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

Episode Date: October 4, 2017

September was one of the most jam-packed months of 2017 until ... well, next month. But worry not, dear listener. The Besties are here to filter out all the disgusting chaff and leave you with a heaping plate of gaming wheat. Delicious, delicious wheat. Games discussed: SteamWorld Dig 2, Danganronpa 3, Heat Signature, Divinity: Original Sin 2, SNES Classic, Metroid: Samus Returns, Cuphead, Golf Story, Destiny 2. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

One time I saw Arcade Fire and what's the name? The front man had the flu and he could barely perform. And then he was like, oh, don't worry about it. I'll just come. We'll turn everything off. I'll come down and we'll jam with you in the audience. And it was amazing until I realized he has the flu. Yeah, he's got everybody sick.

He's spinning on everybody. And then sure enough, I got sick the next week. Epic fail. Ben, when did it again? My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the month. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best game of this month. My name is...

Welcome to The Besties, I know the best game of this month. My name is Russ Preston and I go Welcome to The Besties where we discuss the latest and greatest in pop culture trends, hashtags, fashion, celebrity spats, and celebrity hookups, and video games, and

hot new pizza flavored ice creams. But today, this month, it's all about video games. If you turn them on, you start to play one. You might think we're the bleeps and bloops, but they've come a long way since, since Pac-Man.

What if we had just done a dad rock concert? The entire, the entire podcast. We shifted our format exclusively dad Rock from here on out. I would not complain. I would complain about that. It would make it very difficult to edit. There would be lots of continuity errors.

One of these months, we are going to bring a Pac-Man game. You all realize that, right? Like, eventually, they're going to make a Pac-Man game that's going to be pretty good. And then it will be. Well, there was that Switch one. Yeah, we had a shot at this. Pac-Man First. Oh, shit.

You're right. Missed it. Missed it. that that switch one yeah we had a shot at this pack of verses yeah you're right missed it missed um this was the most buck wild month in one of the most buck wild years of video games since i've been alive can we just start talking about honorable mentions because i think we're going to have a lot of them they're all hitting video games are hitting so hard they are hitting extremely hard i wanted to talk about steam world dig 2 uh on the the switch and it's on other stuff too right uh yeah it's on ps4 vita actually you can uh get is it already yeah i thought it was oh okay well um i played it on switch because i just really really like playing games on switch

and i loved uh i loved steam world heist i didn't get as deep into it as i did the original steam world dig uh which was this like new original ip game from image and form i think is the name of the developer that just like came out of nowhere and was really fucking good it's just all about i think uh what is it it's image and heap i believe what i'm pretty sure you're wrong and it's just a game about digging down and finding treasure and then spending that treasure to get upgrades to help you dig down better and like finding little puzzle chambers and uh steamworld dig 2 uh does that but it's like 10 times bigger than the original and it's just like this huge world that's like really really fun to explore and they added a bunch of new traversal mechanics that makes like getting around the world like

really really fun um i got really sick last week uh like just completely like stomach death uh and i just laid in bed for like two days and just played through all of it and had a had a well not a good time but uh yeah the game that's good at time the game was very very good um it captures some even with like a two-dimensional like in what would feel like a fairly limiting perspective, like it captures some of the best things about games. Like, well, like Minecraft, I think is probably the best example of like that sense of your bag fills up and you can get pretty deep and you'll have a full bag of gems. You trade in for like a ton of cash, but you don't know how to get back up and you don't know the quickest way and you're risking death and losing some of your stuff um and it makes for like really thrilling moments where you're like okay i just have to keep digging i have to find a way to get

these to the service and also i'm out of light and i'm so close to death but i just have to keep pushing because i have to rescue these these gems um another cool thing is like skill challenge like there are surprising little moments of uh really challenging bits that are like perfectly sort of laid out there to make them very tempting there was one i ran into recently called the floor is lava yeah where you had to uh navigate this entire area basically never touching the ground or the walls or the ceiling and you just are using your hook shot type thing to grapple from place to place and it's really really hard um and but you get a really you get a cool reward if you beat it i bet and there's a ton oh you didn't oh it's a shame you didn't do

it um and there's a there's a ton of really smart progression hooks in there too like in addition to the stuff you can buy you can unlock uh skills that modify like a lot of different things about your character and how you explore the world and there are collectibles you can find that unlock more skills and there's a ton of stuff i i think it's a great game and like i love that this developer has like has like made this made this thing that is such a like such a success also it neatly ties uh the steam world dig game into steam world heist at a certain point which is really fucking cool um yeah it's it's neat i i think it's great they've created this world that is like it's all the games released in this world so far have been really solid something i'm fairly early on griffin but something i'm struggling with that i'm curious if

they remedy um i find killing enemies with the pickaxe doesn't feel very good um do you get more options for that like later on yeah i mean you get like pressure bombs that you can shoot out once you get the hookshot once you use the hookshot you can use that to to do combat uh it'll kill some enemies and it'll uh knock back some enemies which you can use that to do combat. It'll kill some enemies and it'll knock back some enemies, which you can use to just knock them into pools of lava. You can use it also like a faster melee attack that you can unlock. There are upgrades to it. There's a lot of different stuff.

But you're right. I didn't really find that I was using the pickaxe for combat very much. For a digging game where there's lots of, not to say that's a subgenre, but for a game where there is like this huge expanse to dig, it all feels very considered, which is like even when you're deep in, you still feel like someone thought about you being there. Yeah. Well, I wanted to make it a fun experience. It is designed for pace. It is designed. It knows how many cycles of, oh, my inventory is full.

