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

Episode Date: August 15, 2017

It’s a hot one After a slow June, things have picked back up considerably for July. We’ve got a ton of great games to talk about and, most excitingly, one of Russ’ classic characters makes an extremely unexpected return. Games discussed: Destiny 2 Beta, Hidden My Game By Mom, Flipping Legend, Vostok Inc., Mass Effect Andromeda, Miitopia, The End is Nigh, Splatoon 2, Pyre. 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!

There was a guy in a silver and blue leotard peeing in the urinal. And I didn't think too much of it until he went up to the sink and washed his hands and then put his gloves on and then pulled the silver mask down over his face. And it wasn't until that exact moment I realized he was cosplaying as Pepsi Man. I realized he was cosplaying as Pepsi Man. And I was so fucking jized to see somebody cosplaying as Pepsi Man, except we were seeing him in the exact only context in which it is not acceptable to ask to have your picture taken with somebody. And all I wanted to do was get a picture with Pepsi Man, who we saw as soon as we entered Comic-Con, and I couldn't because he just came from the Pepsi can.

And I don't know. So if you're out there, Pepsi Man, if you could send me some shots in front of a green screen that I can Photoshop myself into. Some toilet shots of you in your Pepsi Man costume using toilet. I think we can make a lot of money together, bud. Hit me up. Anyway, we saw Pepsi Man.

Shwa. Shwa. Good game. There's the first Infinite Runner. Yeah. No, I know. Do you know that there was actually another person in the bathroom and you just didn't see them? Because they were Crystal Pepsi Man.

Okay. Okay. my name is justin mccroy and i know the best games of the month my name is griffin mccroy and my gaming month's all right it's just my name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and my game of the month's all right. It's just okay, though. My name is Chris Plant, and I already know that I won this month. My name is Russ Frustig, and I know the best game of the week. And I also want to say, if you happen to hear Tom Petty playing on the background, that's not me playing music by accident.

It's actually Tom Petty who is warming up on the concert stage right outside my apartment brag that you and your house uh so welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in dungeons and dragons and fantasy role playing and fashion and cereal milkshakes at Burger King. Hey, Russ, can I just fucking get through it, man? Well, but one of those I wanted to pause and clarify. Are there shapes beyond cubes that could be gelatinous? No. Just cubes.

Yeah. And also cereal-based milkshakes at burger king i covered those so we're gonna hit those twice this week oh sports we do that sometimes for sure we do sports and uh also video games which we're gonna be taking kind of a deeper dive into video games this week you know they have actually i have you got i don't know if you were paying attention at comic convention but uh at comic convention they also showed games now too. Did you see this? Have you seen this?

Is it Pac-Man? Like Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man? Yeah. They've actually come a long way since that, judging from the games at comic convention. Like Pac-Man 2, Ms. Pac-Man 2? That's, you know, it's just a bow on her head. Did you know that's the main difference? I think she's faster also, and that's

probably about as deep as sort of gameplay mechanic innovations are going to come in my lifetime because video games are just Pac-Man. They've actually come a long way since Pac-Man. What the fuck? I'm here to explore that concept. First off, before we get into our picks for the best games of

July 2017, i cannot believe it is almost the end of july already that's preposterous um let's talk about our honorable mentions uh for for the month good luck has anybody heard of a game called player unknowns battlegrounds oh man i'm at a hundred hours on that bad boy and i still stink like shit and that's funny because that reminds me of this game called Year Automata. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So, okay. There are good games.

Yeah, we should talk about the Destiny 2 beta. Did anybody play that? Yeah, I played it. The level. I didn't get in the multiplayer. It is. I thought it was neat. I think that there are.

So I was worried because there's some stuff that like if they do not tweak, it is going to make the PVE experience pretty rough. I think. Cooldowns. Yeah. Cooldowns in general are sort of like. So the state of PVP in Destiny 1, which I didn't necessarily think this, but maybe that says more about like how I played and sort of exploited this stuff when I played PvP in Destiny 1 it's very chaotic right and so there's just a lot of supers going off all the time and a lot of sticky grenade spam and a lot of stuff like that that sort of makes the experience a little bit more a little bit less uh sort of twitchy gunplay focus than i think most folks who

play hardcore pvp would want it to be um and so a lot of that stuff has been dialed down in destiny 2 in this beta and it's also been dialed down in the um in the the non-competitive pve experience to i think a pretty bad degree like yeah grenade grenade grenade the like for me the big thing is grenades are they take much longer to respawn and maybe that's something that will be mitigated with like equipment and shit because that is how it worked in destiny one um grenades take very long to respawn and they're also weaker so they got like hit twice and so grenades just feel really shitty um i played a 30minute strike and only got my super once, despite the fact that I killed like 110 dudes by the time we finished.

There's some stuff that's just like... I think all that stuff is going to be hammered out because it's such a big part of character stuff. I cannot believe that is our first discussion topic with this beta because I was like so excited by the stuff that was happening in the single-player mission. I thought it was beautiful. Yeah. I thought it was beautiful. Yeah, it looks gorgeous.

It looks great. And there's some, there's some, no, Griffin, you already had your chance. You wouldn't complain about grenade spawn times. The thing, the biggest moment for me, and this is going to sound dumb, but the biggest moment for me was when I was in playing in a single player level and a character came over and talked to me while i was playing a level yeah you know in other games and not any character it was mr nathan phillian mr nathan they sprung for the dosh to get nathan back um you know in other games that

wouldn't feel revolutionary but like damn if it's not pretty groundbreaking for destiny to have someone actually like there with you in the world now i don't know what that feels like in the 10th time you play that mission the 15th time and and i've heard that exact criticism leveled i will say though i didn't spend like especially towards the later months of destiny like i was not revisiting those first missions really at all i mean i think it's an unfair criticism there's definitely lots of repetition but it's not like you are i don't know going back to the fucking first mission and just like having to play through it to get your five spin metal that you need or whatever the fuck that was definitely how i mean they had

story missions like that even late in the game i i i i agree i like i don't think story missions are a huge deal i think think they should be super cinematic because more often than not, you're playing the strikes a lot more than the story stuff. I really like... I thought you were going to mention this, Justin, the fact that we were playing

through a solely single-player experience and at one moment... You may not have seen this, but at one moment, you actually do encounter other players, random players. That was my other favorite thing because they deployed additional people cinematically. How cool. Just when the fight got really bad, at one moment you actually do encounter other players that was my other favorite thing because

they deployed additional people cinematically like how cool it like just when the fight got really bad you had people there helping you like how it was so cool and smart and neat and i hope it's really representative of what they're going to do in the full game because that was such a neat moment and so much better than like just having these hosers that are there with you when you start the the mission instead having them like pop up when you really need some support yeah yeah the the new utility powers are also pretty cool not so much on the hunter like each class has a like a special extra thing they can do like the titans can lay down like a little wall that will instantly reload your weapon if you hide behind it which is so sweet uh and the warlocks can lay down like a

little healing field or a damage boosting field and the hunters have like a a dodge dash that if you like kill an enemy right after you come out of it like it instantly respawns your melee and then your melee kill instantly respawns the dodge dash so that one's not as helpful to other people but it lends itself to a really fun play style of just like fucking swimming through enemies like that that's really cool and also the new um public event stuff looks really great there was a i think an ign like exclusive video that was a lot of stuff about um how public events and like uh public adventures and stuff are changing that looks really promising i just i think it looks hot as hell and i'm very yeah i

think it'll be really good i'm excited about plant did you play it at all or yeah i i think my big thing was i forgot that i actually really enjoyed halo because i haven't enjoyed them for a very long time um probably since the odst and come on reach was good reach was good yeah yeah reach was good but this was-player mission. I don't know what about it. I really can't pin it down because I would have to go back to Halo games. But it, like, was triggering something in me that was reminiscent of that. And it felt to me. It felt like Halo 2. It really, really felt like Halo.

