's a blast i wish i had more things like that would give you a reason

to incrementally jump in just so like you don't forget whatever well they have they have like the the i don't know if you did any of the halloween stuff but it was really great like yeah i did you could find these masks that you had to like go out and do these special quests for to make them permanent additions to your inventory you could go trick-or-treating like shooting enemies and collecting candy instead of the the money that they usually drop like i i actually think they've done a pretty good job upkeeping it it's just weird to me to be playing destiny every month and a half instead of like every fucking day all day um but but i i feel like you just gotta look at the time that you spend on it and

say like that was a good time i played with you guys like more than i've ever played any co-op multiplayer game in my life and that's like it's incredible presuming of course you're at like a reasonable light level and that's the shame of it it's like if you weren't playing at launch which i know plant wasn't playing at launch that's where that that's where that divide happens obviously everyone playing at lunch everyone's essentially the same level and can cooperate and work together but it's weird that i'll get to play with you next year like that that's basically how it works you have to have one year where you are behind and then next year even though i'm behind you now i'll be caught up with you yeah well they built it in a way that like yeah you can so long as you start playing at the same time but the problem is it's a pace issue so like if i'm

putting in three hours a week and you're putting in one hour a week right it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that but the scaling is not so harsh that like going back and playing of course i didn't play much with chris because i was too busy trying to get those exotics and shit. Exactly. If I had, it wouldn't have been a pushover for you, moving from high level to low level. Dudes, we are 45 minutes into the show. Yeah, we got to quit. We got to quit.

Good game. Good game. Chris Plant, what's your number three? My number three is Just Cause 3, and I am going to say this. Now, why is that your number three? I'm going to say it up front. It's not a good game in the traditional sense.

That's not the answer I was looking for. Let's try one more time. Why is Just Cause 3, why is it your number three game? I love... We're looking for two words here. Looking for two words. Just Cause.

Just Cause. There we go. There we go. There we go. That's that besties humor that people have been clamoring for. People have been waiting a year for that fucking joke. Missed them jokes, didn't you, Dirty Birds? All right, so Just Cause 3 is not a good game, I agree with you, but why is it on your list?

So I love Just Cause 2. We've talked about it before. I love, I realized this in what I didn't like about The Witcher. I love momentum, and I love just the feel of getting around open worlds. I loved Crackdown because you could jump high. I love EDF because you can fly. Just because, as far as momentum goes, as far as literally getting from point A to point B,

is head and shoulders above everything else. Yeah, it's probably the best traversal of any game. Yeah. Maybe ever. Very difficult to learn at first, but being able to like parachute. Approximately how many times have you chomped it while wingsuiting like into somebody's garden somewhere? Oh man, so many times.

I've also gotten so good at wingsuiting, just like riding about two feet above the ground. Yeah. When you start playing, you think you need a lot more clearance for wingsuiting than you really do. No, you can fly. It's flight. You can fly. It's flight. Unfortunately, the development of the game is, I mean, I don't know what they were thinking at a certain level.

They created this system, and it seems like they really get why people love these games. They add tons of crazy weapons. You have the ability to essentially tether anything you want together and then pull them together. So you could attach a person to a tower and then fling them up to the top of the tower and then let it loose and fire them like a slingshot you can tether uh two towers to get well you can tether two uh okay semis together and make them explode yeah you don't want to piss off the tolkien fans uh but yeah it it it seems like they really get it and then you actually do one of the like missions or or like these like cities they're the stronghold takedowns are literally any objective in the game ever and and the two

things that you have to do is one find items which becomes like an easter egg hunt to blow up and it is the dullest way you can interact with uh a an open world and it feels like it's ripped from like a nintendo 64 like blast corpse way of thinking about game design i want to really drive that home because it's important the map they give you in this game is useless you can't zoom into it very far the stuff when you're like looking through these towns looking for the specific shit you have to blow up to take over the town you can't see the stuff at first until you've taken down like 75 of the stuff already there's no there's no radar in the game but like the map you can't see the stuff at first until you've taken down like 75% of the stuff already. There's no radar in the game, but like the map, you can't zoom into the shit. Some of these installations are just these like 30-story tall towers.

So like on the map, that is represented by like 40 icons just stacked up on top of each other. And you have to like go floor to floor in this tower looking for the fucking satellite dish. Yeah. It's horrible. It's horrible. It's horrible. Honestly, there's something even worse than that, which is this game's all about movement, and large chunks of these battles take place in European-style cities.

Like, non-grid-based, these kind of, I guess, circular or just rambling tiny corridors of streets, which is like, I just can't believe that was like a logical thing for this game that is all about getting around they're saying okay the best way to for you to fight people is grounded in areas where it's almost impossible to get back in the air uh and this game lives in the air uh and and they they could have figured out a way to do this maybe that it just means that it's more i don't know like small towns or something but there's the the most fun happens when you're on big open spaces yeah i think it was andrew reiner posted a gif of like a train

exploding off the rails and going down a mountain yes and while they're wingsuiting over that's a point break that's the game yeah not like being caught in these tiny ass cities there's an there's an early on rails or seemingly on rails shooter segment where like you're running away from a town with like all these trucks chasing you have to shoot the cars and i was like this sucks this is boring and a helicopter came after me and i was like what if i and i zipped up to the helicopter and all of a sudden i took over the helicopter and it wasn't an on-rails segment anymore yeah i was like flow i was flying above this segment and i could shoot down the cars from above or i could zip down to each car and put an explosive on it and blow it up and zip back to the car i was like that shit is better than the main game the on-rails chase segments are better than the main get like well it's yeah

it's insanity and it does sort of show its hand i mean the coolest stuff that you can do in that game you can do very early on so there's really no build well which is good because it's not related to grappling things together because i still have not found a grappling upgrade i've been playing for oh yeah that's the word it's the word i was trying to find those things i was assigned i was assigned to do video on that and and on just cause three and i was like, I'll do a dope-ass stunt reel. And I found out there were upgrades like the thruster mines, which turn your remote mines. They put thrusters on the back of them. So if you put it on a car and then set off your mines, you get about five seconds of turbo boost before it explodes.

It's insane what you can do with those. You can put them on helicopter blades so that they propel the blades in the wrong direction direction and it just brings your helicopter to a stop in the air it's amazing you have to find and unlock them though the way you find them is first you have to find a settlement because they're not on your map to begin with you have to find a settlement one right it right once you find it you can see what conquering that settlement unlocks for you so you don't know as you're flying around whether or not a settlement is going to give you thruster upgrades or whether it's going to give you grappling upgrades or wingsuit upgrades but once you find it you can see oh okay this one does have a wingsuit upgrade it's the 15th one i found thank god then you go in and you clear the

the settlement which is not fun and then it unlocks like a side quest uh that you have to complete and get enough stars on to like move forward on the progression scoring quest uh that you have to complete and get enough stars on to like move forward on the progression scoring system right and you have to move forward on the progression tree a lot of those side quests are fucking suck there's a lot of them are rough rough stuff and then if you do good enough congratulations now you can unlock that upgrade as if you're playing on a console like i am then not doing well in those uh side mission things means um maybe a minute to 90 seconds worth of loading between the two yeah like this game is best experience that is the that is actually the thing about it that is really killing it for me because i really it i i don't mind all of the stuff you guys are talking about

is completely fair and justified i could get over all of it except for the loading times that are really i mean in any game that would be abysmal but in a game like this where it's like i just want to get these dumb side things out of the way to know that i'm staring down the barrel of 90 seconds of like loading maybe more like I've had some outlandish three minute loads. Booting the game is get a fucking magazine ready. That's on PC too.

It's a full minute to 90 seconds to get to a screen where you think like, okay, well now I'll start it. And you start it and it's another load before another screen. It's crazy. I wish I had the best way to play this game and this is a similar thing with just cause too if and it's only if you have pc there are people who create save files where basically everything is untouched

well it's a little stranger with this game uh but they unlock all the stuff for you so you just hop in you look at it as if it is not a game that has a campaign uh or anything it's just a playground for all of its goofy stuff and then you just make your own game um but yeah i i think there's i i've talked to the the guy who runs the studio avalanche a couple times uh christopher sunderberg and he there was a while probably a year or two ago where he was really going off on narrative where he just didn't feel like games needed narrative in the traditional sense and that uh what people loved about just cause was creating their own story and i think again it's like that almost but not quite uh i think i think he's right partly

but ultimately you also narrative can be used to kind of help you figure out what people like or what's pulling people through your games and it feels like there was such little interest in the campaign that had they figured out the issues with the campaign it would have solved a lot of the larger issues around the game sure yes that can provide a heat that propels you through a campaign but just cause didn't need it the problem isn't that there was not great narrative in just cause three it's that it didn't nail the the the just dumb fun stuff that it like it just said so many barriers in your way on the right you can't say we don't need narrative we're just gonna rely on the dumb fun stuff that everybody likes about

just cause anyway cool there was a lot of shit that kept me from doing the dumb fun stuff that i wanted to do in this just cause game yeah like they they didn't nail that that's a shitty like excuse yeah we should i'm glad that you i i i'm glad you brought it up to talk about it because like honest to god if we're doing a most disappointing game segment like just got three was up there for me i was looking forward to that so much the trailers made it seem so fun and like the the the traversal stuff like that was as fun as it i thought it would be and the the dumb combinations you can do with explosives and grappling like that's all fine that is the only stuff that got right in my opinion and everything else like it just drop the ball on yep new games uh new game uh fresh tick no well he

already did one i can drop mine my number three do it all right my numero tres how about that's shocking to me that that's your number three you thought thought it would be higher? It's not even a game. I thought it would be higher. Well, no, no, no, no. I thought it would be higher for you because this is like a dream game of yours. No, I know. Because you love LittleBigPlanet and you love building shit and you love Mario. So it's like, what?

No, yeah. There's just two other games this year that came out that I liked even more. Right? That's surprising. Yeah, it is surprising. So Super Mario Maker, I don't need to talk that much about it. No, you make Mario levels. It's a kid's game. You make Mario levels. i liked even more um right that's surprising yeah it is it is surprising so super mario maker i don't need to talk that much no you make it's a make it yeah you make mario levels um but the the i remember the moment where i knew because i i they they announced it what a couple couple years

ago um and it was it was uh a wii u game at a time when there were like no wii u games announced and everyone just kind of thought it was just gonna be like now sure well devil's third just came out so that um that's a good point super super mario maker everybody just kind of thought it was like a dumb little app because what they were showing off is like here's world one one you can change where the bricks are look you make this pipe super high and if i press this button it changes the super mario world palette like cool um i guess and then at this past e3 they nintendo i feel like killed it because they were like what do you want to play what you want to do they killed it last year too same way with super smash brothers we're like hey everybody just come play it fuck off whatever just come play the game you don't have to watch the trailer a cinematic trailer just come

play the thing they did that really cool with with this year with the nintendo world championships where they showed off that this game was on some dope ass like super mario kaizo shit like you can attach wings to to swamps and make giant goombas and you know make make uh make tiny bowsers or you know what what the fuck ever you can do anything with this game uh and as soon as i saw that i was like oh this is actually going to be very very good and it was. You can do anything with this game. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, oh, this is actually going to be very, very good. And it was because you can do just like anything you could imagine. And like when I was a kid, like drawing up Super Mario levels on a notebook, like this game is that. It comes with a little notebook that shows how they drew Super Mario levels in a notebook. Like it is a very much a realized sort of it's dream and they they did it like perfectly

yeah it's very charming and it's also weirdly modern which is kind of a weird thing to say about nintendo games but nintendo games you know the whole idea of like online play and sharing and sharing video obviously just a year or so ago nintendo i got in a lot of heat because they were blocking youtubers from showing gameplay or whatever it is and this is so the opposite of that where it's so friendly for sharing and so uh good for that that it almost seems like a different nintendo put it out because and and speaking of different nintendo like I can't stress this enough, the number of ways

and the severity with which Super Mario Maker allows you to fucking pervert the laws of this franchise is like, I cannot believe this got the Nintendo seal of approval. Because it's fun as hell, but like,

making these nightmare prisons got the Nintendo seal of approval. Because it's fun as hell, but like, making these nightmare prisons, specifically for Patrick Klepek, is like, I can't believe Nintendo allowed me to do some of the nasty, like, when I was watching Patrick bust his head against Dan Reichert's

like, nightmare spiky garbage pile, I was like, this is a Nintendointendo product this is a nintendo product like they they're so protective of like making it an approachable experience like that right and they're so protective of their of their intellectual properties and this lets you take their intellectual properties and turn it into like dumb, hyper abusive properties. I love it. Like it's a celebration of madness.

