The Besties - The Besties pick the best games of August 2017

Episode Date: September 15, 2017

We know, we know, it’s late, and it’s really, really hard not to just talk about Destiny 2, but you know what? We don’t. Because we’re true professionals with a vague recollection of games that came out before Destiny 2. Games discussed: Everybody’s Golf, Absolver, Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, Nidhogg 2, Agents of Mayhem, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, Sonic Mania, Tacoma, Lone Echo. 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!

yeah can i tell you something that kind of bums me out about mario and his nude top yeah is i as a man who has like you know i'm like a tiny boy but with like a little belly and i always assumed i saw in mario a like you know like-bodied person and instead he's just a barrel yeah he is it is muscle through and through but i mean he he doesn't brag these aren't like he's a single pack but the entire pack is his entire core he's got a strong core yeah he's a cat but he's got it when he wears the overalls you see a tum there's like a little round it's just that's armor everybody oh yeah he's always wearing a kevlar kevlar vest i would say padding to make people

feel more at ease i mean you do that you do those butt stomps that's good for the core that is building up some core strength you need a powerful sort of axis to pivot on what if he's wearing one of those pregnancy sympathy vests that's like that you have to wear in high school i bet that's it he got luigi uh luigi got him pregnant in this uh picture i saw on the internet wow we need to talk about that picture too we need to talk off the podcast My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best games of the last month. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best games of the summertime. My name is Rush Preston, and I know the best games of the summertime My name is Rush Preston and I know the best games of the week Hello everyone, welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in sports, news, entertainment, pop culture

Old retro, the 80s are back And video games and also Destiny 2 is up for discussion. But this month, we're going to ignore all the other ones just to talk about video games. You know we can't talk about Destiny 2, right? Because that one came out in September. It's from the future. We're so late on recording this, we have to pretend that we do not know about the games of September and what is hot and what is eating our lives right now okay well we won't be talking about destiny even though that's probably

what everybody is listening would like to hear us talk yeah surprise the besties for the first time in recorded history are a disappointment uh listen we'll record another we because we were all traveling at like we all sort of spaced it out in a really terrible way. We're going to have to record the September episode tomorrow in an episode that I would like to call Bestinies. But we'll get to that. Let's get into our honorable mentions for this month. Anybody play anything good? There were a lot.

Remember from August? Anybody having fun? Eclipse events? I burned my eyes. anything good there were a lot remember yeah august so i'm having fun eclipse events i burned my eyes uh that's not true chris tell everybody your sad eclipse story no that's true so i went i went to saint joe in the center of this beautiful country of ours and what is saint joe saint joseph missouri It was the center of the eclipse. Maybe you opened a newspaper that day. And the eclipse was like center of totality. It was like one second less than the most time you could get.

Two minutes, 45 seconds or something like that. And about 30 minutes before the eclipse, a big old rain cloud comes in and just moves right on top of us. And just hangs out there. And I saw like bits and pieces through the cloud like when it would break apart uh but no here's the bad thing so i if you used eclipse eclipse glasses kind of hard to spot the sun especially hard to spot it uh through cloud cover oh no you kind of like be like oh, the sun must be behind the clouds now. Where did it go?

I'll just lower my glasses. And then the end of Indiana Jones, your eyes, they melt. Yeah. And your face melts. And then you have to live in shame and silence because for like that whole day, my eyes kind of stung. And I was like, this is it. What?

I'm going to go blind. And I can't tell anybody. Because I'm going to look like a huge idiot. You will get dunked on. So I had that thought constantly because I didn't have the glasses. But I did want to see it. So I catch little peeks. And I read from the science magazine.

If you just get little peeks, I think it's okay. So I just like look up little peeks. But I didn't want to get my orbs scorched. Because I know that if I got on Twitter and complained about my scorched orbs, everybody would be like, what the fuck's wrong with you? But if you don't have the glasses and you look up at the sun, all you see is the sun pretty much. You really cannot see the moon because of the glare. Yeah, fair. Yeah, that's true.

So it's not even worth it. In seven fucking years. I cannot believe it is September 14th and we are talking about the solar eclipse that happened in august zero twenty two thousand that's it um hey so excited how the besties handled the eclipse and then we're finally getting now we're good um i have an honorable mention that i really struggled with whether or not i wanted to make it my game of the month uh because it came out pretty close to the end of the month so i didn't know i'd have time for it little did i know i would have basically 20 days um and that game is everybody's golf on playstation 4 it is if you've played the hot shots golf series which i adore i got really really into

there was a hot shots golf game that was a i think a vita launch title and i'd never gotten too into the series before that but i played the shit out of that one because it is so two into the series before that but i played the shit out of that one because it is so well suited for mobile uh for for handheld devices and man i really wish that uh everybody's golf was out on on vita or switch or something i know it's not going to come to switch because i'm pretty sure it's uh sony property i guess at this point but um uh and and you can remote play it on vita but it's all about hitting like the three button golf presses uh that is sort of a staple of these types of golf games and that's really hard to do with any amount of latency at all um but it is a it's just like a really really good hot shots golf game it feels really uh it feels really good and there are a billion customization options

uh which you know is my jam um and yeah i i don't have too much else to say. Uh, it's, it's got like this hub world that you can run around and explore and there's other activities like fishing and, uh, go-kart racing, I guess, a golf cart racing rather, uh, which I haven't even unlocked yet. Um, but it's been like a nice little like mood game for me, which I'm, I like having one of those, uh, at all times we're just like i don't have any other games to play and i'm just wanting some something to kind of chill out to let's throw on some everybody's golf and play it that's fun yeah it gets me very excited for um golf story i thought that was dropping the 15th i thought that was dropping tomorrow but i guess it's just sometime

this month sometime this yeah sometime uh but that gets me very excited because it's coming to switch and it's like a mario mario golf advance yeah right it looks like the gba and like game boy color mario golf games like using the same like perspective and art style and everything and also golf golf exploration right where like every place is technically a uh is technically like a course so you can just kind of like put around and look for secrets and stuff like it looks it looks really cool was my shit i love that stuff so i hope it's as well hopefully we'll talk about that in the next episode because i think it'll probably make one of our lists rusty really play golf you seem like

somebody who would golf why is that because of my lanky frame? You just seem like a golf... Am I wrong in this? It just seems like a golf... Yeah. Well, I've mentioned... I actually mentioned this on the stream I did with Griffin when we were playing everybody's golf,

but I've played golf once really in real life, and the big struggle I had was actually hitting the ball. Yeah, it's a trouble. Even though it's not moving, it's very, very difficult to hit it because it's so very small. And it's embarrassing. And it's embarrassing. i like to play with my friends i've been

like i've been a few times because there's a bunch of like really cheap courses here in austin and every time we go we have to play scramble which means that we all drop our balls at the furthest drive and then we play out from there and we have to do that because i can't make the ball go far at all. I can't even hit it. I miss it 50% of the time. And that's arguably the least far that you can make a ball go, which is not go. Which is pretty impressive when you think about it.

