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

Episode Date: February 9, 2017

Yes, they’re back. OK? 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: Dragon Quest Builders, Chess, Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA Future Tone, Final Fantasy XV, Gravity Rush 2, Resident Evil 7, Yakuza 0 and Astroneer. Also, the Nintendo Switch. 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!

So, people are going to be very, very surprised when this pops up in their feed, and I think we need, like, what's the most surprising way we can, like, pop out of the intro here? Like, what's the most surprising thing? Like, people turn on their podcast feed, and there we are, and all of a sudden we're talking, like, what's the biggest, what's the most shocking way to do this? JFK is back, baby! Oh, so we're doing, like, JFK jokes. Yeah.

He's alive again? Is that the implication. Yeah. He's alive again. Is that the implication? He's never gone. I'd be pretty surprised if I heard that. I feel like that might overshadow that the besties are back. Like if people say like America's favorite president, JFK has returned to us. And also the podcast that it was never really consistent,

both in terms of release and in terms of quality, but now they're doing it every month is also, both in terms of release and in terms of quality, but now they're doing it every month, is also back until, of course, they'll probably miss one of those months also, again, because of the consistency thing. And then disappear for two years. Yeah, and I think people might be more psyched about John.

About Jackie boy. About Jackie. What about, like, James Buchanan is back, baby. I don't see why it has to be a revived president. Structurally, yeah. It wasn't the ingredients of your gag so much as the recipe that we were pushing against. My idea is we stealth release it as an episode of another podcast so so it could be like um lime lime town and you turn on lime town and they're doing they're talking about their thing there's a big scary conspiracy happening it's like welcome to lime town and then we kind of like burst through

it and i'm not sure how we do that in audio form but we just kind of like burst through the podcast and we're all just fucking just like greased up and we just sort of slide through the podcast and we're all just fucking just like greased up and we just sort of slide through the podcast and through your headphones. I think I know how we do it. So they're like, it turns out the murderer was Conan O'Brien is back, baby, on NBC, The Late Show.

No, where are the surprise, Chris? Holy shit. You gotta go smaller and then bigger. That's the issue. This was a mistake My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I'm the one who knows the best games of the month. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best games of the month. My... Why you punish me? best games of the month. Bye.

Why you punish me? It's me, Hootie. Justin's left. Say your fucking name, Russ Frushtick. Russ Frushtick is here. All right. Welcome to the besties where we talk about

the best games, the best movies, the best TV shows, fashion, fast food, game board pieces what sorry game board pieces game like the thimble from monopoly warhammer custos whatever you want we got it but this week we're focusing on video games you know guys they're not just pac-man anymore they've come a long way uh and we're here to to explore that uh on the besties um i don't want to turn this off on a tangent but a man just went by on a bicycle right outside

griffin and i's house uh with a lance like like like a like a six foot long pole like he was gonna like start hunting the postman hold on I gotta see if I can fucking see this fool he's gone he just zipped by but it looked like medieval garb like he was dressed like a normal fellow on a bike who is going to start assaulting postmen I just opened up my blinds so I'll catch

I'll catch him on lap two thank you Chris you're welcome okay now we can keep going good heads up so just to clarify we're doing this every other day? It's going to feel like it. But no. So you're going to get 150 some odd episodes in a year? Boy, that sounds like a prison of hell.

No, it's every month. And we're going to talk about the best games of the month. And what we thought of them. Because people... Why are we doing this? Guys, we got off on a tangent. Can we please try to start properly with the intro that I have learned from you? I'm ready to hear it. Guys, the second trailer and the last for Beauty and the Beast just came out.

And that movie is going to make so much money. I try to tell anybody that will listen, like, that movie is going to make so much money. I try to tell anybody that'll listen, like, that movie is going to make so much fucking money. There's like, it's not just people, like, there's a generation of people who grew up with it. And also now they're parents. And they have kids who also love it. That movie is going to make so much fucking money. How much money do you guys think that movie is going to fucking make? I don't know.

Here's my concern with that movie. no here here's the issue is that you have this like real cg look to it right like it's much more realistic and then you have real actors but then i look at like the creepy like lamp and like chip is like a little child with like a chunk missing from its head like it gets very crazy it gets grisly yeah i mean everybody um i i i is it possible to invest in a movie because i agree with just i would love to put some money into this and then boost my investment because i this thing's gonna make a cool meal easy it's gonna be easily gonna clear a million dollars at the bo get on the hollywood stock exchange it's gonna be bafo bo head to hsx.com and just buy up beauty and the beast because this is gonna be a super hit for the ages um no i i uh do we do honorable mentions first like things

that didn't make our list for the month and then but like we want to talk about or is that just on our annual shows no i think we can do that because you can do that yeah it is weird though uh before you get into that real quick it's weird not to segue again but january is by and large a shitty month for video games really shitty and for whatever reason this january is pretty damn good i think once you hear everyone's picks you'll be surprised that it was a pretty damn good i think once you hear everyone's picks you'll be surprised that it was a pretty damn good month for games yeah i was really kind of it kind of is almost a little disappointing because like after the rush of the holidays i usually think of this time of the year is like oh i'll just relax and try to read some books and stuff like that but like that has

not come to fruition no books for for me there's been too many video games to play um the one that i've actually oddly spent the most time with and did we talk about dragon quest builders on our last episode i don't think we did uh that's a good i've been playing it it is a very good video game i'm not deeply embedded in the dragon quest thing um yeah i i've i've got i got seven and eight um this sent to me for the 3ds games and i was like oh dope big beefy rpgs to dip into the 3ds i just fucking can't i just can't there's like a slime so boring i'm sorry i know i know there's so many people that love those games but holy shit they don't age well they're they're the

most boring rpgs ever and those are new games those are not like aged games seven and eight are new how new are they well i don't know ps2 they were ps2 games oh really yeah yeah it was my last like true new dragon quest game uh nine i guess the the ds game i actually like that one uh okay because you could like you created your own characters and there's a bunch of like a bunch of customization stuff you could do yeah but by and by and large the world and the story and the writing absolutely there's a fucking slime no one cares like justin tell me i'm builders uh builder the newest one was 10 by the way in 2012 oh was it coming this year i guess oh nerds um but builders is so it it's sort of based on the world building

minecraft sort of formula where you're going around an open world and collecting uh wood dirt just wooden dirt i mean it's not even based on i would say it's 80 that right yeah i mean it's it that's the that that is the part of the formula for sure um layered over with some like light very light jrpg uh sort of i would say the main thing is the storytelling um but there's also some like combat mechanics that feel yeah sort of jrpg like they're active but what's weird about the storytelling is that i didn't really grasp what was going on because the text was flying by so quickly like on the screen like i couldn't understand really or read any of it because for whatever reason my thumb just kept hitting x and i just what like so you just needed to get past it as quickly as possible because it's fucking miserable

okay it's not i mean it's not exactly my cup of tea but the cool thing that they do let me let me here's the the hook for me um in dragon quest builders there are four i guess four i haven't finished yet um because it's a beefy game um they're they're each discrete chapters and each one's a discrete world um and in it you're building a base is like the center of operations um and the base uh they're they there are obviously places to build items, like your workbenches and upgraded workbenches and places to cook and stuff like that. But beyond recipes for items,

the thing that I think is really smart about Dragon Quest Builders is it gives you recipes for rooms. So in your base, there's like a recipe for a private bedroom for example and a private bedroom has to have a bed and a chest and a pot and a lighting source and a sign that says that it's your bedroom uh and and and it has to have at least like the walls have to be complete there has to be a door but but it is much more guided i think than your traditional like your your minecrafts or what have you and for me who always felt sort of overwhelmed by uh the the the minecraft thing um it's really cool and satisfying i think to like

know how to build a room and like have a little bit more signposting there also like it's it it that that that structure of game needs um it needs like a checklist it needs completion stuff like that it needs to give you like um like objectives and and uh uh benchmarks for knowing like how you're progressing through the game there's a lot of really smart stuff there um yeah this this episode is not going to be as long as our four-hour year-end specials. We should move on. I completely agree. I like it. I'm playing it on Vita.