That sequence where you're, like, walking through the, like, wounded soldiers was, like, direct like direct from halo 2 like that same thing happened but even just the level design i mean it it yeah it just felt good in a way that i i came into destiny with uh taking king and i enjoyed it i get why people were really digging it but this clicked for me in a way that that didn't and i was shocked because so much of the criticism of uh of the destiny beta has been like oh it's more of the same and i i feel like i'm seeing that leveled from a lot of people who played like 300 hours of destiny yeah and like it's at that point it's hey you're like a wine aficionado right like everything is gonna be like super super precise that that game it's so i think that's such a whack like thing i i there's i guess all criticisms are whatever but

yeah i that that game is hooks it is a series of hooks that pull you along a thing and right now we don't know what those hooks feel like destiny one was a very fun solid feeling game when it came out that i beat the story of and then stopped playing because the hooks were shitty as hell when the game started. And then those hooks got good, and all of a sudden there was stuff to do, and there was meaningful progression, and there was a reason for me to play with my friends every night

and grind for shit to try and get better stuff and higher up hooks. And that is the story of that game. And right now we know some details about how that shit works but you we won't know until we are a long ways into into playing it and we sort of understand the like progression systems and the like uh the how how gear gets allocated and and like what we're going to be spending our right now i feel like we know we're going to be spending our first 20 hours doing in destiny i played destiny one for hundreds and hundreds of hours and i don't know what that is going to look like in destiny 2 yet um totally yeah there was one moment

specifically another one i wanted to call out where you had to shoot some turbines and did everybody on earth have trouble with this i swear to god i see and this is not me fucking toot my own horn, but like, they're apparently patching that out in the final version of the game. I didn't think it was that hard. I didn't have a problem with it. I think what I wanted to say before that was that you, it actually required you to think like you actually had to think like, and that is so not destiny. Like, oh, wait a minute.

I got to think about how I'm going to do this. Huh? Okay. Well, it is in raids. I mean, and that's what they were trying to do like i was shooting it over and over again thinking this is destiny this should work i don't have that many methods of interacting with my environment i'm just shooting where it tells me to shoot but this he actually had to like be kind of smart in a different way i think that is so spot on and i think that is that's probably the thing that i couldn't think of that makes me think of halo yeah like uh attacking like that big uh scarab yeah and finding the

weak points yeah that you're part of the world and it's not just a static backdrop um i have an i have another game i want to talk about for honorable mention okay go which okay yeah and this justin recommended this to me and i really really loved it uh and it's old so apologies but it's called hidden my game by mom exclamation point yes i thought we might have talked about this on a show but i think we might have it's just it's super good it's on iphone the premise is that your mom has hidden your nintendo ds looking like console and you have to like click to find it. But if you accidentally click on mom, you lose.

And mom hides in cabinets. And sometimes there's an alligator that you have to prop his mouth open and get your Game Boy. It's just really charming and great and free and worth downloading on iPhone. And the sequel is out now. And I know we haven't talked about the sequel. I haven't talked about that. I haven't played the sequel. It's also out. It's I know we haven't talked about the sequel. So I haven't talked about that. I haven't played the sequel. It's also out.

It's basically the same thing, except more and funny. It's really, it's really impressive. Silly and, and some like good meta jokes in there and, and stuff like that. I thought it was great. It was really good. I would go ahead, Justin. There was another little iOS thing I want to mention called called flipping legends and it is published by noodle cake i don't know if the uh the stickbank all folks i don't think it's developed by them uh but it's a really neat sort of endless runner where rather

than run straight along you're flipping uh across a three square wide grid that's sort of laid out in a checkerboard pattern um so if you're on a black and you're flipping diagonally all the time, so if you're on a black square, you're always going to flip to a black square. And when you flip across like off the three by three grid, then you'll land on a white square. So that's how you get back and forth between them. And enemies are laid out in a pattern on the squares and your health is constantly draining and you refill your health by uh killing

enemies so it's really a sort of pattern recognition and almost sort of a rhythm game in the way that you like get the faster you can go through and hit as many guys as possible you have like a combo for hitting them in sequence and the faster you can sort of flip through, um, the, the, the more points you get in the farther you'll get sort of in the levels. Um, and they're really, that's sort of the basis, but there's really interesting like ideas built onto it in that,

that are strange for this genre. Like there are, uh, character classes that each independently level up and have very different special abilities that can that make the game feel very different um and uh it's it's a really neat little little thing that i've sunk a lot of time into that i really kind of dug it's a great like kill 60 seconds kind of thing uh the new latent game on ios and android is also very good it's um it's like it's like 17 bucks but it is like

well it's like but it's a fucking full latent game like it's is there any like in-app purchasing no no it's just it's just a game um which i find very refreshing because i love those games but like i don't always got my 3ds i played it a lot while we were like traveling uh during comic-con and it is just a full ass blatant game and i like it um did we go ahead sorry you go ahead plant you don't talk about i i'm gonna make this really quick but i have a trio of things so i'll keep them really really short um the first is next machina which is uh super stardust people teamed up with uh the original robotron creator i believe and made a twin stick shooter that is unbelievably polished and good um kingsway is a role-playing game that takes place in the

environment of uh like a windows like operating system so you are using windows to travel across the, this world and then like store it. It's like windows 95. Um, yeah, it's really, really, really conceptual and very,

very well made. And then the last thing is a thing. This is like literally just my recommendation to Justin in case he hasn't played it yet. Justin, have you heard of Vostok Inc? No. Oh my gosh.

So it is a clicker game crossed with a twin stick shooter. And when you blow up things as the 2D ship, you get money, which you then use to build things on planets, which is a clicker game. What platform is this on? It is on, I, I believe PC,

PS4, Xbox One, and Vita. I was going to say, he's going to play this whole entire recording. Um, so like, I,

it's weird. This month was like, in some ways it felt slow. And then there are just like all these weird small games that came out right towards the end. Hey, did we talk about Mass Effect Andromeda at all in any way? Like, did we even discuss it? I think we did in did in a i just wanted to say real quick i'm i made a go of it uh because like

there was a part of me that thought like man how bad could a mass effect game be and it is really it's frustrating in a way that i didn't expect it to be frustrating in that all the systems are really crappy and none of them worked they're all like so confusing that it i don't know how they broke it but like the basic stuff like some of the story stuff is nice and and it controls well but like the basics of like building and exploring and all that stuff are just terrible and it's so frustrating and i really thought that i'd be able to like if i heard that if you just blew past a lot of the side stuff and kept focused on the main thing that you could have some fun with it but um hachimachi like after every like almost every

single system requires you to look up a guide somewhere because it's so poorly explained and laid out and organized and the ui is horseshit like it i know that like it's not new to say like andromeda is unenjoyable but i really thought that i'd be able to like wring something out of it and i just absolutely could not um which bummed me out because there was many times i i was like sort of enjoying playing it but all those systems are just so crummy and it's really depressing and don't play Mass Effect Andromeda. Womp womp. There you go.