I got to go back to the top. it knows how many cycles of oh my inventory is full i gotta go back to the top uh you will do before it wants you to get to a fast travel point or to a challenge room or to like a a you know a story mission or something it's it is it's a it's a brilliant game we could we could go on and on but let's again september was buck wild so let's keep keep pounding come a long way since dig dug right yeah well no not really because this is a very Dig Dug-like game. Can you inflate enemies and make their guts pop? No, Jesus, you fucking animal. That's what you do in Dig Dug.

What's wrong with you? I've also been playing Danganronpa V3, the newest Danganronpa game, and I'm enjoying that a lot. I've always really liked that series and this one is uh is really good it is it's um it it takes some time to get into it like and i think this is the biggest problem with these games it's a visual novel about uh 16 high schoolers each one represents like the most skilled person in various crafts and they're called ultimate so there's the ultimate detective and the ultimate inventor um and uh they are placed in a high school where the only way to escape is to murder somebody and get away with the murder uh so there's always a murder and then you

go around investigating it and then there's a class trial where everybody has to work together to figure out who the killer was uh because if you get it wrong, then everybody dies. It's like a really, it's a neat, like it's a really neat, like I, a concept for a, a story and for a game.

It just takes like a little, it takes a long time to like, how long does it take to like usually play through one of these games? I mean, a while they're, they're pretty beefy. I mean, visual novels in general can be pretty expansive experiences.

I'm probably like uh i'm probably i would estimate like 12 hours into the story and yeah i think i'm uh i think i'm on the next to last uh sort of act of the game that's not so bad see when you say like a long time i picture persona where it's like so just play for 12 to 20 hours no it's not nearly not nearly that bad i had this exact problem with dangonropa 2 which i love the first one and i really like the um virtue's last reward the the the sort of like sister series i would say to this um but i could not i bashed my head against the second dangonropa for like several hours and it just like was not it's okay man I'm sure it picked up eventually it's just like you have to really be in the right headspace for one of these games

sure a month where there's so much other stuff to play it's it's a little tough there's a lot of lore and not only that there's 16 characters right and and obviously that gets whittled down uh but you do before you can start the game like you need to know like what this world is about what the stakes are what the rules of this world like you need to know like what this world is about, what the stakes are, what the rules of this world are. You have to know like what the different environments that you're in are, because those are going to be like clues later on. And then you also have to get to know these 16 characters to an extent where you can like know how to suspect them later. What happens if you're wrong at the end? Then everyone everyone dies since the game over.

Yeah, but like, can you just like reload a save? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just redo the class trial. There's not permadeath in this visual novel. That would be pretty wild. You'd be like fucking Moby Dick. It's like turn page 51 if you shot the harpoon good. Turn page 53 if you missed.

Turn 53, throw your book away. You lost. You lost Moby Dick. Throw it away. I have a question is this like near automata where you have to like keep playing to see all the endings because that feels like a thing that i've heard about a lot of visual novel yeah that's that's a valid question let's keep talking about near automata yeah i got that in that's definitely part of the virtualized reward series it's the best part about vlr but it's it's also it's zero escape virtual reward is the zero escape right thank you um

no no no that that has never been a facet in danganronpa so far may in this one but i'm pretty sure it won't be uh what does the title mean uh danganronpa means i think truth bullet uh because you shoot truth you shoot evidence you well it's it's very literal like you get evidence which takes the form of bullets which you actually shoot into statements that there's a lot of new stuff you can do in the class trials in this one and the most like buck wild one is uh the basic thing is like somebody will say something and if you have a piece of evidence that contradicts it you shoot it into that statement and it you know counters their argument but if you hold the button it turns that statement into a lie.

And so you can perjure yourself to like try and if the case just reads a standstill and you know that everybody is on the wrong person, but you don't have evidence to support it, you can lie. you get like really really stuck in a class trial of like okay well can i lie to like perjure myself but try and move the case forward or try to incriminate the real culprit um it's really smart they've done a lot of stuff to the class trials to make it more interesting this time around cool any other honorable mentions i mean i feel like i've done all of them but there's a new pic cross game on switch that's extremely good if you like pic cross well let me ask you about pic cross real quick because i have dipped my toe into the waters of pic cross and the impression i get is that it sort of like caps out pretty quickly in terms of like variables so the big one that they add 2d yeah

the big one they so pic cross 3d if you didn't play it on 3ds is like in my opinion a must own game on 3ds it is like a brilliant puzzle game where it is picross but it takes place on uh you know you know with these 3d objects where you're chiseling away blocks and there's different rule sets and it's very like uh it's very cerebral and very rewarding and this one they have mega lines so the basic premise is like there's a number and that tells you how many blocks are filled in in a line and you have no way you can explain picross in language it's not in this one it has mega lines which basically tells you there are shapes across two lines that uh are connected bricks right so it could be like a tetromino t across two lines and

it'll tell you four and so you know it's going to be you know maybe three on top or one on bottom and so you have to factor those in on top of the normal rules and it's really difficult and really requires some some good brain thinking to figure out uh uh i got one uh heat signature oh yeah oh is the new game from Tom Francis who did the very excellent Gunpoint. And this one is, oh gosh. Imagine Hotline Miami, except you can sort of pause time whenever it makes sense for you and sort of plan what you're going to do and also sometimes teleport weapons and objects from the level into your hands so mechanically that's that's sort of the idea

but the the setting is space you're sort of a mercenary bounty hunter type and you have a crew of people that you can sort of switch between as you go. Each one has a different thing that they're trying to accomplish in this world while you reach towards an overarching goal. But the basic thing is you pick up a mission. Sometimes it's assassinate someone. Sometimes it's steal a ship or whatever, and you go out in your tiny little space pod and basically have to fly into the ship to hijack it.