Anybody spend some time with Absolver? I was really excited for that one, and I checked it out, and it kind of didn't stick with me. Yeah, I played a little bit while I was on vacation. You know, it's interesting. Like like there's many components of it so if you don't know absolver um it's vaguely sort of like a fighter mixed with dark souls sort of yeah for lack of a better term um and it's it's definitely interesting like i i think for me as you so you're wandering the land and you gotta beat up some like big kids that are mean for some reason

and um as you're wandering the land you fight people and you have like as you fight them you learn their moves from observing them and you can learn them faster, I think, if you counter them properly. You have, like, several stances that you can switch between, and then there are moves that switch you between the stances. I would say my – so as somebody who's not, like, a big fighting game aficionado, I would say my – but I do like – it for me it just dumps a lot on you at once yeah there's a lot of moves and there's a lot of like you can customize every move that you do in a given set um and i didn't necessarily as somebody who is not super well versed in fighting games i didn't really understand why one set would be better in a given situation or why you know there's a lot of complexity it

drops on you right at the start and it really for me i was just sort of flailing without a really good path forward for like how i could get better yeah me, it was like an intimidation thing where, um, I, I like trust the from software games now. And so I get dropped in this huge open deadly world and I know that I'm going to have to like bash my head against it. And so I think like,

okay, well I can, I've played these games before and I know what this experience is going to be like. And I know that I really like them. And so I'm willing to like put in the effort. And I think the reason I bounced off absolver is that it didn't like it didn't necessarily have that native trust for me but not only that i don't i don't understand the language of fighting games

really well and while like i think it's a fairly pared down system they have where you are you know building combos and then you can learn how to use those combos and use stuff like faint strikes and different like blocking maneuvers and i think it's more accessible than a fighting game, but I still felt like I would also have to work to learn that stuff too. And I, again, like, I don't think it's like a wall that is unscalable, but I just, I don't know. It seemed like I wasn't really... If you have fighting game fluency, you might be able to... I think it would be sick for you. Like, I think there's a lot of people for whom like this is like a really really cool experience i actually one of my favorite fighting games was er guys or ergies for ps1 it was the square uh published fighting game that had like

a single player story mode and you could also play as cloud i think if you went tifa yeah it was a man they made some fucking that was the same year that they put out Einhander. Man, they made some fucking, they used to make such cool games. But like, I like a fighting game with a story and this is like a fighting game with a huge, like a fighting game by way of Dark Souls. And I think for, there's a lot of people for whom that is going to be the jam.

It just seemed, I played it and I just got the feeling that like I would have to put in like a lot of, a lot of effort to learn how that world works. But I think it's also, it seems like pretty sick game um if that sounds good to you i like sick games yeah anybody else play anything in august 100 years ago i don't think i had any other games so many things i like feel like i missed and i know i need to catch before the end of the year i didn't play hellblade yet i haven't played dream daddy yet um oh i picked up uncharted the lost legacy but i haven't played it yet yeah i like bought it and then i it's still wrapped up on my on my shelf i just haven't dipped into it yet it seems good uncharted i have played um it's it's good it's really good if you but it's not i mean if you're expecting a market change

from the last uncharted game which was very recent and that would be an unreasonable expectation for you to have i think yeah yeah especially since they haven't changed that much like that's it like yeah and it and for me honestly by the end of four I was like, and we spoke about this, I think, at the time. Like, there was way too much in there. Like, I think 4 overstayed its welcome in a big way. So, and I mean, this isn't necessarily the fault of anybody. But hopping back in, I just, like, super wasn't, like, dying for more Uncharted. Right.

It's cool, though. Like, it's very cool. Mechanically, I feel like it's very mechanically i feel like it's like if i want to play this game and i will at some point but if when i do it it'll be specifically for the story and the writing and the great characters and not necessarily for the climbing around on rocks and swinging swinging around i like and and that's why i haven't dipped back into it it's just like it's hard for me to get, I loved Uncharted 4. I thought it was a fucking fantastic game and like a perfect send off to this like quadrilogy that they put together.

And I'm not necessarily saying they shouldn't, you know, make more games in this world. It's just like, I don't know. I want to get in there and I want to play and I want to see these characters, but it's just really hard for me to get psyched about you know sneaking through grass and instant executing enemies and getting a pistol that i shoot you know mercenaries in the head with a hundred times like i feel like i've done that so much there's a moment in the game where like you get one of the classic um uncharted seemingly pointless doohickeys like a weird disc or something that if you push in a certain way, it turns into, I don't know, something,

some sort of MacGuffin. And you climb up to a tower to get the lay of the land, this vast open world. Like one of the missions is like basically an open world, a small one, but an open world where you can sort of approach it in any way.

And you're up in this tower and you're looking, you're opening these doors and through each of the three doors you see in the distance this giant fortress that you need to go to and hump in some way you need to hump the fortress in some way and i was looking at it and i just i had this realization i was like nah i don't think so and i turned it off at that point i was like i nah, I don't think so. And I turned it off at that point. I was like, I really don't need to go run to those fortresses. I wish that was the in-canon event that happened in the game as well.

They're like, eh. Pretty tall town. I've seen it. Chris and I played a little bit of Nidhogg 2. I don't know if you played more than we checked out, Chris. Yeah, I played a little bit. But I think you did not like it a lot more than I did. Yeah, there's certain things about it.

So it's like Nidhogg, which was this really cool indie, basically fencing game where you had a sword and you could hold it in three different positions or throw it. Or you could do a melee attack or jump kick or a dodge roll. And that was kind of it. And the point of it was to kill your opponent and then keep running toward their goal so you're like moving through it's kind of side scrollery and you're moving through different screens and if you can reach the end of their screen uh then you win and it was really cool i was really into it we played it a lot there was kind of this golden age where like nidhogg tower fall and crawl uh were were all popping off and mount Mount Your Friends.

And so there was this sort of like, it all sort of happened all at once, this really great local multiplayer renaissance that I was really into. So I was excited for Nidhogg too, but I don't know. You spawn with one of, I think, four weapons now. There's a big heavy sword, and a bow and arrow, and a little knife, and the fencing foil. There's a big heavy sword and a bow and arrow and a little knife and the fencing foil. And that adds like an element of chance to it that I think kind of eliminates a bit of the purity of the experience. Or maybe it was at least for like the hour or so I spent with it.

Maybe there's like a learning curve where like you have to figure out how to make all those weapons work. But it just didn't really work well for me but the bigger thing was that like there was some there was something just kind of off about the movement of it where there's a like a wall jump that you can do and uh pretty much all the levels that we played when when me and chris played it uh involved like running across this path with like these gaps where there were lower parts of the floor and the gaps were wide enough that you could never jump from one of like the raised platforms to another and so you had to like get down in it and like literally every time i did chris would be chasing me and when i tried to like jump and mantle up to the next thing like a hundred percent of the time i would just wall jump backwards into chris's waiting sword um and after doing that about 50 times i was like

fucking furious and i just like i really i really was not having any fun at all. Also, like, that game is all about, like, running to the opponent's goal. And so when you are very evenly matched with your opponent, like, I would say me and Chris are fairly evenly matched. We played one game that was, like, a half hour. And we just could not get out of the center screen. And that's not, like, that might sound good on paper and fun and challenging, but fuck me.

I just, but we quit. We didn't even finish that match. We were like, do you want to be done? Yes. We were too, we were too proud to let the other person win.

And so we just fucking turned it. We turned the game off and I do not think I'm going to play it. The only winning move is not to play. I liked it a little bit more. I think the issue is it is this weird sensitive command of like when you hit when you're mantling if you hit jump i think you shoot in the other direction and that goes against like your instinct which is when you're mantling it jumped like climb faster and i think the game one i think that's awkward. And two, I'm like not even certain that's true.

So that's a problem. And then three, I just feel like what the game needs is a really clear control like tutorial, which I don't believe is there. When I started like playing it single player, it just kind of threw me in. And I understand that like the hook of the game is its simplicity but like clearly that's not the case so i'm i'm i'm still

like a little warm on it i i think it could be good um i just there's just like not a great way to learn it as a i was gonna say as a quote like just to sort of wrap this up because i know we should probably move on to the actual games do you think the characters in nidhogg 2 look like the characters from nothing but trouble starring chevy chase and demeanor i have no complaints about that i i love the art style it has this like hyper maximalist like art style that is like fucking awesome i think it rules it doesn't look like any other video game and so i'm into that i just i just wish it was more fun to play it. I just thought it looked like the character.

Nothing but trouble. I don't even know what that movie is. And then, Justin, I know you wanted to talk about Agents of Mayhem and how much you loved that. Maybe we get like a one-sentence. Oh, shit. Should I talk about Agents of Mayhem? Maybe like a blurb. Oh, good.

You know what? Yeah, because I didn't really get to. I don't think we did a quality control on it. So I didn't get a chance to take a massive dump on it um that game is so i love the saints grow franchise i will even defend when people got burnt out on like four um like cat out of hell the the expansion well let's not go okay cat out of hell was not great but like four was largely evolutionary and but i still really enjoyed it and thought it had a lot of great moments.