But maybe Anthem will be good though, I bet. Could be. Casey's back. Casey's back in the mix. Getting mild. We'll see. I can start if you want. Sure.

My game is Miitopia on the 3DS, which full transparency i got today um but the uh there's a demo out right now on 3ds and the demo is just the beginning of the game and you can just um import your save from the demo into the uh into the final version so i've probably played between that and the full version of the game a couple hours um which this is an rpg so that is not a lot of time and i do not know like how the experience will necessarily evolve but i wanted to bring it because um i think there's actually a lot of really cool stuff going on it is um a game where you play as me's and there have been a lot of those and most of them have been not so great. Like, um, I was excited for Tomodachi life because it was sold.

It's like animal crossing, but with me, but the game wasn't really there so much. And then obviously like me, Tomo wasn't very good. And, um, uh,

all of the like three DS sort of, um, what's it street pass games or some of them are kind of fun. Um, and I, and there is a lot of similarity with the rpg street pass game with this kind kind of i mean the problem is i assumed this because this is a 30 30 game right and so i assumed that that was just going to be like find me

the um the the street pass game which is very very very lightweight um yes but there's a lot more to me topia and that's kind of why i wanted to bring it and talk to it so it's in this fantasy world and uh the game starts and you pick your me it's really smart um it kind of pulls me's from two sources and also at any time you can uh make a custom me for any character that you want to um or it will sort of scan your 3ds and i guess your uh like nintendo account and what it is linked to and it will sort of scan your 3DS and I guess your like Nintendo account and what it is linked to. And it will, for instance, it like had my Tomodachi life save and I don't know how it got that. And so I could pull any of the Miis that I used or made in Tomodachi life.

It had all my friends on there. It had all the Miis that I made in M me maker that like i guess came with me from the we like i had a lot a lot a lot of me's to choose from because i played a few of these types of games before uh and then there is a me central where um uh people's custom me's will sort of be populated in this big long list uh and whenever you turn the game on if you're connected to the internet uh before you start playing, it will ask you to like vote on some fan creations on which ones you like. And so it sort of populates that list with like only really fucking good

Alf and like a billion anime characters and Mario and Luigi and Zelda and a bunch of Nintendo characters. And Gabe Newell was in my game. The Gabe Newell one was very impressive. And so like that is very cool too. So you will use those Miis. There's your main character and then other party members that you come across.

You can customize them and choose who they are. There are citizens of these different towns that you'll come across. The main like bad guy of the game, you give them a face and like various characters. And the game is about this like big evil warlord who rips everybody's faces off and then puts them on monsters and you have to go kill the monsters and get the faces back.

I mean rips is probably more dramatic than it is. I mean he tears the sinews of the flesh and then it is your, your quests with your party of four sort of, um, adventurers to go out and like get the faces back and fulfill these quests for folks in town and like explore and get treasure and level up and stuff. Um, so like on, on paper, that's what it is, but there's some really, really cool systems for one thing. Whenever you make a, uh, a character out of a me, you choose their personality and there's personalities like

calm and kind and energetic and stubborn and then those personalities have lots of different ways that they manifest so like if you play a kind character then maybe they'll jump in the way of a fatal attack for another person or they will if somebody's like out of healing items they'll give them one of their own um but each characteristic also has a negative side effect so the kind one is sometimes your kind character will like you'll have an enemy on the ropes and your kind character will just spare them so they get to leave and you don't get anything out of the whole fight um and then on top of that there are different classes and the classes are a mix of like fantasy stuff like knight and mage uh with some weirder stuff like chef and pop star um and those all have like different

implications and then there's a whole relationship system in the game so um there are you basically like you move through the world by hopping into these little nodes and then the node will walk you down a path and at certain points you can like choose between different junctions in the path to like take harder or easier routes, um, which you'll make those decisions based on like how many resources you have right now. who will run out and buy stuff that they want uh which is a really uh sometimes very charming sometimes infuriating system where like i see fucking um you know guy fieri my my mage and he's like hey i'm gonna go buy this robe give me 200 gold pieces and i'm like here you go guy fieri he comes back he's like oops i bought one banana instead it's like fucking guy fieri um and then you you can like but in the end you can like choose which me's are roommates and then they will grow closer um whenever they do like i

mentioned the the kind trait where like somebody jumps in front of the wave of fatal attack when they do that the two people their relationship gets closer or they give somebody an item with the kind trait and their relationship gets closer or as a cleric you heal somebody and they are appreciative and your relationship gets closer but as a cleric you heal somebody and they are appreciative and your relationship gets closer but there's also things that will make your relationship fall apart and as your like relationship levels up that also unlocks unique abilities there's like there's a lot of

stuff there's like a lot of it's very deep what makes you fall apart um stuff like so like a stubborn character might just refuse to like act and people are like fuck this fuck you I'm out of here there's attacks that are these powerful aoe attacks that hit all of the enemies but they will also hit your friends and so that will cause your relationship to to suffer so the vibe that i got from the game was sort of like um like i got a tearaway vibe

in the sense that like you feel like you have a lot of control over the world as it populates and like feels very personalized for you, which I liked a lot. Um, also got because the relationship stuff kind of like a fire emblem me thing. Um, I don't know how you feel. Cause again,

like I was just playing the, the demo you were, you're still only like a couple hours in for me. I don't know that this is a game i could play for 10 hours or even five like even though it has like they clearly have a lot of layers of depth to it it seems hard to like i kind of like once i had the the hook the gimmick as it were the like didn't find that the rpg systems were so engaging that i like needed to keep playing yeah i feel that i had a system where you could uh hold in b to fast forward and yeah like it basically

always needed to be that yes yeah i do not need to see these doofuses like running left to right and spouting nonsense but even then there's like cool systems where like the first time that a characteristic trait activates or you use one of your new class powers or you do anything for the first time in battle it kind of slows down time and that fast forward state to like show you this is what that is this is what it looks like this is what it's doing and then in the future after that first time it doesn't it doesn't slow it down anymore so like even even there i usually am fast forwarding also but that's just because like that's usually how i play rpgs um there's also like just a lot of charm to the game and this is sort of tomodachi life-esque in that just they are constantly like there are constantly

these little cut scenes happening while you're walking down the road where like you'll be offered choices or two characters will like um talk to each other and the relationship will uh get get get stronger there's just like a lot of constant um sort of just little little interstitials like that that um i i'm really enjoying i don't think it's the deepest game in the world um and i've been looking forward to it mainly because like we said it is kind of a slow time and i've been looking for like a a game i can like really sink my teeth into and um I've played it for a couple hours now and I think I'll probably keep on going.