I know you played it on PS4, but I really do enjoy that game as well, apart from the story, which is total garbage. It's a good exercise bike game where you're not really that focused on it, but something to occupy you. Okay, Spitfire round. What else do people want to put in here for honorable mentions uh what was i gonna do and then i changed my mind oh no that's your

game plan never mind yeah i don't know you got anything not really i just had that solitary game i just had a solitarica guys on ios solitarica it is a uh a roguelike uh game where it's just like boss battles a series of boss battles uh in a roguelike game except the mechanics are based on solitaire so i played this yeah i'm making matches you uh get like energy to cast spells and fight the enemy and you're trying to clear the the solitaire board it's i don't know yeah great mechanics and it's really really fun i don't know if you guys remember the very first game i brought to the besties in episode one was fairway solitaire which actually sounds very similar so i'm all about it yeah i haven't played too much other than my game which i played the shit out of um uh because I have a baby

and since I started during my paternity leave month holy shit I played some games played Final Fantasy XV which we didn't talk about because we recorded Besties year in special

before it came out that's not a great game I thought it was I thought it was pretty good Sleepy's it's very good I played a lot of Stardew Valley too

but yeah in January things have been pretty tame for me I'll tell you what I'm really looking forward to and this is kind of sad but also very utilitarian uh the thing i'm most looking forward to right now is the fire emblem heroes game oh we put up a preview and uh it looks fucking great like it actually looks like fire emblem there's a lot more depth than the reveal trailer uh showed but not only that you can play it with one hand which

is awesome because like i spend like four hours a day holding a baby in one arm and with that other arm i've mostly been playing chess on my phone i've been trying to get in a chess so a chess a free chess app is what i've been playing most this month yeah do you have to like buy bishops and stuff yeah you have to buy bishops i i actually played a little bit of i got into it because i played a lot of really bad chess the the oh yeah great mobile game um and I wanted to play just sort of the normal stuff. Yeah. I'm going to recommend one thing before we get into it. Hit it.

Hatsune Miku. Project Diva. Flavor Tone. Is that really what it's called? I don't remember the end of the name. Okay. But it's the latest one. Yeah.

Have you played any of these games? No. Just Project Diva X? No. It's like Flavortown. One second. Future Tone. Future Tone.

Thank you. Flavortown. So it's like a greatest hits of all the Hatsune Miku games, which are rhythm games with a teenage girl singer that you like make music for and listen it's a little awkward and i was defending it steffy was i won't say dogging on it but i'll say dogging on it like she really thought it was kind of uh creepy that i was playing this colorful child's game with the dancing. Didn't she see your video all about Hatsune Miku?

Yeah, she knows that I'm a fan. And when we were in Japan, she was like, oh, I get it. This is very neat. But then in the game, so I was like, oh, what do I do with all these points that I've earned? So I opened the menu to buy things for my Miku. It turns out most of the things you buy for your Miku are dirty bikinis. Yeah, and then there are other characters

who look younger than Miku, and you buy the same thing for them. That's the worst idea. Yeah, it's not great at all. And it's so weird because it does feel like it feels like a family-friendly game no and then it's like here here's the school team one piece don't you want to buy that for miku and it's like no i just want to sing songs with miku uh i want to wreck i just want to remedy it's not that bad like final Fantasy XV is half of a great game.

And then the wheels fall off so spectacularly in Final Fantasy. So interesting. Yeah, I finish it. And I disagree with you. Literally polar opposite. That's not fucking nonsense, Griffin. The first half of the game is this cool melding of like we back road trip like 50s sort of diner aesthetics with like uh jrpg mechanics and also some like oblivion you know skyrim sort of mechanics like weaved in there

with some actually like really decent storytelling and fun ways of like building character and stuff like that and then it's just it's this great open world thing and then at the there there's a switch flip to a certain point and suddenly it's on the rails and very badly paced and nothing makes sense and none of it's fun and it's it's so baffling to me it looks like somebody got i think i said this on it got like 60% of the way through a standardized test and then realized they had 10 minutes left and then just started writing like ABBA, ABBA, ABBA, cab, cab, cab, ABBA, just like to finish it.

That works. I thought, I thought, the open world stuff was cool. The world was great. The aesthetic was great. Everything, I mean, it's a fucking Final Fantasy game. The presentation is unparalleled. Nobody's making stuff like this still

and lots of people are trying and they're fucking failing spectacularly while Final Fantasy continues to get better and better and better in that department. I'm so asleep. The storytelling is fucking doo-doo garbage from a trash can because they do half of it in movies and anime before you

even play the game and it's like, oh, here comes Regulus. You here comes Regulus my you know Regulus you love him who the fuck who is this so like that stinks and also the quest design like I swear to god if I have to like go into the forest and look for these like two by two pixel

brown spots in the slightly less brown ground I don't know how you guys have the patience to get through it but but but but but but I felt like once it hit the linear part, it just focused on the cool presentation and the fighting. And at that point, the characters were established and they told a story that you could follow because you didn't need this insane primer to follow it.

I enjoyed the back half of that game more than the first half. Can we alley-oop to my game off this because yeah it builds off this pretty nicely so my game for this month is gravity rush 2 which i think is one of the best games i played in a very long time but that first i'm gonna talk about all of its problems because i know that people are gonna get really hung up on them yeah big one number one i loved the first one and it's goofy like nonsensical story the game starts in the worst way imaginable so if you didn't play gravity rush one the whole hook is you're in an open world and you are this young woman named cat and you have the power to shift the direction of

gravity around you so you can fall upwards and whatnot um so uh she saved the city that was kind of the whole story of the first one and the second one starts and they're like cool uh you for no clear reason are on a mining ship in a different dimension and you also don't have that power really right now and you're going to break stones to mine them for about and you're also walking at like three miles yeah at a glacial place oh and it starts in first person for no explain it's like a weirdly western introduction to that game because i played it too it's trying to where it kind of reminded me of like the beginning of like a gears of war game where it's a lot of like throat clearing and slow walking and people talking and you want

to jump off a building yeah it's just like it gets a lot better after that fly because you change the direction of gravity they don't it's not even that it's like why are we mining we need more food for our poor orphans anyway it's really bad it's really bad and it turns out there is a like direct-to-video anime that you have to watch stop it stop the truth is you don't have to watch it if you can just ignore the first hour it catches you up after that but the first hour is bad and like i hate being the person who is like trust me this video game made by a japanese developer gets really great if you just skip this huge chunk. I mean, it is only an hour versus, like, nine hours of, like, Final Fantasy games.

