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

Episode Date: March 6, 2017

At least the games have been good in 2017! Though we still don’t have a great explanation as to why, the first ever Polygon podcast has returned on a monthly basis. Join The Besties (Russ Frushtick, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy and Chris Plante) as they nonsensically attempt to pick the “best” game released in January 2017. GAMES DISCUSSED: Dandy Dungeon, Chess (again), Fire Emblem Heroes, For Honor, Nioh, Horizon: Zero Dawn Theme song by Ian Dorsch Download MP3" Subscribe? Sure, you can subscribe. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I thought that was a tomb rumor. No, sir. Okay, now it's time to start the intro. Starring me, Justin. The only sane one on the show. The funniest goof. I got my yellow belt. Oh, nice, dude.

Thanks, dude. Did you have doubt? Was there doubt in your mind that you were not going to pass the test? Because you actually had to wait for the results for your Taekwondo test. That's true. I did have to wait for the results in my teacher today did you have to wait in line with the six-year-olds as well or do they uh russ don't be an asshole she was five it was just me and her in taking our tests um and uh in the white belt section and we both did

a great job awesome what level is yellow i didn't like how her how close to the top is it i'd rather not clarify it's the second it's the second one it's the one after white it's the one after nothing it's just above nothing they give you a white belt for coming in and giving them 30 the white belt is functional the white belt holds your gi together that's it actually no you tie your gi together the way the white belt does functional. The white belt holds your gi together. That's it. Actually, no, you tie your gi together. The white belt does nothing. But the yellow belt, I'm a weapon. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the month. My name is Chill Dan, and I know the best games of the month.

My name is Todd, and I play game. My name is Russ Froschek, and I know the best games best game of the week excited to meet todd in this episode finally here on the besties we talk about the latest and greatest in sports technology cars entertainment uh fashion men's fitness and women's fitness and uh so much more but uh this month it's all about video etymologies oh damn no video justin i i heard a rumor about video games that it was because my kids love them right but i don't i'm i'm i'm more of a uh you know silver screen guy sure and so it's it's really just what we're talking about when we talk about video games it's like a fancy term for pac-man right they've uh they've come a long way since pac-man yeah and we're gonna explore just that topic um they're talking a lot about they're talking a lot about dig doug and i'm assuming

that's just about a man named doug who's pretty cool you can dig and i guess he also eats ghosts like all video games they eat the ghosts and pills and stuff and in video games right um not all games have pills anymore actually that's that's a misconception i met with shigeru miyamoto to talk about video games and he told me not all games have pills anymore roll the clip let's hear that now and it's just video sheer memo just like no not anymore not not all games um hey y'all 2017 gaming wise at least what the fuck is going on because it's it's extremely good it's like 2017 is compensating for something yeah it's like the best like first two months of games of a year that i can maybe ever remember. Holy shit.

Yeah, it's been very, very strong. Do you know what it feels like? It's like we were getting all these games from people in America, right? And they were all the same. And then everyone everywhere else in the world was like, what if we started kicking ass? Wait, did we do it again? None of our four games were made in the U.S., right? Where's?

Yeah, wow. Yeah. Is that what happened last week, too? I think most of them. Where was that made? I think America, maybe. Are you sure? It seems European because it's so good.

There was a Valve staff, former Valve staffers on it, so I think it was American. Like Eric Wolpaw? Can we do honorable mentions? Talk about the stuff that didn't quite make the list because I think we all had some stuff. Can I name a big one that should be on this list? Hidden Folks. Oh.

I saw that on the App Store today. I was curious about it, but I have not played it it's like uh waldo yeah it's like where's waldo but made by the guy who did bounden um which is one of my favorite games like period uh and it's where's waldo but black and white and you can play it on your ipad or uh iphone or steam in the the locations they're huge like you you have to zoom in and zoom out to just kind of get around the the kind of 2d maps and everything is interactive so like it has all these cute noises that i think were made by adrian the designer so you'll you'll tap the bushes, and they'll move around a little bit

and go whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. Wow. Or there'll be a garage, and you can limit the garage to the game. Yeah, dog. They really have come a long way since Pac-Man. Yeah, I know. Who is actually named Pac-Man after a puck.

Come on, stop it. Everybody knows this. I was surprised at how many good iOS games games i know y'all played dandy dungeons right yeah yeah i want to talk about that one if we're there's a fun one it was uh yeah it's cool the there's a meta narrative on top of it where you're like a game developer uh who quits his salary job to make games in his underwear pretty much uh and the the you play the actual game itself the game itself is sort of like a dungeon crawler except you have to trace the path you're going to take through each room with the idea being that you can't retrace your steps and you are trying to

get to every square and fight every enemy um yeah i found the game itself kind of poopy personally like not my kind of game but I love the meta stuff I thought was hilarious. Is it poopy, or is it not your kind of game, Russ? Because those are two distinctly different ideas. I think those are the same thing. You're not into poopy games. Impeccable taste. I played a lot of this fun

new iOS. Wow, we're just, like, blazing through, huh? Can't even take a second. Yeah, I don't want to spend two fucking hours doing this show again. It's a fun thing it's very cute the music it's worth it just for the intro song which is absolutely fantastic play it with the sound it's really cute

and I agree the game is not my favorite but especially when you end up having to grind dungeons a lot to try to get gear but the stuff on top of it is really cool I love RPG shit in games that was actually something that turned me off of that game i kind of just wanted like a little puzzler where you had to like route your way through different dungeons making sure that like you walked over the potion if you were low on hit points before you started

fighting the enemy like i was into that shit i was not into the like oh well this is a five star rainbow shell and if you collect eight of these, you can upgrade your sword. It does have kind of an unfortunate pay-to-win thing where you can revive in a dungeon if you buy rice balls. Next, feed the beast. Keep it going. So speaking of iOS games, I've been playing this great iOS game, and it's a really well-designed one, and it's called Chess.

Don't talk about Chess. Did we talk about it last month? Yes. It's really good. Have there been any updates? Yeah, they got this new piece and it's called the Saboteur. Okay. I just played a lot of it and it's really

good and I upgraded to the Platinum membership on chess.com so fucking step to me. What does that give you? Do you get like special like twitch icons and stuff you get like infinite lessons and like uh you can run these little tactics drills and that's like all i like i i spend roughly two and a half hours a day rocking a baby and i have basically now i just spend that time running tactics drills like trying to get that old ranking up um but i also this is not uh ios related but it is kind of chess related i hooked up the uh my oculus and i got oculus touch going and played super hot vr god did i talk about this last month

earth shatteringly good no it's fucking un unbelievably good it is by it is by magnitudes the best fucking vr thing i have done like it is the best vr thing it's my new like go-to you have to check this shit out um but i also started messing around with alt space which is sort of the social app that i think is probably the the most um uh like well-made app for for vr of its kind there's also a rec room but rec room sucks um did i talk about this likeSpace? It's kind of like that, but it's more like Second Life, but not nearly as horny. And I played a game of chess against a dude in this big virtual room. Well, listen, I was playing, and we heard what sounded like cheering

and fighting coming from this theater that was also in this board game space. And we walked over there, and this dad was just showing us his kids' wrestling videos. What? No. What? game space and we walked over there and this dad was just showing us his kids wrestling videos what? no we played chess and his high school aged son was doing wrestling and so while I played chess against this stranger in a board that

was as big as I was this nearby dad explained to me how they score actual wrestling not like fun WD and it was just a really wonderful experience the board was as big as you were yeah it's like a virtual space so you can like drag it it's like it was just a really wonderful experience wait the board was as big as you were yeah it's like a virtual space so you can like drag it it's like it was on some fucking wizard chest shit also uh i played a lot of desktop sim desktop tabletop simulator in vr which is really fun i played some

code names which is a really fun board game and um some secret hitler and all of it really actually performs really well all unliclicensed, I'm assuming. Before we move on to actual games. Yeah, what's up? I just wanted to talk about chess briefly. Okay. What's your end game? What do you mean?

What are you working towards? I mean, what, do you want me to fucking, like, challenge Kasparov in a seven-game set for the fate of the world? No, I'm just like, I like playing it, and it's like a fun little puzzle game and every move is just like a little puzzle that you have to solve. I'm into that shit. Also, like,

you play shooters, you're no eSports champion. Yeah, why are we doing fucking any of this? In Call of Duty, I get gold guns if I play enough of them. Okay, well I get it. Oh, you want the unlocks. You want unlocks is what you're saying. You want skins. I mean, you get your ranking goes up and you play people with higher not everyone cares about the ranking you don't get a belt for everything god okay so that's the end of

that's the end of yeah russ's should just open up his butt and poop the beast is full you should have all right uh folks i'm hearing the beast is full we gotta move on to our real game has anybody played night in the woods though because that's when i actually do when i check out All right, folks, I'm here and the beast is full. We got to move on to our real game. Has anybody played Night in the Woods, though? Because that's one I actually do want to check out. It just came out. I'm working on a review of it, so I can't comment. Oh, well, shoot. Someone at work played it for a stream.