And the series has always had this sort of subtle humanism to it. Like, it is weirdly celebratory of like, everybody in a reverent way, but never, well, I shouldn't say never, occasionally, but rarely a hurtful way down yeah um it's kind of like fast and the furious like very yeah like family oriented even more sort of tongue-in-cheek agents of mayhem has none of that um agents of mayhem is a single player third person shooter

where you swap on the fly between uh your three different agents that you bring to the field each one has a discrete sort of weapon set and ability set and you can you know sort of switch on the fly depending on who you think would be the best in a given situation and it is that part feels okay i guess it's never as fast as you want they they to switch they hype it up that you know you can uh uh you know shoot somebody with a rocket launcher and then as you're landing flip to your sword lady and she will do the sword for this sounds like an xbox one game a little bit it sounds like brute force maybe a touch yeah it sounded like brute force that's what i was thinking too but you're kind of like able to switch on the fly

which is kind of interesting and um it just it just is not in any way funny like there's no everything's like joke adjacent i said this interview everything's like written as if there were a joke and and delivered as if there were a joke, but like, there is no, there is no palpable joke. There's no joke to be had. And the entire thing is just drudgery. The, all of the, the,

the vast majority of the levels end in a layer, which is like an underground gun metal gray base that is assembled from several different components. and they all feel exactly the same it's like every mission is that way ending in a layer like that um all the humor's gone it they dumped so many different upgrades and customization items on you and stuff like that that you never really get a good handle on any of your abilities um it's just it's just so disappointing as somebody who really liked that franchise and they and they really they moved away from uh saints row in more ways than one like

there are characters pierce is in this one but they never don't they don't refer to him as pierce um the kingpin is what they call it and he's like a rap impresario i think or or something like that and it's very it's not like it just has very it's just the name and the character but it doesn't feel like him that's weird at all it's so weird and there there's it's just i get having their backs against the wall after four which basically turned turned you into a God out of hell, which basically turns you into the devil. So it's like, I get the challenge,

but it's just like, it's just so bad. And there are a lot of people who gave it pretty decent scores. That fucking tripped me out. I'm glad they enjoyed it. I think it's a pretty good proof that my taste level is higher than the vast majority. That's what it means. If you ever review a level is higher than the vast majority. That's what it means.

If you ever review a game lower than anybody else. Right. That's the proof positive that we've all been waiting for. Just a quick little side note. I Googled Brute Force to make sure that was the name of the game that I was thinking of. And it wasn't a very good game. I was looking at reviews. As long as we're talking about reviews first.

There's an outlet called Cinescape that gave it 100. This is a perfect. Br brute force is a perfect game. I will go to my grave. It's a perfect game. It's perfection. No flaws. Video games. Perfect.

Let's start talking about our games of the month because we have a lot to do. I want me and Justin to do ours back to back. So I don't know where we want to slot that in. But we have sort of a battle of the lonely space titles that I think could be fun. You can go in the after midterms. I'll start. My game was a pretty typical joining

of two familiar franchises that we all love, Mario Brothers and the Mushroom Kingdom, joined with the Rabbids ofance now who's the what was the first ones you talked about because you know i love those rabbits but i've never heard of a mario mario this yeah mario uh and he's a plumber and he lives no in italy but then john legozamo shows up and takes him through the shower and then they end up in the mushroom kingdom. The movie is. The joke's not, but the movie is so funny.

I love this game, actually. I thought it was a really fun game. Tell us. Mario and Rabbids. The full name, I think, is Mario plus... Folks, that's the kind of insight you expect from... Thank you, Justin. The full game is mario plus folks that's kind of insight you expect from thank you justin uh the full game is called uh mario plus rabbits kingdom battle i want to yeah that's it i thought it was

mario plus rabbits kingdom battle we can't we can't we can't keep judging russ for his life choices um yeah can you tell us anything about it sure it. It's XCOM with Mario Brothers and Rabbids. All right. Pretty much. It's a turn-based strategy game. You know, you use cover like in XCOM. You have a chance to hit like in XCOM. You build up a squad.

They have different abilities. Mario is more about jumping on people, and Luigi is more about running away, as he is wont to do. And they're paired with Rabbids who are dressed like Mario characters, which is even more confusing. So you have a Luigi Rabbid and a Peach Rabbid. And so the idea is to basically progress through these uh sequence of turn-based battles

against even more crazy rabbits who are basically infected by a vr helmet that combines two different things at once the backstory is very complicated and you really don't need to stress about it i think what i found surprising is that it's a really capable interesting turn-based strategy game with like all of the sorts of things that you think about when you're playing an x-com x-com game are presented here i actually think they're presented in a much more palpable and like easy to understand way in this game um a lot of the mechanics that are kind of daunting or frustrating in an x-com game are simplified i'll give an example so um uh reinforcements have always been really annoying in x-com games um they they're handled differently in different games but more

a lot of times it will just be like reinforcements show up like with no notice whatsoever you've been like really careful through the entire mission and and suddenly they they appear and totally wreck your shit because you weren't prepared for them in mario plus rabbits the way they present that reinforcements are about to show up and the exact location of where they're going to show up you just see their ears poking up out of the ground which i kind of love uh it and you can tell based on the ears like what kind of unit it's going to be um they also simplify the idea of chance to hit so it's either 100 chance to hit 50 chance to hit or zero percent chance to hit um and that like especially for people that have never played one of these types of games before makes it like super easy to understand like why did i miss

we're in whereas the next comment might be like 32.3 percent and you like whatever have to do a math problem to figure out whether you're going to hit someone um so i really like the fact that it was much more simplified uh the only thing that i kind of didn't love was, and maybe this is like an unfair comparison. I really, really enjoy the Nintendo Mario RPG games. The writing in them, I think is really good. Treehouse does like really,

really good localization for those games. And obviously this is a different team. This is Ubisoft doing all the writing and stuff like that. And the jokes and the writing just were not nearly as i think interesting or fun or like palpable to like an adult person playing as they are in the mario rpg games like there's not like that pixar i would say there's like one tweak to that and i think the game kind of operates on two levels and one is the rabid level um which is like within like 15 minutes you're walking past giant toilets and don't get me wrong i love poop jokes griffin has

to suffer poop jokes rachel rachel has to suffer them she's not a big fan yes but they're not these ones as a connoisseur of um of toilet humor not not great they're pretty tasteful they're tasteful dookie jokes i think for the most part i mean the toilets are like giant art like you walk past like giant uh wonder of the world size statues but the thing i do like and i think the game does really well is the subtle stuff which is like how they play with the mario characters like luigi being a skeezy sniper who takes cheap shots is hilarious and results in these like in the actual moment funny scenarios where any interactions also between mario uh rabid luigi and luigi is like

fucking great like this game really drills down into luigi's like fucking psyche in a way that i think is really really terrific yeah and i think it feels like and this is kind of a thing that goes across a lot of nintendo games lately even though i know this was made by ubisoft but that they're catching on to the stuff that is happening outside of their control with their fans and like leaning into it when it suits them this is how we get this is how we get luigi dabbing in this game that's that is the that's the the uh the terminus for for what chris is describing is luigi dabbing and that's the end of any fan interaction if they put weird if they put if they put Pat's Toad in the next Mario game it'll be like okay y'all y'all are a little bit too deep

down the the oubliette here um I I played a lot of this on the flight we were up in the northeast recently and I had a lot of flights and travel time I played a lot of it and I would say Russ it's funny I I feel differently about some of the mechanics than you do like some of the things that were simplified to me i found a little frustrating and i'll i'll try to explain like when you are there are like weird weapon modifiers like there are guns that can set people on fire right so you get set on fire and then all of a sudden you're just running around like mad and you're on fire and they're they're doing huge damage there's a bounce effect that can happen where an enemy shoots you or you shoot an enemy and they bounce all over the screen and completely change what the what the