And then it turns into that sort of top down hotline Miami perspective. And there's just a lot of really cool ways that handle stuff like if you get shot, for example, in in in while you're on one of these missions, you get picked, you get knocked unconscious and get thrown into space. Basically they take you to the airlock and flush you into space and you have to grab your body by remote controlling your pod to, to fly into your body and pick it up. But that character then permanently has less time.

The next time they get shot to get picked up, they have less oxygen reserves that's true that is scientifically accurate yeah that's how that's how it works in science but it's just a lot of really cool stuff like in the moment you can decide like well actually i'm going to kill everybody and take this ship for myself and go sell it uh and so it's not like a like a very specific objective like hotline where it's like we'll kill everyone and that's what you're doing no you do have that very specific objective like it's always like assassinate this person sometimes it is steal a whole ship sometimes it's steal a

certain thing off of the ship uh sometimes you're racing against time before like alerts start getting set off and you can sort of stealthily make your way through uh a little bit but it's it's a really interesting um tom francis does a lot of really smart stuff with like minimal design choices and and subverts them in really interesting ways but uh it's a really it's a really cool game and i feel like gunpoint signature i feel like gunpoint which was this other game was well received but also like very intimidating in terms of the mechanics am i thinking the right game no gunpoint was pretty straightforward it was the one i'm thinking the one where you like

program switches and stuff yeah that was it do that but it's very fun for that game intuitive if you're a sort of thinking person yeah i'm not i want i want to mention a game I actually haven't played yet, but I think is really cool. And I'm very excited to play it. I think I'm going to pick up a gaming laptop and maybe take it on the go with me because it seems like a good game for that is Divinity Original Sin 2. I played the original one. It is like a, you know, top down, you know, CRPG. It's like a Baldur's Gate. I think CRPG is the name of the genre.

Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate. Kind of, I think CRPG is the name of the genre. Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate. The original Divinity Original Sin was so cool because there's so much stuff you could do with like actual physical interactions in the world. So you could like pick up a barrel full of oil and throw it down to create a pool of oil and then cast a fire spell on it to like blow it up. But it's taking place in this like turn based CRPG sort of format. And it was really smart. it up but it's taking place in this like turn-based crpg sort of format and it was really smart what i love is in speed runs of this game uh the of the original original sin was to uh the fastest way to do things was to take a chest and fill it up with like a billion things to make it weigh like a mega

ton and then use like magic or hacking maybe to uh lift up that chest and like drop it on enemies to instantly kill them because it's so heavy that it does it's like that shit like that is is is in the game and have you seen the uh teleportation videos no no people are getting like i i i don't know how original sin 2 works so pardon me if this is all technically wrong, but people are ramping up their teleportation powers. And then instead of fighting bosses, teleporting like the big bosses to the other big bosses in the game and then just having them kill each other. That's fucking great. That's crazy. So like that stuff is really cool. And from everything I've heard, like Original Sin 2 is like an RPG masterpiece.

So I'm excited to dig into it. What I wanted to mention is that it also has what's called Game Master Mode, where other people can, I think four people can hop into the world, create their characters, hop into like this online environment that is run by another player who's playing as the Game Master. And they have a suite of tools to run people through like proper like pen and paper RPG D&D style adventures. rpg dnd style adventures um so they can like create these uh text prompts and have you roll dice to like get through them and then uh do battles where they control the uh enemies and they can use like fog of war to lock things out and they can create items on the fly that they can drop into people's inventories um and there are modules that will be released to like help lead you through stuff one of them is is the, the starting one, uh, that comes with the game is actually lost minds of Phandelver,

which juice. And I have played a couple of times now. It's the starting, uh, like a starters handbook, uh, adventure that comes with fifth edition of D and D. Uh,

it's really, it seems really, really, really cool. And I would love to like get a group of folks together to, to try to play it sometime. Did they license that? Uh,

yeah. Yeah. That seems like a good streaming thing. i think it could be really fun i think yeah we could definitely do something like that um i i have one other thing i want to mention uh okay i don't i think this technically counts but the snes classic mini oh yeah it is such a great thing and i'm so glad that it feels like they nintendo is still having its way they there there's a scarcity that they're getting video of people waiting on lines that can fill up morning shows and build a pipe for christmas but it seems like people who wanted a copy on launch day for the most part were able to get it yeah plant and i went to the same place and

didn't realize it yeah because they had so many copies right like 50 of them yeah yeah but it is it is so wonderful and it is i have hooked it up to we have a projector in our bedroom and having it hooked up to something like that where the cords aren't really an issue because it's just right next to the bed yeah is it's such like a nice little like treat um and that feels like such a nice place for it to be i i can picture it in the dorms especially and it just being such a perfect little thing and when you think about how expensive these games are to own legally yeah um what a joy it is that there is a somewhat affordable option for people to own

things like five bucks a game at this point uh i think there's 22 games and it's 80 bucks so uh less than that even i i think yeah i mean like a copy of final fantasy three or six but three in america would cost you probably about 60 bucks these days so mario rpg what have you been playing mostly i've been i've been digging into uh secret of mana just because it's one of my favorite games basically of all time i've been picking at super metroid just because i don't know if i ever finished it as a kid i remember most of it um it's a ridiculous lineup it's like you keep looking like it is baffling and it's been really cool to like my daughter's three and she can't really like grok a lot of the gameplay mechanics but she like being able to show her this stuff yeah from my childhood and being able to turn on um the one that i was most excited to see for