I don't want to give their name out, but they literally could not make it past a platforming sequence that happens in the first five minutes. Oh, God, not again. Oh, no, not again. Oh, no. Too late. This indie platform adventure is too late for us. You could say they were doomed.

Okay. So that's, who wants to start this month? I'm going to start. Oh, boy. Wow. Okay. Just got to go ahead and, what's your game, Russ? My game is called fire emblem heroes

okay good you okay with that that's fine that's the i i want to hear about it because i've heard a lot of chatter about it but i'm not a big fire emblem fan and i'm curious if this would be more up my alley okay so fire emblem heroes uh is i guess the third technically the third nintendo mobile game to come out. I'm not counting Pokemon Go because Nintendo didn't make that. Yeah, I was about to say. But so there was Miitomo,

which really wasn't a game at all. It was basically fiery garbage. And then Mario Run, which came out, which was okay-ish. How frustrating is Miitomo in that they were like, let's release Tomodachi Life, but with less interactivity. It was terrible. the worst uh also just real quick about pokemon go they

just updated it with second gen pokemon but they only added 80 of i believe i think 101 i think i think gen 2 brought it up to 250 something hey guys why couldn't you fucking get the other 20 it's been like forever since pokemon go was released you're like oh man we couldn't crack toadodile what if we couldn't we couldn't crack sintra we just don't know how to make a raccoon 3d what are you talking about it would take them no there is no amount of pokemon they could add 600 new pokemon on top of the 700 existing i still wouldn't play that game yeah it really doesn't matter to me. And I think everyone who's like quit playing Pokemon is sort of in that boat.

Like nothing would bring them back to it. Yeah. I think like a real Pokemon game. Yeah, that might be good. Yeah, that'd be fun. Thankfully, Fire Emblem, which is the third Nintendo mobile game made by Intelligent Systems,

which are one of their best developers, is really effing good. It is one of my favorite mobile games I think I've ever played. So it's a free-to-play game, and basically you summon a variety of characters from the Fire Emblem franchise, starting with the very first game

to even the most recent game. And you use those characters in 4v4... Sorry. Sorry. You use those characters in 4v4 battles in, like, much smaller arenas. So, generally in Fire Emblem... You repeated yourself like I'm gonna

edit. I just want to make it super clear that that was totally in there. Oh, but you're gonna get the cough out of there, right? I wouldn't make a habit of that. You're gonna get the cough out of there, right? Yeah, I'll be sure to get the cough out of it for the besties. I officially, I edit out all your stupid coughs. Justin, edit out the fucking cough. What?

Oh, no, the cough was in. Didn't everybody hear the cough? Please, Justin, edit the cough out. I'm gonna keep putting, I'm gonna keep mentioning the cough, so it'll be like it won't even make sense without the cough. The cough is a key story point of this episode. See, God, no, we don't need

the sequel. Okay, so you have these smaller maps. Traditionally Fire Emblem maps are like huge and like 64 by 64 squares. These are really pretty small. I think it's like 4 by 8 or like probably 8 by 8

is probably what it works out to. But in terms of the mechanics and how it all works, it's very, very close to classic Fire Emblem. You have the traditional sword beats axe beats spear, red beats green beats blue,

like that rock, know rock paper scissors mechanic is it work why i like it so much is there by having the smaller maps um games play out very fast uh you could spend like an hour or more on a single map into like a normal firebomb game here you could finish a map in like five minutes which i think matches mobile really well that's that's long that's a long match if it takes five five minutes which i think matches mobile really well that's that's long that's a long match if it takes five five minutes like in my experience like they just fucking fly right by that sounds hugely appealing to me as someone who's not a huge firework person or fire emblem person sorry i like i love fire emblem and i played and reviewed fates um uh last last year

yeah i think last february um and it's exceptional but yeah like it's it is exhausting some of some of the like levels taking 45 minutes to an hour uh while you like very carefully move around and like move like two steps forward then one step back and always having like your slowest people at the front because they can take the biggest hits because if somebody dies that's it yeah um and that without that restriction like the game just flies by maps sorry i'm loading the game up because i wanted to lock down maps are one two three four five six they're six by eight so 48 48 squares yeah um so the other thing i like about the smaller maps and something they don't do in the normal fire rooms very much at all there's a little bit of this but very little is positioning is a huge

deal like a lot of the characters that you get have abilities where you'll like swap positions with another person or you'll like warp to another person or stuff like that and because the maps are so small that positioning makes a huge impact where you can like swap places

like a mage and a tank can swap places um and and it really just like changes the overall flow of an entire game i got um i got a unit named effie uh this is this is like my favorite thing about the game is the positioning stuff and effie is this big like crazy strong really high defense knight but she can only move one space so i can either like work really hard to like keep her at the front line and sort of move the rest of my army very slowly. Or she has an ability where I can just fucking kick one of my teammates and it moves them forward two spaces. And using that, like,

I can either take this like defensive position or I can just like move into high gear and just like Zerg rush the, the enemy by putting a a a combatant like right behind their their enemy lines there's like there's so much like nuance to that to that uh that strategy griffin let me ask you better chess do you think it's better chess chess too um i i play it when i'm like no i i don't i there's like at first blush when i was like looking at trailers for the game and getting excited because i've been looking forward to it i first of all before we knew anything i was 100 right and they were just gonna fuck it right up yes um but looking

at like the first trailers it does it did just kind of seem like a you mentioned rock paper scissors and that's always been a consideration for fire emblem like uh Like, what is it? Spears beat swords beat axes, or maybe I have that backwards, but I thought that was going to be it. Just like put your sword guy next to the axe guy and you'll win. But there's the positioning stuff. It adds a lot to it.

Everybody has unique skills and some of those skills can like counteract that rock, rock paper scissors system like there's skills that completely nullify those bonuses um and and uh debuffs uh there are ones that sort of go add like another layer like one that makes you very good at killing armored units or archers are really good at killing flying units that has nothing to do with the red blue green rock paper scissors system so like even if you're like a blue unit attacking a green unit if they're flying and you have a way of like

hurting flying enemies then then um then you get bonuses there so there's like so many different ways to make your teammates play along with each other um and and it's it is it is way more complex than i thought it was gonna be yeah it Yeah, it's super, super interesting. I want to hear Plant's story. Plant, tell your story. No, it's not fun. I know, I know. That's why I went into it.

So, like, I made the mistake of, like, reading advice about this game. Oh, did you do the restart shit? Yeah, 10 things to do before you play this game. And I was like, okay, cool. I trust people. And they were like, delete the game over and over again until you get at least, I don't know, five characters with four stars each.

Two five-star characters is what people tell us. Yeah, and like, no. That's no way. That's awful. Yeah, I wasted two days kind of, like, in my spare time picking at it. Like, oh, I need to go to the bathroom. Maybe I'll do this right now. And it wouldn't work.

So then I ended up just, like, kind of giving up. And I don't really have any love for these characters anyway, so it didn't really mean anything who I had. And then I tried to play, and I don't really have any love for these characters anyway, so it didn't really mean anything who I had. And then I tried to play, and I don't know. There were other games I could play, so I just didn't. Yeah, it's competing with a lot for you. Chris, I don't know if we can even say what Chris Plant has right now. You can't say any of the things I'm playing. But I will say that I despise Chris Plant.

And I hope you, Chris, appreciate that it's just temporary until I have the things that you have, but in this moment right now, you are my mortal foe. I do want to say, like, a lot of people have talked about the free-to-play nature of this game and how it's pay-to-win and stuff like that.

So as of right now, there are there's probably about 10% of the game that is 110% pay to win. No question about it. It is pay to win. If you spend $4,000, you can make a team that will absolutely demolish other teams, and that kind of sucks. But they've been really smart about it. So there is like a PvP mechanic where you play other teams, but you actually get matched up against teams that are within your skill range and like stat level.

So even though I'm not going to like rank to like top 1000 in the world ever, ever, ever, because those are all 100% people that have spent a ton of money. I still am able to do PVP every week and rank and get a bunch of feathers and stuff like that and with the with the currencies you can then get five stars that you like and and you can elevate people without having to like commit to the free-to-play mechanic like slot machine mechanic which yeah is very encouraging but they still i would also say they're very generous with how much free stuff they give you yeah every every day you in, they give you two orbs, which you need five to summon somebody. But you also get an orb every time you beat a level. And I've spent money on the game.

I spent probably at this point about, I want to say about 25 bucks. Not proud of that. But at the same time, I've probably played it because it is like, I mentioned this in the last episode, like i i really do i'm not exaggerating like um i i rock my baby to sleep like a lot and so the games i'm playing right now are games i can play uh with the one free hand i have while i'm doing that and so i've played no joke 30 40 hours of fire emblem heroes like i played a lot and yeah i'll drop 25 bucks on it and and it wasn't necessarily to get the best the best guys although i've gotten some you can't you have no idea what you'll get yes it's mostly that like the more you people you have the more the more

teammates you have the more options you have like the more strategies become available to you um olivia is uh a really cool character who uh has a support ability that just lets somebody else take a second turn and that unlocks so much stuff because all of a sudden like the characters that you have that you really like you can give a second turn or if you're in a situation where um there are two two like enemies in front of you and you have two heroes that could potentially do some damage, you can like choose which one gets to go again. And there's a lot of stuff like that. There's a lot of layers like that

where you can build strategies out of just individual characters. And so like having- And a lot of characters like Olivia, for example, and another character, Sharina, are characters that you get for free just by like signing in

and doing like an easy mission. Yeah, every day there's a cycling catalog of free heroes that all you have to do is like beat them in a really easy battle and then you just have them. And they're really low ranked. You have to like level them up and it takes a little bit longer. But like, yeah, Olivia, I didn't get out of the gosh upon. I just got her guaranteed for free and everybody did.