battlefield is like and to me a lot of those battles sort of turned very chaotic as a result of that like i would have sort of a strategy and then, you know, an enemy would use a big grenade that would set everybody on fire and send everybody running. And all of a sudden the strategy had just sort of fallen apart. And I feel like my, the thing that exacerbates that is the simplified hit percentages because it removes the possibility of adding that element of of surprise or taking a chance or trying to write those situations like to your ability to adapt is limited right so if

i get like knocked uh way out of where i was going to to try to take the shot maybe i have still have the hit percentage but it's very reduced and like i don't know i could give it a shot maybe maybe this will work you know there's a chance this could work and i feel like that's really eliminated here it's like well my thing is screwed up now and there's really no sort of coming back for it so like i don't know that chaotic element that they introduce in battles um really was not great for me the other thing i'll say is like the difficulty curve is very strange you can just sort of chug through the first area and not have to learn much chug is a great way of a great verb by the way because i was watching justin play on the plane i was like wow you've this looks fun the part i'm at in the beginning is not because

it's just the same type of shit over and over. I feel like it does not get very fun until more stuff gets added, and I have not hit that point yet, and I've played for a while. Yeah, you introduce things like drones that are cool that you can send on a path to attack an enemy. That stuff is neat. I don't know.

I wish that the firefights feel a little flat as a result until the enemies do something that completely sort of knocks the whole battlefield up on its end and i just wish there was a a way of like re-controlling that there's also one thing that i thought was very strange um the characters have pretty wildly differing hit points so like luigi if you want to use luigi he has literally like half as many hit points as as some of the other people uh on the on yeah but that's in keeping that's in keeping with like like he's a sniper that's the whole kind of point is that he's not supposed to be like front lines yeah if you build them as a front lines but those lines are very uh like the enemies have a lot of mobility and a lot of range that's my lines are very that's very hard to keep drawn that is my biggest complaint

and that is why i think i'm maybe done is that i feel like a lot of the maps again and maybe this is just a symptom of me being early on in the game uh i think i'm on like the second chapter of it or whatever uh the maps are really condensed and every character can move and shoot really far and it makes it really really tough to know like how to how to uh fire emblem heroes is another example where it's a like a six by eight grid and you know exactly like you have to every square that you move really matters and you know exactly where to put your folks so that you can team attack somebody while avoiding getting team attacked by somebody else and that with i really don't think that is

represented well here at all where i will like move in peach and go in and do a kick a dash attack and then get cover and shoot somebody and take them out and be what i think is really far away from the enemy team but no they can move really really far and then shoot really really far and just dunk on me and then all of a sudden that character is out and it just doesn't it doesn't like that never really clicked with me i i think that changes pretty hardcore after the first third of the game um and i well it doesn't you can still be very mobile just to like sort of defend on that point because i i get what you're saying i think there's two things that work here one you're right enemies both enemies and your squad are extremely mobile you can use pipes you can bounce off other people so like yes uh you can move around a lot i do think

you learn the limitations of both your movement and the enemy squad movement pretty reasonably well uh i would say probably pretty close to where you're at to the point where you know when you're 100 safe or not i would also say the um the benefit of it is basically it keeps the ma like one of the issues I have with XCOM as well, even though I do like this, especially in games like XCOM or Fire Emblem, the normal Fire Emblem games where battles last like two hours

and you have to be super careful about every single move. I kind of like that almost all of the Rabbids battles are like 15 minutes long. And if you die, which I did a bunch of times i died a bunch of times on a few battles like i was able to readjust my strategy in keeping with that stuff justin's point about the randomness is is fair there are ways to mitigate that but it does result i think the fire debuff is like one of the most clever i i don't love playing the game but i love seeing the excitement of the developers who are not nintendo developers getting their hands on this nintendo property and thinking

of ways to like adapt that because the fire debuff where you get caught on fire and it does like a little bit of damage but the real like setback is that you run in a sort of chaotic path and then end up yeah maybe it's fucking exactly how fire works in in super mario 64 you get set on fire and then mario just runs and runs around also in your life probably i love that i think that's really clever and really cute and and and fun and i i really appreciate that and i was like i kept thinking about that developer that we saw during the ubisoft press conference when shigeru miyamoto was like thanking the the development team and then we get like the close-up of the the director i think on the game and he was like tearing up because that's fucking shigeru miyamoto like i love that stuff

that is that's that's that's my jam and you can see that stuff like all over the game and i think that's really cool it's very thoughtful like it's thoughtful in a way that like other licensed mario properties have not been for sure. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. I think they were, they really took their time.

The one thing I would say to that crying gentleman is the block puzzles in the game are just unforgivable. They're so annoying. And I don't understand. You move blocks like super slowly. And with most of the puzzles, you see what needs to happen. And then it's just this procedure of like, well, right let me move all these blocks around and it's i think it's very annoying yeah i agree the the stuff in between is not it's not great if you have a

sliding block puzzle and i'm not allowed to grab the block and move it in whichever direction i choose you have fucked up somewhere yeah it took it's also mario can't jump in that world and that's just that's weird it feels really strange well that's why you play as the uh the what is it the little peepo yeah peepo the peepo is a very good name that's can i ruin the end of that game or is that not appropriate um there's a kind of i'm not gonna ruin it but there is an amazing twist at the end of the game. So if you want to stick with it. Yeah, tell me afterwards because I'm not going to play this. It's just funny. Christopher, what do you got? I realized we have

another theme. Oh, boy. This is the weird versions of the big mascots because I have Sonic Mania. Sonic Mania is not weird. Sonic Mania is a weird game game it's weird that they finally game it's where they finally made a good one in for once yeah i mean so for people who don't know

sonic mania is essentially a sequel to the original sonic trilogy plus plus Knuckles, plus Sonic CD. It's made by Christian Whitehead and a handful of other, I guess you could call them fan Sonic game creators up until this point. And then they did lots of work with Sega over the years. They have a thing called the Retro Engine that allows games to be played on modern platforms that look close to the Sega Genesis, Sega CD. So this looks like those old games, except for that it runs, obviously, much, much, much better. And it plays much, much better,

because as I think people are kind of coming to terms with, Sonic games had a great first level that most of the development resources went into and that was like uh just a rocket shot from beginning to end and then uh this game that was not designed for platforming really became a platformer uh the rest of the game and most people just didn't finish it but they kind of loved sonic because either that level was so wonderful on its own or maybe they just loved really messy platforming or they didn't have an nintendo console like me um and they they really dug their uh their heels in but this game it solves that by one I think whatever this engine they're using is making it easier to kind of create all these loop-to-loops and create these wild courses.

And they're pacing it better. So each stage has areas that are a little bit more platforming and the controls work better, so that helps. and the controls work better so that helps uh but you're always kind of a few seconds away from speed which is i think what people enjoy about sonic to begin with um but the other thing i really liked about it is it it goes back and it looks at the problems and it takes them seriously as if like maybe there's great design underneath this if we just pick at it long enough and i i think arthur wrote our review and and spoke about like well you know it's good but it doesn't really fix the big problems with the with the original game and i i think kind of the opposite i think it realizes there is some really smart ideas and the big one being that if you look at

Sonic versus Mario Mario was all about moving left to right and Sonic was kind of this unusual game that was more of like a puzzle you're going up and down yeah you're going right to left sometimes you're you're having to like find your way around in the later courses and that felt comparatively like it lacked a flow but here it feels like being lost inside of like a maze like level that you would draw on your binder when you're in high school yeah that's a good way of putting it just it's so bizarre there i mean by the second kind of phase of stages it feels like there must be a dozen if not dozens of paths through each individual course and you're you're almost not sure if you're going the wrong direction a lot of the times but you always seem to be going

the right one um just because it's built really really well um the only the only issue with that is and i i really dig this game i i play it like a lot just sort of like dipping in whenever I have my Switch with me traveling. It's probably what I played the most when I was on that same tour with Juice. The problem with that is the Chaos Emeralds, they show up in these big gold rings that you can find in each level. And I am such a completionist, and I know there's some dope stuff that's going to come out of those. And not only do I feel like I reached the end of the level and I didn't find a Chaos Emerald ring? And I think like, ah, fuck, I must have gone the wrong way. Which does make me feel a little bit like I failed while exploring that maze.