I gotta say, it would be so nice if this was on mobile. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Or Switch, for that matter. Sure, yeah, that would be fine. I have a ton of friends on Switch. I thought it was very cute, though. I don't know why Russ

feels compelled to brag, but but i have so many friends and everyone loves me on switch and and they say i'm cool and quitting my mom says i'm really cool but you're quitting your mom i said even my mom thinks i'm cool sorry including your mom got it including my mom yeah um what next uh i'll go okay great so uh the game that i'm bringing is a game called the end is nigh um it is a platforming game by ed mc edmund mcmillan and a gentleman named tyler g and i'm forgetting his last name sorry tyler um and uh so edmund people know his work from super meat boy is like the biggest one tyler glial glial thank you glial glial yes some uh so he uh edmund made super meat boy and binding of isaac which were like two of his biggest titles i don't know by the way it's still a good fucking game oh yeah totally really holds up

and End is Nigh is very similar to Super Meat Boy in the sense that it's like a very traditional platformer but with modern controls so the premise is you survive the apocalypse as like a ball of ash

I think your name is literally ash and you are hunting the world to, for tumors in this case to find and build a friend out of tumors. And how that sort of presents in the game is a series of like tricky, increasingly difficult, uh, platforming sequences that are like single screen platform, like not like tricky in the sense there's a lot of mechanics going on but tricky in the sense of like tricky jumps and stuff like that and um this whole world

is like presented as very dark but it's backed by like a really cool uh score of remixed uh fair use stuff stuff like call the mountain king and a few other ones that are like you know classical mountain king and a few other ones that are like you know classical staples but uh sort of redone with kind of a heavy metal bent to them and i mean for me like i love like spunky and meat boy and stuff like that i love really tough platforming games because i like the feeling of like you're constantly getting better as you learn a map or as you learn the challenge and um i think from a design standpoint uh you know edmund is is like very well honed in terms of designing levels and like teaching you a mechanic and then sort of altering that mechanic slightly and adding new variables to it um and i've really enjoyed it uh it's it out on Steam, I want to say about two or three weeks ago.

Uh, but it's also coming to Switch and PS4. Um, so I think it'll be great on Switch. I think that's like a perfect home for it. And PS4, it'll be good too. But, uh, yeah. I was shocked how different it felt than Super Meat Boy. Because when I saw it, it looked identical. Yes. it felt than super meat boy because when i saw it it looked identical yes um but the the game is a lot it's weird because i think super meat boy especially as it goes on requires uh a tremendous

amount of skill and precision yeah but this game from the very beginning i feel like requires more um because the difference is you you can't really just like bounce around the side of walls like you can in super meat boy there are hooks right and you use hooks to get around the environment but also there's like a ledge grab yeah it's like a ledge grab but only well it's all ledges and then also these hooks that come out of walls but then you also have a long jump that is used off of hooks that gets you to places you might not expect or that look like they might be uh too far away um and i found pretty quickly that i don't know the skill curve felt like it shot up fast not that that's bad at all yeah but i i was i i felt like with super meat boy i was doing pretty

well for a long time or there was a little more room for error um we're here it got hard or yeah very quickly as somebody who definitely has a skill cap with those games and enjoyed like a good portion of meat boy i will say that like i for me personally it got hard too fast like i really didn't have this period where i felt like oh i'm having fun with this because i'm increasing in skill it just felt very antagonistic from the beginning and like if you're somebody who is looking for that, I completely kind of, I can see why that would be refreshing. Like if you're coming straight off of meat boy into this, that's probably where from a skill level, like you need to be at. But for me, it just, it got

hard so fast that I don't feel like I had a period where I felt like I was improving or, or, or was really enjoying myself. There was a lot of times where, like, I could see the jump that needed to happen and just, like, couldn't get it to time out right. And after about 20 tries, it's like, okay, I'm going to find something else to do. But again, that's specific to the game, just me personally. Yeah, totally.

What's interesting, it's not specific to the game just me personally yeah totally what's interesting um it's like it's a very nuanced difference between this and super meat boy that like kind of requires like a lot of obsessive platforming care um so meat boy is like a very analog um platforming game you hold down run you have like a lot of air control you can sort of like edge jumps in like different way like ways that you wouldn't necessarily expect like there's a little like more give and take in terms of like where you're gonna land from a jump whereas this is very locked down there's no run button so if you do a long jump the long jump will always 100 land you in the exact same spot every single time um which is interesting because for me that actually made

the game easier because i knew there was like no sort of like oh my hand you know moved the analog stick at the wrong time at the last second um so i didn't like go off course but it also kind of i don't know i it made it feel more closer to like a um a rhythm game in the sense because i knew exactly what was going to happen whenever i hit a given button for the most part and it kind of took some of the guesswork out of what would ordinarily be like a much harder platformer but you know i can totally see the other side it makes sense that it would be like very intimidating for a lot of people it also doesn't i don't think it does a good job of um rewarding you for progressing through the game as well as meat boy did meat boy had a lot of things like um uh like bandages that unlock new characters and like crazy themed secret levels um and this has like

very very hard arcade levels that are themed as well but there's no as far as i'm aware there's no unlockable characters um and that sort of makes it a little more grindy to get through it but i the platforming stuff alone was enough for me yeah i definitely also think like i feel like the world kind of put me off it was not i i wasn't like part of the part of the uh enticement with games like that is that like want to see what really comes next and because of the post-apocalyptic thing like i just was not that interested in because it was also kind of crummy you know i was not that interested in where else i was going to be able to sort of see and explore yeah i think the the later worlds get more interesting to look at uh pretty noticeably

but i agree like starting with just like pretty familiar dark broken buildings post-apocalyptic thing is is not the best place to start. It looks almost exactly like Cannibal. Yeah, the first levels, that's true. The four-color palette sort of Yeah.

What should we talk about in halftime? Because I think we talked about Destiny. Yeah, can we just edit to Destiny? I don't even know which one this fucking is. What is that supposed to be? Hello, it is... Hi. Wait, is it Jean-Baptiste?

Jean-Baptiste, yeah, yeah. I don't remember Jean-Baptiste quite sounding like that, but all right. Wow, it's been so long. So long, but not long enough in like a different way. What is going on, besties? Wait, I'm sorry. Before we...

I really don't think this is Jean-Baptiste. I really, I think this is one of other, Russ's other characters doing a prank call. I think there might be a reason there is, this is Jean-Baptiste. Did the last time we see Jean-Baptiste, he got pushed out a window? Yes, but I was fine.

Okay. This is no problem. I don't know if you guys remember i am an independent developer from canada uh-huh canada and now and now just by you i need you to understand jean-baptiste anywhere you said there where you were from it was going to be um slanderous and hurtful towards whatever kind nation okay you claim to hail from where in canada are you from the eastern i don't i don't own this i don't own any of this do not tweet at me please like that sort of down thereabouts um yes is does this mean you speak french we uh-huh and what else what else do you know from that beautiful language?

Oh, there are follow-up questions. No, thank you. I guess my only one is, why would you be here? Well, I am here in America. Thank you for asking, Griffin. I am here in America for an exploration on game design. I have been in Chicago. Have you been to Chicago?ago yeah i lived there for a

while it was nice it was nice yes i was invited there to exhibit my game well sure what was that game it is a game well it is a game about walking around and seeing creatures and hugging them and capturing them and bringing them home with you. That actually sounds good to me. That's actually tickling all my sensibilities. Jean, please tell me more about the game. Sure. Well, you walk around and you can open any door you would like.