I will be really interested actually to see if Nintendo can release another 2D Mario at this point. Like I'm not sure that there's a – when will people want that? Like at this point, like they've given away the keys to the castle to an extent where like i just can't imagine there will ever be a market for that again i feel like having those i'm not saying they couldn't evolve it i'm just like well i'm not saying they couldn't do things where like that this game isn't capable of but when will there be a market of people who are like wanting to play something like that and have it where that hasn't been like completely completely safe yeah this this this game has me both like really happy and also a little worried about the future of nintendo um and mostly because this feels like this is very sad but like the great uh game of a watt is nintendo of like being riskier yeah for sure giving people

what they want listening to shareholders and and actually doing interesting things with what people are clamoring for um and when i think about this and then i think about them going to mobile man that makes me really excited at the same time i'm i just hope this vision like what led to like you said mario maker even existing which it really is hard to like explain how bizarre that this company that was so protective of mario i mean it's like thinking about disney being so protective with mickey mouse um yeah they would make this i i hope that r2d2 is on like a coffee mate box right that mix of like vision and willingness to kind of please everyone uh which is man talk about a difficult needle a thread uh and and also like that continues yeah and also like just releasing

risky games like talk about risky games on wii u how about splatoon like yeah hey nintendo you released like a shooter about like kid squids that's bananas but you did it and it was amazing like yeah i it was it was i didn't play my wii u a whole lot this year but man when i did like they stuck the landing in ways that i didn't i'm not used to them sticking the landing like if they had released like a new Metroid that was baller and released like that new Zelda that was baller and that was like the two games I played on Wii U this year that's the kind of Nintendo experience I'm used to not this like really really rich and frankly fucking hilarious user-generated content experience and like the most original shooter I've played in the past decade like nintendo hats off to you that's some that's some that's some bold stuff now maybe show the 3ds just a little bit more love just a little

bit well it's all about the nx now moving yeah it's true we're gonna care about that again um all right my dudes uh my number three is um uh you trying to pick which one you wanna You trying to pick which one you want to No because I put I put Magic Star I just honestly my My top Or not like These games

Like necessarily like my personal top three Was not necessarily these It's just the ones that I thought would be the best Sort of like that I could reach consensus on Basically Really part in the kimono, huh? Yeah.

Really? When I'm, well, I mean, I'm just trying to be honest. Like there's just stuff that I like magic circles, a good one where like, I like magic circle a little bit better than my number three game.

But like, if we're trying to reach a consensus among us, I think that, that my number three, uh, well, it's honestly, it's the one that I wanted to talk to you guys about the most um and it's fallout four yeah uh uh so uh let me start i'll just tell you sort of where i'm

coming from i'm super looking forward to it uh it's out by the way you should know yeah fall for oh shit hold on i'll be back with you guys in 70 hours um i got i got into it pretty deep i dug it um i really enjoyed it for my first i would guess like 30 hours and then i hit that point of like uh i guess i should try to i should try to slow down a little bit and really like get into this world and and check stuff out and and get into some stuff and and you know explore more um i ended up playing about 60 hours and uh i'm not sure exactly how to articulate where i sort of lost a bit of the the the shine on fallout 4 and i'm hoping that by talking to you guys i can go sort of piece it together but I definitely got this sense

the longer that I played the more I really felt like it really there was a lot of stuff in it that started to feel really samey to me and I didn't feel like the I thought as deep as it was I would have appreciated

that it just like focused on doing about half as much twice as well yeah so it would be kind of what that makes perfect sense yeah that would be my my feeling i recently played wasteland 2 which was made by the people that made the original fallout it's a top-down turn-based uh tactical game but you know in terms of the world and and the uh the style of gameplay it's very similar to fallout obviously and the thing that i noticed when playing that game is by nature of it being a top-down much more simplistically developed game which is to say

not fully you know explorable open world they were allowed to do a lot of things that kind of go to the core of fallout which is to say you come to a farm and the farm is taken over by mutant plant creatures and you're approached by a scientist can you convince the scientist to heal them yourself can you uh give him an antidote to spread him on the plants do you keep the antidote for yourself to power yourself up etc and in fallout obviously the thought for those things happen but much more infrequently and more often than not it's like go here clear all the raiders out get a thing come back and son i honestly god i i sometimes it seems like it's gonna do something like that and then it just like doesn't yeah like here here's the most telling thing to me about fallout 4 is if i say to this group of people i'm hoping this works what's the what's the like coolest mission stuff you did in the game and i'm i'm willing to bet we would all say the same thing. Let's count. Three, two, one.

Okay, three, two, one, Silver Shroud. Yeah, like, that was everybody's, like... Yeah, that was a lot of fun. I would say, like, okay, if not Rise, I would say most people. I just forgot about it, but yeah, that makes sense. That's, like, the best thing that you did in the game. And the fact that that's, like,

everybody's favorite thing in the game is sort of indicative of the fact that there's not competition like there's not much there there was in my mind like no other mission set where you're doing that crazy like getting drawn into the dream world in skyrim or like there's no like breaking into the palace there's no there's no escape from the the island of dr moreau like uh like, Oblivion DLC shit. Like, there just wasn't that much interesting stuff. Did I miss, like, a memory den? Apart from that one story mission where you go to the memory den and, like, do stuff.

Honestly, I think that's the only thing where you get into it. But that's exactly what I'm talking about. You roll up into a place that's called the memory den that has these little dope-ass looking Matrix pods. And you're like, oh, shit. There's going to be, like, you know. I'm going to go to the Wild and dream dream missions or something like that or the the mission where you help out like the the family of people who are like super old and you have to like help them track down this ancient relic and you're like oh this is gonna be cool yeah it's gonna be cool

but then at the end you're just getting a shootout that's that's what i'm talking about like so many of the missions just end with a shootout or a punch out or a stealth out like i did everybody finish the game yeah yeah i'm gonna i want to say if we could get spoilery for like not two don't get too super i know just i need to be it needs to be spoilery for like three minutes and then if you haven't played the game skip ahead three minutes and and i won't be talking about anymore but i need to i need to talk about something really quick that i think is really important to the reason I didn't connect. Wait, somebody's fumbling with their phone right now trying to fast forward. Let's get into it.

We're strong. Sing the spoiler song. I'm waiting. Sing the spoiler song. The spoilers have begun. Okay, so. You are a dog person. Are you talking about that part?

No. No. no no the the part that that i think bothers me is that you can in the game you can choose which faction you want to proceed with yes you can uh follow the uh the minutemen you can follow with the institute and sort of follow their quest lines or the brotherhood and the uh or i first off or the railroad i think that those delineation that idea was not laid out well enough i think for for starters i don't think that it it was uh a lot of times i was like not really sure what i needed to do to progress and not just like from a quest market perspective but from a narrative perspective like what i needed i was often i was often confused of who i was helping

in a given mission because like tell me tell me what the difference is between the the minute men and the railroad really like they're both good the good guys and it's really weird i think to choose which faction like choose which faction you're going to go with and finish their storyline and then expect to feel any sort of sense of narrative satisfaction when you have conquered over the forces you're opposing when really all it is is which side you're playing. Like it doesn't really matter which side you went with because it's not going to feel narratively satisfying because they can't make a real narrative arc because it's completely in your hands how you want to proceed with it. And I think what really rang this home with me is I went with the uh the the minute men because they seemed like the most sort of noble group and they were the first ones i started with and they were fighting for humanity i'm into it and then almost as soon as i finished fighting the institute uh the leader

the minute men told me that that we needed to get artillery and bomb the hell out of the brotherhood of steel and wipe them off the map like what are you serious i'm the general how about we not do that and maybe like like talk to them a little bit because there's like eight people alive left especially after i finished doing my dark deeds yeah um but i think that that was my i think that's why i didn't and i think new vegas which had a very similar system they were definitely i think inspired by what was done in new vegas just overall was much more interesting the way they did factions and the writing was probably a little bit better. It just didn't quite nail it.

My bigger problem was progression because by like level maybe 15, I could do literally everything. I was a stealthy character that had a dope ass melee weapon I found that does like sick melee damage. And I also had like a gun that could like kill anything in just a couple shots and near infinite ammo for it

and I could sneak really really good and I could hack any computer and pick any lock like when I finished Skyrim and by finished I mean I played like 130 hours and just like the guilt I was feeling of investing that much time into something was overwhelming but I immediately wanted to hop back into it because I was a magic user the first time. And there were so many, you could be like 15 different types of magic users and it would be a different experience every time.

But I wanted to be a stealth guy, like an assassin that used poison and bows, or I wanted to be a warrior that used heavy armor and axes and it would feel different. That just doesn't exist here because by level 15, I was everything. I was a tank mage. Like the,

the progression system does not allow you to specialize or i should say rather like it allows you to just be everything with no like gear gating whatsoever i thought that was a big bummer because like i i just didn't i didn't feel a need to like hop back in and play it again because i had already made a character that was all archetypes yeah i like the logic of them getting rid of the super minute stat point thing, which I always thought was a little bit clumsy. But the end result was that. You feel like a golden god.

And you can increase the difficulty level and make it a little more interesting for yourself. But you're still going to be doing the same shit. You're still going to be sneaking when you can. Y'all, I know we've praised this game a lot, but we have a lot more games to get to. You're right, you're right. So that's round one, though.

Or round three? What the fuck ever. That's round three. We got to pick a winner from those four. So I think Just Cause and three and Fallout probably are not going to make the cut based on the overall tone of the conversation. I mean, let's go around.