Because it's not always evident, like, which path I should be going if I want to get to it. The mini games that you have to do to get the Chaos Emeralds are abysmal. They're really not fun. Yeah. And then, so like, I play through the level and i get to one of those things and then i fail it and then you don't get a second chance and it's like well yet shit this is kind of my feel about all collectibles and video games is that they're awful and like the pursuit of collectibles distracts from like basically collectibles

are what you do on your second or third or maybe your fourth playthrough unless it's a game like crackdown where the collectibles like make the game sure and even then like that i'm glad to hear somebody's making crackdown that was alexa um but yeah i i i agree like i for a long time i had that same thing and i think was actually the uncharted games that, finally weaned me off. Because I was like, here are these games that are all about moving forward and being cinematic. And you want me to, like, look around in the cracks for, like, a lost vase. Did not work for me. Just one other thing about the courses, too, that I really dig.

Is they understand that there is,'s like very thin narrative to like level design and the the way the phase basically works when you go into like a new zone the first one is usually a throwback to something that you are familiar with so the pinball area or like like classic sonic stage and then the second one is a spin on it where they kind of do their own thing but also like and what one example is you have a boss fight at the end of the first zone and he basically lights the stage on fire and then the second stage is in like kind of in flames or there's smaller things too where you can change the stage there's a flame shield now and that will essentially melt uh some platforms that you're on so there's just this like i don't there's more of a sense that there's a place here and not just oh these are

the same loop-de-loops over and over again like slightly different pixels on them um so yeah it's kind of metal sluggy in that way i kind of got that vibe where metal slug like levels progress into one another and like reference back to older levels yeah yeah for sure um griffin there's a thing in here that i a boss fight that i think we can talk about now that i know yeah it's like level two or level three are you talking about the it's it's very early on okay yeah one of the boss fights is just uh dr robotnik's mean bean machine you just play a quick round of mean bean machine with dr robotnik and it's actually really easy because he fucking sucks at his own game like he sucks so bad and so it only lasts like 30 seconds or so uh but it's a really really cute touch there's good

stuff like that all over like the metropolis area there's a boss fight where after you beat it it's in front of this huge television and then the tv breaks and then it makes that buzz that happened during the i think it was sonic 06 reveal event they did a stream uh maybe it wasn't sonic 06 but they did a stream that just had this horrible buzz going through it the whole time and that's like in the game like there's so much shit like that that is just like full but the term love letter gets used a lot um when when when talking about like retro games especially or games sort of inspired by retro aesthetics but like this is this is that to a t like it's i have so this is a very like

goofy comparison but it reminds me of the shining the movie to the shining the book and that like or any stephen king uh adaptation and that like the source text is super lovable but also like kind of a mess and i'm not even sure the people who created it fully understood what was good about it and then this like person comes along and they're like yeah a lot of this doesn't work but there's something really powerful conceptually or philosophically about it and i am going to make that my own and i'm going to put so much love into it and whether or not i mean i'm glad that sonic fans really dig it but it feels very much like its own thing um if we're being honest, it is such a stark improvement upon classic Sonic games. Can I ask, with all this in mind,

this is a love letter, they did a very good job capturing the spirit of Sonic without necessarily copying what most of the games have done. Can Sonic games exist outside of this? which is to say like an extreme love letter but like like is there a way to do new sonic games and have them be good without have them just being like the closest representation of what the spirit of sonic generations is a good game sonic colors is a good game too they're i mean they're not like the world's most amazing games but in terms of like 3d platformers those are so so there was a game that came out either last year or the year before last that i thought was my favorite sonic game called freedom

planet uh that was basically just like we're gonna we're gonna make a sonic game and it's gonna be really fucking good and it it really is um because it doesn't you you aren't playing a sonic right you are not beholden to like duck down to spin dash and go up a ramp and like there's different characters who have different sort of uh traversal methods and and ways of moving around that i thought was like really really slick i think this formula is really strong it's just that like it lost its way for a while yeah i think for 3d2 what what Sonic Generations and Colors started to figure out, and then I guess they just pieced on it, was that there are two games. There's the speed game, which is essentially like an infinite runner if you play it in 3D. And there is the puzzle platforming game.

And Generations solved that by having, okay, well, there's the full-on modern 3D Sonic, and that is just going to operate like Infinite Runner. And then, okay, we'll do the flat 2D side-scrolling, even though there's still 3D characters for the rest. And being able to bounce back and forth just felt like they were being kind of honest with themselves about what the games were. And then we got like Sonic Worlds whatever that mario galaxy thing was and after that it's just been back to i don't even know what they're trying at this point yeah um should we skip halftime because we spent forever on uh honorable mentions i think we should spend five minutes on do you have a character you want to bring in is that what it is no then let's skip halftime because the only thing i want to talk about is destiny if we're not going to do that then i don't want to

talk about i don't know i think time for destiny time i feel like people talk about a lot like to hear us talk about other things too okay i will justin if you want to talk about destiny let's let's talk about how how has it been for you let's talk at high level are you doing the right we're going to talk so much about Destiny. The whole next episode is just going to be about Destiny. Let's hold off. And Metroid. Let's, God, this is, can we talk about this?

It is September 14th, 2017. I think this might be the best video game year in my lifetime. I cannot think of another, especially like, I think about, I keep thinking about the fact that like Mario and Zelda came out, are going to have come out in the same year. That's buck wild. Destiny 2 came out and is one of my favorite shooters ever. Persona 5 was out this year. Gravity Rush 2.

Everybody doesn't need to say it all at once. I know I'm forgetting about other stuff, but it just feels like, especially looking forward toward the end of the year, it's just like, it's fucking, PUBG, like it's fucking bananas how many games came out. feels it was that year that bioshock came out and like six other amazing games came out 2007 yeah it's uh 98 i think was like the dope year where or i think 97 is when final fantasy 7 came out and like all those really good n64 games came out like that

was a really good year 2007 resident evil 7 came out this year all those really good N64 games came out. Like that was a really good year. 2007 was a good year. Resident Evil 7 came out this year. It's every, it's every. Okay, now here. Shit. I will say y'all, 2007. This would be tight. Okay, here's 2007.

Modern Warfare. That was a good one. Bioshock. Bioshock. Portal. Team Fortress 2. The entire Orange Box. Team Fortress 2.

Loving it. Yeah. Half-Life Episode 2. Super Mario Galaxy. Jesus. Assassin's Creed. yeah bioshock portal team fortress the entire orange box team fortress loving it yeah half life episode 2 super mario galaxy jesus assassin's creed rock band yeah the witch fucking crazy uncharted unreal tournament 3 god of war 2 uh forza motorsport 2 mass effect that was that's probably i think so i guess it's just years that end in seven it's just like a really every decade we get like one year where it's just like what up what up what up what up justin i have a question yeah so like everything you named launched the franchises for like the following decade yeah does that mean this is a decade of near automata 2 welcome everyone god i played a lot of that game um oh my gosh let's let's it's a very good year i just want to talk about near automata for half jesus christ

fucking rules man it's such a good game i'm glad that we're going to be talking about that again for this episode um justin do you want to do your lonely space game you don't want to do my lonely i will do my lonely space game first this you want me to do my lonely space game? I will do my lonely space game first. This game is from 13 years ago, so I barely remember it, but no. It did make a big impression on me. Tacoma is the new game from Fulbright, the Gone Home developers,

and it is very much in the spirit of that game. You are some sort of space employee. The nature of your task is hidden from you until later in the game. But you are aboard a space station that has become inoperable at some point in the past, and the crew is gone uh but the sort of ship's ai has recorded conversations um that they had so the especially in the last sort of uh 72 hours um before this sort of catastrophe happened um and you the bulk of the game is you exploring the ship and watching these conversations take place. And your progression is, I would say, gated a little bit more than it was in Gone Home.