And the creatures are in behind doors and then they will leap into your phone. It is a phone game. Mm-hmm. And it has been... God, I just realized what he's doing. A big success. Wait, really? Wait, you just realized?

Yeah, it took me a second. It has been such a success. It is my first big success, and I wanted all of the fans to come and experience it with me in Chicago. Interesting. I hate to ask, but what's the name of this game? This is Pokemon Go. Go? Go?

Go? Pokemon Go? Are you talking about the type of beer? It was localized as Pokemon Go in America. But it is Pokemon Go. From the French. From French. French. Go means uh i'll translate

goes means to capture or to hug okay great i like that then it's weird that those are synonymous there must be a very confusing country to live in it is you never know if you're going to jail or if you're getting married right we we show the game in Chicago, and everyone seemed so excited about it. There was so much yelling and excitement about it. I saw that. There was a video of them shouting, like, we can't play because they were, like, so excited for the game. What you didn't hear, that video was doctored,

and it was them saying, we can't wait to play. Yes. Well, they had been playing all morning and then the second the video went up we turned it off just just to see what they would do because that's the magic of game design is you control the experience it's a sort of human experimentation as well

you know I would love to hear more about the game but I mean Pokemon Go or Go's has been such a huge success financially. Yes. This must mean that you have a wealth that you didn't have before. Oh, yes. I get $33 each month from Nintendo. That's a small amount.

That's not a very big amount of money. No, that is a success. They say this is a large percentage of overall game income. Is that American dollars or Canadian dollars? This is American. Canadian, it's 87. I'm sorry, do you have a cold? Is something wrong? Yes, I'm a little ill because there was water flying at me in Chicago.

Rain? A little bit. They call it rain. Oh, from the sky or from people? No, it was from the land. Land water. I did not know where it was coming from. And then I looked down and it was coming from mouths, which might just be a cultural difference

that I'm not familiar with. I'm sorry. Are you melting and your voice is going from soprano to baritone? Is it exhausting just speaking in that ridiculous voice, John? I have been traveling so very often in the planes and the air

is hard. It's hard on my internals. Buddy, I hope you get the rest you need as you leave this call immediately. And we're so happy you could stop by. Can you buy more gold coins? Yeah, we'll do our best. Yeah, I hope you get the rest you need as you leave this call immediately. And we're so happy you could stop by. Can you buy more gold coins? Yeah, we'll do our best. Yeah, I'll get some Ultra Balls.

Okay, coins. Yeah, I'll get them right now if you just leave. Okay, I'm turning the crank on the servers right now. They'll be up in a second. Is that what happened? Oh, you were at the event and you were like, who's cranking the servers? No, you shouldn't have worn sleeves. It's getting so close to that crank oh no i'll cut them off goodbye okay bye john god what a treat

i really forgot that guy existed now he does again um who wants to go next of the deep well of characters who could have come by i didn't think jean baptiste was going to be the one to get the reboot um so soon yeah i'm so happy he could stop by uh me too plant it's such an honor sure yeah i'll talk about a game called splatoon 2 it is like splatoon 1 uh almost entirely but only nobody only nobody only people played this one yeah that would be the huge difference so to catch everybody up uh i guess mr miyamoto himself was like i want to make a shooter but i don't want to make people shoot people uh that will not be the priority and he's like what if i imagine he was playing tony hawk at the time and he's like, Hey, this graffiti mode's pretty good.

What if we made that into a Nintendo game? You don't think it was Mark Echo's getting up? No, that was after Tony Hawk. Don't give Mark Echo credit for the work of the bird man. His personal work, coding his video game. He wouldn't put his name on it if he didn't do all of the work.

If he didn't code it entirely himself obviously um so yeah you uh teams of four you uh the goal is to paint the most of the environment and the maps you're on and you can also you know like splat your other little squid friends i'm do we do we have to explain the basics i don't think so people get paints okay you are describing just the Turf War mode in the standard play. There's other modes like King of the Hill, sort of capture the zone

style mode. Yeah, and that's like the big change. There's single player now that is pretty good. Good enough to keep you entertained on a flight when you don't have an internet connection. There are bosses that I think are pretty charming, but there's only four or five of them.

Uh, yeah, I just finished the, I have 100% of the single player, but I got fucking into it. It's very good. I think it feels so bad. Like compared to playing against people,

I think it is so unpleasurable. But anyway, yeah, I don't love the single player either. I come somewhere in the middle, but anyway, the thing, you know, player either i come somewhere in the middle but anyway the thing you know what it is it's navigating the world in the way that you have to navigate the world uh feels bad to me in a single player game and having to like paint to go faster like all

that kind of garbage like feels really crummy to me i i it makes so much sense in the multiplayer and it's such a cool way of like moving your territory forward. And then, but then the single player, it's just like, it's just me here. Well, I like it.

Cause there's lots of like environmental puzzle stuff in some of the later levels that you like have to figure out, like, where do I put the paint in order to like build myself a launch pad that I can squid jump from one part to the other. Like, I think there's a lot of like sophistication to it and some of the later parts.

Yeah, I agree. Um, I, I am a big fan of the multiplayer i i love that the game has this ability to reward people who if your team's in the pits and you just really want to like get the other team uncomfortable and you're fast you can cut across the map and get into the other team's zone. And if you're okay at the game, uh,

really, really wreck shit and, um, completely throw the team off in a way that I find really enjoyable. That, that reminds me more of like a sport, um, like a traditional sport than it does like a shooter.

Um, where you're, you're, you're, the ball is going back and forth across the field and there are just so many fun ways to break up the pace or a team can basically be dominating one second and then be just completely thrown off their game the next um but the thing that i want to talk about that I surprisingly am enjoying the most is Salmon Run, which is the, like, horde mode. Oh, yeah, you put it online.

Yeah, it's a horde mode, and you can play with, again, up to four people, I believe. And it's, I mean, like any traditional horde mode. The big difference being there are a bunch of small enemies, and then there are how many? Five, six bosses? Eight. I think there's seven or eight. Okay. And all of them have different methods of how you destroy them.

There's like one tiny creature, but it has tons of plates stacked on its back, and you have to remove all the plates before you can blow it up. There's, I think it's the salmon, that there's a big marker on the ground right before it pops up, salmon that there's a big marker on the ground right before it pops up and if you don't uh drop a bomb there so it comes up and eats that it'll eat you uh and just wreck you there are two giant recycling bins uh that float in the air uh there are all sorts of different things and it has a level of creativity and weirdness that i i i i'm like shocked it's a nintendo game like well no but if you look at nintendo games without the context of having played them for 30 years yeah but i guess that's the thing is i can't remember the last time i saw something new like

this i like arms a lot it's not weird in the way that this is this is like weird in like a renin stimpy sort of way do you mean splatoon is the mode just this mode okay uh salmon run i mean splatoon as a whole is also weird in a design point of view that it's so cool and interesting you're talking about actually aesthetic of these like wild looking like fish monsters yeah trying to beat you to death with like frying pans it's very it's like it's very like it is cartoonish and i'm not saying that to describe like the game's color palette it is like a car it is like watching a cartoon in a way it's like the rabbits yeah god you did say you couldn't believe it was a nintendo game but we should talk about the fact that