some reason was super castlevania 4 that was yeah it's the first snes game that we got and i can still remember like what the uh the moment when i held the chain whip button and you can move the direction around and the whip just flailed all over the place and i can remember swinging like you could never do this on the nes never look at that whip flipping around it's amazing seven and up in that game there's some amazing the whole mode seven level under i think it's the underground level it's like so fucking great the uh i think i kind of found interesting i was able to pick one up as well i was actually not going to get one and then stupid amazon parked their stupid treasure truck like a block for me and i was like oh so i picked one up what occurs and i know it's the worst anecdotally it was not as hard to get well i showed up at 55 and just

rolled up on one i guess and and and you sort of mentioned it but it kind of made me think the other day how interesting it is when we think of like nostalgic games and we have this picture of like pixelated games and the reason uh you know pixel 2d games are a big deal is because a lot of people that are making games now grew up with those types of games and it's kind of interesting when you think of like there was a part of me when i was growing up like when the n64 came out i was like okay 2d games are basically done we're never going to see them anymore and now there's this like new wave of nostalgia which will impact the current generation so so uh justin's child will grow up with 2d games and that will be part of their nostalgia as well and so it kind of lives on and i thought it's like 70s culture like we had

70s culture as teenagers and now there's like certain 70s fashions that are bouncing again yeah as we like have kids i the thing that i cannot wait for is there is a culture and like just a shout out to these people tumblr artist who were raised on the Sega Dreamcast and I love that that you can start to see a wave of nostalgia for that window of video games and I love it I I I don't know if there's gonna be so much warmth for nintendo 64 like playstation 1 era because woof are are those games rough i think they're yeah they're kind of what nes the you know having the nes mini to the snes mini was no i think early 3d games just age really really poorly yeah that's the problem like obviously mario 64 is great but like most of those are pretty to that point holy shit starfox one is unplayable y'all that frame rate

i did not realize how fucking bad that was like it's i remember loving that game as a kid and playing it now is like whoa is my starfox 2 i honestly thought the smes classic was like i thought mine was broken because it's literally like four frames a second it's super bad by the way say if you're listening mini dreamcast classic oh my god i would devour it you just do it and it has to come with a vmu you know because if i can't carry around my little kale uh we gotta get we gotta move let's get cranking um juice what justin is Destiny, so why don't we save that for last so we can take more time. And let's move through ours a little quicker.

So I'm bringing a game called... I'm gonna screw this up. Metroid Samus Returns I think is the name of the game. I hesitate only because the game that it's based on, which was Metroid 2, the return of Samus, but essentially it's a remake of metroid 2

and remakes probably not even fair because it's really like a total i have no idea why they called it i have no it's a total conversion yeah you know when you like it's like every aspect of the game has been completely redone the map is completely different the art uh is fully 3d it's a 2.5 d game but like it's all 3d graphics and um just every single aspect the only thing that they kept the same was the plot which is samus needs to go to the home of the metroids and murder every fucking one of them uh and you do that um and it's just i think what's amazing about it and and i felt the same way about metroid zero mission which was the remake of the original Metroid game that came out on GBA, I think, GBA? Yeah, GBA.

Basically took all of these things that you remember about these classic games and love about these classic games and then added modern gameplay design concepts to them. And also Zero Mission had a ton of and also a zero mission had a ton of new stuff yeah and a ton of new stuff it added basically a another chapter to the end of the game that was kind of wild but it doesn't feel like a departure or a rewriting it feels like additive on like what the core idea was it kind of just like paints a new coat on this like nostalgic memory that you have with like gameplay that is not like a total chore to get through and um metroid the new metroid which is on 3ds probably the last 3ds game i will ever play if i had to guess um which is kind of a bummer but also also bringing this shit to Switch now, I hope. It adds stuff like countering attacks,

which I think has only been in one Metroid game so far, and that was Other M. But in the 2D Metroid games, the fact that you can counter an attack in a 2D Metroid game means the clumsy eight-directional aiming shit is gone, where if you have the proper timing you basically counter an enemy as they're attacking and you basically annihilate them the second you after you counter them and it feels like really fluid and cool um there's some amazing boss fights in

this game apart from like so you fight like shit i think there's like 40 metroid boss battles those have been pretty lame for me so far because you don't like the same i the metroid fights are just like kind of the same thing over and over again it feels like except like there's slight changes to their patterns i don't really i mean they get pretty fucking complex i don't know how far you are they get pretty fucking complex towards the end um i kind of liked that you would like meet one and it'd be kind of a tough fight and then they'd like change the environment around a little to make it a little bit harder and then the second that you felt like okay i've really like i've mastered this fight like i crushed these metroids the metroids evolve and then

you're fighting a completely new one with different patterns and different styles and stuff like that um so i like that but there's also some other boss fight stuff um that i really thought was just like some of the best boss fights in metroid history are in this game uh there's one in particular that i want to spoil but it's really spectacular and it's just like oh god i couldn't put it down like i reviewed it and generally you know for review games you kind of have to play it very quickly and it's a drag but here like it matched my pace of like how often i wanted to play it which was all the fucking time until i fetished it um it's it's really excellent if you're

completionist there's like some really smart completionist things in there that like don't make you look on a game fact to find every single collectible you can like actually find it all in the game um and it's just fucking great man if you love metroid especially classic metroid but really any fucking metroid game it's one of the best they've ever made uh and i feel like it's gonna kind of be forgotten by nature of it being towards the end of the 3ds life cycle but shit dog it's so good. I... Go ahead. Oh, sorry, Griff, go ahead. I just, like, I have enjoyed it. I got to, like, the second part of the... The third part of the world.

So early. It's huge. It's a lot bigger than you thought it was. I know, it's very, very big. My main complaint, I don't know how to get past this, and it's kind of what made me stop playing it a little bit. Also, the fact that this is a very competitive month. I don't think it feels very good.