I think it's great. I hope they support it as well as they have in the first month. I think the first month has had a lot of variety and events and things to keep people engaged. Like Griffin, I finished the campaign as well. So I'm sort of getting to a point where I don't have as much to encourage me to log in every single day beyond the bonus.

I played it every single day since it came out, and I have. I've gotten that bonus every single day. I've played this game every single day since it came out earlier this month. I have now finished every story mission on every difficulty and cleared out all of the missions. And to be honest, the rewards for PvP, so I ranked really high in PvP last month

because I have a pretty awesome team. I got really lucky. What was your rank? Rank, I don't know. I had like 3, 3900 that was my score yeah it was really good um and i i did really really well because i put together an awesome team and they are at max level like super powerful and there aren't that many substitutions i think i would even make like i i don't even go to the gashapon to draw like oh i need this person

for my team like my team's pretty much perfect i've beaten every one of the single player levels and the reward for pvp if you do like i i really really really well like i did for the for the last season i think seasons are like four days you get one like one fifteenth of the amount of currency that you need to boost uh ten percent you get ten 10 okay you can pretty easily get 2 000 feathers you so after like so what it would take 40 days of playing this game and raxing out maxing out your pvp ranking to like get enough currency to boost up a unit to like the max uh star rating which is how they measure potential like the pvp rewards are fucking shit and now i've beaten every level that gives you free orbs so like i i

there isn't much left in the game for me to um be drawn into now this is the same thing i said about like destiny which is i played destiny forever as a value proposition like destiny paid off but i hit a point where it's just like well i have all the best stuff and i've beaten all the stuff and i've spent a lot of time playing this game but i'm bummed that there's like not i guess i'm just bummed that there's not more to it and while the PvP stuff is cool it is really really really unrewarding so hopefully they can

fix that too. So that's Griffin's game. Russ what do you think? I did. I wanted to bring this game but Russ. Griffin really did. I didn't play as much as Griffin's game so I think it made more sense but I have played a ton of this game and it's excellent. Justin you should definitely definitely play it uh speaking as a master of mobile taste yeah i'll i'll try it um can i talk about a game yeah yes pretty

big departure from that um for honor is a new game from ubisoft ub Ubisoft? Doesn't matter. Ubisoft. How do you do this? How do you do this? Ubisoft, right? Ubisoft. Ubisoft. It's a new game from them. And it is, hmm, trying to think of the best way to describe it. It's a multiplayer action game. Think of it as

structurally, it's not unlike Battlefield 1. Let's start there. Oh, no. Let him go. I'm serious. I want to follow this out. Okay, Russ. I'll let you guys blather on about

a mobile game for a half hour. I feel like the least you can do is show me the same curtsy. Structurally, it's sort of like Battlefield 1 in that it's primarily a PvP game, at least at its core. And the single-player component, which there is one, is actually broken up into different campaigns to expose you to the different roles you can play hence the the the parallel to battlefield one specifically but it is a sword fighting game and and sort of like that that hand-to-hand weapon combat game um there it's not just swords there's you know double sword sword and shield axes you. Um, and the focus is really on those one versus one encounters. Um, the smartest, coolest, best thing about For Honor is when you have two people facing off in, in a duel, um, you hold the, one of the triggers in

to stay focused on the person. And then your right stick controls both blocking and the direction of the attacks you want to make. So if you see the person that you're fighting with, you see their directions too. So you can see if they're about to attack from the left, the top, or the right, and you can block in kind. But that's also where they're blocking so if you want to attack them you want to do it in a different direction so if you're blocking what is that boxing game fight night or yeah that's not a bad yeah that's right it's kind of like that

that's not battlefield one meets fight night justin do you mind if i throw one other thing in uh please yeah yeah i it feels to me uh and i love this game, but like Bushido Blade extrapolated to a modern blockbuster. No, yeah, for sure. It's that level of focus on like the import of individual moves, like being able to really devastate enemies and in turn be devastated by some ill-timed uh blocks and there's also parries if you if you do a strong attack at the same time you're blocking you can parry there's throws uh you can break break uh your enemy's block um and and so it becomes very there's definitely like a strategic element to it um in the combat and the combat like the one-on-one um combat is really the best part of it and they extrapolate it in the combat. And the combat, like the one-on-one combat is really the best part of

it. And they extrapolate it in some interesting ideas. There's one fight, for example, where while you're fighting the main guy, he is sending wolves after you that you have to block at the same time while you're attacking him. And blocking the attacks from the wolves gives you a chance to attack them and and thin their ranks out some um so that stuff is is all really neat in in the single player campaign the story is a little i would say threadbare but you know it's it's functional um in multiplayer it's really interesting and i have really mixed feelings about it because that mechanic extrapolated out is you you start to understand why um multiplayer and shooting has been tied together uh as as often as it has because multiplayer with the sword combat is in some instances it works great there's a like a capture the flag kind of mode um or i guess more specifically sort of zone control um and if you run to the zone where there is one person

guarding it and it's you versus them and whoever wins is going to take control of the of the zone that's very cool um but i feel like just as often for me it was because the combat is balanced in the way it is there's no surprise attack there's no like you're not going to really get if two people come after you you're pretty much done i mean you're you're maybe if you were super duper crazy skilled um in which case you know you would hope you would be paired against people who are similarly skilled. But if two people come after you at the same time, it is completely unenjoyable. Because you essentially can't see where they're blocking or – Right.

You can only track one person at a time, right? So you can theoretically fight one person all day long. But the second you have two two you can't track where the other person's attacking from so it's completely luck of the draw um you know what that's like what your life baby okay just like fair enough um there's some interesting meta stuff layered on top of the the pvp um you choose a faction be it uh knight viking or samurai and those three factions are vying for control the world when you win you get resources that you can use to sort of buffer your faction's forces in a certain area. And winning those modes, you know, gives you more forces so you can try to attack areas that your enemy control.

And then at the end of a season, which I think is like 10 weeks, then whichever faction is doing the best, the people in that faction get better rewards. And I guess there's going to be an ongoing – they say the world will be forever changed by the events of each season. So I guess there will be some impact to some ongoing narrative after those 10 weeks. There's an off-season period, and then it starts back up again. packed to some ongoing narrative after those 10 weeks there's an off-season period and then it starts back up again um but i for me my experience i played like the entire first campaign i played the the knights campaign and then i hopped into multiplayer which is actually kind of fun because you have to to be able to do multiplayer at all you have to beat your faction leader um just to get in which is sort of a way of just putting you through your paces to make sure you can hang.

But for every time that I had a really cool one-on-one with somebody, I had an equally unenjoyable and infuriating two-on-one, which is just always miserable. And I don't know what the solution to that is. There is a one-on-one mode, though, right? Yeah, yeah. That is definitely a mode, and there's traditional death matching and stuff.

The best parallel I can draw is it has that sort of Assassin's Creed kind of thing of, oh, wow, there's some really you guys really laid down the groundwork of some interesting mechanics here. But there are just some big, big caveats, I think, that did not get worked worked out for this for this one yeah i i am genuinely excited about it as an e-sport um for the reasons that you mentioned because it is punishing when you get those two-on-one situations so i'm really excited to see what that looks like as a team game and also it has a thing going for it that i mean next to no games i think have outside of something even like street fighter which is the language is immediately uh readable like even if you don't play the game communicating like how the defense versus offense works in the game is pretty easy to understand uh with a quick first impression so i think i think it's gonna i hope

it'll stream really well and that it'll be an interesting uh game to actually watch more so than a lot of games of that ilk and also because if everybody does essentially have to get in close combat it it centers the action in a way that sometimes shooters don't. It's hard to really tell what all is going on on the battlefield at one time. It is really cool. One of the cool facets of that is that you can call for help at any point on the battlefield, and a map indicator pops up. And because the pace is slower than it would be with a shooter,

you actually can make a judgment on like, well, I could probably get over there and definitely turn the tide of that fight. I would be a big asset because basically if there's two of us, that person's going to die. So do I have time to get over there and actually make a difference? And that's cool because that never happens in a shooter. It's just the action moves too quickly. So that is interesting. Russ, did you play For Honor? I did.