the deployment of splatoon run is a very nintendo ass bad decision not splatoon salmon run yeah do you want to walk through how much of a mess that is so here here's i i kind of get where they're coming from there is a progression and a loot cycle to uh splatoon 2's online multiplayer where like there's shops and those shops update every day and when you buy gear at shops it has like uh perks that you can unlock on them that like change your you know speed or your how much ink you use when you use your weapons and all kinds of like different modifiers but none of that carries over to the other modes um mention yes right so single

player has separate progression loops then multiplayer it has separate but but loops. But you mentioned that before I started playing the game. The single player and the Salmon Run do feed back into the multiplayer. You can unlock shit in those modes that you will then use in single player. I didn't know single player did that. Yeah. So in Salmon Run, it only works for, I think it's like like i think the time they have it set to and maybe this is the biggest problem is 5 a.m to 5 p.m i think pacific time every other day i'm pretty sure that's what the schedule is i could be wrong um the idea is this right in every one of those

sessions you have a pay grade that increases as you uh complete missions and don't die if your team ever wipes out in a salmon run mission then it's over and you lose um but if you can complete missions in a row then your pay grade increases your rank increases um your pay grade affects like how many points like um rank up points you get from a mission so you're the higher your pay grade the more you'll pull down for a successful mission and then uh at the end of a i guess day um i could be 100% wrong on this but i think this is how it works at the end of a day your like rank determines what prizes you get from that so maybe it's an exclusive shirt that has some different stuff on it there are little gosh upon balls that have like different bonuses like experience point uh increases or money increases for the multiplayer

mode sure i think what they are going for roughly in terms of feel is iron banner which is a monthly thing in destiny where you play this like special mode of pvp and then you can unlock this exclusive gear and it is an exciting thing problem is it's not infrequent enough for it to carry that kind of excitement. I think it's really just like, Oh, it's not on today. Fuck. And the other big problem is it's literally the best thing in the game.

And I want to do it all the time. It doesn't make any sense to me at all. Like why they would lock because it's in the, you can play it at any time you want it locally you can play salmon run whenever you'd like the only time to play it online is when it's quote active and for the life of me i cannot see an upside there's actually a bunch of shit in this game that i cannot see an upside to and maybe fans of splatoon in this podcast can explain to me a few of those things i mean some, some things aren't just Nintendo things.

Like... No, okay. No, that's not... I don't agree. I'll give you an example. And plenty has been said about this, but let's talk about it again. The fucking TV show at the beginning of every time you load the game. That you have to sit through, and they tell you what the maps are, and there's some fun

puns, but you have to sit through it every time. There's no way to skip it and it makes me want to throw my Switch out the window. The other thing I agree with you is a Nintendo thing, which is when you're playing a multiplayer game in modern multiplayer, like PUBG, Destiny, you name it, the primary number one thing that people want to do is play against randoms with their friends, right?

To do it in Splatoon is a nightmare Nick who is a very like has played a lot of Nintendo games I have played a lot of Nintendo games we had a crew of four people getting everyone into the same match like as like a quote party was next

to impossible due to a number of factors not the least of which was the chat program that they've released is absolute total dog shit um so we moved to discord which is a very capable app and it handles things fine and that's what i'd recommend if you're playing uh splatoon online but getting people like there's just no until i think you're ranked like b minus and you're playing like ranked matches there's no way to be as a crew of four people just like take on all comers against like randoms on the it's not an option

that's wild i think that i think there is i think there is if you rank up and get into ranked league play whatever the fuck it's called and then you can make a team before you match up against people but before that there is not all you can do is there's a friends battle thing that doesn't let you make a party well you can do a friends battle but you can't play people online you you can only do private matches if you do friends battle there's other stuff like or i should say you can play people online but you can only do like 2v2 you can't like play randoms online there's other whack stuff like the the fact that you cannot you have to back out the menu to change your weapon uh so bad like that really stinks it's like if you're in a flow and you're playing and you're in a pretty good groove and then you have

like to leave the whole thing to go change your weapon. Like that, especially because it can take a good long while sometimes to get into a match. I've had a couple where like three minutes of waiting and it's still timed out and it didn't work and it didn't find me a group of people to play with. And that's like happened a few times. Like, yeah, exactly. That's good, it's reawakened the love of literacy.

But like, that's weird. It's reawakened the love of literacy. But that's weird. And there's other... I'll tell you one of my Splatoon issues. A good one first. I like how short the matches are. It keeps you from getting too invested in what's happening. It's like, okay, I'm just having my fun. But on the flip side of that,

I do wish who won and lost every game was not a complete and utter surprise to me every single time. I do wish I had – I never know. I never have any idea who won. Like every once in a while if I'm getting like housed, then I'll – like I can see that line of the opposing team like outside my door. Then in those rare cases i i i know what happened but i think that boils down to the communication breakdown right because there's no there's there's no chat in the game without using the stupid mobile app and so i've had games like that too where i get like fucking nine kills and i'm

painting the the whole world little did i know there were some motherfuckers behind me like painting up whatever i painted and my teammates were doing jack shit yeah and so i i thought i crushed it and then i get beaten like 20 80 and like there's i had no idea because my teammates weren't talking to me it's another thing that like playing with friends and being able to chat with them would be like hey the left side of the map is all also you can open up the map at any point to like jump to wherever your teammates are and that actually gives you a very good indication of like what needs painted. But I think being able to communicate

would definitely help that even more. Yeah, and there's stuff, the weapon switch also is irritating because in terms of like being on a team is also irritating because I've ended up on, I like to use the paint roller because I like being able to like contribute without having to get into a bunch of fights.

But I was on a team, I got paired with a team where literally everyone on the team was using paint rollers and it did not go well. There was not a good sort of team to be on. It would be really nice to be able to switch that to adjust, like to make a good team that has like its bases covered would be really nice. It kind of makes me think that maybe, and this is just speculation,

but maybe Nintendo realized that they had like basically nothing coming out in the summer or at least until like Rabbids, I guess. And it feels rushed. It feels like there was a lot of like stuff in this game that just as being a multiplayer game, it just seems crazy to me that it isn't in there i kind of feel like the opposite this is weird but i i think that they they knew all this stuff long like far far in advance i kind of wonder if splatoon 1 was rushed and it was like oh let's get this rough version of it out and then we can finish it for splatoon 2 but they didn't finish it they left a bunch of dumps sure i mean those are like i said i'm not this is not me apologizing for them this is me saying like i think i don't know if they know they did bad to think that nintendo does know how to do multiplayer very very good and they just didn't

have time to do it like it's just like they know game design they obviously know how game design so fucking well and if you play a modern day shooter for a half hour you can just see like so many failings in splatoon which is as a game design game really good and really enjoyable and i love the art style and the look of it but like i mean you're right because if you look at the switch it's it's super bare bones as well it's like the least they could possibly do for like friends lists and and all that stuff so i swear to get it but splatoon is billed as a multiplayer game it's not billed as a single player game so to like leave all that shit on the table is just fucking bonkers to me i want to i want to put a bow on it and go to the thing that you said about design really quick uh before we wrap and i think this is a thing that we talked about