Yeah. So, anyway, there's that. And then there's the other big issue, which is it is the missions themselves are pretty straightforward. Like, go from A to B. Or, like, kill this many things. But I've had this epiphany this month. And it's from, like, playing all these really good Japanese games. And it's that Western games hide the artificiality of video games.

Like, they spend a ton of money and time to make it so you don't think too much about, like, how really you're just, like, fulfilling these very, very rote quests. And it looks nice. And you're just like fulfilling these very very rote quests and it looks nice and you're like caught up in the action so you just miss it well japanese games are like whatever we're not going to conceal it at all there's gobs of menus there's all these things but we're going to put all those resources into just absolutely bizarre and wonderful art and like experimental gameplay ideas that might work and they might not but we're still gonna like put resources into it yeah i buy that um and that's why i like i can look past this game because it's definitely not as polished as a western game but like the story is so wild and like so much more interesting than anything i've played from west in a long time um and just

the idea of like an open world game that is about using the actual architecture as your playground and is like your way of attacking characters versus all these giant open world games that spend so much money on the open world you can't interact with the world in any imaginable way except for to shoot it um that's like super exciting so yeah i get why it's flawed but i feel like i've been like complaining about getting these certain type of games forever and ever and ever and then somebody actually went and made that game that i wanted and it's broken but like it exists i also really like um her as a character she kind of of feels like she would be a side character in another game because she's like very goofy and lighthearted and like acts as comic relief for almost everyone else in the game.

And ordinarily that's like your funny friend that you have. But obviously here she's the protagonist and it just ties everything together like very nicely in this like kind of warm enjoyable light um i don't disagree with any of the like complaints that you brought up because i do like a lot of the missions are rote and like kind of dull but the other thing i wanted to call attention to was you mentioned the experimental gameplay stuff the most fun that i've had in that game is this weird photography mode now it's a japanese game and when japanese games sometimes have photography modes they sometimes

get super icky this is not the case in this game in this game um it flirts with it it it i don't even the first mission is an elderly man who asks you to take pictures of strange women on the street because it will prevent him from dying of loneliness. I guess I wasn't reading through carefully. But the actual gameplay gets better. Yeah, the actual gameplay mechanic is like you can plop down a camera on a tripod and use that to basically identify certain spots in the map

that have hidden treasure in them and you can then upload that photo that you take as a hint for other players on your friends list to see like oh there's a treasure there let me use this photo to figure out where that is and then i find like super entertaining engaging like i've done a bunch of those and those are super fun and like innovative to the point of like you know you wouldn't see that in a western game like they wouldn't bother in a ubisoft game because half of the buildings look identical yeah is that is that combat any better yeah uh well so so yes and no so that was the big issue for me with the first one and i i like the first one a lot i'm gonna play this um as soon as i'm i'm done with my current game but um that was i i think the big the big stumbling block was it got very hard to

follow the action yeah the aerial combat is a is a little bit better but the uh force powers like you being on the ground and just picking up like a dozen boxes or human bodies and throwing them at your enemies is wonderful and hysterical i mean it's essentially you spamming the throw button but it is a very rewarding experience yeah in the first game you could basically like gravity kick your way to success and in this game i think that's true but for the for the force throw they like nerf the gravity kick and made force throw the like dominant power in the game it also is just like very old-fashioned like almost nes-ish in that you continue getting powers that

aren't really useful except for to beat like the boss in front of you up until the end of the game uh but again like that's more they wanted to find a way to make it not be a cut scene so it's like sure like we would like you to turn into this giant creature uh so you have that power now uh and uh 10 seconds have passed so i guess you could use it to beat this boss yeah it just bums me out that it's not on vita um because i think the the like very light kind of repetitive gameplay fits so well for v i mean granted they probably couldn't pull off all the visuals on vita but like it fits so well for that platform and i loved playing on vita and uh you're disappointed by games not being on vita you're in for a tough no my man switch switch is gonna take over switch vita 2.0 is the most accurate way to describe this that's all i care about

a half time let's talk about switch a half yeah can i can i spoil one thing from gravity rush are people okay with gravity rush spoilers i think so okay yeah i guess fast forward a couple minutes if you don't okay this will be really quick but this is just one of the things that i absolutely loved about this game so the first uh third of it or whatever takes place on these like floating islands uh of an open world and you're like running around y uh of an open world and you're like running around yada yada yada and you're hearing all these rumors about like the uh this poor the poor factory workers of the area but you never really see them and there comes a mission where you get your beacon to uh go to where we need to go next and it says like 800 meters beneath

where you are so you stand on the edge of the city and just fall off and free fall for a minute and a half falling through the clouds and then as the clouds break you realize there's an entire another open world underneath where you've been and i guess you could have gone there before but it just never occurs to you that there would be anything down there because it's like a ton of cloud and like emptiness. And they do a few other moments similar to that, but the game ends up being drastically bigger, drastically, drastically bigger than it is when the game starts.

That's all. I could jump to my game next because it's also like another Japanese development studio just kind of like crushing it. What? No, it's also like another Japanese development studio just kind of like crushing it. What? No, it's just funny. They are both from Japan, but they could not be more different. Yeah, but I mean, it's shocking because there weren't a ton of great games from Japanese developers for a long time. I mean, at this scale.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't want to. Everybody thought Final Fantasy XV was going to be one, and then it wasn't. It was, yeah. I don't want to. Everybody thought Final Fantasy XV was going to be won, and then it wasn't. It was, yeah. So that was a bad thing for everybody. I don't want to generalize and say Japanese games got bad for a long time or whatever, but I can't think.

They're so tightly. It's been two months of really fucking solid stuff, and that culminated, I think, in my game of the month, and to be honest, definitely a top five goatee contender for me which was what it's january yeah i know uh resident evil 7 is the best resident evil game since four i don't think it quite gets over four um because i think for uh particularly the wii version come at me it's a fucking. Yeah, Wii version's very good. 7 is Capcom's confession

that they fucked this franchise up so bad. Yeah, I mean, we should just before you go into it, we should address your statement that it's the best one since 4 is not a high bar. It's the best one other than 4. It's better than 1, 2, 3, all of them. Oh, oh, oh. Code Veronica? Yeah, dude. It's the best one I've ever been for. It's better than 1, 2, 3, all of them. Code Veronica? Yeah, dude.

It's extremely good. 5, I played all of for some reason, even though it was bad. 6, I saw trailers for that, and I was like, ha ha ha, nice try. No thanks. And in 7, they have abandoned this, like like we're a paramilitary counterterrorism

unit where there's there's zombie attacks happening all over the globe and we got like government conspiracy cyber wesker like fuck off with that boss fights in a volcano like y'all lost your minds at some point uh and that point was at the end of four um even though four was outlandish as well like four was outlandish right four got more four gets more and more and more outlandish as it goes but it's a fun sort of like yeah sure outlandish it's it starts off like very scary traditional resident evil and by the end of it you are like doing a jet ski rocket fight or something crazy like yes but it's true but it's fun but then five and six are all jet ski rocket fights and they suffer for it so for seven seven i i i i i i told uh i was talking to nick about this in cool games

and i said that i can't i couldn't believe that resident evil 7 was a resident evil game that they like called it resident evil because it was such not only a departure from the bad games that recently came out but the whole franchise like I couldn't believe that this was called Resident Evil 7 until I got to the first door that you have to unlock with statues of dog heads and it was like oh yeah here it is um so let's get rid of that so what's it like things that are unique about Resident Evil 7 who's's played it, by the way? I played the demo, so I know the gameplay, but it's too scary for me. I played a bit. It's a Resident Evil game, but it is first person.