Say your votes. Well, I mean, Russ and I should abstain, right? Because, Russ, I'm assuming you're going to vote for Destiny. I say Super Mario Maker. I would be okay with that, actually. I wasn't crazy about it, but that's not my... I'm fine with that, too. Go for it. In defense of that, of not't crazy about it but that's not my i mean i'm fine with that too go for it but i

bet in defense of that of not being crazy about it like i know people who didn't make any levels even though the levels are like really easy to make even if you don't make any levels it's infinite mario forever yeah that's pretty good uh so congratulations super mario maker number three best game of the year not how it well not how it works no uh we'll figure it out um round two round two same order same order yeah same order let's do it my number two game is ori and the blind forest still don't know why it's called the blind forest but a lovely game that made me cry within the first like 30 seconds yeah they're on some up shit for sure oh my god uh yeah so ori uh if you haven't played it is a 2d metroidvania style game uh with like a hand-painted look to it you're a little white creature dude uh that kind of looks like an alien kind of looks like stitch. And, you know, some bad shit happens in your forest,

and you have to go sort of fix the problem. It just, of all the games I played this year, nailed every single facet of what it was trying to do so expertly well. Without overly aping, like, any other thing, I felt like. Because you say Metroidroidvania and not like that's got connotations up in my brain yeah i mean it is definitely that like there's no question that it's gear you know you're getting this upgrade now you can access this area etc but the way they do upgrades uh just a very simple example so like ordinarily like you'd get like a

simple double jump and that exists in this game too but there's a there's an upgrade you can get where you can like launch yourself off projectiles and that's something that i've like never ever seen in this sort of game before and it totally like makes you rethink how you approach circumstances and it's like you know like a sequence where you can like use each bullet that's being fired at you as like a trampoline to get you to another area. The way it handles saving too is really smart. Oh yeah, I totally forgot

about that. Really interesting. It's like you're spending checkpoints. What did the system, I don't remember how it works. You know, I forget but I remember playing it and going, hey, this save system is really cool. It was basically an item that you would get uh that you had to refill uh by collecting like enough orbs to do it right yeah you could like generate a save point basically wherever you wanted to right exactly

so that was i mean that's a really neat thing because generally in these games you would go back all the way to the area where they decided oh there should be a save here yeah uh it was really cool and it was like one of many many many things that you could level up so like in addition to like the upgrades that you find in the world you can level up um and like increase your attack power or increase your health bar or increase like how often you can make those checkpoints there's like i i actually found that really interesting because it's sort of a supplement to the mechanical upgrades of like well you need the double jump to move on obviously but it's a really hard game like it's genuinely very very difficult um both in terms of like combat and

and platforming and so you also have to like figure out how you best want to uh outfit yourself to just like fucking survive um which is yeah it's a it's a it's a neat system it's like a nice sort of rpg hybrid idea yeah i have a question the difficulty is actually oh sorry go ahead oh sorry i i i'm curious if you or or any of you played the new tomb raider and it's weirdly connected here um only because i feel like that was the other big metroidvania of the year that did a really good job and it's interesting to me that i'm i'm feeling like more people played ori than played tomb raider well yeah because it was crazy to me well first of all it just came out what no it came the same day beginning of November. Well, still.

I played a little bit of it, but that's the same deal with me, which is to say the timing of it. I liked what I played. I thought it was really good. But it didn't come out, or it came out at a time that was completely bereft of competition, and I absolutely adored it. It had expertly, like you mentioned it being difficult, but it's like it it had expertly like you mentioned it being difficult but it's like it is expertly done difficulty i mean like yeah it doesn't feel unfair it doesn't feel unfair but you get in these sequences that are you are just hanging by the

wire's edge i mean you are barely hanging on and when you actually finish them especially like some of the escapes after you beat a boss and you and you finish them like you really do feel like god i i should have not made that a lot of that shit reminded me of like the old um heart of darkness and uh eric like the eric chahi games where it's just like these moments of like incredible danger that you just repeat over and over and over and over and over again. Yeah. But to have that like really innovative save system like in addition to that idea was, yeah, it was really good. I didn't finish Ori and the Blind Forest, but I very much want to.

They also did boss fights in a really cool way in the sense that they weren't, they were more like platforming challenges. Kind of like those Rayman levels that were really hard. they were more like platforming challenges kind of like those rayman levels that were really hard but thanks to you know the design of them but also the score i think made a big impact on like how epic and like intense it felt um and yeah finishing them you'd get this like amazing moment where you like burst through the clouds or whatever and have this like epic satisfaction of like a breath of relief it's just like so so well designed and and i absolutely loved it i don't i don't know how many people played it but i hope a bunch did cool next game bring it do it do the thing oh yeah um okay and it seems like uh half the games

are going to talk about are going to be things that that we have as much bad things to say as good. Don't be so negative, man. My next game is Metal Gear Solid V, The Phantom Pain, which I have very little bad to say outside of its very outdated gender politics. But I've played most, if not all, Metal Gear games. I haven't finished all. And I've enjoyed them. I really enjoyed Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater. I went back and tried to play that before Phantom Pain came out.

And boy, did that not go well. That was not fun. Were you playing on 3DS? That explains it. I was playing on Vita. But no, just, again, the traversal system, that old school style of getting around the world and loading screens between each venue is not a pleasure.

But it did make me appreciate The Phantom Pain all the more because this was the first game of this kind. I mean, one, stealth open world, it turns out is a great idea. But two, it felt like I was actually in a large, open space versus something like Far Cry where it feels like an open space with like a series of tiny camps that I go to. And like, I'm sneaking into them, but I'm never from more than like 50 yards away well I felt like I was doing things in this game where I was scouting out plans to break into a compound that felt actually to scale like one-to-one scale not to uh video game scale

and there's a mission that comes and I don't think this is a spoiler, because how do you spoil a Metal Gear game? Oh, I can do it pretty easily. Are you kidding? Oh, gosh. Give Konami 18 months, and they will show you. Oh, no. God.

But there is a mission when, I guess probably a third of the way through the game, you go to, again, and this is where they have some issues, generic African nation. I don't know if they actually ever say where it is. Uh, and you, you bust up like a, uh, oil tanker facility or something. But the amount of land that I covered to break in and plant explosives in the distance at which i was when i finally let like hell break loose without people knowing i was ever even there and to be able to see all that happening in the distance it just felt huge yeah

like i felt like i was in a world and and that that alone was pretty awesome and there's all the other stuff which there will get to the best thing i've heard about it and like the most accurate sort of description of of what i liked about it actually was uh uh rocco from mega 64 during the video game awards it was like they were doing a talking head segment and he referred to it as a metal gear amusement park and i think that's like perfect because it is like it's so, but unlike so many other open world games that I, that I feel like drop the ball on this aspect, each little container, each little, like, station that you had to take over, and each little, you know, even to, like, a super micro scale of just, like, a little guard outpost that just has a couple people in it, and a guy in a

watchtower, all the way up to, like, like like like you said like that big oil facility um it feels like a metal gear game like each one feels like a little self-contained mission in a metal gear game like the the oil facility is a really good example of that's big shell like that's like yeah that's like requiring you to to do espionage in a very like metal gear way um and it was enough to make like each sort of uh each mission feel different in a way because you can't approach the little guard facility the little guard shack and the big oil facility in the same way like you have to have a different approach and that stands in stark contrast to uh just cause three where it's just like your your bag of tricks works the same no matter where you are um and and i don't mean to just call out just cause three because i think many many many open world games fall into that

trap um and metal gear i i feel like avoids it in some really really smart ways because you have to because you have to avoid it or else you're fucking dead. I have to make an embarrassing confession that I really was enjoying Metal Gear and then Destiny's Taken King came out and I kind of lost the plot. It was so dense

and I just don't know that I'll be able to go back to Metal Gear at this point. I got to the first set of credits and then Destiny came out. So I feel somewhat accomplished um i i do kind of agree with justin a little bit there in that um it was maybe a little bit too dense like at the the there's a ridiculous number of main story missions in the game uh like a lot uh and then on top of that there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these side missions and my my biggest complaint for for metal gear is entirely um like systemic like the the having to go back to your mother base between side missions um or to like cash out or

it's it's hard to describe because you don't have to do it. Um, it just takes, sometimes it takes a very long time to move between side missions. It does have a fast travel system, but it is the most preposterous fast travel system. I didn't know about it until about 40 hours in. Yeah. Um,

and, and, and so like it, it is clumsy getting between the different stuff, which I think is maybe the only thing that just cause three does a little bit better. Cause you can't fly between shit. I need to stop comparing those games cause they're completely different.

But I, it felt like it was always a little bit harder than it needed to be moving between those different, uh, missions and the different, like the, the, the hundreds of things that the game has for you to do,

uh, are all fun and unique and stuff, but just like actually getting to them i felt like was it took like twice as long as it should have taken there's one other thing that i want to praise uh about the game too i i did not buy into the kojima as a brilliant storyteller storyteller or i guess metaphorical mind of uh the video games uh until until this game and i think i really understood how to read um his work i guess i i think i always wanted to be like uh this is gonna be a really bad metaphor so bear with me but like like a polished uh final line drawing like

like it was pen and you and you could see what it was like trying to go for. And everything playing through Metal Gear 5 feels more like a sketch. Like he's just kind of like, it's about language. And it's about how language can be tied to the awful things we do. In the game itself,

how you get through the game is about learning languages and silencing people it's like i i get why uh game journalists have had a field day covering metal gear games for so long because it it basically leaves enough uh enough vagueness and kind of slots for you to fill in whatever you want it to mean uh while giving you like the kernel of a good idea uh and it's a game that essentially allows you to like wax eloquent and sound intelligent without actually ever i think saying anything definitively enough that it pushes anyone in particular away except sort of a general feeling that war is probably bad. Or bad. No good.

No good that war. That's my favorite line from the game. It's like having David Hader here with us. I thought his character, when David Hader did show up and replace Keeper Shudder,

we all knew what happened. We didn't finish it, but i'm assuming that happens later and i thought it was a great moment it's a high five moment my favorite my actually my favorite moment from metal gear solid 5 is when jeff keely dropped that fucking atomic heat bomb on konami live during the video game awards okay i was excited by that in the moment as well um if you didn't watch the the awards he uh he had asked uh kojima to be there to accept what is like creator of the year award or something like that oh it was just the award i feel like some awards for metal gear solid 5 yeah sports sports game of the year uh and konami basically like legally had him bound so he couldn't come to represent the game at award shows or whatever and he keely like put the heat to him and like as well he should have and it was pretty great and

you don't see a lot of it um in in video game journalism like period but it was there is certainly like is they are probably not going to make a lot more video games i mean like it it is not like there is not a big working relationship here that keely is sacrificing no but anyway from what he did it was baller but like it is very rare to find a company that is like still a big target like that but like really it's a safe it's a pretty safe play this shit that but but the thing that he called them out for is the reason why they're not gonna make more video like that fucking idiot decision making ability that they have showcased throughout this past year is exactly why they're not going to be a big target like i have no sympathy for that well and they don't the impression i get

is that they don't care because they're just gonna make mobile games that make a ton of money and they don't care what the hardcore game and that's it that is an invincible like industry that is going that is going absolutely nowhere yeah fucking idiots do you remember when they were making a fucking game with guillermo del toro do you remember they're making a new silent hill game with guillermo del toro no i don't remember that because that part of my brain was deleted yeah i i uh i i think there's a lot of bad ideas and bad decision makers over there. I also would not be in a rush to defend a Guillermo del Toro video game project, knowing how those have gone in the past.

Well, was there one other one that was bad? You mean just the one? Insane and the Clown? Yeah. Well, there's been two. The one thing that evolved and couldn't get purchased anywhere. I don't think we should ever be in a rush to defend things that we do not know what sort of disasters might have been lurking on the development side. At the very least, we can defend the PT demo.

Yeah, PT was baller as hell. Which should fucking exist. That's true. Yeah, and then they ate it. They ate it. They opened their maw. They are the nothing from the editing story. And consigned it to oblivion.