I played it briefly. I played for 20 minutes or so. So I get the idea, and I really appreciate the riskiness of it. It is a risky game, and I think artistically it looks really cool. What really put me off of it weirdly enough was the UI even though I agree with Plant that it's like very clear what's going on it's like

very bright and very like esportsy like ESPN or like a lot of like bright super colorful overlays and I found that like really took me out of what was going on because the scenes themselves are like look like very gritty realistic Yeah. Yeah, I know exactly what you said. The language that is used to describe this game on the back of the box was not like join an epic fantasy battle

between knights and samurai it's like a lot of esports type language uh about you know different move sets and and etc etc it's definitely like that's the focus um if you get into it i could definitely yeah how how bad are the kills is it how much how is it buckets of guts when you cut them up if you finish a and if you kill somebody with a heavy attack it gives you the option to execute them which if you do that you like it's like like a big flourish you chop their head off pull all their bones out Pull all their bones out. Pull all their bones out. If I had worked on the game, I would have let you do that. Just pull their bones out of their body? Yeah, like it's funny.

When they do it on Mortal Kombat, it's funny. And I play other games and it's like they don't let you pull their bones out or anything. Or like turn them into a baby. You're turning them into a baby or just pull their guts out of their butt. Anyway, if people get really deep into it i could see it having legs i could also see this sort of being the sort of game where i will say this i've had trouble matching even now on ps4 i've had trouble matching with people who are comparable skill to me um i think if they continue with this game it if you want to play it i would start now because i think it's a sort of game where like if in three weeks in a month the people that are still playing

it are going to be absolutely savage like by comparable skill do you just mean like they're much better than you um the the ranking i mean also yes by extension but also the i also think uh competitive fighting people already seem to have an advantage i've seen a few people i follow on twitter who do street fighter posting like 97 percent uh kill but i guess it's not like a kd ratio there but like 97 to 2 like just absurd numbers um after playing it for like a weekend um so yeah i have a feeling that it might even be a little too late unless you are really into that hardcore thing well the maps are small like it's only what 4v4 right yeah and there's cool ideas in that the

map that you play on is um dictated by where the front of the fight is between your faction and the other factions so like those are the maps that you play where the battle is actually like taking place in the in the metagame which is kind of a neat idea yeah but with 4v4 at that point if you have two people on there they're like pretty good you're you're toast at that point like they're just going to work together and just, like, annihilate maybe a bunch of, like, randos that are playing together on the other side. Yeah.

If you have any sort of coordination or teamwork, like, absolute brutality. I think it would be. And I don't know that you can't really blame them for that necessarily, although it does speak to, like, maybe they shouldn't matchmake teams against solo players. But I know, like, Rainbow Six is the same way at solo players but i know like rainbow six is the same way at this point we're like it's so coordinated that there's really no like if you

don't know what you're doing you're you are f'd like you might as well be standing still i think the push in multiplayer lately um for for a lot of the big franchises has been towards making letting everyone have the feeling that they are contributing even if they're not the best skill wise i think you saw that in titanfall definitely obviously in overwatch um and i and i this is not that game if you can't beat someone in a fight then you are a drain on the team yeah i want to i want to come back to this game in like six months because i think it is something that would be worth at least checking back in on i'm reminded of you mentioned rainbow six but siege was like a fine game when it launched it felt like the same thing of like people are already pretty good at it how do you join and now it is like an entire esports scene i mean it's crazy what they've done with that game um and i kind of

am curious if they'll do something here where we could check in on it before the end of the year and it's basically a different game altogether. I would be surprised if it maintains an audience, but I could be wrong. That's what people said about Siege. It had nobody on the servers at first, and now it's crowded.

We'll see. Halftime is here. Boom, boom. And, um, a lot of people are just buzzing about halftime. Just really excited to know what the boys are going to get into this time. Whose butts are they going to rip out?

No, you don't rip the butts out. You rip the guts out of the butts. I have this whole design document and I've sent it. I thought I'd send it to pretty much everybody at this point, but do you guys want to talk about the switch again? Cause that's just getting funnier and funnier. I have this whole design document, and I thought I'd send it to pretty much everybody at this point. Do you guys want to talk about the Switch again? Because that's just getting funnier and funnier.

I'll say this about the Switch. Every fucking day I wake up to 40 tweets from people saying, oh, the case is so much bigger than the game cartridge. Hey, dummies, do you want a fucking game case that's like the size of a of a postage stamp really think really think about what you're saying dum-dum that game cases is the perfect example of like weird game blog stuff where it's like three years ago game cases they don't have the the feel that they used to have they're so flimsy and where's my instructions and then like a year later it's like I can't believe they came

with a piece of paper. They're wasting paper. And now they're too big? Andy Rooney's had enough. The cool thing about the Switch game cases is even though they're pretty big,

consider that you can put all one game that you're going to be playing on the Switch in that case. So it should fit. Wow. Wow. Zelda and Snipperclips. That's two and snipper clips that's two step to this is not

a launch game it's not i think it is right i don't think it is oh my god just stop the stop the podcast all right i'm i'm editing this out wink ierclips podcast. There is one, though. There is a Snipperclips podcast. This game has a lot of buzz. It says it's due for in March 2017. Though I don't see a specific date. I don't think it's an actual launch game. I think it's just Just Dance, Zelda, and some

other garbage. Wow. Not to generalize. What about 1-2-Switch? Oh, yeah. 1-2-Switch oh yeah 1-2-Switch silence everybody oh my gosh I mean 1-2-Switch I don't know man

you've tugged on that invisible T you love that shit 1-2-Switch there are ads on I've seen ads in the mass media for 1-2-Switch, and it is like, it is everything short of a Nintendo executive like popping his head up from the bottom of the screen like, huh? Remember? Huh? Remember?

Well, we should also say like, maybe this is pulling back the curtain a bit, but like Nintendo 100% is not going to give us that game early uh they are working with some mainstream outlets that will like so we could have they could have a i guess a review or something out right when the switch launches but like we definitely will not and i think a big reason is because they know yeah that anyone who's played a video game will not be super interested they want this they want the switch to be so synonymous with zelda almost in the way that um old people in 1987 called the nintendo entertainment system mario plug your plug your mario into the tv and let's spool that red man up. Let's spool up that good red-headed plumber boy. Come on.

Oh, no. You unplugged the Mario and the game died. Like, that is essentially what they want. They want you to think of this as your portable Zelda. It is a very convincing argument from Nintendo's perspective, right? Like, a Zelda is a huge sell. And your only counter to that is, well, what if people could just buy it on Wii U, and then Nintendo could say,

oh, nobody bought one of those. Don't worry, that's not going to happen. I saw a quote from a GameStop executive. He was like, oh yeah, the attach rate on the Switch is way higher. People are definitely buying game for this thing. With the Wii U, it came with a pack-in game, which was arguably the best launch

game there was and then no games for quite a while i like zombie you better but that's fine zombie was a really good yeah zombie you is a really good implementation of the and the people bought it no wait no they didn't i don't think i mean like you don't have a point that sales don't mean quality, Russ. You're right, but I think it is funny that he's talking about the attach rate when no one bought any games for the Wii U. So, of course, there was... I'm trying to remember the first Wii U game.

I mean, Nintendo Land was pretty sick. Right, and there was a pack-in. There was a pack-in, though. Yeah, I can't remember. Cannot recall. There was a Mario game at launch it was the new super mario brothers side scrolling game that wasn't very good no it wasn't was it no no it wasn't it was it was a poop it was b it was b tier anything else we want to talk about in this very very negative Is there anything anybody's excited about right now?

We're going to GDC. Anything at GDC? Yeah. I mean, I'm not going. No. Yeah, no, you're staying home. No, I'm not going to do that. Hey, we can talk about something. This is something we can talk about that is a little bit old,

but I think it's been since the last time I recorded. E3 opened the public. No. Yeah. what do you mean no i think that's whatever yeah i think it's fine it's a scam it is kind of like here's here's the thing we should you know who we should get is travis mackleroy because he went to e3 last year and justin and i got to hang out with him um a little bit i mean obviously we're super super super busy whenever we're um whenever we're there wait it wasn't last year was it juice when did we hang out with travis at e3 i guess maybe two years ago because i wasn't there yeah that's right um so uh yeah and like travis it was his first time going and he was so disappointed because it's like what did you do he's like well i uh stood in

line to watch a video of mafia 3 and the line took an hour and a half, and the video was eight minutes long. It's interesting because I could see from the organizer's perspective, as somebody who, I have not been, I did not go to the most recent one, but the one before that, I could say pretty authoritatively, there was some room. There was room for additional humans, I would say. There wasn't even the issue. As Griffin said, more and more every year, they take more and more away from the floor, like, playability-wise. They just are not stationed. Yeah, if you're imagining, like, an E3 where at every booth, there's just row upon row

of playable machines. That's PAX is what you're thinking of. PAX is what you're thinking of packs is what you're thinking i will say this sony is usually pretty good about yeah so let's talk let's talk about like realistically because i there may be some people who secured some tickets to this thing who listen this podcast what what to expect so like nintendo there's um it's gonna be tough to get into nintendo but if you can't wait sorry do you think they're gonna tie Nintendo Switches to young women again? Oh, I thought, I hope not. So they did that in the past, with the

3DS. I think it'll be an awkward E3 for Nintendo, because their thing will be out already. It could potentially be a potentially triumphant E3 for Nintendo, if they fucking show up with, like, any surprises. Because at that point, like,

I will be watching nintendo very intently because i have just spent money on their thing and i would like there to be more stuff on it thank you because at that point i think i will have 100% at zeldo and uh and ready for ready for fresh meat all they need to do is just have mario playable and people be over the moon excited like that's it sony does great sony has like rose sony really does have rows and rows of like pretty much all their shit like big first party things that they announced at the show you'll that's mostly going to be for press up in the up in the and there's lines you could like wait in line for a little demo little booth yes but there's lots of like uh they have a ton of

indie games like tons and tons and tons like uh we happy few was playable i think in their booth maybe in microsoft microsoft more and more is becoming more like this too where you can just go play basically any xbox one game that uh was talked about the show most third-party companies um capcom is pretty good about letting you play stuff uh square enix is actually pretty good about letting you play stuff but a lot of that has a lot of statues that you can get photos. Yeah, that's the other... Like, pretty much most other companies are, come sit in our dark theater.