It takes place mostly in this sort of decrepit manner and sort of attached outer buildings in a Louisiana, like, swampland area and that's the the level that's in the demo correct that is i think the there's several houses like okay in the game that are part of this like little uh compound and i think the demo the demo yes definitely takes place in in that that area is in the game for sure um and the demo is a really fucking great sales pitch for this game if you are on the fence play the demo because it's stellar um what what they've done here is they have stripped away literally all of this big blockbuster action bullshit that has seriously ruined the franchise five and six were bad games yeah um uh to the to the point where you play a character named ethan who's just

like a dude he is not this huge burly uh super marine uh enhanced with you know uh what is it raccoon cells giving him special regenerative like no you're just this dude. And you get a message from your wife, Mia, that she is in this manner after she's been missing for several years. And that way, I guess it's kind of a throwback to Resident Evil 1, which mainly takes place in a big house. And so you go to this place. You don't have any weapons. When you walk in the door and you go a pretty long time without weapons, there are a few like kind of tense chapters where things are exceedingly dangerous and you have no way to deal with it except to just kind of run away um there's a lot of really great scenes where like somebody's chasing you with like a one-hit-kill

weapon and the only thing you can do is try to keep them on the opposite end of a dining room table that you try to like circle around to try to get to the door it's like a benny hill sketch yeah but a fucking terrifying one it is the presentation of the game is really stellar i have a i picked up a ps4 pro last year and it's one of the first games i've played on it uh which is more of a damnation of my purchase of the ps4 pro that like really takes advantage of the hdr shit um because it is like the jump scare is like all payoff man well and the hcr correct me if i'm wrong that comes out into the contrast so because you have a very dark game and then like maybe a flashlight or something it's the perfect game for that right so things will be very very dark and then all of a sudden there's a very bright scary face right in front of you like it plans out so

um it never get like um it has a really nice power curve, and a lot of that is supported by one of the better, like, resource management balances that they've had in one of these games. Like, you really have to be very diligent with each bullet and with each, like, item combination, and you really need to, like, find as much as you can. Are herbs in the game? There are herbs, yeah. Like, can um can you mix like red and yellow well there's herbs and then there are these things

called kim packs c-h-e-m uh and those come in a few different colors and you have to mix those with different items to get which they've been k-i-m packs yeah these are my excellent packs i think what's interesting griffin about what you're what you're saying is the – and it's something that like a lot of people lump Resident Evil in with survival horror because it kind of invented the genre. But if you really look at the games, like it's not a scary series. I mean it's really not. There's a couple – The first one is scary.

The first one I thought was pretty scary. The dog's jumping through the window, right? Yeah. So there's that. Yeah. And then – And the second one. It's just not – it's never – it sounds like what you're talking about sounds like it's taking a page from silent

hill which to me has always been scarier because you're just a person in a world like for me if i'm a member of like a paramilitary force and i'm armed to the teeth i can only ever be so scared right if you're playing a survival horror game and you can find a rocket launcher in it that's it's just like by that point the game stops being scary so to that point you mentioned silent hell i think the more apt comparison definitely there's there's uh tones of pt here um although like we don't know what silent hills was gonna be so i i would be uh less um quick to like make that comparison than i would to like an outlast uh or this sort of indie pc game horror movement um but uh where you are you know an outlast you're completely powerless

all you can do games like that and amnesia like you're just running away uh and that's that is the only thing you can do uh i think it i think it hits some of those notes really fucking well like there there are are times in this game where you feel completely powerless and uh terrified of this like like really fucking terrifying thing that's chasing you but it also it does have some really nice loops in terms of um there's some there's lots of puzzles that you have to solve and lots of environmental puzzles and there's a lot of going back through areas that you've already conquered because there's lots of shortcuts and gear gating and stuff like that uh and then there's these like puzzles that kind of go throughout the length of the entire game and if you chase those threads you end up with like the double barrel shotgun um and and but it's you're never too powerful even

though you get a flamethrower at a certain point in the game um it's it's it's kind of shitty it's like it's a grounded flamethrower it's not a very good weapon and also you go through uh fuel for it like really really fast so you're never you're never you're never super super powerful the game is so brilliant and and how it rewards you with new stuff and how it still makes you feel like around any corner could be a thing that's gonna murder you yeah so one of the issues that i think the franchise ran into is not i can't even blame them for it because it's kind of a natural like evolution of how these things go is like okay so griffin apart from like maybe changing the setting like how do you make a sequel for this game that's not more action heavy more you know what i mean

like i i i don't know what what point you're trying to make here because i'm trying to make the argument that like you can only play this card once in a while no i just i disagree i think i think with this game they have established a new way of doing these games uh i finished the game in about eight hours and um which is not like a super short experience by any stretch of the imagination but i wanted fucking so much more of it uh when it was done because i i i i i loved it man and yeah i think a new setting would be good but i don't necessarily agree that there has to be like a certain escalation i i've been going a long time and i would like to talk about just one more thing about the game that i think is um like so indicative of how how much they've course corrected and how like brilliant a game they've

made uh and that is the first boss fight of the game because hey check this out the boss fights are fucking good in this game because they are all like for the most part pretty scary hide and hide and seeks phil didn't like the boss fights if phil's out of his mind uh the boss fights are good there's there's a couple at the end that are very resident evil like shoot the big big monster with the unlikely weapon stuff um but but there's some really really good boss fights in the game and the first one that you do uh is against this guy that kind of torments you throughout the first hour or so of the game. And you don't really have any recourse for it. And it takes place in this garage.

And this is seriously in the first hour of the game. And if you want to fast forward, I totally get it. But it's in this garage. And you don't have a weapon when you walk in. But somebody gets killed. And then you do get a gun from them with, like, nine bullets in it. And then you're fighting this uh invincible dude that the game's main antagonist is this family of uh uh like uh hillbillies i guess kind of oh um well i know but they're they're also um invincible unkillable

mutant uh hillbillies not like a not like they have something going for them right not like a hills have eyes kind of way but there's definitely like a sam raimi like schlocky humor to it that really fucking works so anyway you're fighting is this invincible uh mutant dad and you're in this garage and in this garage the what's so fucking cool about this fight is there's like a bunch of different ways that it can play out because there's some items laying around the garage for instance you can run and pick up this gun that gets dropped and you can just try and shoot your way through the fight

and you might be able to pull that off you also have a knife that you can use and that seems like a pretty long winded way of doing the fight the other thing you can do is you can find car keys that let you get in the car and drive it into him and crush him with the car that way sure and this is what i did and uh at a certain point you think you've killed him but then he

stands up and tears the roof off the car and then drives around he like takes hold of the wheel and presses the pedal down with both of you in the car and tries to kill you by crashing it into stuff in the garage you're in the passenger seat no you're in the driver's seat he's on top of the fucking car like and it's so fucking kind of funny and scary and cool yeah but he can also uh uh if you're too slow he can tear you out of the car and all of a sudden he's in the car driving it around and he can drive into you and hit you with the car and damn it and you have to shoot him out of and this is it's all this it's all really dynamic and it's not like quick time event resident evil bullshit it is all from this first person perspective and you still have this same feeling of like i'm gonna fucking die but it's taking place in this like dynamic fight that you probably didn't experience the same way as somebody else it is fucking genius