Those fucks. There's no reason for that. Those fucking assholes. Fuck those guys, fuck those guys for real. If you're the president of Konami and you're listening right now, fuck your brain. You're bad at making decisions, bad call, idiot. But your vacuum retailer and your real estate companies are great. That was one of the best fucking things. That was one of the best fucking things. That was one of the best fucking things. It was a free download that everybody played and loved and you're like, nah, fuck

this. Idiot! No reason for that, you fucking idiot. Just because it had Kojima's name at the end of it? Why did you do that, you fucking moron? Maybe he was trying to cover the fact that he gave Kojima millions of dollars to make a free thing for another thing that they're not making.

Well, whose fault is that like cruising his boss is like cruising psn like what's his pt ah shit delete it delete it before he sees what we did well fuck that guy's brain too fuck that guy's baby brain idiot use it for a second and think about what you're doing hey you know everybody likes pizza pizza hutch just like fuck pizza done delete pizza recipe from the database archives forever idiots hey guys check this out check out this idea like just conceptualize this for a second p tizza whoa okay who's next me i want to talk about my number two game of the year hit it uh and it is bloodborne bloodborne i just just replayed Bloodborne to do that DLC. I know that there's some sour grapes in this podcast.

Re, the Bloodborne DLC, which I feel absolutely. But we can talk about that in a bit because the game itself, Bloodborne, is, in my opinion, the best game from software, which is probably my favorite game developer right now um has ever made best game they've ever made in terms of like uh pacing and in terms of difficulty and in terms of mechanics and in terms of like completely inscrutable narrative and tone that if you take the time to unravel it is like the richest most baller like lovecraft shit that has maybe ever been in a game. It does feel, it's the first time, so I've played Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2.

It does feel the first time like I actually cared enough to be like, what's with these space babies? Right. It seems weird. Well, that's, yes. Because in the Souls games, like there's narrative there, but it's like deep, deep fantasy. I do not care.

There's a fucking dragon. He lives in the earth. There's a there, but it's like deep, deep fantasy. I do not care. There's a fucking dragon. He lives in the earth. There's a crystal of evil. A lot of it is like based on characters. Like you have to give a shit about the great witch of ETH or whatever. And in this, like they very smartly moved away from that and more to like ideas. The world itself. Right.

Because you think you understand the game. Like they show you just enough and it's enough of it is familiar enough that it's like oh there's werewolves and there's like tainted blood and if your blood gets tainted you turn into a werewolf and there's hunters that hunt those werewolves down and there's a church that uses that blood to heal people like you get enough of that from the storyline and then all of a sudden aliens show up and you're like well fuck okay i guess it's time to like dig in that. Like there are layers upon layers upon layers of these like arcane secrets that like,

man, I loved unraveling that shit. Somebody put like a 120 page document like that goes into a deep dive of every layer in the game. And I read that shit. It's a novella. And I read that shit and I, man, it's been forever since i've gotten that deep into the the lore of a game yeah there's a few really good youtube recaps like 20 minute

long like beat by beat what is this thing what's going on here that if you're interested definitely so so like i love dark souls and i love dark souls 2 and all the the dlc for those games and i love those games despite not really giving a shit about the narrative bloodborne does all of the stuff that i loved about those games but also has like this this for lack of a better term like addicting narrative that that is just waiting for you to unspool uh and and i feel like a lot of that stuff actually gets even richer in the dlc because the dlc adds like five new layers that are even crazier than the craziest layers that are in the the vanilla game um but but a narrative aside like

just playing the game is super fun the the trick weapon system is really cool it has some of the best character designs and absolute like best boss designs the bosses for the first time feel like impossible they feel like impossible but also totally fair in a way that like dark souls bosses haven't really felt before the first boss in the game is like a total dickwad that requires you to know like oh don't trust the camera system in this game um i actually beat him without the cleric beast the card beast uh yeah if you lock on you have a harder time doing that but i didn't know that but i still you know still managed to to get through it okay i think it was actually very smartly it sort of keeps you from the level up system the beginning of bloodborne is so fucking hard i remember when i first was playing it for

like video stuff because i did video guides on every boss in the game which was boy howdy a fun week and a half um but the game starts out you can't level up and you're in a town that has like a billion people in it and there's no way to like trick your way through the game like i was waiting for that resident evil 4 moment of just like oh you have to like go into the right building and it triggers a cut scene where just everybody leaves just because there's vaguely european people with pitchforks doesn't mean it's your resident evil 4 well people with pitchforks doesn't mean it's Resident Evil 4. Well, people with pitchforks all celebrating around a giant bonfire.

It's actually very, and bells ringing to like some, yeah, there's a lot of crossover there, but you can't level up. So if you died that part, fuck you, get better, keep doing it. And then very, like, eventually you get to the point where you can do the usual soul stuff of just like, well, I need to grind for a while because obviously I'm not ready for this, or I've missed

some weapons, or I need to like level up my my stuff in order to to make progress um but it handles all that stuff in such smart measures uh where like i actually never did feel like in dark souls there was like a point where i was just like well i have to stop going after bosses for like a dozen hours and just like level up and and find the weapons i need and like find the ways to upgrade them um and and bloodborne i never really felt that way i just felt like i i need to get better at that for me that the main sticking point was the blood starved beast which is like maybe the third or fourth boss that you have to fight in the poison dude yeah yeah he's really hard like he's very very very very very very difficult um but man like it it delivers that soul's idea of just like

fucking climbing that mountain and then once you get to the top of it you are the king shit of fuck mountain of video games forever uh and it has more of those moments than any souls game has ever given me before it's gorgeous too absolutely really really pretty um justin you want to have anything to say about it because i know that your your opinion of it is a bit soured because of how they handled the dlc it was super soured i i really like bloodborne a lot and i and i'm with you i thought it was the most it was weirdly like in many ways the the most sort of accessible like yeah you have not played one of those games before that that would be the one i would tell you about uh tell you to start with actually um but i think dark souls 2 actually

kind of started that trend um i just thought that the that was an easy game for babies right exactly i liked it a lot but i just thought it was a i thought the way you access the dlc and and not just the way you access the dlc because a lot of people got hung up okay a lot of people got hung up about the fact that like i thought it was a crazy way of accessing the dlc um you're talking about mechanically how you act like you have to get an item and then access the dlc um and i honestly that didn't bother me like that was very blood it was very souls like it was very souls way of doing it the thing that bothered me about it was that because when you beat the game you're forced into a new game plus playthrough um so when you want to play the dlc that you got you have the option of either a playing through to the to on the new game plus difficulty which i did not want to do um and then playing the uh the dlc like

on the new game plus difficulty playing the harder version of the dlc right of some of the hardest content it's the harder version of the hardest content in bloodborne so far or starting a new game and which is what i did starting a new game and like playing through like i would say a considerable chunk of the game to get to the level you need to be at to be able to play that DLC, right? Yeah. You can't access the DLC until you beat Vicar Amelia,

who's I think the fourth boss in the game. But even that boss, even then you're going to be way low level. I was on my second playthrough. I was about level 30 when I beat Vicar Amelia, uh, in order to even have a fighting chance at the DLC, you gotta be 60.

And then the final boss of the DLC is the hardest. Maybe the hardest boss I've ever played in a Souls game. It took me close to six or seven hours of attempts to try and beat him. But once I did, again, it's the most exhilarating feeling I've felt playing a new game on there. It's just not fair. It's just not fair. Like, let me just play with my character at the difficulty I was playing at. The new game plus stuff is very bad because it's the first, I think it's the first time where, well, actually, I don't know how they handled it in Dark Souls 1.

In Dark Souls 2, after you beat the final boss, I think you have the option to start a New Game Plus thing. I think that's right. In Bloodborne, when you beat the game, it's like, well, okay, you're done. Move on to the next thing, which actually was a bummer for me because I didn't do any of the chalice dungeons my first time through playing Bloodborne. And then when it started the new game plus, I was like, well, shit, like, I don't want to do this stuff on new game plus. I wanted to do it at the regular difficulty.

And if it sounds like we're being babies, like it, it does ramp things up pretty considerably every time you get move up a plus. I should also mention for what it's worth the chalice dungeons don't get harder in new game plus oh fuck me yeah well whatever um and moreover though like this is the other thing about it like we um like we have to play a lot of games for our jobs like i can't i love everybody and i wish that i had the time to like sink uh you know hours upon hours into like perfecting my soul skills but like you hear what we're doing on the show like it's been a lot a

lot a lot of video games and those skills aren't necessarily like transferable game to game like i wish that i could just spend time grinding my bloodborne skills but like i i can't i have a lot of games i have to be somewhat knowledgeable about it i i will say on a replay of bloodborne um the the best thing about bloodborne is the best thing about all souls games which is like you get to a new area and you just get fucked for like an hour and a half by these different guys that want to just like tear your shit apart and then by the time you develop the skills to beat them or when you come back to those areas after you've leveled up 80 times and you just like hulkamania runs wild god yeah you're just like hey remember when you fucked me cool cool cool

check this out cool you have a torch and a little rag yeah on a second playthrough because you know what's up you kind of get that the whole way through and my second playthrough of bloodborne lasted like no joke half as long yeah i i finished nearly every boss my first time through because once you know the trick and once you like and again this is a game i beat in february and i replayed in december and i still remembered all that stuff like i feel like that's kind of a testament to how like memorable the the the bloodborne experience as a whole was yeah that was like 20 minutes i apologize we should we should yeah we should definitely move on the Let's do the last number two. That's mine, and it is Batman Arkham Asylum,

which if you're talking about traditional video games, I think is the best one of the year. Let me ask you something before we dive deep into it. Okay. Did you like Batman Arkham Asylum? I'm sorry, Batman Arkham, what is it called? City? Wait, no, you dummy.

You said Batman Arkham Asylum. That's not even the name of the thing. Right. What are you talking about? Batman Arkham Knight is the game that's out. Batman Arkham Asylum came out fucking nine years ago. Four years ago. Yeah, okay, you know, whatever fucking Arkham game they're making now.

Batman Arkham. The newest one. The best traditional video game of the year. This one, I remember the name of. I'm in my Twilight years. Give me a fucking break. Okay. The one with the pointy ears.

Batman Arkham Knight, I guess. Okay, so Arkham Knight. Is that what it is? Okay, yes. Yeah. Did you like Batman Arkham Knight more than the previous Batman Arkham City game? You know, I, well, okay. So the previous one, directly previous to this, was Origins, and it was garbage.

I'm sorry. Ignoring that one, I've removed it from my brain. Yeah, I actually like this much, much more than City. Interesting. Because I thought I liked Asylum. I liked the first one better than City. Much, much, much more. I thought City was overfull. I thought the locomotion

in City was sort of a stopgap and I thought that the big advantage for, and I thought they really perfected it in this one with the combination of that and the big advantage for and i thought they really perfected it in this one with the combination of that and the batmobile um and and the like the improved gliding and what have you i thought the real advantage of this one versus the other two um and and and you can kind of say this about asylum um is that the storytelling in this game is really especially for this sort of game is really excellent i totally totally disagree and

that's interesting like okay well yeah i think that it really gets down to some of the core stuff about um like batman and the joker and like what the two of them actually represent to each other and the the way that batman uh quote unquote defe defeats the Joker in this game is amazing. It's like the most savage way that like Batman has ever taken down the Joker is like literally it was freaking me the fuck out. I'll be honest. Like, it's really, really. Man, I forgot about that. Right.