EA is the worst about this, I feel like. Like, come sit in our dark theater for a while. Oh, you're excited about The Sims 4? Come sit in this dark theater. Wait in line for 45 minutes. Come watch our, you know, eight-minute-long presentation and then get the fuck out of here. I think if you're there for... You live in LA and you're there for 45 minutes, come watch our, you know, eight minute long presentation and then get the fuck out of here. I think if you're there for,

you live in LA and you're there for a day, I don't think it's the worst thing, but it's an experience. No, I just set expectations to low and assume that you're not going to see the things that you actually want to see. And if you do want to see

like the playable things that are there and actually playable, it's like an amusement park. You're going to like to, if you want to ride the big ride, like you are going to ride fewer rides throughout the day because you are going to be waiting in a lot of lines and broadly speaking don't expect there to be like good and bad times to get in

the line just get in the line and and hang on for dear life because it and also be recognize that there is a second e3 happening um on like well, there's several E3s happening, but there is a judges E3, and judges, I think it's the, what? That doesn't really happen anymore. I mean, it sort of does, but not really anymore. I mean, yes, there are. There are things that I, a press person,

have shown up to appointments at E3, e3 and it's like oh you're not a judge for polygon so uh you can only watch us play this you can't actually play it but there there is there are other strata of like like there's another strata of accessibility to this stuff where like yeah if you're a judge if you're a judge then you can play breath of the wild just come on upstairs and just come play it so like there there's there's there is like another layer that is or if you're kanye right there is another layer that is like what you want which is like oh i actually want to go and play all the games well one last bit of advice before we move on to our next game uh don't eat at the galaxy cafe oh my god they go across the street there's food trucks it'll be

fine don't need to go you're gonna pay 12 for a slice of prosciutto and it's not a no bueno do not go to the fucking you gotta layer on top of that go to the devolver street party and get like some some some street food and like play some open to the public though i'm pretty sure yeah get get also get coffee before you go because the line for the starbucks at the convention center it's a disaster utter lunacy uh let's talk about can i do my game because i don't want to end on my game because i feel like i'm going to be kind of an anticlimactic presenter is that is your game neo get it it is neo yeah um i i will stay um I will state, I have, and I'm not complaining,

but I have about one hour of gaming time throughout the week. I used to play games all day and night, all day because I wasn't doing secret. I wasn't doing a lot of work at work. And now I do very much work at work, making all the great video content that that the people crave um and at night i am hanging out with my with my family um and so i just don't have that much time so i have not played a lot of neo but i really like it and i it is something i'm

uh i'm gonna gonna return to i think i've put some good time into it. I've put about six hours in. That's, that's about what I've done. So Neo is, uh, it's a Dark Souls, and I feel like that's a pretty, uh, ubiquitous comparison,

maybe a lazy comparison, but fucking, holy shit, it's, it's Dark Souls, uh, by way of Team Ninja. And,

I, I really think that's all you kind of need to know. Like, imagine something with, like, the speed and combo focus and really punishing nature of, like, a Ninja Gaiden game. Ninja Gaiden game and then sort of layer on top of that a structure that is very Dark Souls where you have checkpoints that you can rest at to level up and spin to the souls which in this game is called Amrita that you have acquired while playing but if you die you drop all of it but you have one chance to go get it and every time you do hit up one of those shrines to pause and level up all of the enemies respawn, and so there's always something like,

there's always things to fight. At this point, is this like a not another teen movie situation where there's just like, how do you think, what is his name, Miyazaki, who created Dark Souls? Yeah. What do you think he thinks? I don't know.

I don't know. You think he's pissed? I don't know. It's like really close. It's extremely fucking Dark Souls. Like, yes, absolutely. But I don't think i it's like really close it's like it's extremely fucking dark like yes absolutely um but i don't think that's necessarily like i i there are like 15 major structural things that it apes from dark souls um but like at this point like i feel like so many of those things are so ubiquitous like for action rpgs they are so ubiquitous that, like, it, that, Dark Souls is, like, maybe the most important game franchise of the last decade.

Like, I cannot think of anything that has so completely transformed, like, how an entire, what, like, our expectations of an entire genre are. This just happens to be one of those games that is like really really pretty pretty identical um but because of that like uh team ninja ninja gaiden aspect to it it feels like totally different um yeah so on top of all of that like good tried and true action rpg stuff that this game borrows from uh borrows from the soul series you have uh really really fast combat using uh several different weapon specializations uh the game is set in the uh sengoku era of like uh like nobunaga and all that stuff so there's like a a historical aspect to it but like it will be giving you sort of characters from Sengoku history, but then also one of them will have a magic cat spirit that they use to, like, cast spells and shit.

But all of the weapons are, like, you know, katanas, or you can do dual katanas. There are spears. There's, like, a chainsaw weapon. You can use bows and flintlock rifles um and there are different specializations and different skills that you can unlock for each weapon class um and one of the really cool things the two like sort of defining features of combat is there are multiple stances um that you can change between at will and each one has different moves and different combos and different skills uh for each of the different weapon categories so you can come at an enemy with like a high uh katana stance

to try and like just go really really uh slow and aggressive but those moves cost a lot of energy or you can go low which is really good fast defensive uh position to be in or you can go sort of medium which is better for like taking on multiple enemies at once, because it's a lot of sweeping attacks. The whole time you have to be managing your ki, which is very much like stamina in a Souls game. It is stamina. But you can do what's called a ki burst. Pulse, I think. Ki pulse.

Yeah, ki pulse. Justin's on point. Where after you do an attack, you can time out pressing the R1 button. It's a PS4 exclusive. You press the R1 button and you will recover a portion of your key much faster. And you basically have to do that if you want to live.

And it really requires you to like uh combo your shit together and do everything with uh basically flawless timing uh there are also some other benefits like you can combo out of a key pulse into other things there are yokai which are um not the adorable versions of um japanese folklore ghosts uh that you would see in a yokai watch but like really fucking bits uh like scary ass demons that are really really powerful that generate these zones that they when they're standing in them they are empowered by them you can use a key pulse to like uh get rid of those my favorite thing about the game is how it handles um uh magic uh which uh and what's the other there are ninjutsu skills that you can get as well um and whenever you unlock those using the skill points that you earn by um uh not by

leveling up you do get those points by leveling up but you can also get them just by doing the shit so like if you use your sword and fight a, you will get points that you can unlock combat abilities with. You use those to unlock spells in this game are kind of just like guaranteed item summons that you will have every time you go to a shrine. So instead of getting like, I haven't unlocked a ranged attack spell yet. I don't even know if there's anything like that in the game. spell yet i don't even know if there's anything like that in the game but you will you can uh unlock skills that every time you rest at a shrine you will start out with like two fire talismans that you can use on your sword and then all of a sudden your sword has like a fire element on it and it's just guaranteed or you can get one that let you uh spawn with seven kunai

uh or shuriken that you can use to uh or shuriken that you can use to attack enemies at range. Or little blinding bombs that you can throw down. And so it's an interesting approach to inventory. I always struggle with games that require you to be judicious about inventory. Because I'm always too prudent with it. And I feel like I reached the end of the game with an inventory stuff full of stuff that would have been way more fun to use had I been playing. This game kind of circumvents that with these systems where you spawn in and guaranteed

you have all of these fun toys to play around with because it is how you have decided to spec. The one thing I was going to say that kind of put me off to it a little. First of all, I'm not a huge guess of that time period.

I don't know. I've seen a lot of games in that time period and it just like doesn't grab me super well. But like that's a taste thing. I totally appreciate. The one thing that kind of put me off was that unlike Dark Souls, this follows the model of Ninja Gaiden insofar as like the levels are discrete levels. Like they do not interact with one another. They do not interconnect. There's not one giant map.