There are certain segments where you have to listen for a fragment of conversation in the cutscene, for lack of a better term, which are represented by sort of a wireframe. And sometimes someone will mention a code or something. And there's also points in the scenes where you can pause and look at somebody's display that they brought up and read personal emails and more sort of like world building, stuff like that. But every once in a while, a password or something. But it's not really a skill-based game in the same way that Gone Home

was not a skill-based game. But I was really moved by the thing I thought that was really interesting about this game versus Gone Home. And it seems subtle, but to to me if you have ever you guys like sleep no more is that what is that is that a tv show sleep no more is an interactive not really yeah i guess technically interactive theater experience where you walk around a hotel and you watch these scenes play out and there's something very profound about um watching a scene happen around you that you cannot interact with um it's a really interesting feeling to like feel sort of like a ghost in a space and it's certainly even though the the wire frames are

technically the the ones who are not present um The fact that they will sort of walk right through you makes you very much feel like a ghost or an interloper. And they do a really shockingly good job of drawing. For characters that are basically wireframes, they draw them all, and I mean in a narrative sense, draw them all really well and are very clearly defined and have really in it like you have a really good sense of who everybody

is it helps that they're all color coded so their wireframe is color coded their locker is set to a certain color and it really and you also see their face right when they're speaking you see like the ID right am I remembering that wrong um

i don't i don't know about that but you could you you find the bottom photos and stuff like that in their personal spaces that show you like what they look like otherwise they are represented by this like wireframe hologram right sure um and you know it uh i will say this i don't think the story sort of the the the broad story hit home with me it did not have the same emotional impact but as a method of storytelling um i thought it was really fascinating uh and it does feel like like obviously so this is steve gainer's studio he worked on gone home and before that he was working at infinity ward i'm sorry not infinity ward what is it irrational irrational irrational he was a 2k marine he loves a little bit right he was a 2k marine design the grenade launchers for yeah he made all the he made all the good sounds with his mouth michael winslow style

yeah he he did what is considered to be one of the heights of bioshock his uh of the franchise which was the expansion pack for bioshock 2 which is really excellent and you've it's interesting to see him and obviously he's surrounded by surrounded himself with other people that are really engaged with this kind of storytelling but it's interesting to see how he has um explored it and also done it uh in ways that are not only interesting but also affordable for a smaller studio to pull off so if you did like fully modeled fully motion captured like fully detailed 3d environments in tacoma there's no way they would have pulled it off right like the level of detail and animation uh would have been way too expensive but it was obviously a step up from what was essentially like just auto audio

diaries and like reading text in gone home so they've really just evolved that it's really interesting i would also make the argument that had they done that it would have been less effective yeah see i i completely yeah we're about to have an argument about that because my game took a different route uh my i think that the way that they told the story was really fucking cool like i felt like i was more a part of this world than i wasn't gone home. And gone home was one of my favorite games of all time. Um,

because it was so like, it was so profound and so unique, uh, when, when it first came out and I was so like bought into what they were doing with it. And I was even more bought in, in,

in Tacoma. Uh, like the characters are so great and the acting was so fantastic. And I felt, it really delivered that sense of going from knowing nothing about this world to knowing a lot of really having a very intimate connection with these characters the problem was for me um and and bear with me because this is going to seem like a pretty like surface level argument uh it's a it's a pretty short game you can probably finish it in uh two hours hour and a half, two hours, which is very much like in the style of Gone Home.

And I don't have any problem with that. Like I have no qualms with a game's length as long as it like earns that length. And it definitely does here. But in this case, I really enjoyed interacting with this world and learning about these people so much that I was really disappointed when it was over. And I think the reason why that was is because while the method of interacting with the world, I enjoyed much, much more than in Gone Home. Gone Home was a character study in a single character.

And it gave you an hour and a half, two hours of learning about that one character. And you get the same amount of time exploring these six characters, technically seven, because there's like this AI character that you get to know. And I guess you kind of get to know like what your characters about they're sort of at the end. And that to me was just not enough time to flesh them out in the way

that I wanted to, where I kind of learned like what their backstory was and then what their relationship was with each other. And then the game was over. Like I, I needed like, I needed, I i needed some some more like when the is part of that is it partly just like you kind of need to think of it differently than a traditional like do you think of it more like a play in that sense where you're not necessarily going to get

100 percent thoroughness on these characters you're going to get what you can get to sort of develop a story between them I mean if you think about it that way then I don't think it was a great play like that's just not a good way of thinking about it because again if you saw a play and the play was two hours long and it just showed you what the relationships were with these characters and then showed

you what their backstories were and introduced like some some character traits which this game does and it does it really really well and then the play was over without like much else happening it felt um it felt rushed like when the climax kind of happens and you start to see like uh these folks plans start to get into motion and you see sort of them start like being forced to tackle this big big heavy problem that they're all in like that moment came right i felt like right after all the introduction work and that introduction work was like half the game and so i just i wanted i wanted it to be a little bit more

fleshed out like i want i just wanted more from these characters because again like the way you learn about them is so cool and then it does some great great character work and then it's kind of over before you get like the third the third step in that process i think the issue with all that is if if you're going to use the play metaphor is that it's each kind of partition of the space station is its own one act that is kind of building towards something but they all have their kind of beginning middle and end uh pseudo moment of growth for each of the characters but they're i don't want to go into like huge spoilers but i'll just say that like there are other players in this universe um and they have a very important role within the universe sure and i think it's very gutsy in how it wants that these players to seem almost like background um

but the problem is ultimately like your antagonists in this universe are not on the ship. And that puts it in a situation that I think has the problem that comes with the ending is you and you, the character that the player is playing, and ultimately the antagonists of the game are experiencing an entirely separate story and you basically get a tiny hint of what that is after watching this other story which makes it kind of an unusual framing device um i will also say in terms of the story without getting into spoilers one of the people who was outside of the ship and is very important is the uh ceo of the company that is handling this uh space thing and why why you're in space is tied to his business model but it was like a little disappointing to see somebody from the bioshock universe doing to see somebody from the bioshock universe doing another story about the dangers of capitalism yeah and like pseudo-libertarian dudes who have strong beliefs and i don't know it felt like very familiar and i kept waiting for a twist that never really came for me the one thing i will say

and this is about kind of what justin was talking about with the the depiction of the people i think it definitely works but going back to sleep no more i think a huge part of what people love about sleep no more and interactive theater is the voyeurism like you are an invisible person and you can get really close to human bodies in a way that you can't in another space. I know that sounds very creepy, but that is an appeal. Like you are near people and like you're there is a permission as long as you behave like a decent human being to have a proximity to people and like see people act and behave and make bold choices. behave and make bold choices and this is like the rare time where i kept thinking as i was playing it man somebody figured out how to make a david cage game and they don't have david cage's resources yeah this is the game i wish he had made because being able to be up close with people who looked

real during these scenes and like to see them cry to see them feel pain, to see like being robbed of that depiction of emotion. Yeah. It really hurt it. It delivers some great like romance and a really great, like a fucking like, man, it fucked me up. There's a character

and a lot of her arc is just about how she deals with anxiety and like panic attacks. And like that was fantastic. And like, that was, that was, that was fantastic. And I totally get what Chris is saying here because like a lot of that, that power I think is robbed by the fact by like,

when you see two holograms kissing, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't feel as like powerful as seeing like two actual human, human beings doing. And I, that was a thing that i kept thinking was coming i'm gonna say like one spoiler thing this is not huge because this is a thing that

doesn't happen um so fast forward 30 seconds um but i kept thinking that like there was some twist that like everybody was ai that like there was going to be a reason that we were seeing these things as this because so much of the game is about the essentially privileges and rights of artificial intelligence what does that mean in the future and i kept waiting for something like oh you got us to fall in love with these people and they're not actually people sure um the game also does a great job of i i compared it kind of to uh it's sort of the inverse of prey uh where prairie set upon this god that came out this year too fuck what a good year uh it came out uh the the the characters in prey were like really great and expanded entirely from audio logs and emails