It's like the great like, wow, Batman, you were really taking this like embodiment of fear basically like if you want to know what like batman basically i guess we're already kind of in spoiler territory because you don't know the joker's in it until but anyway the the batman uh forces the joker to face his own mortality and like takes the joker through the use of fear gas to like his own funeral and no's there. And then he's in his own crib. It's like, holy shit. Damn, Batman. He just used to dress like a bat. It's like an episode of Intervention.

Super quick side discussion. That should have been the end of the fucking game. I forgot about that because of how much shit I had to do afterwards trying to get the dumb nightfall bullshit afterwards. I'm obsessed with that classical stuff and i just didn't that that ending was so great in the game there i really wish that that extra like you have to do all the garbage in order to see the good stuff why don't you just watch it on youtube that's a good point

all right anyway justin i'm sorry yeah but there's a lot of cool stuff like that throughout the game with like um i love how you would turn your turn and the Joker would just sort of like appear out of nowhere. It was a very, all the skills were at their best. I love like the way that they've brought out like a bunch of characters in some ways that are very, like villains you don't see a lot in ways that are genuinely like very, very creepy. Villains you don't see a lot in ways that are genuinely very, very creepy. There's a side mission where you're examining these corpses that have been laid across the city and trying to figure out who is leaving them there and where they're coming from. And trying to track that down and where it ends up is really some of the darkest stuff. That's every side mission.

All the side missions in the game, I was doing them not because they're particularly fun because like finding those corpses and then like using your dumb scanner on them it wasn't fun but like narratively speaking it was dope as hell and that was true of like all of them the man bat stuff the yeah like all of that was was it was less mechanics and less like upgrades um yeah and and more just like i wanted to know who was behind this stuff. You talk about Magic Circle and that idea of wasting time. I really like this game. At the same time,

I was constantly sensing that my time was not being put to the best possible use. Yeah, totally. Also, not connected to that, but man, I think I would love this game a thousand times more one if it ran on my pc uh from the beginning but two uh the art style i just i i've never been a big fan everybody hates the asylum art style but man in this game it is

oh i mean it it's just it somehow looks like what every unreal game looked like uh in the at the beginning like of the 360 with gears of war where it's just like well everything's just made of pure meat we found a we found all these stacks of raw meat we wrapped some skin we found around it and then we painted it funny colors and like over sexualized it uh welcome uh it's just man is it off-putting um i'm i'm not kidding about the point i made earlier justin and we've talked about this um when we submitted our top 10 votes for for polygon batman was like my number 10 vote it was like the bottom of the of the votes which i guess is still something because there were a lot of stuff that didn't make the cut but like when when when you

were reviewing this game and you showed it to me and you're like this is the most incredible game of the year this is gonna be a game of the year and i watched and i was like yes yes i agree this is absolutely gonna be game of the year i think this and it happened to a lot of games for me this year but this one most of all it that shit just done fell off and i think it was partially because it uh you know came out before a lot of the games that i am also i also really really enjoyed but i also think that i like maybe two-thirds of the game i spent playing it normally until i got to the end of the story and then i spent another third just like trying to do the the all of the side missions and just like gorge myself on the things that i guess i should have been doing throughout the game all along although that would have like altered

the pace that i enjoyed playing the game at originally just to see like the good ending and it kind of it kind of took some of the wind out of my sails i think that's completely fair there's just a lot of fat just stupid's a stupid thing at the end. Because I've never felt compelled to do that stuff in an Arkham game before. No, but you like the story of this. You want to see how it wraps up. Right, I wanted to treat it

like I was treating all of the other side quests for the game, which is like, I got to find out who's leaving these bodies everywhere. I felt like in order to to get the good stuff like in order to like wrap up this story of this game that i the i had really enjoyed the story of i should do like a bunch of shit i didn't want to do yeah i think it's completely legit um but let's let's pick that's all four of this right uh yeah and i gotta say i think for me uh i gotta go Bloodborne.

Yeah. Plant. Yeah, I'm torn between that and Metal Gear, but I could go Bloodborne. I don't feel bad about that. I am voted out. What were you going to say? I'd probably say Metal Gear, but Bloodborne is cool, too. They're both so good and i love ori as well but but i really like bloodborne as well so i i don't feel bad about pushing that

forward griffin's running the table right i am well don't worry i think that's gonna come to a completely to stop in round one i need to start doing my fucking zen deep breathing exercises for talking about my number one game with you two chuckle fucks. Just travel back in time to when I tried to argue about Destiny and you guys made the fuck fun of me. Or when you tried to argue about Towerfall. Yeah, Towerfall. We all have a number one game like my number one game,

but I guess let's stick with the order we got. Yeah. Okay. So my number one game is Downwell. Downwell is a mobile game. It's also on Steam, but I played it predominantly on my iPhone. It is without a doubt the best action game I've ever played on a mobile device. And it's just like super, super, really, really effing well designed. It's roguelike in the sense that it's randomly generated somewhat but uh you know you're you're falling down this well this seemingly infinitely deep well and encountering enemies

and killing them using gun boots and a variety of upgrades and it's it's very much the spirit of learning how enemies react and learning how each of the environments are and what the upgrades are and what you should be taking at a given time. It's like very core to what a roguelike is, but super refined in the way that games like, uh, nuclear throne, like have like down moments or even like Spelunky, which is absolutely one of my favorite games of all time.

Um, this feels like a very, um, net, um, focused take on like, would say i would say condensed like the the loop that spelunky goes for it cuts literally like every spare moment that spelunky spins not doing the good spelunky stuff and it just removes that shit altogether and i think the result is a game that feels smaller uh in scale but man that loop is on point it's so tight i've dropped so much time playing this game and i i i i've been playing it probably for i guess the last two or three months and i just beat it the other

day after probably hundreds and hundreds of runs and i play on the subway and i wait on normal or hard mode on normal oh my gosh this is the rare game that I crushed you in. Why, have you beaten the hard mode? Oh yeah, I beat it in two weeks. I have very strong feelings about the ending in this game. I agree with you. I think it's fantastic. The boss is...

I'm sorry. It is very bad. Sorry, I thought you meant the end-end, but the boss has some issues. The end of the game, this is, I agree with the idea that it's like a very slimmed down Spelunky. It's just the action. It's learning how to manage health, and there's a thing called charge, which is basically how many bullets you can fire before you hit the ground.

I think what is interesting about the mobile version is it favors a certain style of play that is a floatier, that is really using the gun boots and controlling your fall. And it doesn't allow for a lot of precision. And that's okay. The four main kind of worlds work very well with that. The final stage is a bit more of a bullet hell that requires not just managing what's coming up from the ground, but what is, I guess, falling down towards you. And it just doesn't work. It becomes a Twitch game instead of kind of i guess a patience game almost and and once that happens your fingers cannot find their place uh and and every pixel counts

and and i just found it to be really unenjoyable and the way i ended up beating it was just by like basically becoming an overpowered god and holding down fire uh and i mean hoping for the best uh and once you start playing hard mode this is especially evident that it doesn't work quite as well in mobile but that's like a weird thing where i was talking to tom connor's our video guy about this where when i was kind of batting my head against the final boss. It felt like the game I had spent the most time playing in my life that I was very reluctant to actually recommend to people. Because once you do get to the boss and you do start batting your head against it,

it's so maddening because you've learned how to be good at this game and it doesn't feel fair anymore, but you've dedicated so much time that you you have right you and the you and the game have you and you and the game have an agreement that if you learn how to be better at it you will progress and there's like a there's a that that there's a mountain that you have to climb and then if you get better at it you're gonna move further in the game and then to have like after doing that for so long you start to like want that ending and to have it like to have that agreement kind of broken on the game's end is is kind of a bummer my interpretation of the ending

and i agree with everything that's been said is it's similar to ftl in the sense that like the the final boss of ftl uh is less about the actual mechanics of it and more have you built your character appropriately enough to beat this boss and the one time that I beat down well was I you know was hitting every combo and picking up the right pickups and buying the right things and my reward for that was I was so overpowered that i was able to just eek by and beat it uh i agree with you it's not it doesn't feel in the way that like ori the boss those boss challenges and platforming things feel so ingrained in like the core of the gameplay this feels very separate from that or even spelunky what what's enjoyable about spelunky is that you it does allow you to

play many types of ways and i I felt like what I ended up learning playing down, and again, this is local to mobile. I think it controls much better on PC with a traditional controller. But on mobile, I found that I had to play a very specific way. And what felt like options was actually learning a very specific build that I could use to essentially get past the ending. I'm curious to hear, Russ, because you picked this as your number one. Is this really your favorite game of the year or is it just the game that you want to champion the most?

No, I mean, it's the game that I've had the most, from a minute-to-minute standpoint, the game that I've had the most fun playing so like taken king obviously has a lot of dips ori has some mostly excellent but it's definitely up there orion down well probably pretty comparable in terms of my favorite games but i just like every time i was playing down well there's that moment when you like have a big run and then you lose and you start from the beginning and it's like disheartening like i didn't feel that with downwell in the sense that like i just enjoyed the minute to minute because it was so well refined and great so i agree about

the issues with the um the boss fight and everything like that but fuck man i just like i didn't mean to i didn't i didn't mean to sound judgmental like you know no it sounded conspiratorial no i didn't mean to sound conspiratorial if anything my number one game is indie game no no although i think this is going to be the like is it gonna be like an indie round just like looking at the games that we're talking about i think that's i don't know i think that's really cool uh but yeah i'm i'm did you so you gave up on playing it on mobile chris and you went to pc no i i i beat it it on mobile. And I do want to say it also does a really good job of making something that is actually, I think, easier feel more badass. When you get to the fourth stage, you're basically in free fall.

But you're also getting your weapon reloaded almost constantly. So it looks like you're like, wow've i've really mastered this game i'm i'm i'm at the toughest area but in reality like i never lost life in the in this final stage like well that it is designed to make you feel so badass and also to prep you for the final boss for the final boss it's a way to like that was that was such a cool idea and again this is similar to splunky the hardest part of this game is actually the second world uh and then it kind of gets i think easier but feels more badass and i i love that build yeah um cool next next thing we're playing uh My next game is Rocket League.

This would have been on my list had plant not picked it. For what that's worth. I think, man, talk about a game that just arrived, right place, right time, on top of being absolutely excellent. Did you play Acrobatic Supersonic

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit? The old one that was on like ps2 or three rocket power battle cars yeah the game i did not i did not play the price i saw videos of that one before did anybody play that game like i feel like i agree with you rocket actually nobody played it rocket league owns bones i'm just amazed at how like it came out of nowhere despite the fact that it had a predecessor. Yeah, it was very rough. Street Fighter II was the second Street Fighter. That's so true.

That's a really good point. I don't know that. That's heavy. But this game, it just does so much well. One, it's just fun. Like, okay, great, Soccer with Cars, great. You've already won me over, and it feels excellent. It looks beautiful. But two, that it was this, like, free game on PSN.