And I think the biggest my biggest complaint there is just like I don't like having to use the analog stick to move around in 3DS games because like I don't think it I don't think it feels great. Like if there is ever an option to use the D-pad especially in a 2d platformer game like this like i will always opt for that um and like that that alone also like i don't know it feels very um it feels very fast like the way that samus moves like she falls very quickly and uh you know turns her momentum very very quickly while in like another 2d metroid game like it's a little bit floatier um and so that combined with having to use the stick like it just doesn't it doesn't feel that great to me to play it um and i get that you have to use the stick because there is 360 degree aiming this time around which is uh which is you know kind of a

kind of a cool thing but um yeah i i kind of just wish I could move around using the, the, the D pad just cause that. Yeah. I don't disagree. I, I, I, that was exactly what I was going to hit on. It's just, this is not a knock against the game proper. I, I, I just hope it like the bring it to switch or something because I really don't enjoy, um, I really don't enjoy um i really

don't enjoy the feel of the game and i think it is just centered on the disc i don't like moving around the environment with the the stick it just feels weird and i also don't like the having to stop to aim with the the trigger there to to give me that like complete control it just doesn't i don't know that that part just isn't clicking i from a control perspective i think it's just 2d games that that bothers me like a 3d game like the super mario 3d land uh game the the stick is fine and like a top-down 3d game like animal crossing new leaf like i i don't mind uh using the stick to to run around a 3d space it's just having to like go around a 2d environment like pressing down on the the the the uh circle pad to like duck to get you know a different angle on your shots like i don't know yeah i just don't think it feels very good it also it also

is this is not really a complaint about the game but it is also weirdly infuriating to start a metroid game and not have the things to not be able to instantly turn into a morph ball and then oh stop it that's all of them that's every fucking Metroid game but it's saying like it's very irritating to have to back out of a tunnel to shoot the thing when it's like I know you know how to do bombs you've learned this so many times please tell me you still remember how to do this she sold all her equipment between games that was quick that's nice that's that's all fair but i think it's a great game there's gonna be another 3ds game coming what about all the uh atlas is re-releasing like a bunch of really great uh nintendo ds rpgs

including radiant historia which nobody played and was a fucking masterpiece put that shit on switch dogs i'm not i can't i'm sorry i'm charging enough devices right now the uh the uh mario and luigi superstar saga like one of the first great is coming out they're doing a remaster of that that shit i would buy on switch in a heartbeat yeah like but i mean i got the i got the new 3ds xl uh which i really really enjoy or i guess the new 2ds xl uh which i think is really fantastic so i'm i'm actually eager to play more stuff on it i do love that mario and luigi early games are great yeah uh next let's go with cuphead yeah yeah let's talk about cuphead cuphead oh man uh in a released in a whirlwind of controversy comes cuphead a very perfectly okay uh boss battle collection that

is a throwback to 1930s cartoons and 1990s uh running gun shooters for the mostly the sega genesis like uh treasure games gunstar heroes comes to mind metal slug sure uh Metal Slug. Sure. Kind of. Ish. Boss Battles. Yeah, it's mostly Boss Battles. I think that they realized that releasing a collection of Boss Battles in the year 2017 is a little unusual. So there are a handful of platforming stages throughout the game that I don't quite know why they're there. Because it doesn't feel like that's where their hearts were uh but the boss battles wow are they good um for people who like a little bit of difficulty who enjoy shmups um who enjoy bullet hells who enjoy learning boss patterns and then

exploiting them uh this is the game for you it is you you play as a cuphead you can play with another person cuphead his name is i'm sorry there's a race of cupheads there could you don't know his dad could be named cuphead yeah he could be cuphead jr um and then mugman is is your co-op person and you uh just fill enemies with uh little projectiles uh and it's mostly static screens uh and they use different patterns and you master them i mean it's really really simple on the top level to talk about the joy of it for me uh having having played through it is i think it to do these games well uh you have you have two things that you have to nail uh one is where can i be on screen um like a lot of good shmups have you have your spaceship uh when i say this i'm talking about shoot them up so where you're

flying around and just waves of bullets are coming at you you have your ship but then you have a dot on the ship and that is like the the point that can't you know be touched by a bullet the rest of your ship is fine so yeah like you you it has to communicate those things and i think cuphead had a huge challenge in itself in that you're you're a large character um and also it's this beautiful 1930s animation making it look good and natural and not just be the cliche glowing red areas on a boss is very very tricky um and they they communicate it very very well um barring some issues at the very end um the other thing is also just nailing the the feel uh you're talking about your movement um i played it with an xbox elite controller with a d-pad and it's a shame these things are so expensive because

i i think that is really the best way to play it um it feels so much better xbox controller has a d-pad on it does and i played it with that too and here we go it's fine it's fucking elitist oh oh i mean literally we can't do a type 5 on i can't use my hockey puck on my ds on samus and then and then be like oh no no we can't we can't have that we can't spend 150 dollars for a controller i agree i'm not saying people should do it i'm just saying it's a shame that the basic xbox controller doesn't have a good d-pad that's that's all i'm saying um remember they tried to fix the 361 by making one that turned to make it good oh yeah oh my god i forgot about that um the other thing about the controls is the default controls on this game are horrible like i cannot believe it shipped with these these controls they make no sense the game is all about speed and timing and being able to do

multiple things at once and the decision on their end was to put all of the main powers on the face buttons uh so your thumb just breaks and contorts the only way i could figure out playing it at first was using my thumb and then essentially making an okay symbol with my thumb and pointer finger and using the pointer finger to press the other face buttons that weren't like i think x and b it was wait why didn't you just change it to triggers no i did i i eventually like remapped but i assumed there was a reason that they wanted me to use this finger torture um and i was wrong uh yeah and i think they for what it's worth i think the reason they did it and i don't think this is a smart reason is because they wanted