and you know dnd character sheets that you find laying around their office and you really get to love those characters and then inevitably you find them dead in it on a on a toilet somewhere like a hundred percent of the time they are fucking uh no that's not true there's those characters okay but pretty much all of them are fucking dead and toilet bodies and and so that like felt like after a while i was just like corpse robbing kind of but but what this game does is it makes you fall in love with these characters and then hope holy shit you don't come into a room and see a cryopod with a corpse in it because that would be very very very sad and so that that it does that really well where i did care about these characters a lot and genuinely had a lot of dread that i was gonna find like around any corner would be a body and i'd be like oh shit like that is heartbreaking

it does a really great job of setting up those stakes and and following through on them um can i move on to my game for the final one yes um my video game is also a lonely space game and it is called lone echo and uh technically it came out at like the very end of july but i'm gonna do it here anyway because uh holy shit that i fall in love with this game in a major way. It is a virtual reality game for Oculus Rift using the touch controllers. It is set upon a mining station that is orbiting Saturn. You play as a robot named Jack. And Jack, the only sort of person that is also aboard this station is

a human woman named olivia uh who is the uh the captain of this station um and uh while while sort of like going through your your your boot up and your like duties at the beginning of the game. Uh, right. Great. Uh, the station is hit by, uh, this anomaly that opens up in, in the rings of Saturn. And you go around the station with Olivia trying to figure out what's going

on, what the anomaly is about doing some repairs to essential systems. Um, it is very like, uh, hardcore space opera sci-fi where like there's just a lot of we got to recalibrate the um yeah and so like i think it's similar to uh to come in the sense that like it's just it's it's a very personal it's just you and olivia and you're in VR. And so you can go up and like grab her helmet and,

uh, she will like slap your hand away, uh, like every time, which is very, very charming. Um, there is, that's how you get points,

right? That's how you get points. Just how many times you can grab her helmet. Um, there is, uh, there are like conversation options that you can, uh,

open up. So there's like sort of a dialogue thing going on but most of the game is you and olivia going around the space station fixing up what needs to get fixed up and then going out to investigate this this anomaly um and there's god there's so much to talk about here uh we have to i i want to talk just because i found this to be by far the most incredible thing and one of the reasons it's probably the best vr experience i've had the movement in the game is out so fucking so this is this is i the thing i like about vr and i don't play that much vr these days i kind of like my relationship with vr now where i hear about some hot shit and then i throw on the headset and i play that hot shit and i'm reminded

that vr is here and exceptionally good there's not a bunch of software for it because it's tough to dedicate that that many resources to making something for a very limited install base this game is developed by uh ready at dawn who made a lot of really great games and also uh the order 1886 um and but mostly great their ratio their hit rate is their hit rate is fucking hot as hell. Wow. Made some hot-ass PSP games. Yeah, they made some really good PSP. Griffin, you literally just willed that game back into existence.

Yeah, sorry about that. It had, like, fallen off existence. And there's some studios that have made stuff like this before. There's some studios who have dedicated resources, right? I think this had, like, a 60-person dev team, which is which is like pretty good size for a vr game um and what i really like about vr is seeing how uh these these devs who are on the fucking cutting edge who are like on the frontier of figuring out how out how stuff works handle problems with making games work in vr um so i i went to quake con a couple weeks ago and played the bethesda

vr games and like doom vr does some cool stuff where like you move around by teleporting and while you're choosing where to teleport time slows down so there's also sort of a mechanic like that uh in fallout vr the way that the vats system works is really neat like time uh slows way down and then whenever you point your gun at at somebody like it highlights body parts that you are going to hit when you're aiming at them so you can line up these like crazy shots uh and so that's really neat skyrim vr doesn't do anything like skyrim vr their solution as far as i can tell unless they do some major work before it comes out they saw these problems with adapting skyrim to vr and for a lot of them they're just like i don't know maybe you just like i don't know we'll

just do something and it doesn't feel like it doesn't feel inspired and it doesn't feel like they are like discovering new stuff for how to solve like things like locomotion. And Lone Echo is on the opposite end of that, where the way that they handle locomotion is so novel and so fucking exciting. Basically, how it works is you are there's no gravity anywhere there's no artificial gravity you will never walk in in lone echo the only way you get around is by reaching out with your hands grabbing on to any wall it's pretty easy like you can grab onto any like even sheer surface uh and you pull and launch yourself through space and you have some like thrusters on your wrists uh which by the way feels fucking awesome you feel like superman you just point your wrist where you want to go and you pull the thruster button but they're really limited and they don't make you go very fast it's mostly for

correction of your trajectory as you like launch yourself off of other platforms it's so good it feels so so good and there's also this game started uh as a game jam uh that was sort of inspired by like how astronauts move around the the iss uh and is originally and this is also part of the game a game called echo arena where you are flying around this sort of uh arena inders game style uh flying towards these discs and throwing them into an opponent's goal but you can also grab onto your opponents and like punch them in the head to stun them, so it's like a full contact sport. But that method of getting around,

it's a beefy game. It lasts like six, seven, maybe eight hours, and it never gets old. It is fun from start to finish. It feels so good. Yeah, speaking as someone that I've spoken about this before, motion sickness is a problem for me in some games. Mirror's Edge was like the most recent game

that really gave me a lot of problems. VR obviously is very hit or miss for me. Games where you're walking in VR are like a total no-go. The teleport situation that a lot of games use is a total, it's good. It's a solve. It doesn't make me sick when I use those games. I was really worried in this game

because that wasn't there. And so I played for about an hour and I never got like super, super nauseous. I started, after an hour, I started feeling like a little bit weird. And I thought about it for a while and I was talking to Ben Gucero, who's like the obsessive VR fan on staff.

And he was like, you know, it's interesting. Part of that might be VR or part of that might be vr or part of that might be this is what your body feels like after you've been waiting for an hour it is the it's that the most immersive vr game i have ever played and that word i think has lost its meaning a little bit when talking about vr but here i mean it like i took off the headset and was like fuck like i was just i was just because you can spend a lot of time in in this game i found myself playing it and being so hooked and having so much fun with it that i knew i was getting exhausted like it is difficult to leave that

headset on for you know over an hour but i found myself like sticking into it for a couple of hours and then hopping out of it and having had this like really immersive experience and then you take the headset off and all of a sudden your gravity's back and it's like it's really really powerful so that that works really well the other yeah the other big thing i think for the immersion and and griffin like the gravity thing is one thing like having gravity come back is one thing i finished playing and the big thing that they do in this game that is so successful is that there are no there's no ui in every thing there's no ui so every single thing that you're doing whether it's selecting dialogue choices happens on your wrist on like a little wrist

computer that you look down to interact with obviously things you pick up or with your hands so there's no menu so you didn't you didn't make it very far there are there's a ton of stuff like that it's all on your wrists right and so if you want to look at what your mission objectives is that's on like the side of your wrist there's a little like iphone unlock slide that you just drag your finger across it works every time right and then there's a little window that pops up and you can grab the window and fucking launch it away and it'll disappear when it gets a certain distance away from you if you want to like track a mission so that you can like see a waypoint on your map you just like press a button that appears on this

dynamic window um you have a scanner that you activate by touching a button at the top of your wrist and then it just like pops out of your robot arm and then you point it at something and scan it for a couple of seconds and then a little tab appears next to the scanner you reach over with your other hand grab that tab and you pull it out of your wrist and it just appears and then you can look at with the data on it and fucking throw it away from yourself as far as you want it's crazy i i so i i experienced all that stuff which which i thought was mind-blowing and then and took so i took the helmet off i took a break after about an hour i went back to my computer i was like doing some work on my computer and i was looking down at my hands in the most bizarre like i just had robot hands

for an hour and now i don't and i had this like total out of body freak out while i was at my computer that i've never had when playing vr and i really think like the the lack of menus is a huge part of that where it's like you were this person you were the robot i guess you were this person. You were the robot, I guess. You were this robot for an hour, and now you're not, and what is real? And it really was a total mindfuck for a surprising amount of time. Is this Oculus funded, like never going to be on Vive, basically? I think so, probably. I don't know, actually. I think it's an Oculus exclusive for right now.