And that kind of bummed me out in the sense that I didn't feel like I had as much ownership of the world, I guess you could say. Yeah, it's weird. You play for a long time before you actually get to that point where you can unlock the open world. You have to beat a pretty rough boss before you get to that point where you can unlock the open world um you have to beat a pretty rough boss uh before you you get to that point and for me it was honestly where i

kind of lost interest i was really enjoying the combat is really fun and also it's in a way in a way it's harder than dark souls i think like enemies tend to hit harder and i think there's a lot more to keep in your head at any one given time in terms of different stances etc etc um but it's also more forgiving when you die um you dying returns you to a uh a shrine but it it just doesn't it doesn't hurt as bad you lose your your uh i i'm not going to call them soul you know souls you lose your – I'm not going to call them souls. You know, souls. You lose your souls basically to get into the parlance. But it doesn't hurt in the same way.

It's more forgiving I think in that perspective. The problem that I had with it honestly is that it just – especially once you get to that point where you unlock the open world, it just bogs down with systems so hard like just system upon system like especially when it comes to weapons and weapon management there's like durability loot is a disaster in general it's it's a nightmare there's familiarity with each weapon that is not particularly well explained and then you can deconstruct weapons but you can also inherit the abilities from one weapon into a new weapon. And then you can craft weapons with those weapons. And then armor has a lot of like – there are different versions of armor pieces. So you really have to like – you can't tell at a glance if something is better or worse.

You really have to like dig in and look at the numbers and see if it's an improvement for you or not. How much of that do you think is just because you're familiar with Dark Souls and the terminology for things? When Dark Souls came out, no one knew what the hell humanity was, for example. Well, yeah, but I am fairly familiar with the Souls series, and I found it inscrutable. It almost feels like they were

trying to layer things like they were trying to layer on differentiators um that it did that were like not necessary because the core game is it's really fucking tight but it really is really good and it also i'm with russ in a sense that the the having discrete levels i think removes a sense of like when you play a souls game the really the only time you can breathe is when you're at a at a at a bonfire then you can like okay take a breath re-examine you know take a second and then you're right back out in it and that's the only respite you get um it really does break the intensity i think a little bit to like you finish the level and then you get a ranking on the level. And the surprise of it where like you're in this old pirate colony and you beat the boss there and you like go through a tunnel and all of a sudden you're in a fucking volcano. And it's like, whoa, what?

You don't get that you don't get that transition really i would also say there is a huge difference and this maybe isn't that different from dark souls but there is a huge difference between um the different weapons and and what you can do i had one boss that i tried the first boss actually that i tried probably 15 times to be with uh dual swords and um i think a single sword which was the the two you can have sort of two weapon combos at any one given time but you put a lot of your resources into how good you are at those weapons where you that's what you sort of spend your upgrades on there's like the the skill upgrades but there's also upgrading your proficiency with weapons and giving new new abilities um and those are all from the same resource pool so you really have to pick weapons and specialize in them.

And the first boss I tried and tried and tried and tried with my weapon combo, the first time I tried with an axe was just really slow and hits really hard. I beat him the first try, which that seems really scary to me if I'm on a later level and I don't have my axe abilities. You know, if I haven't put any points into that, that sounds really daunting to like, well, I just don't, I'm just not good know, if I haven't put any points into that, that sounds really daunting to like, well, I'm just not good with the weapons I need to beat this boss.

That sounds really demoralizing, I feel like. It has made some amazing speed runs. Have you watched any of the videos? People have already beaten the game. It took Phil 80 hours to finish the game. And there's a speed run for that game that's about an hour and a half right now. Oh my God.

Yeah, and while the guy is doing it it he's just talking through all of this like it's him sprinting and like reflexively playing through it but largely just being like okay i open the menu for like five seconds and i see this this this and this how can i arrange those okay i'm gonna do this with my head no no no i'm gonna use this and then oh yeah i'll use this weapon in this buff okay people are still watching a game get routed like that is the most exciting shit like um i i do want to say because i feel like we've been uh we've made it sound like a shittier version of dark souls and i don't think that's um accurate i think there's definitely some of that the big tonal stuff that dark souls um not only does better but that neo doesn't really do at all but i will also say it is fun as

fuck to play like the combat in the game uh is every every like fight is really meaningful and you have to be on top of your game like that that is uh very much like dark souls but like it is so fast and fluid and like just slick as hell like it just i've i've i've been enjoying just like running around and fighting shit which i i haven't really gotten that fatigue that i get in dark souls where like um i oh god i've been in this area for so long and i've been fighting these same dudes and i'm just like i'm ready to i'm ready to move on god where can i find a new weapon like i'm so exhausted with this weapon like i haven't run into any of that because it's just it's really really really fun to like run into a big group of dudes and like slice your way out of it i can i can transition

to our next game off of that uh because i think the game that i brought is very similar in that both studios um i feel like have been stuck on franchises that maybe have lost their glisten a long time ago uh and then they got to make a new franchise uh in a genre they weren't used to and they for like for the most part nailed it and mine is horizon zero dawn um from gorilla games best known for making kills popular bad franchise kill zone yeah for a a decade they made those games. I interviewed some of those

devs during a Killzone Shadowfall event in Cologne during Gamescom, and the joy that they I think that was when they first started talking about we're working on a new IP. The fucking elation that they had when like,

and no joke, like I wish I, I wish I'd held onto the interview cause it was seriously like, yeah. So a kill zone shadow fall, you get different loadouts and there's one that lets you see enemies through walls. And it's like, oh,

okay. So what's, what do you guys have? This looks pretty much done. Are you guys moving on anything next? I'm like, okay, so next we can't talk about it yet,

but yeah, I used to hear the joke that we used to i used to hear or maybe i said it i don't know but um kill maybe one of you guys did i don't know uh but killzone fans are sort of like the canadian girlfriend from high school like oh yeah she exists yeah no no she's real she's definitely real no no they, no. She's real. She's definitely real. No, no, no. They're out there. Somebody's buying those fucking games. Like, somebody was buying them. I just... I don't know anyone. What was amazing about that studio

is that they made a shooter, as you said, for 10 years that never felt good. Like, you could... It was never a good shooter. It was never... It never felt very good. I get it also confused with Resistance,

although they did make a very good Resistance. The third Resistance rules is very, very fucking good. Anyway, so... Also so also a key secret killzone 3 is actually okay anyway i'll drop that little nugget in there um no it feels like what they did was they got trashed for a handful of things for 10 years that were not entirely within their control because... That's bullshit. That's true. If you have to make a franchise and you're married to the property and all the characters within it, that's kind of out of your control. The story of Killzone, granted, was super shitty and no one cared. No, that's not true. The story in those games, especially the later ones, weren't terrible.

They were at least on par, if not better than most shooters. weren't terrible they were they were at least on par if not better than most shooters okay but i would say there's no explanation for how you could make a shooting game just not feel good yeah i would agree with that but like i would say is the things that they got taken a task for over and over again was the feel of the game uh you're stuck making generic combat there's no color in this world and the world itself is just not a place anybody wants to spend any time and they're like okay let's do a game that uh the thing we prioritize is fixing those things and then see where we go from there they made horizon is set in i think they're calling it post post apocalypse which i guess is the right way of describing it it's the apocalypse has happened um vegetation has taken the earth back but for

a reason that you learn in the game um a lot of most of the creatures are robots um it's like enslaved apocalypse yeah sure for people who played that game yeah um six people that played yeah uh ruled too by the way as long as we're talking about things that ruled oh my gosh um uh and and yeah the the world is i mean they clearly knew how to make beautiful games if there was one thing that killzone did well as it was like a graphical showpiece and they do that here it is the closest comparison is The Witcher basically in terms of a beautiful rich colorful

open world I'm playing on that pro maybe just because I haven't played too much stuff on the pro but it's one of the prettiest fucking games I've maybe ever played yeah for real they put in characters who don't get me wrong the story is not like the most amazing video game story on the planet it is for an open world game uh pretty

darn great and it i i won't spoil anything but it goes at the assassin creed concept of like hey there was a society before this one and does it so much better i mean it just felt like they they really broke down what worked and what didn't work about assassin's creed's weird time bending story and tried to fix it and did a pretty good job at coming close um but most of all like the combat is just real nice um it is a game more or less about hunting there there are sequences where you have to fight humans and those are whatever those are bad but yeah but you start completely underpowered um just walking from point a to point b is pretty dangerous and it teaches you to be a bit stealthy and then over the course of the game you get all these different weapons and it's like the reverse

of what watchdogs 2 was for me where watchdogs 2 had this amazing premise of like you're a hacktivist and you have all these abilities to change the world but then you end up using guns uh that are like the most generic guns this is the exact opposite in that like half the weapons i used didn't have any damaging powers they would be used to like tie a beast down to the ground or trip them up or it would be a freezing buff uh to like kind of stun them so most of my loadout at any time would be all these basically how can i bring this animal down then getting close and just start stabbing it in the neck uh furiously um and it was it was i mean it's fantastic it's throughout the game i would say probably every two hours or so i was completely changing the way

i would go about hunting because i would discover just a totally superior way than i was doing it before um yeah i i'm just on the enemies themselves like i don't think i've ever seen more impressive looking enemies in a game like yeah the animation of them is like creatures are fucking mind-blowing like so so so, so impressive that, like, every little part is moving inside. Like, you could see their exoskeleton moving, and, like, the battery is glowing. The hitboxes are fucking, like, wild. Like, you shoot,