and like like kind of quantum breaky or not quantum break uh quantum quantum dream ask those games uh no no no because it's not it's not uh it's not scripted you're not like pressing r2 to go like you are still having to aim and shoot it feels like any other part of the game it is just unfolding around you in this really like unpredictable way and like from that point i was like all right resident evil like i am buying whatever you're selling yeah this fucking rules too scary it is it's a pretty scary game also play those games it's all scary it's astonishing i don't have this but it's astonishing to me to me that this is all playable in playstation vr um i will i will pick up a psvr someday and i will

replay this game uh i've heard it is by far the pukiest of the VR games. I don't doubt it. Almost impossible to play. I still want it. We're going to take a quick break now to talk about the – I'm sure Russ has some dumb thing, but I'm not going to let him do that. Because I want to talk – and I haven't been able to talk to anybody about this,

because I want to talk about the Nintendo Switch. Russ, you got hands on am i the only one here that played it no switch yeah it was at uh it was at pac south last weekend and i wanted to go check it out but i didn't have time i just got here for me russ is it gonna be whack or dope those are my two options one word whack or dope i'll go dope okay yeah it's dope wait are you talking about just the hardware or the odds of it actually i'm talking about arms exclusively the rest of the thing is whack but it's arms is dope no um so as griffin and i alluded to earlier i think we're both fans of the vita as a platform yeah i'm mostly because i'm a fan of remote play which literally saved my life not literally it saved my life in december when we had the baby and like um there was a lot of

just kind of like watching over him in the living room while he napped and we watched tv and i played final fantasy that way and stardew valley that way and i actually played some resident evil 7 that way the mapping is really smart they switch it's the only game on remote play i played rest you're the only person that's going to find this interesting they switched the crouch and sprint uh touch inputs because uh a sprint is on the left stick right and every game yeah oh but you can't move and sprint but you can't move and sprint on the vita so they just switch the sticks it's the most genius like lightweight fix for that anyway sorry that's another shit yes i i i play but i do appreciate it

uh yeah so the vita is awesome and it's dead as we've established no games are really coming out for it these days although you can still play on remote play and and i do that as well um and we have the we've had the 3ds which is obviously like for when games come out it's great but obviously there's very few games on it and it's a very underpowered system the games run at fucking 320p or some shit like it is not a blockbuster of a system and so i'm a big fan of um playing games portably you know tv's on in the background i'm chilling on the couch or i'm on the subway or something like that and in that venue the idea that nintendo is making a new console which a can be played portable which it can it's not like enormously huge to the point where you can't play

games portably but also the fact that like i think over time they're going to continue to abandon the 3ds so essentially almost all of their development prowess which is not going into mobile but everything else probably like 90 of their development prowess is going into one single console system which is not really promising yeah ever i mean since the launch of the original game boy they've been splitting their development resources across multiple platforms and now we have this kind of unification but they've said the opposite technically right yeah right they've acted like they're gonna keep all yeah it's horseshit like they'll they'll continue to

support it i think for the next year there's a new fire emblem game coming out this year um but i think by march of 2018 the 3ds will pretty much be dead uh assuming that saying that is so people in japan and i in America continue to buy 3DSs. Yeah, they don't want to. There will be six first-party 3DS games that come out this year, and they will all be my favorite games ever. Totally. So the portability aspect is a huge thing. The fact that you have all this development support is a huge thing.

And I think it's extremely innovative and not in the ways that I thought it was going to be. I think a lot of attention gets placed on, hey, it's a console that you plug into your TV and then you take it with you, and that's the hook. But the multiplayer element of the fact that wherever you go with it, you have two controllers with you, I think is going to be a huge, huge game changer

to the point where events like packs east or south or whatever will be absolutely teeming with these where you have crowds of people grouped together playing multiplayer games and that's something that like has never made it to the u.s where it's always been very popular in japan and i think by the fact that you've got multiple controllers you've got these systems it's got a freaking kickstand um you're just gonna see like a lot more people doing this now granted their big like launch premiere game at that event was one two switch which was pretty close to steaming garbage um i don't know what they're thinking because the i played it and it

was pretty awful you know what that shit looks like you know that shit reminds me of fucking welcome park on the playstation vita yeah how for 50 it's it's wild to me that that is not a nintendo land ass included game like i can't i imagine you could have like a fun night or two with it but i don't even know that i want to pay 50 bucks to milk some invisible cows i can do that right hey look i'm doing it hey guys guess what i'm doing right now milking an invisible cow and i'm really good at it i'm producing lots of invisible you know what they should have done here from uh christopher plant about this because i i i can see how definitely if you have a commute of any length out the appeal is is pretty apparent for me I don't

drive a lot well I mean I shouldn't say that I'm not never on public transportation I should say so like the opportunities where I'm gonna be out and about and able to play the switch portably are going to be few and far between so I'm a little bit concerned that it'll basically not like a lot of the appeal will be lost. Chris, are you in that same mindset or do you see a future for it in your life? I mean, I kind of second everything here of if indie game developers care and if they make this like the switch from Vita to this hardware. Yeah, I'll care.

I don't think like obviously that wasn't enough to save the vita so i don't see that being like some big thing for other people but i think that's a pretty whack comparison like i don't think it's gonna have a completely different dev i don't think it should be too bad because the wii u had like some of the best nintendo games and that wasn't even close to enough to get people interested yeah but consider consider like the the vita died primary for a lot of reasons but a big one was that sony was dividing their time and energy between the ps4 and the vita and eventually they just gave up and and indies filled in a lot of the blanks but for the most part they just gave up and third party gave up etc and here obviously nintendo's not going to give up because it's their primary console now.

Yeah, I mean, they won't give up unless nobody buys it, which is a very real possibility if there are no games from Nintendo. Sure, but I think you have certainly two to three years of Nintendo games pretty much guaranteed. Yeah, but like I said, that's not enough. Like, that just doesn't work at all for nintendo when it doesn't have 30 part third-party developers and it doesn't have like a main like main mainstream gimmick like something that's going to make people who watch the today show be like well i've never bought a video game console but i i'll try this yeah then it's not it doesn't have it's not gonna be the way they'll never it's not gonna be the way that's what i'm saying is that's the way was

an aberration that's a for real problem for them because the problem like the thing that they have to decide right now is okay we're the second console if like if they truly don't get third-party support and they only have like a new game every five or six months uh let's say three and be like super generous then that is a second console for people which is big money and unlike uh even the wii u which only had to be competing as a second console against like hey you already own an xbox uh maybe instead of a playstation 4 you'll get a wii u now they have to compete with the fact that microsoft and sony are going to be releasing new hardware, what, every other year? Maybe every year? So, like, the competition for, like, being a new console for people to buy,

for us, it's no big deal. We're grown-ups, and we work in this industry. That's a huge, huge cost to ask people to make, and it's not like the Nintendo DS, which Nintendo's mobile hardware numbers are always like holy cow those are huge yeah but we forget like yeah it also drops to a hundred dollars after a couple years um and i mean this will this will eventually drop to 199 in a couple years like yeah but like 199 is still more than the entry price of a normal piece like yeah i'm just saying there are some like serious serious roadblocks ahead sure i mean i'm