And Sony has been, you know, like, giving these free indie games away as PS Plus for a long time. And it felt like something like this was bound to strike. Like, one of those investments was going to pay off big. And it definitely happened. And that gave it such a huge player base. And people, I think, were so eager to advocate for it because it was free. So it felt even more like an underdog. But what I really, really, really, really, really dig about this game is I finally got

esports. Finally got esports. It finally felt like an esport that I could watch and enjoy from the beginning and also watch other people who are good at it and learn how to do those things. Yes. Even fighting games, I kind of generally understand what's going on, but I never really feel like I can walk away from watching it and be better. Shooters, same way. And anything like waller dota i'm just totally out of it sure but because it is familiar because it's soccer because people know how to film soccer essentially uh it allowed me to like watch an esport and be totally engaged in it

it the difficulty curve of rocket league if you want to call it that like a skill curve, I guess, because you can play it competently having never played it before. You just drive your car into the ball and hit it towards the goal. But then from there, there is a curve that is almost imperceptibly steep and nearly infinitely long. And that's the best thing about it because you and I used to play together and we would have our friends come over and play it and like all of us would just be at different points on that curve and yet the game was still like really really really fun like you were figuring out how to like to do the shit where you would fly up in the air and kick the game with your ass and there's so much reward with that too like that's why everybody could still play because i would do that but then i would like but then like you said you you watch high level rocket league play and it's like they're playing

a whole nother fucking game it's pale it's fucking yeah but it's really it's really it's really cool to watch but it's cool in a way that like when i watch people play like high level smash like i see that and i just go like well there's just no way i will ever ever ever do that but because this this curve is so shallow and so long like i feel like i could ostensibly get to that point with rocket league someday i it's it's really like it's really inviting in in a way that despite the fact like i watch it and i go like well that's still crazy that somebody did that with their car it still like makes me want to get to that point also there's oh sorry go ahead i was gonna say it also there's moments in fighting games or counter-strike or whatever where there's like

a thing you should be doing so if you're edge guarding and smash brothers you should be using this power at this given time there's so much analog nature to uh rocket league where like you watch these esports competitions and like there's so many branches of possibility at every split second yeah and that's what makes it so interesting and so you really don't know how I mean in the way that like an actual sport is played and there's so many variant variants of like how is this play gonna play outog is such a good word to describe what's so great about Rocket League, because in Smash, like you said, like you're edge hogging, there's like,

well, if you're playing Fox, then Fox has an ability that he uses, and you have to use that ability in the right way, in the right frame, in order to do it. But like, your cars don't have abilities. They can drive, they can jump, they can like dash, they can boost and brake. And so like, they can boost and break and so like there's not like oh well if you're using the ice cream truck then you can you know do the the hyper dash or

whatever like there isn't that you're all on on you know equal footing uh and and so like you you you feel like you're the the matchup is never unfair uh from a mechanical perspective you can all do the same shit which makes it more impressive i feel like when you do dope shit i i i also just think there were so many opportunities for the creators of this game to uh cash in uh or to do the evil thing or to do the cynical thing post-release, and they haven't. If anything, they seem to grok why the game became so popular with the free stuff and have done such an interesting job of continually updating it, rapidly updating it, and giving fans the stuff they want. rapidly updating it and giving fans the stuff they want it like some of the updates they're so bizarre it feels like stuff that like you would see kids write to game pro or egm back in the day

and be like man i like madden but like what if it was on ice and the balls were five times as big and they'd be like yeah cool thanks we're gonna publish that in our letters to the editor uh and and they're like yeah what if we did that that i bet that would make a lot of people happy let's put that in there um i'll tell you my favorite moment my favorite rocket league moment was not actually playing it it was when i went to quake con which i it happens in dallas and i cover it every year it's like a big amazing three-day non-stop land party um and it's just like a cool it's always been a really cool atmosphere to be in because you see people playing land multiplayer matches of games that you forgot existed or games that you didn't even know had land multiplayer modes um this year i'm not joking half of the people half of the like

2 000 people that brought their computers to the the byoc room uh we're all playing rocket league and just like it had a different energy just being in the room um first of all because the room is pitch black and freezing cold because there's a billion computers running in it and you know seeing all these bright orange and blue you know shapes moving around on nearly everybody's screens was cool but just like people were just like screaming constantly because that the game elicits that from you i had no idea the game was going to be a big deal but seeing like you know almost a thousand people all playing it in the same room simultaneously was really really cool yeah a big reason why it was so popular was just because of

how evidently cool it is just watching it like you get exploding out of the launch of the game um in an instant you're like oh i want to be playing this game and so few games are that like knowing oh that was a good shot and call of duty or whatever takes some knowledge of the game whereas here if you know nothing about the game you're like oh my god it was an amazing shot with the last second right sure time to move on uh okay so my number one game of 2015, AD, the year of our Lord, is Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer. Now, listen, I know a lot of... No, it's Undertale, which is a game that somebody has probably told you to play to an exasperating degree already. an exasperating degree already and so i don't want to like lean on that too much even though i definitely did that to russ chris and justin to have a discussion about it and uh probably did

them a disservice in that regard but uh it is a uh it is an independent role-playing game with turn-based battles uh in which you don't have to kill anybody in the entirety of the game and and i feel like when i say that i i want to couch all this by saying like i was two months late playing undertale like it was not a game i was looking forward to it had a kickstarter campaign it was in development for a while then it came out and like i watched a trailer for it and was like oh okay i get it like it's a some ironic humor layered on top of a you know a mechanic where you don't have to kill anybody but the way that it handles that idea it makes it unique from any other game that has like allowed a uh for lack

of a better term like a pacifist run through the game because it never like it doesn't beat you over the head with the idea that you shouldn't kill anybody like the closest you get is the fact that like the first character you meet runs you through the tutorials of the game and you're never like given a tutorial on how to do combat like how to fight um you're just told like here's a here's a person in this underworld that you have met uh and you should just like be nice to them and talk to them and say what's up um but you're never explicitly called like told like don't kill anybody ever uh and then it's it's up to you like how you want to do it but i feel like it's very easy to kind of miss the point of undertale and not get it um because if you start

playing it like any other game uh and you you treat it like any other sort of role-playing game where it's like well here's a boss and obviously this boss is one of those bosses that like you have to beat in order to move on like the second you do that you kind of lose out on what is really magical about Undertale which is like sometimes it's really hard not to kill somebody like sometimes it's really you have to go to pretty great lengths not to uh not not to do a fight like you wouldn't any other role playing game um the the characters are all really really great it has this uh pervasive humor about it where like nearly every joke lands and is very very charming um and after the first 45 minutes well no even in that that first 45 minutes i feel like is i know you were not a fan of it but like there's some good goofs

in there man like the the tutorial character like walks you through all of these puzzles and challenges because she decides that it's too hard for you to to try and do on your own like i that that stuff is really like makes this a sort of endearing character. And there's stuff like that throughout the entire game. But like I said, like, I... Looking at, like, how people talk about the game, it's either, like I said, you're an exasperating superfan because the game resonates with you on such an emotional level,

or, like, if you don't get it like i feel like there is a a latent hostility that you feel um because the second that you the second that you like kill somebody it feels like you've lost the game already and it doesn't make it super clear that maybe you shouldn't do that, because if it did, then it wouldn't feel as special when you do find the pacifist solution to a thing. Yeah, I like the hook of it. Like, I like the idea of it. I admittedly, I thought the beginning was like really tough for me to get through just because like there were a couple gags. But for the most part, it like felt like a super, super dry rpg which granted you could like beat people by like petting them or whatever

but it didn't stand out to me it admittedly got a lot better once you get past that part and you get to the first town or whatever um just in terms of the writing but it's still there were definitely things that like kept me from enjoying myself, like the randomly generated fights against people that I've already fought. Like I figured this out. I know how to make you happy. Stop talking to me. Yeah, I just told, that's what I couldn't get past is like, from everything I've heard, it's not a lengthy game. and I played the first 30 minutes of it,

or sorry, first hour or so, and then restarted because I didn't like what had happened to me, and I played the first 90 minutes, which probably would have taken me two hours if it had been my first playthrough, so like a good chunk, and it just was like not making good use of my time, even for like a short game, like I felt like in the first hour, my time was really being wasted,

and especially with the random battles, I can't excuse that shit. It's 2015. I get like wanting to do a throwback thing or whatever like i'm sorry i can't i can't i can't if you were just running into guys like they were literally in the world and you like walked up and talked to them and you're like how am i going to figure out how to make friends with this guy it's totally fine it is a player hostile mechanic that actively discourages exploration and has for literally 20 years that's why everybody's a couple things though a couple things though the more that

you encounter those random encounters the fewer show up um so it's not like it's not like as you're playing you're constantly being buffeted by random encounters and yeah like you do see each each monster in the game has like a different sort of personality trait and figuring out how to interact with that, which is really, really, really, really simple at first. Like here's a sad bug. It's like, well, tell him a joke. Okay, that did it. Peaceful solution discovered. Later on, you have like six or seven options.

Sometimes you have to like do them in sequence. them in sequence and while you're doing them the really cool thing about uh the characters is uh their attacks are represented in this little sort of bullet hell mini game uh that part's really really cool and it does some really genuinely super cool shit later on like there's a vegetable monster and one of the peaceful options you have is like talk about how hungry you are and then all of a sudden in this little bullet hell miniigame instead of throwing all vegetables at you that hurt you if you get hit by them some of the vegetables heal you and so you can like eat some of those vegetables thanks vegetable monster that was really great uh and that's actually what pacifies the the vegetable monster and like it does some it mixes up the formula in some really really challenging ways later on. But that stuff I feel like works really well because it makes the monsters just as much characters

as the NPCs that you talk to in the towns. And yeah, you run into them multiple times, but I draw no delineation between that and any other RPG where you just fucking hit them with a sword to get the points that they give you so you can get stronger or whatever. In deference to me, I don't play those either. Yeah,

I guess that's, I guess that's fair. Uh, the, the game, like the game handles morality and such a like, uh, interesting and unprecedented.

And it's fucking embarrassing that it's unprecedented way in that, like the characters are all so great and, and so enjoyable and so charming and so endearing that if you decide to just fucking kill all of them, there's not like you don't get evil points that like moves you down the evil scale. And all of a sudden you get evil side powers or whatever. You just feel bad. Like you feel a very like real guilt for doing it. feel a very like real guilt for doing it and in the inverse like if you work hard to like figure out the solutions which are almost never obvious solutions on you know how to essentially save them the game delivers content that otherwise you don't see and it's some of like the best the best like

stuff that happens in the game leading up to like this really uh delightful ending that is like has a really really happy conclusion that like games typically don't dole out to that degree um and and i don't know like the way that it i've seen people call it emotionally manipulative because like it makes you like characters by making these really endearing characters and it makes you feel guilty for killing them for for killing them and the fact that that's like the fact that that's a fucking novel concept is like exactly why it it i think it deserves to be talked about it also does some really cool meta shit with uh repeated playthroughs like i don't want to spoil it but like that that's my favorite thing and so few games do it but just just game characters aware of game mechanics in a not shitty, mad hazard way,

but a really, really, really intelligent way. The Undertale does a lot of that, too. Without any specific spoilers, when I restarted because I killed a character I didn't realize I didn't have to, and when I did, someone referenced exactly what I had done like specifically said we all know you're doing this

because you killed this creature and felt bad about it and you wanted to try again I was like whoa there's a some light spoilers here so for like a minute maybe skip ahead that super happy ending you get by not by working hard to

not kill anybody and endeavoring to like find the peaceful solution in the face of like hyper non-peaceful enemies from time to time uh there's of course the inverse of that where you fucking kill everything in the world and uh when you when you're doing that it's probably not your first run right like you you have to actually work hard and And it's not just you do every fight and kill everything that you, you know, get in a random encounter with. You literally have to walk around until you have exhausted the area of enemies by killing everything in it. Like, you have to know that you know what you're doing. And then towards the end of the game, somebody comments on it like, you're not a bad person. And then towards the end of the game, somebody comments on it like, you're not a bad person.