And this is something that we kind of addressed when talking about Tacoma. This is a game about Jack and Olivia like that's it and and so it is all about their relationship uh Jack is voiced by uh uh oh shit what's that dude oh Troy Baker um and um there's a the voice actress who does Olivia's Alice Coulthard, who has, has done like a bunch of games. Like her voice is very recognizable and they do a great job. Like this, this,

this relationship between the two of them is the point of the entire game. And it is, it is fantastic to the point where like you are a robot where if you die, your consciousness is just instantly teleported into another robot body that just like pops out of a hub. but Olivia doesn't have that. And so the whole time you feel there, there's this sense of,

because again, there is a disaster that happens. And now all of a sudden it is, it is about like this human's relationship with this AI who is becoming more emotional and more human. And it does like, it doesn't, it doesn't burn out. It doesn't like end before it needs to.

Like you really, really, really get to explore that relationship. And it is, it is really fantastic. Yeah. If I had to knock one small thing in terms of the immersion and I, there's not a solve for this right now. Technologically, I fully get why it's in the game but um there were moments where i wasn't able to uh look around 360 degrees um because the wires were getting tangled or the sensors were off or stuff like that and the way to sort of reorient yourself it's like that 15 degree like breaking

like yeah yeah you do like these abrupt turns which yourself is like... It's that 15-degree turn. Like breaking the... Like, yeah. Yeah, you do like these abrupt turns, which again is like a solve for a problem. I don't think it's a great solve, but again, without a wireless headset solution, there's not a really great way around it. My only... My qualm with the game is the last third of it maybe

takes place in this sort of different environment that I'm not going to spoil uh but there's it becomes that traversal becomes a lot more um you have to have a certain mastery to it because there are things that you just like you can't touch uh and it becomes a lot more sort of like there's a bigger emphasis on like the movement as gameplay movement as like a challenge that that you can fail uh as opposed to a really really neat exploration mechanic and there's still like a lot of exploration that happens in this environment but there's a lot of sections where it's just like okay fly around this tunnel and be real real careful um and that stuff is really cool but i

i feel like it detracted from it just a little bit. If it weren't for that stuff, this would be definitely game of the year contender. Superhot was really cool, and Superhot in my mind was the best way to do a shooter in this world. But I understood before VR came out, I could envision, okay, one day there's going to be a really good shooter in this.

Lone Echo is so fucking fresh and like original i i think the closest comparison you could make is very can i just i i know you're trying to make a point but i think that's very dismissive of super hot super hot isn't not a shooter that's fair that's fair i'm i'm specifically talking about like i put maybe it's just because i played super hot on pc and then i played it on vr that's that's fair i i don't want i don't want to shit talk super hot because i think Superhot is still my favorite VR game. So they made a Halo. Big deal.

No. Okay. But they didn't make a Halo because you couldn't make a Halo in VR. You could make a shooter where time stands still and that is the way that like you handle like knowing your environment when you are in a first person VR perspective. I didn't mean to sound like I was shit talking Superhot. I didn't mean to sound like I was shit talking super hot, super hot is the paragon of what I was describing earlier of, okay, we have figured out how to make this experience work in VR and we have

changed stuff dramatically and thoughtfully to make that experience work. I just, I don't know. I guess I just didn't expect like this. I could not have expected this type of experience. And maybe there was a drift which i played a little bit of which is kind of that same thing of you flying through space but like this is this is this is a completely different beast it is like it is a really really fucking

fantastic game that i cannot recommend highly enough if you have uh if you if you have an oculus headset um because it just tells a great story. And more importantly, like, it is a thoughtful adventure game that because of the way that they have done locomotion is, like, really fun to play. It is not a... I think the term walking simulator, right, when used as a pejorative, can describe, like, some of these experiences

and those comparisons would be made by mostly shitty people. But you could not say that about this. this is an adventure game sure but it is not like it is not boring because it simulates the feeling of being in space better than any game i have ever played in my entire life um i i love it to love it to bits great game um well even though i plant you didn't play that lone echo joint did you nah i'm hoping to play it in like the next couple weeks hearing your passion though it feels like probably that one should take it um right i don't know that well speaking as the the only other person that played lone echo i would also agree that that would be my pick um yeah i just like i i just like i

really like i i thought this is one of those rare months where i've actually played all the games and i like sonic and i like rabbits and i really liked tacoma but like lone echo fucking floored me so that's like definitely my my pick cool yeah i think it's the best vr experience i've ever had and it should be played by anyone who has the capability to play it got a winner try to get in there get in there and do some nasty things on his computer to try and make it work with the with the vibe there's some guys there's probably some guys yeah i'm sure there's some guys what's the on a yeah they're saying there's a github uh are we let's do some things are we in a new we're not in a new quarter

what was the July game because that was 70 years ago July and I don't remember what it would have been uh Splatoon probably Splatoon it might have been Splatoon maybe that seems right right

maybe Pire came out I think that was one we talked about, but I don't think it won. No, that did not win. I think it was Splatoon 2. I'm looking at a list now. It was Splatoon 2, Pyre, The End is Nigh, and Miitopia. Yeah, it was Splatoon 2. Okay, I think this game is better than Splatoon 2.

Also, we talked about Hidden My Game by Mom. Russ, I just want to let you know Brother Ate My Pudding is out live. What? Is this the spiritual sequel? Brother Ate My Pudding is... Well, there was an actual sequel. Yeah, well, there was Hidden My Game by Mom 2. You know what's coming to Switch?

Really? Yeah, isn't that very good? In Brother Ate My Pudding, the boy is back, and he ate his sister's pudding, and this time he has to find a place to hide from her because she's very angry that he ate a pudding. Sure. This sounds like maybe that's the game of the month.

Yeah, I should have mentioned that in Honorable Legends. Brother Ate My Pudding is the best game of the year 2017. The certificate's in the mail. So Lone Echo echo but wait now lone echo has to go against splatoon yeah i i okay i think lone echo wins but i realize again two people haven't played it so yeah i mean i played a lot of splatoon 2 but i haven't in a while it did not have the like long tail that i kind of expected it to have um i kind of i finished a single player and i got up to like level 15 or so in the multiplayer and had some fun with it i did one of the splat fests and played a bunch of salmon run and now i think i'm okay i think i'm good yeah are we sure i the june game didn't supplant no because it's a different

quarter april oh that was a different quarter okay and the game for that quarter was persona no persona was not because griffin was super upset was it pub g yeah it is all zelda pub g and now currently lone echo lone echo lone echo uh but we have a september is going to come i love you so much september though damn be brutal let's talk about september so we got destiny to talk about other things beyond destiny uh yeah so yeah i think we should because there are very good games yeah metroid in september metroid uh which i reviewed and uh danganronpa 3 i'm very very excited for uh cuphead comes out in september oh wow finally knack 2 i mean everybody's all hyphy for that one yeah um knack in the action yeah there's some there's some there's some stuff there's some stuff what was the what was the there

was another one what was it did they get mark morrison to do return of the knack um oh dishonored thing oh yeah dishonored i played that at quake con also it's fucking great um starfox 2 which no one's ever played tournament on uh the switch it's a good time um yeah what are you talking about for the snes classic super nintendo classic that's october is that well, no. You're going to get it in October because Walmart shipments are going to move pretty slow. But yeah.

But it's the end of September, yeah. Right on. But it's going to be all Destiny. We're probably going to spend an hour talking about Destiny. Just to keep you. Yeah, we're going to clear our calendars. But that's going to do it for us

for this month, folks. Thank you so much for joining us. You can read all about these games at Polygon.com as long as other games mainly destiny too and uh but that is going to do it for us so uh for my co-hosts my name is justin mccroy thank you for listening the besties we'll be back with you next month with the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. Done. Besties!