to make the controls as basic as possible and a lot of people that are like casual people don't think this is a smart reason is because they wanted to make the controls as basic as possible and a lot of people that are like casual people don't really grok the like trigger thing necessarily so by just using face buttons they made it a little bit easier but that also doesn't explain the locking being on a trigger so never mind yeah yeah it doesn't make a lot of sense one other thing that i i was impressed by and i was curious about this when i saw it in previews is these cartoons do not have the the best history uh racist caricatures were kind of like a bread and butter of this period right um and for the most part they are able to maintain that style and in some cases reference the worst, like the really nasty aspects of it without actually depicting those terrible things. What is an example of that with a reference? I'm not going to go it there.

I'm just curious, honestly. I honestly don't know how to talk about it without sounding awful. Sounding awful. about it without sounding awful sounding awful um yeah i i found like i was looking for it too and i think anyone that like knows that era of song of the south and stuff like that was is certainly like very aware of it and i think they lean i mean it seems pretty yeah it seems like they handled it with like a lot of kid kid gloves for the most part yeah yeah which is for the best really like that shit should not be in this game right yeah yeah um so yeah i i think it was good i don't think it's nearly as hard as um the hype cycle like made it out to be

i i think it's way more what pro gamer get good yeah well i i think it is on top of just being able to tell like what's hurting you and what you can hurt it really really cues you into what an attack is going to be like if you think about the punch out thing where oh you know this character is twisting left and right two times that means he's about to deliver this attack. Right. It forecasts its attacks very, very, very, very, very, very clearly. So if you are patient and learn how to do that, for the most part, I feel like once you know how to beat a boss, it's only a few more rounds until you do it. It doesn't have that issue, again, except for the final bosses,

where I know how to beat this but the game is so punishing that even though i i know the path to victory i can't achieve it and and that's the thing that i don't enjoy about kind of classic running gunners is it becomes more of a thing of just arbitrary skill um the end in luck where you don't have like a limited number of lives to have to worry about you can you can the second you are frustrated you can retry and it reloads the battle in i don't know a second a half a second so it's it's so much it's all of the things that are good about that period of uh video games with so much of the fat cut away speaking of loading I played on the Xbox one

and it has been no grip since I played something on the Xbox one I've mainly played on the ps4 pro and I think I've been a little bit spoiled because the loading into the world and out of the world like loading up missions and stuff feels pretty onerous you got that same thing when you restart like when you retry inside of a mission that that that that loads right away but like going back into the world or starting a new level like it takes a little bit yeah um can we play this together playing because it's got co-op and that's how i want to play it because it looks really fun but i haven't yeah i want to try it co-op looks like it could destroy friendships because the difference is you share a pool of life and you when you revive to to bring somebody back uh you have to parry them but really that's just kind of tempting you to get yourself in danger spot yeah so yeah i'm very curious about it yeah i've seen

so i i played a little bit of co-op in the office and i played uh and and they do two interesting things one you're right like the pairing system which i think is really awesome the like reviving another player before their ghost flies off the screen is like really cool yeah um it also increases the health of all the enemies in the game uh bosses and little guys and Um, so I actually think it is a lot harder to play in co-op, but I, it's super fun. Like the,

the like strategy and finally making it to the end. Like there is a celebratory element to this game that should absolutely be like applauded. And I think they did a really good job of making it like a great couch co-op game. Yeah. Um, I do want to say,

I just can't say enough about the aesthetics too. A lot of times with games that have a specific look, you get a little bit inured to it after a while, it kind of fades into the background, but man, it's just so considered and deliberate and unlike anything, I think, in video games that it was really delightful. It's one of the few games,

like I got my daughter into the room, like you have to see this and then you have to watch daddy curse and it's it's holistic with them in that it nails the when you're in a boss fight it looks like uh steamboat willie essentially but when you're in that overworld it has that that look of almost like a disneyland map yeah combined with the first world you are in, the music is just a riff on Disneyland Times Square. It is really... Main Street? Yeah, thank you, Main Street.

That would be a very different park. But yeah, every little detail is so good at that. I really wish the final boss battles are good because it is weird that this game that is all about just fantastic boss battles ends with wolf the the final the penultimate boss is you have to fight between three and nine bosses and then do this impossible parrying exercise uh with and basically store up lives because there's not a really a great way to do it and then the final boss i swear has a bug in it that deals automatic damage if you don't essentially perform a dodge the way that the game wants you to uh so

it was a huge bummer and i hope they patch the ending heavily i hope they take the criticism um because well it's it's such a drag for it to be so fair yeah and then to get to what should be exciting and just i i really just had to brute force it yeah i'm surprised that you had trouble with it given like specifically given your controller and how great that is yeah that's what i i and i i hit the just win mode on my control because i'm like yo i do want to say one more thing before we close it out i did not the friendliest of colorblind friendly games in the world and if you are colorblind just specifically the issue is they use two colors a lot purple and pink and pink you can parry and purple you can't and the problem here is that they both have red in them

and it is really really difficult to tell them apart at sometimes certain art it's doable i can tell but certain art is like a real struggle and for a game that's all about like very quick movement good fucking luck yeah so just keep that in mind um i want to talk about mine real quick because we don't have a ton of time and i want to get to destiny but my game this week this month is golf story for the nintendo switch this is a golf rpg from uh sidebar games sort of in the style of the really good camelot um mario sports rpgs mar, specifically Mario Tennis and Mario Golf for Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance,

which are, in my mind, sort of the pinnacle of this. I feel like Russ and I have talked specifically a lot about games like this, probably on Besties and how modern Mario sports games have kind of lost a lot of the magic that made those games so great i don't get it like they like every like those were tens like people people love them gave perfect scores those games and they're like is a is a fucking wonderful wonderful wonderful game um

and i'm i'm glad to say the golf story maintains a lot of what makes those games really great it is yeah a golf rpg where you play sort of this fledgling golfer who is trying to make their way in this circuit and they are in this world uh that is entirely made up basically of uh eight golf courses with different themes um and what's really neat about the game is that it just drops you into a course and then gives you free reign to go around exploring that course um and in exploring it you can find lots of sort of hidden objectives and bonuses that you can just sort of go around and find. You can level up and get money that you can use to purchase a few new goods.