You're just doing this because you can. And when I got that particular conversation with somebody, it was fucking horrifying because they were right. I wasn't doing it because I, Griffin, the person who was playing the game, was a bad person. It was because it was content that I knew was in the game that I had to do. that I had to do. And it like made the whole thing real in like a fucking like insane way that like stuck with me. Uh, and, and is,

is why it is my favorite game of the year because like it gets, it gets real. Like, it's not like, it's not just, there's a moment in the game that is sad. And I was sad during that moment. It like,

it got fucking real guys. Um, and also because like, it's occasionally hysterical, occasionally like kind of scary, and it does all that usual emotional stuff too. But I adored Undertale. But like I said, it is easy to sort of get out of the flow of it and miss the message.

I talked to Chris a little bit about it, because Chris did the same thing you did, Justin, which is kill that first character. I'm still kind of pissed. Right, and I think that's so interesting, because the game, it doesn't beat you over the head with it, but it does in no uncertain terms say,

hey, don't kill anybody, and then you reach this boss fight, and it's like, no, no, no, you reach this boss fight, and it's like, well, it doesn't seem like I can do a peaceful solution to this, so I guess I'll just kill this one thing. And it's like, okay,

and Russ said the same thing, that's what I'm saying, is like, you killed somebody. Like, you can say what you want to say. The game said don't kill somebody, and then you killed somebody. Yeah, the issue there, though, is the game does have so much repetition in those random fights. And then to get to a very pivotal point where it does the RPG thing of recycling dialogue. Okay, but there's progress and there's

the the character that you're fighting that you killed has like facial expressions that change the more that you do things like things are changing it's not like you're really looking for it but like i think the game gets in its own way a little bit yeah what i what i was struggling with along those lines is that there is an experience like a leveling system that you don't get any experience if you don't kill stuff. And it left me wondering, especially with the repetition left me wondering, like,

should I be balancing this? Like, are there some things that I should kill to level? And then there's some things that I should try to save. Are there things that are worth saving and things that aren't worth saving and like i i i really i get where it's coming from and like it's something that i actually like think a lot about in games and i'm i think it's really worth like thinking about and talking about um i just think it it does not do it in the best way like i don't think it just it it um it's overly subtle like the moral code

of the game is is is overly subtle but i feel like it almost i feel like it has to be because if it if it just if you every time you got in a fight you had a spare or kill button it would it would it wouldn't have no impact that but like if you're doing something and like like if they were different dialogue there was different dial actually different dialogue showing up in that sequence i probably wouldn't have killed that thing but but yeah i did kill this one specific spot too i i and it's on well and it's also so early it is a it is a pivotal spot it is it is that is the fucking run killer right there although it doesn't have to be a run killer if you kill that character it's like the game comes to an end you can go on and still like experience the rest of the stuff in the game but like the fact that you we're all

talking about this the fact that you felt this guilt about it the fact that justin restarted so we could go back and do it i didn't really feel guilt as much as i felt like this is the right way i should be playing is not coming on and i can't figure out how to not kill this character absolutely agreed i don't feel guilty i felt like i was tricked right like i don't feel like it laid out what what my like i feel like i needed to solve a rubik's cube puzzle and not i felt like i was trying to emotional connection you're saying like i i totally get what you guys are saying and i'm like i don't want to sound like preachy or high in my ear anything like that but like it's still it ultimately at the end of the day, it is still a binary,

and it tells you not to kill a thing. It doesn't say that, though. It doesn't say that. Well, even beyond that, it's not that it tells me that. It's that I tried not to do that for a while, and then to find out that I... And you got close. And I was duped by the language of video

games i'm not saying that's bad i think it's interesting i i can appreciate this game in many different spots it's very interesting yeah if you're gonna totally joke or do something like that it needs to be like three or four or something like you you do definitely get that it's 20 it's 26 yeah right it's like it doesn't it yeah it just didn't work for me um but i i think there's a lot i really like about this game i have not finished it yet and i cannot wait to finish it because it feels like it's getting better and better after that beginning i'm also a little bummed that i feel like i need to restart yeah i understand you guys like getting turned off early and not wanting to finish it for for this particular like discussion but like fuck the repeated playthrough stuff gets like that thing

that you mentioned justin like there's so much of that and it's so fucking cool and it makes me like it makes you think about npcs in games like i was playing fallout at the same time i was playing this and just like whatever fucking no scope headshot exploding gibbing like every single person in the game um and but then Undertale like makes you think about the question of just like like what if these were people that could remember like what if next time you played Fallout like they'd be like hey you fucking made my head explode like a watermelon Gallagher nice work uh like what what if a game could do that but it handles it like when i say that you it sounds like a cheesy hook but it really like undertale handles it so so so well uh let's talk

about the best game of the year but the three of you guys are fucking murderers psychopaths so i guess it might not be for you uh my favorite game of the year I should say is Her Story or as some people say Her Story which is let me just put it this way folks FMV games are back and they are back

we are we are all this is a tip of the spear you watch oh my god one time I all this is a this is a tip of the spear you watch oh my god um one time i watched uh this is uh only sort of related one time i watched the the mc hammer behind the music and the very like in the closing moments where they're talking about where hammer's career is at again uh his hairdresser yes his hairdresser is trying to make the case that um there's a big hammer resurgence in the offing that it is coming and he said i don't know what happened the first time i don't know if it

was the planets lining up or whatever but those planets are lining up again like just getting ready for like hammer to make a big comeback that's how i feel about fmv games they're back in a major way her story is the mc hammer of video games yes um god okay so if you haven't played her story you should probably just go play it uh because it's not that short it's pretty short it's pretty cheap i played it on an ipad with my wife with like an earbud in one ear uh and it's still like it it works really really well if you if you haven't played it because you don't want to plop down in front of a computer like the the mobile version of it works really well there's no fucking like twitchy you know headshots you have to execute it's a great it's actually a really

good co-op game in a in a way that like fmv games are starting to come into their own in that regard like because there's not that twitch aspect people are starting to take those out of fmv games and realize they work better without them uh you're starting to see more people who are who are doing games that are actually really fun to play with somebody else like because of the pace and they're they're they're much more narrative driven but her story is about um there is a uh you are a an investigator of some sort uh and you are uh trying to unearth a crime, basically, and trying to find the clues about it. I'm being really general here intentionally. You're trying to unearth clues about a crime, and the only thing that you have, like the only clues that you have with regards to that are the video interviews with a woman who the clips are actually like

split into her answers to questions. And those answers are to questions that you don't have access to. You don't know what the questions are. You only can watch her answers to the questions. You only can watch her answers to the questions. But every word that she says has been cataloged so that you can search for any word in the transcript of any video. But you can, at max, return like five results at a time. So you only get the first five results of any given search term. So if you search for something really common like the,

you're going to get the five sort of chronologically earliest videos pretty much because she says the and pretty much almost all of them. Which is a fair strategy if you want to call it that. Right, if you want to use common words as just a way to find stuff you haven't found before. But basically you have to become pretty intentional about like you have to about what you are playing and why and like what video clip you're you're looking for like what you're specifically looking for information on because uh the the real like the difficulty if you want to call it that in the game of the challenge is finding the right search term to

find the exact bit of information you need to find that new piece of information that you uh haven't haven't unearthed before um it's a really interesting way to intake a story because it's a non-linear it's truly non-linear in that if you knew the right thing to look for you could see you know yeah the the hook or the whatever of the whole story on your first search. You probably won't. But you sort of decide, weirdly, you sort of decide when you beat it. You sort of decide when it's done.

There is kind of an ending, kind of. Sort of. Well. I wouldn't call it a goal. I would say when you have done when you have done enough her story a new thing happens all right i i mean there's there you have an objective going in you don't really beat her story um honestly calling it a game is like kind of like i i'm not oh super i'm not super interested in those sorts of semantic discussions but like it is it it is so

unlike pretty much anything else i've ever played it's kind of a magic trick the way that they handle the non-linear story because what you what you said is true like if you know the right word that is in like the one clip that reveals the nature of the crime and who did it uh you could you could beat the game if you want to call it beating it in like four seconds but like the the fact that the game is is designed in a way that that almost certainly isn't going to happen and that despite the fact that using those search terms you could watch the whole thing out of order it still makes narrative sense like i still felt like i was figuring stuff out in an order despite the fact that there should have been no order to it whatsoever i don't know how

behind the writing it's like a really tough thing to pull off right it's so every every word of dialogue because it can't just be well written it has to be if you consider each word also a game mechanic it's so intentional in a way that i literally don't know how they that they they did it where they wrote a script that was you know good and engrossing but also if they had put the wrong word in the wrong place the story would have been revealed to you out of order right because you think you start playing and you think like whoa well i'm gonna search for the word killer and like your mind works through those obvious words and then through those obvious words the story is told kind of in order like it's it i can't even wrap my mind around how difficult that must have been yeah it's pretty impressive i will

say that parts of the story overall are a little dumb like the the the twist of it is like or i should say like the story that explains the twist of the game is a little dumb but at the same time like i was like in the moment when i was playing it i was very engrossed and figure out what it was uh yeah definitely worth playing go grab it are we out of gas are we out of gas gang i'm like this is the end of the that's it we have to decide the number one of that group yeah so what griffin recap for me what do we have what are the animal crossing happy home designer we can't recap we got to pick the best of those so we have best of her story rocket league yep downwell and undertale downwell undertale god

i feel like it's only her story is the only one of that whole bunch so i would pick rocket league i didn't like any of the other games i didn't like any of them um i mean like this is a tough this is a tough one because i know the three of you did like actively disliked undertale so i feel like i shouldn't even waste my vote on it. I didn't dislike Undertale. I liked it a lot. Yeah, I didn't dislike it. It ain't gonna get no votes. No, it ain't moving.

Let's narrow it down to two from those four. I'm willing to drop Undertale because I know it's just not gonna do it, but go play it if you haven't. Rocket League, yes, I agree on and her story i would say between those two okay um it's got i think i'm rocket league yeah yeah yep yep well that's not quite fair for reasons that we won't reveal here but uh it doesn't it literally

doesn't matter because even if he was voting then we might have an actual discussion about it that's valid i watched dumb chris anyway i i just kind of found the original game would win over let's take a trip back in time to 2015 when justin couldn't fucking play tower fall sure yeah he comes back just because tower falls yeah it's similar i think actually oh that's that just launched on vita can that be considered for our a surprise winner four years in a row okay so we got bloodborne super mario maker and rocket league congratulations bloodborne yeah congrats bloodborne you did it buddy plant what's your vote uh yeah i'm fine with that i've got this this amazing new system is so friction free i think i think this is us not doing it all year so when it comes around it's like yeah sure that

sounds no sense yeah whatever we're not you know what it is we don't have a full year of like defending games to the hilt like to already to already have these lines drawn in the sand. Yeah, my blade is dull. Yeah, right. I need the three of your blades to sharpen it by shaking. Overall, though, I thought it was... So, okay, congratulations, Bloodborne.

Hooray. I would vote Rocket League. No one cares. I mean, I would, too. Okay. I think a tie of rocket league and bloodborne sounds great to me i think i think they're both what what's going on here no no no no no is this a tiebreaker you died i killed you we have a tiebreaker and you didn't ask the number one pie-breaking king of the besties. I buried you!

I buried you under the ocean. You're dead. The weird thing is that people can't see this, but he's covered in, it looks like, algae. And one of his eyeballs is hanging out of a bear skull. There's a very small crab coming out of the socket. He's wrapped in plastic.