not talking about the financial viability of whether this is the future of nintendo or not like in terms of me liking it i think it's good i just i i i just think there has to be games right like i think yeah and but i think russ also that, in that if they really do consolidate, and also if they learned any one lesson from the Wii U, it's that they have to develop at least twice as many games for this thing as they did, and now that they, while we were recording this, they announced that Pokemon Sun and Moon

sold 15 million copies, and that Super Mario Run run made like 56 million dollars like yeah they have they i think they they have some stability through these other channels and i'm hoping against hope that they fucking invest in in the switch because i don't i i think a lot of the comparisons you're making is to the success that they had with the wii and I don't think they'll ever... No, not at all. I don't think they'll ever be in the first console race again. They were with the Wii, just because it was such an aberration. I don't think that's a race

that they're trying to even get in. Yeah, this is a totally new thing. I just hope... I would be fucking happy... We're viewing this through a lens of like the wii u was a failure and it was a failure if they'd release twice as many games to the wii u i don't think it would have been a failure conceptually like i would i would think back on that system with higher regard because they had some fucking great games and ultimately i think it was a really

good idea for a system they just didn't invest in it enough i here here's here's the thing that i will say about uh about whether or not all this will will work and this is like getting like really weedsy but i feel like one of the biggest problems for the wii u was uh they wanted to beat people to market they rushed to get it out and they didn't have games up top and a lot of great games oh i think like a ton of great games came out for the wii u but by the time they did it was too late and nobody wanted to like buy a week i wouldn't say a ton i would say a ratio wise it's the most lacking nor good exclusives came to the wii u than any other console it just didn't have third party games that's pretty fair like name more than five

great exclusives on any console okay okay but anyway i wait i like totally wrap it i know it's easy but yeah my thing with the switch and what it feels like looking at the announcements is they're making the exact same mistake again and they needed to get this hardware out there really fast and we're not going to see like games actually develop for this thing for a long ass time so what we're going to have in the interim is like tech demo thing with arms a game that was supposed to come out on the wii u with zelda and then like maybe you can't leverage zelda as a negative against this thing no no it's super good but it's it's it's still them doing the same thing of like it's a lot of stop gapping and i think my the long-term health of it i think is going to be decided on whether or not they can get those games out fast enough yeah i mean we won't know again i

think as with any console it takes a year like the first year is lacking. Very true. And that was the case with the PS4, the Xbox One, Xbox 360, et cetera. It's brutal. Do you remember all this time about how like, oh, dude, Rezogun. I've been playing Rezogun for like three months. That is a dope-ass game. But Rezogun is the perfect example. And I completely agree. People have mocked me mercilessly on Twitter about this.

But I think even though indies do not sell consoles they do give worth to people if they buy a console they have a reason to turn it on every other week because there's a new indie coming out versus buying a console having it sit on a shelf for six months and then when someone asks them should i buy this console you say no because there's no good games on it that's a big conceptual difference so i love it's cool to see indies at launch like binding of isaac and the world of goo pack like it's cool clips and snipper clips snipper clips is that an indie i thought that was internally developed who knows anyway people seem to love it i that was the one game i didn't play snipper you didn't play snipper clips no i played everything

else snipper clips is gonna be fucking great snipper clips would be fucking great snipper clips would be my reso gun indies even old indies i don't like put spunky on their dog like like how much do you pay for portable spunky where the ice level actually works the ice level always works you just need to be good at the game okay anyway i whatever if you haven't pre-ordered one now you're not gonna get one and launch too bad hey did all four of us pre-order one? I did. Yes. Yeah. Of course. Okay, so. Yeah.

Okay, listen. I pre-ordered two. Oops. Okay. Oops, all berries. Let me move on to my game. Continuing our streak of Japanese games. Wow.

Yeah, I know. Mine is Yakuza 0. Fuck yeah. I'm going to be up front and say first a few caveats one i have not played the entirety of the yakuza game before i've dipped my toe in what'd you play what'd you put what'd you dip into four all right sounds sounds like the one that i did uh but the but uh i've been playing yakuza zero i have not finished yakuakuza 0 because I have been so caught up in these charming little sub stories littered throughout the game. The setup, this is the open world.

You're in a neighborhood, a Japanese neighborhood where the Yakuza reigns supreme. It's like 1986. It's like early, mid 80s somewhere so they already ran supreme it's not like an origin story yeah right the yakuza are already uh just yakuzaing everywhere sure and um there is a very here's the the the pluses i can say about the game overall uh first off it is a very salient core narrative that is very easy to understand. And like the propelling force of the core narrative is like very understandable and very like easy to get invested in,

which is a puppy gets killed. Is that, um, no, you've been on that level. Uh, basically you've been in, in the opening hours of the game,

you are wronged by Yakuza higher ups who are trying to clamber their way to the top of the organization. And you cast off your Yakuza mantle and decide to wage war on them and prove you're innocent of a murder that you've been framed for, which is very is very cool. But the stuff that I've been spending most of the time with in the game has nothing to do with that whatsoever. I've been spending most of the time with in the game has nothing to do with that whatsoever. As you're cruising around town, you just run into these basically little vignettes that are happening and sort of interject yourself. And the vignettes are all like without fail, utterly bizarre. I mean, in the most endearing sort of interesting way possible to give you an example uh just in the few that i've played in the in in sort of after the first they open up gradually so at the point i'm out in the game i've opened up a few uh i taught a very nice dominatrix how to uh better dominate her clients

i helped shut down a ring of girls selling their panties is this all done through like text boxes or are they like are you doing things it's sort of that thing of i mean the game itself has no english dialogue um it's all subtitled but like the the actual exchanges are sort of that thing of like a phrase is actually spoken but there's a lot more in the text um that i think i think fresh means like are you fit, like, is this mini games or is it like you beat up some people and then it's like, by being up to speed.

Or you're just standing there watching a cut scene. No, it's, it's, it's, a lot of it's dialogue choices. A lot of it's like, especially with the dominatrix one,

to use as an example, it's like choosing the right thing to help her be more dominatrixy um and and you're literally like at one point hiding in a closet feeding her like lines to to be oh that's funny is hysterical yeah um but a lot of times it does devolve into fighting because it's yakuza it's a game about fighting people with your fist so like a lot of times people get very steamed and it's always hilarious because. It's a game about fighting people with your fist. So a lot of times people will get very steamed. And it's always hilarious, because the people picking fights

are always these poor schlubs. And you beat the fighting in the game is sick and hyper stylish. Very cool, yeah. If you don't want to play the game, at least look up a compilation of the heat moves that you can do in the game, including one where you throw an apple into a man's mouth, and he falls down because of the force of the heat moves uh that you can do in the game including one where you throw a man into throw an apple into a man's mouth and he falls down because of the force of the apple throw

and then you stomp it and it turns it into juice in his face it turns it into apple tasty tasty refreshing apple juice in one just another example of one of these like really weird side stories i uh i was recruited to be the producer of a restaurant commercial because I had an imposing presence and that's all a producer needs to do is keep people in line. And there was a very sort of like scatterbrained director who was very schlocky and I had to keep him in line.