weirdly with watchdogs 2 which was a game that i just i think you mentioned this for all of its opportunity it was not very creative with it with its weaponry um it it talked a lot about um non-lethal kills and like being able to use weapons in interesting ways and then everything was just kind of the same weapons uh that you had seen any shooter and i i don't think it can be understated how creative uh splatoon is and how much it like really makes me think about how lacking in creativity most shooters are in terms of like if you're going to interact with the world through a gun um hey this game makes it makes the floor poison uh it covers the floor with poison or a rad fucking water slide like yeah or one of those two and and the way that you like slop up your your weapon is just there's there's so much variety

that is the thing that i think splatoon 2 does much better than splatoon 1 is i think the weapons are a lot more creative um there's just more of them um i do wish that you can change on the fly easier but i i think like that kind of almost gets lost uh because it's like oh it's a colorful silly game where you paint uh but if you think about like if this didn't look colorful in like a kid's game it's doing so much stuff with a shooter and it continues to bum me out that after what was it that the studio that did uh resistance insomniac i think yeah yeah like there was a time where it felt like there was more creativity happening with what a gun does in a game and i think like for a long time

instead of focusing on that it's just oh we're gonna make this gun thing that you're familiar with feel better and better and better and sometimes i am okay with it not being better but just being different yeah i think overwatch is probably the best big example of a game that does it well yeah but i agree with you that a lot of shooters these days kind of like you know the battlefields of the world kind of just fall into well this is a faster SMG and this is a slower SMG and this is a high card rifle. And they all pretty much, I think it's very telling that whenever I'm almost anytime when I'm

killed by something in Splatoon, I think, well, of course they have that thing. Look at that. It's a giant paint bucket. They're just dumping paint everywhere. It's way better than what I've got.

Especially when you're like starting out, everybody's got like the most bananas paint slinging tech. I will say like, I really haven't been playing a lot of PUBG, although I think I'm finally starting to slow down a little bit. And it is also really, really nice to play a game that is the opposite of that in virtually every way. Like three minutes and then it's over. Low stakes. I'm good at it, which is very novel. uh i'm good at it which is very novel like it i honestly play it while i'm like waiting for the plane to spawn and like it is it is i i i feel like every time we talk about a switch game i

could talk about this like oh yes well everybody's uh you know praises and criticisms are fair but we should also talk about the fact that like just playing a game on the switch fucking owns it is the best it's the best shit ever i get home and i play it on my tv and it looks great and i use the pro controller and it feels really good and i go get on an airplane and i play it for three hours like it's amazing it's great oh uh brief brief tag onto that i did just get overcooked which just came comes out on switch like today oh yeah or tomorrow what's that and uh that's like a perfect example it's so good it's uh it's a cooking top-down cooking game it's kind of like imagine like a really good mario party mini game where there's four people running around like

carrying pots and chopping vegetables and like trying to coordinate to like deliver food really quickly uh i realize it sounds really shitty when I describe it. Griffin and I had a very complex night. Yeah, we played that with our friends. It's up to four players. One person can go and chop stuff and then throw it in a pot, and then another person will take it out of the pot when it's done cooking, put it in a bowl,

and then you've got to serve up the bowl, and then you've got to wash the dish. That's the basic cycle of it. But then the fucking stages as you go on, it's all of a sudden, cooking put it in a bowl and then you got to serve up the bowl and then you gotta wash the dish that's the basic cycle of it but then the fucking stages as you go on it's all of a sudden instead of being in a kitchen you are in two trucks that are racing side by side on a a freeway and so you have to like figure out like okay i'm gonna throw an onion on your side you have to catch it three two one you drop the fucking onion or there's one where it's just like you're moving around a track where nobody can pass one another because there's just space for

one person and so you have to constantly be thinking in order like okay i'm gonna put the onion down player two you're gonna chop it player three you're gonna oh fuck you didn't grab it now i have to run all the way around this track like it is a hysterical infuriating party you know make you want to fucking kill your friends uh and it's great for switch because everyone has two controllers like with the device itself so it's like super easy to get four players going cool um i'm gonna take a moment to talk about pyre which is the new game from supergiant uh creators of bastion and transistor and this is uh very different

maybe even more different than transistor was from bast. This is, so basically it's a visual novel crossed with sports. In short, you are one of a triumph, begins as a triumvirate and then gradually expands of people who are trying to escape a sort of purgatory-like environment, an extremely colorful, beautifully rendered purgatory. And the way you have to do it is to succeed in these eight,

what they're called rites. But the rites are basically a sort of sport where each team has a goal, and you're trying to take a celestial orb and jam it into the opposing team's goal until you douse their pyre, their flame. And that's the basics, but there's a lot more layered onto that. You can throw the ball, and the further you throw it, the more points you get. You can basically dunk, which is jump

at a length and slam it in. Bigger, slower players tend to douse the flame more so there's kind of a risk reward there and a lot of the players who are characters that you meet in the world and recruit onto your squad have different abilities there's a little imp that can fly around and it's harder to hit and that kind of thing but the

gameplay for that is very enjoyable and neat and interesting and multilayered. The unusual thing about it is that it is kind of a rarity in the game itself. The vast majority of the time you're traveling from in between the rights and you are talking to the people on your crew. talking to the people on your crew. There's these completely optional conversations. And almost every time your little wagon stops,

you can go inside the wagon and talk to somebody. And your choices with them sometimes have a gameplay impact. Sometimes you've got a branching path and different characters want you to go different ways and you get rewards based on which ones you choose. Sometimes just the conversations themselves can make the players faster in the next game or make them play better in different ways, which is interesting. It's an interesting way of like layering it on. And even when you are in the rights themselves,

if you lose, the game doesn't stop. It just sort of continues the story on from that point. And the characters are all really sharply written and interesting. And you kind of like they ingratiate themselves to you really quickly. There's another really smart thing that it does that I want every sort of visual novel from now to the end of time to do where, uh, key terms, things that would be in a glossary, you can highlight and explains to you what they are.

Um, so like you don't have to keep track of all the mythology. You can just kind of highlight it and see like, Oh, right. That was that guy who did that thing. I remember. Can I address that in particular?

There's some VNs that do that. It's, it's, it's very, very cool, but this was not the, that's like a, i also want to i also want to address that in particular because i i didn't play a ton i played about an hour so um here's the thing i'm i'm a big super giant fan

i loved bastion uh i didn't love transistor as much but i liked it but in both of those cases uh i thought they used story uh very carefully in the sense of like these are obviously very weird worlds that you're being introduced to with like a lot of backstory and a lot of like history but they're smart insofar as they they very slowly introduce you to the the world you're in to the characters you're in etc and by the end you feel like you have a pretty good handle on these worlds but like at for the first hour or so you're like completely lost and in this game they like start right from the jump with like a lot of talking and a lot of like highlighting things to figure out what they are and if i'm honest it kind of feels a little bit like lazy writing to rely on footnotes to explain like what this town is called rather

than sort of doing that in the writing itself if that makes i'd rather make that optional like rather than make you have to reread and it doesn't give you more than is in the story the things in there are communicated to you elsewhere it's just to be able to remind like for example there's a character called sandalwood who is some sort of informant for your group and before you like learn more about sandalwood early on when you highlight its name it basically says it's some sort of informant for them you don't know more than that so like you're only getting information early on i was getting additional information from those tool tips about towns and stuff like that maybe i mean that may be the case i would say broadly

speaking though it's pretty good about about uh like the deep lore stuff that you would already know um that you're that you know i i appreciated being able to like dig because like i don't always care like yeah it's fine. Whatever. Right. Googly woods. Yeah. Totally.