You should know, it's been a tough year for me it's been 12 months since i've made that pivotal decision whatever the fuck i predicted last year i don't remember and i'm back to break this intense tie between what the what games i don't even know rocket league and uh and which was the one where you got to bang all the like animal creatures uh and you made friends with them tokyo jungle animal crossing animal crossing happy home designer there's a skeleton and he makes like puns oh oh undertale yeah and then you like you flirt with the skeleton and you like you have a thing going with him? There is, yes. There is a skeletal dating simulator. I vote for the skeleton fucking game.

Yes, it's happening. Is this a three-way tie now? Three-way tie. Undertale, Rocket League, Bloodborne. That sounds good to me, guys. Let's just swap out Rocket League for Super Mario Maker, and that sounds great, guys. I'm totally on board with it.

Happy to be of service. Thank you, New York Giraffe. So three-way tie. First one in Polygon, or I shouldn't say Polygon. We do not want to associate this with Polygon branding officially in any way. But congratulations to those three games. Equally good.

One of them's a little bit better, I agree, but let's just call it what it is, you know? What'd you guys think of this year in terms of gaming? It was a weird year. Like, I feel like there were more games that people liked that I just didn't get like at all.

And I, I, it, it's not like a, I wouldn't call it a year where there were just so many great games. It does seem like there's like, the quality is more spread out where like four or five years ago, it was like,

Oh, these were the three best games of the year. No question question but i feel like the terminology we're using is now inadequate because what what the fuck does best best mean like i don't know i don't know about you guys but like when i was talking to chris about this um when i make like my top 10 votes my top 10 decision what do you do like what metric are you using hours played enjoyment it's what i like the most we've also like the most the oscar problem right like the oscars isn't really the best movie of the year like there's there's an oscar movie and people vote on oscar types of movies and like the besties doesn't do that for games right like we're not just looking at like

okay what are the headiest games of the year or games that aspire to be the best we're comparing things here that are like an esport with an mv story based game with like batman michael bay versus of you know merchant ivory picture yeah other mediums have this they just don't usually put these things against each other. You know what? I think I'm just looking at like... You know, there was a lot of hubbub about 2014 in games and being a little bit underwhelming. I'm looking at the

Game of the Year list from 2014 for Polygon. I actually think I dug last year... Let me read this to you guys and let me know what you think. This is Polygon's top 10 from 2014 pt that was what number 10 number 10 super smash brothers for wii u fucking good game shovel knight yeah that was a good game far cry 4 totally rad it's a really good game hearthstone damn that was a good game mario kart 8 sick middle earth shadow of mordor fucking great dark souls 2 are you kidding me uh wolfenstein the new order and dragon age inquisition like 2014

for me for my personal taste like that kind of kicks this but that's can i do something with that list though really quick i feel like better versions of almost all of those games came out this year really no like the better version of far cry for me is metal gear or the new assassin well it's not even the same yeah yeah yeah i know but like the better version of dark souls 2 is bloodborne okay i'll grant you that one but like like in terms of more interesting nintendo games i'd take splatoon like over either of those i mean they're great they're great, they're great, but I've just played those games before.

This is last year. I think it's less, Justin, that the games last year were as good. It's just like those 10, not familiar even, those 10 were the winners. If you looked at the Polygon voting

for the top 10 last year, it's going to be like, maybe there's a few outliers, but how are you voting on these 10 games? How are you ranking these 10 games? My top 10 list, maybe three of the games on my top 10 list made it on our Polygon's top 10. That's sort of what I was saying. It wasn't as obvious this year.

It was more spread out. I think there's because... I think there's an embarrassment of riches right now. Right, but we've got to be careful because I don't think it's because there are more great games. I agree. I think there's just more games, and you find the stuff that means the most to you

through this much, much broader palette. I think there are more great games for more targeted groups of people i think that's what's changing is there are tons i think way more games out and i think there are way more good to great games i think they're for very specific groups now uh which is it's it's funny that we're not doing this show now on a weekly basis because there would absolutely be more fodder. Yeah, it could easily be done now. There is like totally room for a show that on a weekly basis just puts four games against each other. Because that's how much stuff comes out.

And anyway, this is how we've chosen to tell everybody listening that we, 2016, the year of the, no, I'm just kidding. No, no. This two hours we've done now has almost killed me but yeah i i i this year's weird because there's so much and there's so much good stuff and at the same time i can't really say there was anything this year that like i i wish something had moved me like undertale had for griffin um and i can't say that there's anything that really hit me that really landed with that sort of impact for me this year uh maybe you should uh finish undertale yeah i'm gonna finish it no because because i

joking aside like it was that for me in a year that otherwise like Bloodborne's a terrific game and I I sort of work my rankings as like what games are going to mean the most to me in the future like what games am I going to like replay um like Undertale yeah absolutely Bloodborne absolutely um like that that's kind of how I made that decision and for for a while like i didn't have something like that until undertale and i feel like that those are the types of experiences that are mean the most to me oh there is one thing that i do want to say about all this stuff is less and less i don't have time and i think justin kind of hit this too time for a mediocre version of call of duty or a halo or a game that i'm that i've already done before um because there is so much and there's so much that is fresher than those things

that seeing sequels of things that i've already done and they look very similar to what i've already done man i just i can't like there's there are too many other things to play and too many things that like are happy to eat hundreds of hours of my time for me to carve out a portion of my life to be like yeah like call of duty is really really well made but it turns out there are a lot of really well-made games now um yeah and you have to find a way to spice up my life i feel the same way about open world games almost as a whole genre in that like i it's kind of the well's kind of been poisoned for me a little bit in the sense that like i it's hard for me to enjoy an open world game without feeling like this is a lot like almost all of the other open world games where

you go around filling out a map doing stuff that is yes there's a lot of it but it's not as deep as like it would have been in a more linear campaign where they spent more time doing less stuff to make that less stuff a whole lot better like i i assassin's creed everybody said was so great this year and i played it and i just felt that same way just like this treats me a lot like every other ubisoft open world game treats me. And like, yeah, it's well made,

but I, I don't have any, I just don't have the, can you do that? Yeah. How many times can you like climb the towers to find the way points for the side missions and then do the side missions over and over again? Like in,

in I, that used to be my shit and now it is not my shit anymore. And I would be surprised if like, I would be surprised if I got deep into that, like that genre at all in 2016. Yeah, I mean, a big left turn, I think would have to be made. So biggest disappointments,

Codename Steam, what a shit pile. Hoofa doofa. Yeah, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. I hated that game. Guys, we forgot to do a halftime. Oh no. Oh yeah, here's our halftime. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Here's our halftime.

It's at the end. Codename Steam is a real pile of shit. You know the worst part about... Let me tell you the worst thing about Codename Steam. The worst thing about Codename Steam is that after I put out my review, they released an update of uh uh code name steam that slightly increased your ability to fast forward the enemy action and maybe you have to go back and play more code name steam is the worst thing that's ever happened to me uh so that's gonna do it for us animal

crossing happy home designer both my favorite game of the year and also one of my biggest disappointments um so so powerful where its core ideas the game moved me guys criterion games essentially disappearing from the face of the industry is my big disappointment i guess it was kind of a bummer yeah sorry i didn't get as many platinums as i thought i would this year i platinum that uh persona that Persona 4 Dancing All Night. That was worthwhile. Absolutely it was. Oh, biggest disappointment, Persona 5 getting delayed. I need it.

I want it. I do love how long they waited to delay that, though. It's like December 30, December 32. They're like, guys, I don't think it's going to drop in 2015, guys. Sorry. Be a little bit late. I gotta say, as far as disappointments, I'm a little disappointed that I'm not

getting into as many mobile games as I used to. There just aren't that many good ones. I mean, the Lara Croft game I thought was really, really good. Russ, I trust you on this. There used to be a lot that I was just like

all the time getting hooked on new stuff i just don't get hooked on mobile games at all i would say these days maybe one a month is like a really good mobile game um but not more than that is essentially where we're at how can i I find recommendations on those, Russ? Because I miss getting the... I miss hearing about it. So you could find a bunch of very good games on ProductHunt.com, which is where I work. Look at that. You know, I just edited that to say Polygon.

No! I just went through... What is Polygon? Russ, what is Polygon? What is Polygon? Imagine a world where people think things are cool and they upvote those things those products and they discuss them and and the magic happens uh you know so it's like amazon it's kind of like besties the forum it's like besties the website that's how they recruited

you for your pioneering work with the besties but with the world famous besties podcast so come to product hunt and pay my bills um no this was like i'm glad we did this because it was like speak for yourself no it was a fascinating year like there's a lot to there's a lot to talk about which i think is evidenced by the fact that we spent what feels like the first half of this podcast talking about games that we weren't going to discuss. There was just like, yeah, there's a lot of stuff for everybody. If you couldn't find a game to like this year, it's like... Who are you, Vladimir Putin?

He doesn't like anything. We're paying attention. Yeah. Come on, Putin. Get with it. Check out Undertale. Check out Undertale, Putin. You're gonna love it. Any final words? Never again. I mean it this time.

I really don't know where this is. I hope someone is hearing this. I don't know where it goes. Yeah, we're into some can't stop the signal bullshit right now. I don't know where this is going. We're literally doing some pirate radio stuff. Nope, no final words here. Great job. I thought we did a really good job discussing stuff. Nope. No final words here. Great job.

I thought we did a really good job discussing it, and we were all very respectful. And wait, what won? We had a three-way tie. Between Bloodborne and Rocket League and non-finalist Undertale. That's fine. Whatever.

Nobody gives a fuck anyway. Truth. I do want to just, I guess final words, if we do want to put a button on it. For real though, Konami, fuck off. Stop being total fucking monster dicks. Or do, but just like be ready. So I guess I'll see you guys.

Be ready for what happened next. Next week, next week. Yeah, we're back. Back in a big, big way. Next week. What if Konami does drop some dope shit in 2016 and then like the next episode of the besties has to start with like a big long mea culpa from me just like guys i'm sorry i told sid uh sorry i told konami to stop being such

monster dicks hey 12.5 months ago i said something very mean and 12 months ago they change this might all be like meta pt shit of like the worst villain in the world can you fucking imagine if this was all just one giant long con by like he did that bullshit with the whale trailer that was for metal gear oh my god and the head transplant this is what i'm saying trailer that was for Metal Gear. Oh my god and the head transplant? This is what I'm saying. Guillermo del Toro is gonna like pop up at the end and high five him. Got you. Crimson Geek. What were you saying about my

baby brain sucker? Now who's got the baby brain? You do have the baby brain. It's gonna be released like Frog Factions as one of Konami's like super shitty mobile free to play gambling games. But if you play like 15 hours of it.

Fucking Norman Reedus appears. Flow of Actions ARG is my game of the year. Yeah, absolutely. Let's end the podcast. Do it. It is. It's already ended.

You know, you've forgotten how to end it. You gotta end it. Oh, oh, oh, okay. Okay. Um,

so send us your email recommendations for what you want us to talk about next week uh no i think you usually do stuff like that tweet at us at bestiespodcast.org is a twitter handle uh anyway uh until the next time we speak uh my name is justin mcroy i'm christopher thomas plant i'm rossig. I don't think we've ever done this. No, me neither. Anyway, so this is the end of the show, because shouldn't, I know the last part, though. Shouldn't the world's best friends

pick the world's best games? Besties! besties