if you shoot one of the robot enemies in, like, their eye, it does a lot of damage, and I thought for sure, like, oh, as long as I shoot it sort of around the eye, I get that bone no you basically have to get it right in there because every other part of the thing is like something that can be pried off and like recovered as as a resource it's really or as a weapon like the later you get in the game you start fighting these huge beasts that seem there's just no shot and the game plan often is okay well that's the biggest thing

in the room i can either learn up an ability by doing these kind of side uh the equivalent of assassin's creed 2 missions that allows me to take over these humongous things or i can find a way to remove the giant cannon on its back grab it in my hands and just start like wrecking house um yeah i mean it's i like i said i i enjoyed it so much because i just felt like if if you're into exploring different ways to go about things it will let you do that i i know that some people have not liked it because they found a system that worked well enough and they hammered that until the credits yeah but experimenting is like the name that seems like so whack to me though it's like well yeah i mean you can play

it in a boring way congratulations like you found a boring way to play it well good for you i i'm sorry no i'm gonna i the onus for that shit is on the develop like i i i am definitely that type of player where um i mentioned earlier that the all of the human versus human stuff i've done just fucking is is really bad um because you don't have the tools you don't have the your tools you do you can't you can't use the tools you can lay down like a bomb trap or whatever and you can use your like lob uh lob bombs at them or whatever but like a hundred percent of the time the better thing to do is run backwards slow down time and shoot them in the brain killing them instantly non-stop and it is very very very very easy to do that and

like i feel i honestly feel that way about mo i have not gotten especially far in the game but like i don't think i've discovered anything as good as uh laying down a shock trap paralyzing the shit out of them and then like switching to my super high damage bow and then like shooting them in their weak points a few times and that's that's just for the the stronger enemies the weaker enemies like i will you know either kill with stealth or just shoot them in the eye killing them instantly yeah that won't work in the second half. Like, the end of the game, I mean, it does become more bomb-heavy, especially there's a final boss fight that is, you're going to need the, like, heavy explosives.

But the trick for a lot of the animals, especially, have you even gotten to, like, flying animals? No. Yeah, once you get to that it you have to have other techniques and it's more i just think it's like the way the thing that to me i'm not somebody who actually does like to experiment i like to like build up a core skill set and lean on that um and kind of overpower that's the way i typically play um the thing that i think is really cool about horizon is that it keeps you on your toes

by the fact that even the lowest enemy, if you are not on your game, they can wreck your shop. Like even the weakest enemy can kill at the beginning stages, like until your armor is upgraded and stuff. Even the weakest enemy can kill you in two or three hits.

So you really have to be smart about and like thinking about the situation tactically. And also animals almost always tend to travel in large groups. So that very much is like, well, if I wait into the middle of that, I'm definitely going to die. Like it is going to be very bad. So I have to think tactically about how I'm going to approach it. And unlike a lot of open world games where you can have the same approach over and over again, a lot of the, I would say most of the encounters that I've had have felt very specific. I mean, they felt like they were designed for that moment. There's one where, one of the early ones where you're supposed to investigate this structure and there are these two gigantic, I forget what they're called.

I think snaptooth or something like that. But there are these two gigantic beasts that are roaming around it. And if you piss one off, the other one is going to get pissed off too. So you really have to like lay out your traps and get ready and be prepared for it. And there's so many like fun little, one of my favorite little things is you can, um, uh, there are horse type animals that you can override, which basically lets you take control of them and turn them into a mount. Um, but they're almost always in a patch together. And if you override one and turn it into your mount, the other guys get pissed off at you right away and are going to try to kill you so every time that you it turns it into this fun little experience where you're not just rolling

up and taking a horse you're rolling up taking a horse and then you have to get the hell out before the other horses turn on you and try to kill you um and there's a lot of little encounters like that that are that are a ton of fun it it is fun to try to break it too there's uh these cauldron missions essentially culminate with boss battles more or less uh but you can trigger them so it allows you to kind of prepare the room beforehand and with one of them i i should find this screenshot and share it with y'all but i laid i don't, probably 30 traditional traps and then, like, another 20 trip lines. So the screen was just covered. And then, like, woke up and just shot it in the eye and waited for it to come to me.

And, like, it's just so fun to, like, play with the game. It's a thing that my beef with Assassin's's creed is i i feel like i'm weirdly limited most of the time and there are so many tools in this to kind of like make the fun if you want to i really love also the one of the reasons that i'm always put off from games that have like really rich systems of combat is that they're almost always um like resource scarcity dictates how often you can do them so i'm always hesitant it's like that old like i didn't use my potions because i was waiting for the right time and i finished the game with 99 potions like i you don't run into that with this game because you can make all your ammo basically on the fly and if you've been smart

about collecting resources at all like you have the stuff that you need to make them. But you do need to make them. But what I mean on the fly, I mean literally you can be in midair like fashioning an arrow so that you – Well, fashioning ten arrows at a time. Yeah, fashioning ten arrows at a time so you have the arrow that you need. That is one thing. But that does tie to my one sort of big complaint with the game is there is a lot of picking up stuff like there is a lot of looting um i mean you can't walk five feet without seeing a tree you can harvest or

a plant that you need for medicine or a plant you need for wax or whatever and every enemy expedited later on plant um there are perks that can like make it so you pull more from those things yeah um i it didn't bother me too much because at least it didn't do the kind of uh far cry thing where it's like we want to make sure that you see an animation for it um you can kind of do it on the move but i i still don't know why in these games you can't just walk over the bodies and get everything resource management is an issue yeah there's stuff like that like when you do get the mount right you're as you're riding you're passing by a bunch of resources so it's like it makes it a lot less pleasurable to ride somewhere when you know like oh man i'm passing up even if you don't need them

at that exact moment i don't know what i'm going to want to make you know 20 shock traps or whatever so i i feel like i should be picking up the stuff i was room for it i never i never really had an issue with that though because i felt like you just always had stuff i was pitched on this game as like oh griffin you like the monster hunter games uh this is basically like that but like this is this is just another game i feel like we talked about a lot of games this week that just have really bad inventory problems where I don't know, like, when half the shit that I pick up is like, oh, more desert glass.

I don't know what that's, let me go check. Oh, I can only sell this. Like, well, why didn't they just drop, why didn't they just drop, you know, rubies? Why didn't they just drop, you know, the zinni I need? Some of those things are cool, though, because you'll pick up ancient chimes. And if you look at the image, it's a set of car keys and stuff like that. No, that's cool.

And, like, the artifacts that are the ancient vessels that are all a bunch of coffee cups. Like, there's really, really cool. You should just be able to sell it from the menu then. Well, yeah. My bigger problem is with gear in that, like is there's so much of it and it is so um some of it is incremental but frustratingly like some of it isn't so like you'll spend a bunch of money buying this uh blue quality sling and it's like fuck yeah new sling and then the very next vendor you get to is like oh well he's got a way doper purple quality sling and i actually need that one to launch shock bolts um because mine only does frost and explosion bolts so um well

fuck i just spent all my money on this now already like outclassed sling well shit maybe you put your mods into it you put your mods into it yeah you can't get those back out there that's it that's it like you put you get you can collect mods in this game that have like stat bonuses for your shit but once you install them you can't you can't pop them out unless you get a very in-game um a very far down perk and it's like at that point it's like i don't know i don't know what this i don't i don't want to buy anything i don't want to upgrade anything i don't want to spend any of my money on anything because i i now i've had like a few experiences where i buy some shit and then fucking 14 minutes later i find a better thing that i wish i'd saved my money for now all my good it also has one of my pet peeves which is situational armor which like my plea to

game developers please i'm never gonna do that i'm never gonna put on my special sneaky armor when i'm gonna be sneaking and i'm not gonna put on my special sneaky armor when I'm going to be sneaking. And I'm not going to put on my special corruption armor when I'm going to be fighting corruption enemies. Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to sneak and then I'm going to fight him. And I'm not going to change my armor mid-fight. Please just let me feel like I'm wearing the better armor rather than wondering like, oh, I should have my other one. Link wears blue armor when he's swimming and stuff. Come on. You do that.