I'll just go there and get the thing I need to get. Right. Um, I do kind of wish there was more of the game part of the game. Um, I'm not, the game part was fun. I liked it.

The game part's really fun. And I, and I wanted to like experiment more with the, the, the different characters and, and get to play with each of them more but it's actually kind of so rare uh and and you have to end up benching people um which is interesting because sometimes you'll have conversations after the match like why did

you bench me because if you play in the rights it helps you to uh you're earning, like, I forget what it's called, but it's basically like experience that you need to leave the purgatory that you find yourself in. So people are like upset if you don't play them, which is cool. I just wish there was more of that stuff. It kind of feels like this would be the third game in like a series where you're like building a world.

And the first game would be like a very narrow, like building a world and the first game would be like a very narrow like one or two or three character game and then by the third game they're doing like oh this is an interesting spin-off telling this side tale about these people in this weird game that they play you know what i mean yeah for sure it feels like they bit off a lot for this first game it's way better than blitzball but it feels like the blitzball of a larger like because that's the other thing is like the world is really cool and the character is really cool and i wanted to i wish there was more to interact with them um and it's also fucking gorgeous like so good like it reminds me it's like don bluthi to a certain extent um and

what was the name of that pc rpg that came? Like, you know what I'm talking about? The Pillars. It was like hand-drawn. What was it called? Banner Saga? Oh, Banner Saga. Banner Saga. I was thinking Banner Saga, yeah. So it kind of looks like that, but like even more polished and just like gorgeous, gorgeous,

gorgeous. So like they clearly know presentation really, really well. And I was just kind of bummed that like it wasn't a more for me at least it wasn't a more engaging experience to like draw me into the world the interactivity parts of it yeah i think that that's completely legit i i do think there are issues with like sort of springing a visual novel on somebody rather than sort of like which is definitely the situation i found myself in you know like i knew the about the sort of sports angle of it, but I didn't know how much of it was that and how much of it was like just story.

And I think that like, you're not, everybody's in the mood for that. And I think that there's definitely a possibility that you could end up feeling like, yeah, you know, I'd kind of like, like to be playing a video game right now rather than, than reading. Um, cause I, I can get down with that sometimes, but it's not always what I want. But the mechanics are really cool. I think it's very neat that a studio that is the size of Supergiant, which so many of those studios are really living sort of game to game. I think it's really admirable that they continue to sort of evolve so much, you know, in between

each of the games like they haven't like gone back to the bastion well which i think a lot of people would be happy uh if they did and they've continued they made an astounding amount of money off bastion and that's basically like supported all their creativity so it's kind of like castle crashers in that way where castle crashers made a ton of money and then i'd love a new fucking castle crashers i know but they're gonna do other stuff oh but why not do a new castle crashers i know i would kill for it um but it's it's cool it's it it is not exactly what i kind of hoped it would be like because mechanically i i really thought bastion especially but also transition to a less extent was like so

like fun and so mechanical and into for lack of a better word I I'm kind of missing that but it's cool this was an interesting month yeah it sure was

wasn't it I don't I don't it's just like a lot of like kind of flawed things not bad games certainly but like nothing that was like an obvious winner I mean yeah if I

can we give it to the split can we give it to the split can we give it to the destiny 2 beta because I think that's what I found the most fun play no I think I think mine was splatoon 2 but if I'm being completely honest there wasn't like a bunch of competition yeah

yeah I think there were a bunch of like small things I think I don't know it's been such a good like wildly good year it's not that there were like July wasn't even slow this year it was just it was everybody who was

wise to not put their weird smaller game up against some massive release push them out into the world in july and that's where we had i we had such a collection of runner-ups right like yeah it was just yeah it was just a weird a weird month for weird games i like that that's that's a nice way to like yeah for sure split the year uh what's up in august let's take a look somebody dropped a list oh man we gotta pick an actual winner oh yeah i mean for me

splatoon 2 i think yeah it's splatoon 2 i think that's fair i like for what it is like i like it a lot more than i should you know i like splatoon uh too a lot more than i typically like games of that sort so yeah i think that's completely fair i think when splatoon hits its heights the heights are higher than any of the other games in this list uh that's august looks like this list this has fucking arc survival evolved on ps4 xbox one and pc just copied and pasted it possible um uh agents of mayhem juice i know you're fucking psyched out of your mind for that one um yeah not what i i almost want to do it so i can sonic mania is a big deal yeah sure there's a oh the uncharted uh lost legacy rabbit oh fucking absolver shit yeah oh the next episode's gotta be late because all this shit's

coming out August 29th. I gotta give me that Absolver. Got to play Absolver. That game is so hot. Everybody's Golf? I'm excited for that one. Why is it called Everybody's Golf now? I don't know. Mario and Rabbids Kingdom Battle was pretty fun.

Super psyched. There's some good stuff next month. It is a very good month. And then obviously the rest of the year will be very packed as well. Screaming nightmare. To revisit our sort of overarching strategy, the game of the first quarter of the year is Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild.

The second quarter game is PUBG correct? I guess we're in Q3 now huh? Yeah this is Q3 so the current Splatoon 2 is the current leader Yeah you in trouble How good Nintendo Switch how good are you? Hey Switch how good

are you though? I was like really sketchy about this whole thing when it launched but like hachimachi man what like it is it's gone so fast sorry you dropped out there for me uh it is it has become a must-own console like so much faster than i would have imagined like it is for me it's already exceeded the wii u i think pretty handily which is well a lot of that is indie stuff too people gave me a lot of shit for saying that but like indie stuff supports the first year of a console way better because it

takes a while for the triple a stuff to come around so it fills in the blanks and you have shit like overcooked and you have shit like sonic mania. And I don't know if Sonic Mania is indie, but no, certainly. Or like Cave Story or what have you like this bunch of shit on that platform. And I love fucking playing it. It's so fun. It's everything I wanted. Nick pointed this out on Twitter and blew my fucking mind. When we have Game of the Year discussions this year, we will be measuring Breath of the Wild against Super Mario Odyssey in the same year.

Fucking brutal. It's fucking's gonna be fucking brutal. It's fucking wild. I can't. It's gonna be brutal. It's such a good start. It really is. I'm very excited. Nintendo should do that more and just have a burner console in between the good ones. So they can like, hey, we've already got some good

games and it'll be tried. Let's get up on it. Fucking brilliant. So that is gonna to do it first congratulations to splatoon 2. uh you can find reviews for most of these games on polygon.com i think maybe not certainly not me uh metopia but maybe some of the others no we got a review up today uh allegra wrote the review right she was excited to get to play a good game once um and uh She decided to get to play a good game for once. Usually she gets the stinkers.

Oh, August is also Night Trap, so fuck y'all. It's going to be pretty good. And that's going to do it for us. So until next month for the other jokers, my name is Justin McElroy. We will rejoin you in August for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!