And by leveling up, you can increase certain stats. It does an interesting thing with leveling where if you boost your power, which basically increases how far you can hit the ball, especially from drives, it decreases your more technical stats. So you have to be. That was a thing in Mario Golf as well, though. I guess so. I don't really remember. But so it makes sense, right?

If you boost your drive so you can drive it, you know, 250 yards, then your control is going to be a little bit off and your your spin is going to be a little bit off um and so you constantly have you can't just like rush that you have to be constantly sort of maintaining your other stats um the this the side quests in this game i think this part's probably going to be a little bit divisive um in that you in like following the story you are going to do a ton of side quests and i would liken these to uh objectives in like tony hawk's pro skater 4 where you're just going around the world and you're not necessarily going around doing you know missions where you're doing stunt combos you're doing weird shit um like for instance in golf story maybe that entails getting a lawnmower and mowing the grass or hunting down moles that

have taken over the course and and hitting balls into into their sort of field. What's really neat is that you don't have to like load up one of these missions to start golfing. You don't have to start a course to start golfing. There is a button that you press and you just drop your ball on the ground and now you can shoot. And so like anytime you are anywhere, you can golf. So maybe you see like an island off in the distance and you think that there's something on that island.

You can just drop your ball, hit a ball, hit it over there and then see what's up maybe there's a switch that you have to like hit um there's also a neat skill that you can unlock where you drop the ball or you throw the ball up in the air and then you can hit it right away as it's falling which is feels really really sick every time um in general like it feels really good it is it one of those three hit golf games where you hit uh you aim your shot and then you hit it once to start the meter then you hit it twice to choose your power then you hit it a third time to choose like how well you control the ball um yeah and so that is the basic loop of the game you will go around following this story which entails you to like do different favors for people in the course or explore uh you know parts of the course to find things and then you will usually end sort of your your

your run on each of these eight courses by actually playing that course maybe against other people or in just sort of an open game to see how good a score you can get um and the writing is surprisingly pretty funny and it's kind of like... You likened it to Undertale. Yeah. I guess that's a weird comparison for me because there's lots of funny games out there. It's also sort of in line with the Mario RPGs a little bit. Yeah, Mario RPGs are the one. It's very irreverent and humorous.

But yeah, this is my jam. I really liked... My favorite part of the mario golf games was going around the world and finding different stuff and like finding little secrets and finding ways to to get better i wish there was my two big complaints is i wish there was more um gear that you could like spend money on like whenever you find a new pro shop there's usually only a couple things that you can buy and usually one of them is like kind of situational helping you solve a puzzle in the world that you're in for instance the first pro shop you unlock you can buy a disc and all of a sudden you can use

that to play disc golf which is like a whole nother thing that is pretty fun also um and then you can buy like a club or two i wish there was like a store with a ton of stuff so you could be like saving up your money to buy things usually it's just like do you have enough money to buy the one or two things that is available at this store um but the the other thing is that um there is uh there there are what's the word i'm looking for um uh like slopes and like different angles whenever you are putting or hitting shots. And there's a little UI indicator telling you like which way the ground is sloping

and how like severe a slope it is. I wish that that was more representative and how it is in games like Everybody's Golf or Hot Shots Golf or the Mario Golf games where it shows you like on the ground, like, is going a little bit you know down downhill towards you so you gotta be hitting a little bit harder using that one ui thing makes putting kind of tough and it makes uh like measuring your putt pretty difficult i've botched a lot of putts just because like that one indicator isn't really enough of a visual language to tell you like

to to help you aim your putts correctly um and so that's that's kind of frustrating but otherwise i think it feels like a really great golf game and the golf is really fun there's not like a ton of actual proper like playing through a course that you will do um which is i i find myself at times like just wishing like okay i wish that the story now required me to play a course because i just i would like to golf but on the inverse of that i've i loved everybody's golf on ps4 um but that game is just all golf for the most part and it gets i stopped playing it because that gets tiresome um so i wish the balance was like a little bit better but i i just really enjoy exploring these worlds and doing all the different little side quests that they have through them yeah i think it's also a perfect game for switch or mobile uh i would still be

playing everybody's golf if it was on vita for sure um so yeah i think it's a really great little game yeah i i agree with everything you said i thought the writing was great tonally it's a lot of fun i like doing the side stuff i did find myself and this is kind of a weird thing but i found myself kind of wishing that they bit more of what like mario rp mario golf did on gba like you talked about the putting which i 100 agree with but like a lot of stuff like the way they handle um shot previews is a little weird the way they handle um putting spin on your ball is weird um there's like no like the whole like backspin mechanic is like it just feels like odd so like it does feel like they kind of made this with more of a focus on the rpg aspects than they did the