And the challenge of this particular like sub story in the dialogue part is people would throw TV production slang at me. And I had to know what I had to guess what they meant. But like so I could keep up the ruse that I was an actual producer because I was filling in for somebody else. And then the producer, the real producer shows up. And of course, him and his buddies are very upset and want to fist fight me. And I beat the stuffings out of them. And then the direct and then like and this is the moment that really sells it.

And like a lot of the sub stories have this where after the director sees it, he like lets on that he knew the whole time and admits that it's because their business is about building dreams and uh creating fantasies that people want to live in and enriching people that way it has like a very long sort of sweet yeah vignette about like the power of film and then you run into him again when he's shooting a michael jackson uh video with steven spielberg and you have to fight the zombies. You have to fight the zombies in the Thriller video. I was like, it's going over the top at some point because it always does. My favorite thing, and I haven't reached this point in the game, but I saw a video

of it, is apparently there's lots of minigames, right? Like Justin said, there's a batting one. Juice, is there taxi driving? Because that is my all-time favorite Yakuza thing. There are taxis. I don't know if you can drive them or-time favorite yakuza thing there are taxis i don't know if you can drive in yakuza 5 there's a whole thing where you can earn money by driving a cab but you have to follow all of the rules of the road uh like you have to stop at traffic

lights and use your blinker or else you lose points and get paid less and also it's in japan so you're driving on the left side of the road so you're gonna fuck up a lot uh but in yakuza 5 and yakuza 0 you can go bowling and one of the scenes is if you get a turkey while you're bowling the bowling alley manager calls you over and says you got a turkey you've won our special prize an actual turkey sure and then she bends down and puts a chicken up on the table and there's this whole debate like that's not a turkey this is a chicken she says oh yeah i guess it is anyway do you want us to kill it and cook it for you right now and he's like what are you talking about uh and you have this whole conversation and eventually the protagonist of the game uh

kiryu i think is his name he says i'll just take i'll just take the live chicken you befriend the chicken and then i guess there's there's another thing i haven't gotten to there's like a real estate management sort of metagame happening in the background. You hire the chicken as a real estate manager. Sure. So it's full of stuff like this. The thriller thing is the best. They're all hysterical. It's so self-aware,

right? This is not... I get really uncomfortable when people commenting on Japanese culture like, oh, isn't that so fucking weird? It knows what it is. Clearly it knows what it is and it is so like it makes it more fun to like laugh along with it um it's so it's absolutely surreal the entire thing is like it's baffling and so fun and funny um and the fighting is the fighting's really good fighting's really good you use there's like the i the environment is littered with uh different

you've like different fighting styles you can switch it on the fly there's like a fast one um there's one called beast where you just are like brutal and picking up uh pressing the square button near any item instead of like usually it makes you like pick it up um but pressing the square button when you're in beast mode just like picks up and swings it around in a like a video store sign that you're smashing on somebody's other picks up and swings it around in a like a video store sign that you're smashing on somebody's other picking up somebody's bicycle and just smashing it on their head um and that that stuff is great and the story stuff is like is really fun and funny and and it it wavers wildly yeah between this like deathly serious yakuza thing and like these like fucking helping

a guy a grown man who's obsessed with a slot car racing. Who's being made fun of by the other kids in slot car racing because he's a virgin. Like that kind of stuff is like littered with that. And it's hysterical. And I'm really enjoying it. I haven't played that much of it because I got kind of sidetracked with Resident Evil. But my only complaint with the game is that, and it's my same complaint I've had with all the Yakuza games I've tried playing, I never get too much into them

because they're really long-winded at times. And Justin mentioned the Deathly Serious stuff. Like, it's good. It's a fine crime story. It just is like, it takes a really long time to get through. And even though this is the prequel, I guess, this is sequentially the first game in the yakuza series

i still felt like i didn't know enough about the world from the other games despite the fact that this should be the first one in series and i kind of do they reference like characters from other games i i kind of had this they might not have i might it may have just been all internal and may have been left over from yakuza 5 which i did bail from because that game has like four playable characters with storylines that are developed over the course of the whole series and like i'm i'm sorry i'm not gonna go back and play like a ps2 era brawler that came out in japan only to sort of like learn how to the the the series is just a little bit um uh what's what's the word I'm looking for?

It's not as inviting to newcomers as I wish it was. And it also, at certain times, it just kind of moves at a snail's pace. But I enjoy it. And I dig Tokyo tourism stuff in games. Just walking around a Japanese city and like seeing the sites and having freedom to do whatever dumb mini games i want to do yeah i mean yeah persona 5 hello i want you really excited my game next month by the way definitely gonna be persona 5 no you can't jump the it could be racist you don't know i was just kidding they've pushed

that game back a million times okay it's never coming out uh i've got i think you're last yeah i've got my game last game coming up uh so my game is a game called astroneer um this is a game that came out in late december uh as an early yeah but like i didn't play in the whole this month so whatever um you couldn't rock me too but whatever yeah it it came out on steam early access and xbox one early access i'm pretty sure it's on if not coming okay so i put it on steam and i had just seen sort of screenshots of it and and kind of got the vibe like oh it's like a no man's sky kind of like planet as you know space exploration game but the more i started playing it i just found it like super way more engaging than uh no man's sky was and i just kind of want

to like wrap my head around why that is so so the premise is is very straightforward there's not no throat clearing or anything you launch um from a space station you land on a planet in like a lone capsule and while you're on the planet you have to go around and collect resources to build out your capsule and sort of advance and explore deeper into this planet there's a few mechanics at work the big one is oxygen so you run out of oxygen if you leave your spaceship for too long but you can also drop down these tethers so you can make these kind of like paths into the wilds of this planet where you can basically like maintain an oxygen line so long as you're still connected.

So you'll build these like giant, huge, mile-long chains of tethers to help you explore better. And as you explore, you're collecting these resources and the resources um something that i really like about it that no man's sky didn't do was that the resources are physical objects um so you'll see like um like a group of plants and you'll gather the plants using this device that i'll talk about in a second. Um, and as you're collecting them, they kind of like fuse into this physical block of organic material that plugs into the back of your backpack, but it's an actual like physics object. So you can actually like unplug it from your backpack, like wave it around. You can leave it on the ground. You could like throw it. Um,

and it kind of makes the idea of like collecting things a little more meaningful because it's not just like you open your inventory and there's like 99 blue gems and it's like this very amorphous kind of like lacking idea here everything you're interacting with has this like weight and heft to it which i really liked um so the bit your main tool in this exploration thing is uh it's like an excavator i don't know what they call it but essentially all it does is it lets you either dig in or build up land uh the all the land is like fully um uh you know you can customize it or dig right into it to the point where you can make like giant holes deep into the earth and dig into caves and stuff like that. But the, the art style is like this low poly art style.