Yeah. No. when he's swimming and stuff come on you do that um yeah no uh it's it's it's i i'm not as in love with this game as everybody is and it makes me feel like i'm a bad person because i recognize it's a it's a very good game but the shine has come so fucking far off the open world apple for me and honestly it actually makes me scared that i might not enjoy the next zelda game like i that thought keeps me up at night um but it's just like it's it's i don't feel like i am getting more powerful i don't feel like my uh like my the my process of playing the game has changed significantly from the first two hours of playing the game and so what i'm left with is this experience where i i don't feel like my character my routine my place or anything is evolving and so now i'm just like

left with this gigantic open i'm left with it let me feel you're left with this gigantic open world that like i am now less interested to explore because i just don't like i don't i don't see how running into this camp of bandits and killing everybody in there is gonna really feel any different from like going and killing this big big hunt that will give me what like a horn I can spend on a bow that will be not as good as the bow that I can buy 15 minutes later like I have serious serious structural problems with this game I think that's totally fine how where are you at in it um i mean i'm not super far i'm like i'm about uh six or seven hours and i want to say there's there's i mean this is like the worst most

annoying thing but there is oh it really unlocks around 15 there's there's a city that you get to when you actually get to the open world like the game essentially it looks like an open world but it it expands to do all of these things where you learn all the skills when you get to the main city which is annoying because it is pretty long before you get it's just i a lot of this is my own preference these days because i really don't i don't have that much time to play games anymore and this used to be my jam like if you had asked me in 2010 griffin what's your favorite type of game it's like big ass action rpgs that you can like spend 100 hours playing and mmos that you can like just spend a thousand hours playing and like that's that that's fine but like i the the games i play now are a games i can play with one hand

and b games that are like nice um games that are like efficient with time. And Horizon may very well be a very good game. It's just like I have no stomach for it. I look at a far-off point in the, no pun intended, Horizon, and I just think, well, it's going to take me like 10 minutes to get there. I'd rather go play another game that in 10 minutes I can go beat a level or something. This is hilarious to me because I feel like we switched sides like it feels like we did we absolutely did i i see i just disagree because i think the moment to moment stuff in horizon is so fun like i just i like

doing it like if i run into a herd of enemies i don't think like uh drudgery i think like oh cool uh oh shit i really wandered into this one i gotta on the fly figure out how to get out of this um i also want to give a quick uh record a thumbs up or whatever to um ashley birch plays the oh yeah the main character and her performance is really nicely like especially for this kind of game her performance is really nicely understated she has a lot of like as with any open world game a lot of talking to herself etc and it never feels grating it always feels like very pleasant and comes from a very sort of realistic place it never feels funny you say that because i literally didn't notice her talking to herself yeah it's not it's not like in tomb raider it's not like in tomb raider where laura cross like okay laura you gotta pull this rebar out of your spleen and it's like why are you saying that just do it just pull the rebar out of your spleen she makes uh uh interesting in-world remarks that

give it a bit more color like if she picks up a a shock root like i heard her say like oh it's sticky like uh that's an interesting like way of communicating one of the senses that i don't normally get while playing a video game um and her interactions with the uncharted stuff does that. And her care interactions with the characters, the other characters, especially are like, even though she is the bat, like clearly and demonstrably the baddest ass person in the world over and

over again. And she'll do bad ass things in front of people. The attitude never becomes like, yeah, I did that. I'm, it's never like egomaniacal it's always really nicely understated can i give a minor spoiler i won't say the name of any of

the characters or where this falls it's just a really good moment i'm gonna say it you can delete it if you want um there is a moment you know that right what i will not be doing that okay i really don't think this is like a huge thing there is a moment where a very powerful man is into her and, like, makes a pass on her. And it's not appropriate at that time. And it's not, like, he's not lecherous or anything. It's just, like, definitely wrong time, dude. And it gives you the dialogue tree. And all three are variations of essentially, like, wrong time dude and it gives you the dialogue tree and all three are variations of essentially like

wrong time um and it's so great that it felt like it could have was doing the awful thing that happens in these games where it's like and cool now here's the romance that you were waiting for uh sure it doesn't fit at all in the context of the story but you know there's a woman and a man and they should be together i guess and just totally cuts it off at the knees and then throughout the rest of the game that guy's like yeah that was that was real bad like i definitely should not have done that but that's the whole dialogue tree system is that right where essentially what you're picking does not make any impact whatsoever um yes no i mean it's not huge but you get that's that was the rare time where it was pretty much like all three were like pretty clearly the same

thing i i sure you at least say different things okay all right listen guys this has gone on long enough yeah these are all exceptional games but we have to pick the most exceptional uh one of the of the batch um and i feel like we may have more of a disagreement than we did last time um but where's where's everybody sitting griffin and i are holding hands above hugging i i i was really harsh on horizon zero dawn i think i i think it's a good game i have problems with like i i i'm very very um critical of the uh sense of progression you get while playing a game like that's a really that's just has always and will always be like an important thing for me to like enjoy a game and i don't i i haven't enjoyed that in horizon but i also recognize like it is a it is a fucking achievement

um but man i've played so much fire emblem heroes and i think it's like i think it's probably the best mobile game i've played in a few years yeah i would agree with that um so i'm definitely sorry y'all i have the exact opposite problem like for me like i i can't get into the the mobile games no i don't feel i don't feel any joy or reward. The reason you're put off is because you obsessed over it, and you re-rolled, and you burnt yourself out. Justin, promise me, just don't do that shit. What?

When you play the game, don't do that shit. I won't do that. I'll just keep playing Dandy Dungeons. But the point I wanted to make, for me, I play a lot of games, at least try most games. And for me, it was such a relief to play something that for me was as sort of like joyful as Horizon is. Like it just makes me happy to play it. It's moment to moment fun and it's smart and it doesn't make me cringe with like the story stuff. But it the combat is is really inventive.

It has you attacking problems in different ways that really require strategy. I've I've had some amazing encounters just because the the set of tools is so diverse and it just moment to moment is is is a joy to play um and and it it is a huge relief to play because i have not felt that way from a triple a game for for quite some time actually i'll say this i'm totally willing to switch my vote um as punishment for how bad mitoma was okay okay i think we've used the worst criteria on the besties and also and also just to let nintendo know that you came very close with fire and one heroes good start a good start i'm gonna need the animal crossing game you make make to be an even better you proved me wrong i talked a lot of shit about how bad you were gonna fuck this up and you didn't fuck this

up you made a pretty you made a fucking good Fire Emblem game for mobile. I'm going to need you to do that for Animal Crossing. It can't be like a card game that's like a party game. Hey, hey, hey. If rolling dice with fucking smiley faces on it is involved in the process, that's bad. Delete that shit. Russ, are you comfortable with that?

I mean, there's really no... Comfortable with Horizon? At this point, here we are. Yeah, no, Horizon's a very good game. I have no objections to it. Fire Emblem is excellent, and I will continue to play it, but that's fine.

Okay, so, now, congratulations to Horizon Zero Dawn. You're the best game of February. Is Horizon Zero Dawn better... I forgot we did this. ...than Resident Evil 1, right? ...than Resident Evil 7.

I will say, for me, I finished Resident Evil 7 since we recorded the last episode. And for me, I really loved Resident Evil 7. I think it was so smart in all the ways you're talking about. For me, the wheels of Resident Evil 7 really come off in the final act. Like, they really lose sight of everything that was cool about the game leading up to that point. Do you mean the second that they leave the fucking

house that is, like, the main character in the whole shit? We're gonna do one that's a haunted house story, and it's just set in this spooky house, and then you're gonna leave the house, you're gonna be in a boat for a bit it's like no come on we were in a cool house for a while remember how you were like scraping for every bullet we're just gonna get you a machine gun real quick is that okay and you'll have plenty of ammo don't even worry about that anymore it's just you just got a machine gun all the time. I'm going to vote Horizon on this, but I want to say I love the second half of Resident Evil 7.

I love the whole game. I'm giving it shit. What I love about it is it feels like they were like, people keep talking about, oh, it's a reboot of Resident Evil 1. No, it's a reboot of every Resident Evil game, and they just crammed it into a single game and made almost in order and like in ratio of like how it is represented yeah it's like oh we hit resident

evil 5 oh god we're in resident evil 6 yeah i i enjoyed all i think all of it's very fun i just think it's hysterical that they literally went through the entire wildness of that series in a single game um i've heard the dlc is really fucking good too yeah um horizons in my game so i abstain from voting because i'm too scared to play i still think i think resident evil 7 is um i liked it better but um that's because it was an eight hour game that I finished and felt good about myself. So, um, yeah. Uh, it sounds like, it sounds like Horizon wins with, uh, Russ's abstention. Excellent. Congratulations to Horizon.

With Russ's abstinence. Uh, uh, let's all try to finish Horizon before the next time so we can, you know. Oh no, I won't. I want to talk about the ending. No, that's totally fine. Cause there's pretty much, actually we might want to just skip March because there's really nothing coming out in March so we might just like oh my god

it is a fun joke horrifying how many fucking games there's the there's the new Jim Tendo there's is Mass Effect out next month yep yes Recon's out next month okay well that won't be an issue thank you so much for listening to the besties we hope you've enjoyed yourself um uh we've certainly have uh we've got a lot more stuff

at polygon.com and at a chris plant site theverge.com oh thank you um yeah yeah it's great there's lots of great stuff on both sites um actually uh because of an article on the verge i bought some headphones that I probably shouldn't have. Oh, my gosh. It's your fault. I saw your tweet. I'm sorry. I blame you.

But there's more headphones on The Verge for you to read about. And other things, too. It's not just headphones. There's lots of stuff. Earbuds. Imprinters. Until next month. My name is Justin McElroy.

I'm Griffin McElroy. I'm Todd. No, we don't do this, Ross. We don't do this at the end. We'll see you next month for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Best games. Besties.