It's gorgeous. And so, but it works really well for that. Cause you end up, you know, a lot of these games where you're like customizing the land and like digging into the land, it ends up with like a lot of sharp,

jaggy grossness that makes it kind of look unrealistic. But for whatever reason, this like low poly art style works perfectly for that, where it's like it just as you're sculpting the land, it just feels much more natural to like see these like weird like polygons, like flattening or building up and stuff like that. So you've got like a lot of freedom in terms of customizing like the world around you and as you progress through the game you're collecting more resources you're finding objects

to research uh which in turn unlock new buildings for your base and the buildings let you do stuff like build a um like a moon buggy or uh like a crane for your moon buggy buggy there's this amazing moment where i was like just cruising around on the on moon buggy or like a crane for your moon buggy, there's this amazing moment where I was like just cruising around on the buggy, which takes probably like three or four hours to eventually build up to. And I found this, just the top of like a crashed massive solar, what is that, like a solar, what collects solar rays? Solar panel? Solar panel, thank you. So it was rays solar panel solar panel thank you so it was

like a it was like a satellite solar panel thing but it was enormous it was it looked like skylab and all that was there was sort of like the top half of it and i spent like 15 minutes slowly digging it out and like 90 of it was under the ground this massive like crashed out of space solar panel and i finally dug dug it out and it the second i like freed it under the ground this massive like crashed out of space solar panel and i finally dug dug it out and it the second i like freed it from the ground it became a physics physics object that i could then grab with my crane and drag it back to my base and if i placed it with the solar panel facing up it would actually give power to my base which is just this like crazy moment of realization we're like wow they're

really making every little object in the world kind of mean something and just gives a lot more satisfaction to like exploring and finding new things and uh stuff like that have you talked about the fact that there's co-op i haven't so i actually haven't played the co-op uh although i've watched people play it i've watched videos of it but there is i think it's up to four players at once can go to town i am dying to try it in co-op because it seems like perfect for that everyone like kind of building and doing their own thing and then coming together let's do it together yeah let's rock and roll um i am i looked this up on steam before we started uh recording because i haven't played it and i hadn't really even heard of it um yeah and i'd like to read the top review uh this person says

went to the top of a mountain asked friend if he wanted to try to build to the moon spent the next hour building up you can like terraform the ground in the game yeah i spent the next hour building up into the atmosphere past the atmosphere into space space debris flying by keep going up start getting motion sickness from the spinning due to actually rotating with the planet, falls off accidentally. I have no idea you could do that. Yeah, that's really, that's true.

You can actually do that. That's super sick. Yeah, it sounds like my cup of tea, and I think sort of a more cynical person would say like, well, this is what No Man's Sky should have been, but to be honest, yeah, it does kind of of set like you mentioning there's not like a menu where you have 99 carbon and you have to inject it into your spaceship so you can jump to the next plant like everything being very physics based and very um experimental exploratory like

sounds pretty pretty cool yeah so that you dropped in the room russ uh this looks great i'm excited yeah so what i want to say you know for the no man's sky thing like i think the big difference is that no man's sky was trying to do like 60 different things like randomized uh you know animal generation and randomized planets and blah blah and so on and so forth and it ended up like kind of spreading itself very thin uh this game again it's early access so they're like slowly building it up but this game has started i think much more focused which is to say like they want to make that first planet experience really cool and satisfying and interesting and then they're going to kind of build on top of that now right now you can actually leave the planet and go to another planet.

You can build a spaceship once you get the proper materials and research. And the other planets have different gravity and stuff like that. But the randomness aspect of the different planets is not the driving force. There are also no animals. There are quasi-violent plants that you'll run into but i i think they were very smart and kind of picking their battles and saying we're gonna make this like base building physics based cooperative experience like as tight as we can and then kind of similar to minecraft start like adding things to it and i honestly believe like this game is going to be around for three to four years um i there's a really strong fan

base already and if they continue to support it as well as they have so far i think it's going to be really this is like the best possible scenario for these open access games yeah i mean it i i will always wonder what would have happened with no man's sky if it had been developed with the audience i usually do not think that is like the best way to make a game but these kind of like start with a kernel of an idea and then start to find the game it just feels like there's such an opportunity to see like to essentially it's free qa to test it out to see what works and then to kind of build towards that to test it out to see what works and then to kind of build towards that yeah it also forces you to make sure that your first 15 minutes or so is like a really interesting slice um which yeah is is it's the hardest part of making a game is making sure that that loop the first thing your player sees

is like a fun interesting loop yeah and no matter what and then you can just and then once you can nail that you can just at like just like your space station is modular they treat the game as modular which is like okay we've nailed this aspect now we're going to start doing this aspect and we'll test we'll try different things that might not be perfect right out of the gate but slowly but surely you're just building onto this mound of cool stuff and but i think as a start um it's a really great start it's not a surprise they've got like some former valve people working on this game so like it doesn't surprise me that it's as good as it is early on

but um definitely a game worth watching i i really dig it cool well uh this is the best game of january was oh now we fight to the death yeah remember this has this is the best game of January was. Oh, now we fight to the death. Yeah. Remember? This has always been the best part of the show. Oh. I mean, for me, personally speaking, I would do Yakuza or Resident Evil. I think Resident Evil is a better game, but I also know that nobody here has played it.

Well, again, I've played the demo. And it's also a game that I know that I wouldn't play, although I appreciate the artistry and why it's good. So I would probably vote Resident Evil as well. I'm going to vote Gravity Rush, knowing that it is more of a... A thinking man's game. It's more cerebral.

No, it's a statement. You know, like, I know it's going to lose. It's a protest vote. It's the Gary Johnson vote. Yeah, I wouldn't be able to go to bat for Yakuza 0 just because I feel like I haven't played enough of it. But I feel like noting when somebody pulls a series, like, from the depths of depravity into the limelight there were 3ds games that came out too like so many resident evil games came out

that i was like fuck all this it was done like it was dead they really so it wasn't they made that fucking raccoon city shooter oh they made so many bad resident evil games it's astonishing i should love that game i think that's worth celebrating. Do you think they just killed everyone that was working on the old games and just went to a college and hired a bunch of 20-year-olds? Yeah, it sounds really Resident Evil to me. So you guys okay with Resident Evil 7?

Yeah, let's do that. Our best game of January 2017 is Resident Evil 7. If we could take a minute, now that we're doing this, are we going 2017 is Resident Evil 7. If we could take a minute, now that we're doing this. Now that we're doing, wait, are we going to put Resident Evil against the winner of next? No. That's the way the game works.

It's a year show that goes all year long. Oh yeah, I forgot about this. That was how we started. Oh, that's such a dumb way to do it, but okay. Let's talk about predictions for February then. Anybody have any? There's some jamos coming out in February too. The Fire Emblem game I'm looking forward to,

Nioh, comes out next month. Oh, yeah, Nioh. It's going to be tough to beat. Does Nier come out? Horizon Zero Dawn comes out February 28th. Oh, Horizon I think is going to be tough. Horizon's going to be great, but that Nier Automata demo was...

Is Nier out? I don't think Nier's out in february is it it's not no i don't think i could have picked hitman that would have been a cop out wouldn't it yeah hitman's old well it's the first season on disc releases tomorrow near is next month yeah i guess so yeah in america no no north america's march 7th uh well and halo wars 2 guys oh i guess pc might be next month i don't know i don't know i don't know um yeah that near near automata looks pretty cool um there's psychonauts game no big deal is that really coming out on psvr one yeah oh um i played it at an event it's it's kind of cool oh Oh, Torment, Tides of Numenera looks nice.

We got stuff. For Honor. Yeah, there's some good stuff. Poochie and Yoshi's Woolly World on 3DS. Yeah, so it should be interesting, and we will talk about those games and maybe some other ones. Who knows?

It's impossible to say. But that's going to do it. Do I say it? I just say it. That's going to do it for us this time on the besties yeah you talk about polygon tune in next month for the besties yeah because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games besties you nailed it Besties