like really minutiae of like golf which i think makes golf games really good i'll give you like a really simple example of in mario golf on gba and i think on gamebook gameboy color as well when you are putting and you get really close to the cup it actually does like this cool zoom in on the cup to show you like how close you are to like getting it in and like that's something that i kind of missed here um yeah there's just like a lot of like like if you're looking as griffin said if you're looking for like a real golf game uh hot shots is excellent and and is really like that um and i kind of wish they were like married a little bit closer and and this was a stronger golf game but i really enjoy going through it

the other one minor complaint i have is that the side quests really are not side quests insofar as you need to do them to progress the story uh there's like some of them are some of them are like you have to go you know help the the groundskeeper in order to like fix up the course in order to play the tournament but there was an instance where like um i needed a shovel and for the life of me could like not find where i could like figure out where i could get a shovel i got caught up on that also yeah and and you're like totally stuck and i've done everything else in the map and i'm running around like a blind person so the so uh yeah but there are a couple instances where i think they struggle with clarity in terms of what they want you to do.

But for the most part, it's fine and a lot of fun. As somebody who doesn't know anything about golf, I found myself—this is going to be embarrassing and stupid— I found myself really frustrated by the fact that I would set up my marker for where I wanted the shot to go, and then I would get the shot perfect, and then it would go way past where I wanted it to go. Yeah, the ball travels pretty far, and you've got to, like, count it. Eventually you learn to counter for that and, like, hit it way shorter. It's defaulted me to a golf rod that is inappropriate for the thing that they want me to do, which forced me to kind of, of like change that on the fly,

which is probably not weird for somebody who like knows about golf games. But for me, I found it. Yeah. Coming again, right off everybody's golf. Like I kind of had a better understanding of that stuff. Like I,

to Justin's point, like if you hit the ball, it is going to go way past where you think it's going to go because the ball is going to roll. And so the way you counter that is by maybe choosing a different uh a uh you know a different golf rod and like i always put backspin on pretty much every shot that i do just so the ball doesn't go forever and ever and ever um so so yeah there is some institutional knowledge that is very very helpful in in that regard um let's get to the big show let's just do it let's just do it show so

a very good game released this month is called destiny um is the second one actually so destiny destiny returns is it destiny destiny samus returns destiny samus returns it's called destiny two um okay so the first destiny was a game that was built to be a sort of online persistent first shooter we could endlessly uh collect loot with your friends and uh uh have unique stories connected to all your weapons uh but it was basically fundamentally a broken game that was uh a lot of the the systems underneath the shooting uh even though the shooting was excellent all the systems underneath the shooting that would compel you to continue to play it were were bad in a way that i think uh is is probably the worst they could be in that they were designed to sort of addict and hook and keep you grinding on things

without giving much fun or new things in return. And for the people that was effective on, it was very effective. And I think it was almost kind of a cruel game at its inception, though. You're talking about the vanilla. We're talking about vanilla original Destiny. I'm walking us in a little bit.

And then as Destiny grew over the years, that put a lot of people off. And the people that was not designed to attract bounced hard and got a really bad taste in their mouth about Destiny. Over the years, Destiny got various expansions that made it a much more, I would say, humane experience. A lot more pleasant, a lot more, it felt a lot easier to justify your time spent in Destiny because there was a lot of stuff to do and it was all really enjoyable. So enter Destiny 2 where they have sort of defaulted to that, where you are a guardian who at the very beginning of the game loses your light, which sort of a code for

superpowers in this case uh because it's been stolen by a mean guy named gall and your your objective in the story um is to take down gall get your light back get light back for all the guardians and rescue the traveler which is a weird super power alien ball um i'm gonna try to do like components really fast story-wise uh it is a huge improvement over destiny which was a barely sort of tattered together collection of scraps of fragments of story. This is a much more coherent story. It's much more, especially towards the end, it ramps up in ways that are evocative of some of the best moments in Halo,

where it takes what you know and puts it into a very grand sort of operatic setting that feels very cool to do. So story is a, is a huge improvement there. The things that are sort of hovering around the story are a lot more pleasant. There are adventures that are like mini quests that you can do that are cool and handcrafted, though don't evolve over time.

There are lost sectors sectors which are basically like miniature dungeons that you blow through and kill a boss and get some loot there are public events which there were in the original destiny um but they are uh sort of bigger battles that theoretically require multiple people to pile on and and participate in but these are more humane in that you used to need a app to tell you when these things were going to pop off now you get a map with a timer and and everything so you know exactly when it's going to happen um and they're also a lot more rewarding than they used to be and a lot more fun like that is that is the activity that i have spent most of my destiny 2

time doing just because there's no gate on it and it's like instantaneous and it's usually like pretty rewarding i i i fucking adore what they've done with public events so destiny is is two is i would say the key differentiator if i were to sum it boil it down to one thing it is a much more rewarding game than destiny one ever was and that works in a lot of contexts. It's rewarding in the sense that the things that you do inherently in the game, I think are more fun than they were in Destiny and they're much more pleasant. So it's rewarding in that sense.

It's rewarding in the sense that you get your loot much more quickly, it feels like. The drop rates on the sort of most sought afterafter items, the exotic items, are a lot faster. There's a ton of also legendary, which is one step below that. There's a ton of those items to collect, but you get them in a really steady clip. There are also sort of built-in grinds that have been chipped away. built-in grinds that have been chipped away. You used to have to level up your weapons by using them repeatedly

and collect these really crappy little resources on the planets to level them up. That is gone. That part of the grind is gone. So in almost every sense, it's more rewarding. I think that is the thing that might hamper it for some people in that after playing it a ton, and I do mean like a lot, I don't know exactly how much time, but a lot in the past few weeks, I feel pretty much like I've done everything I want to do and that is not necessarily a complaint for me who has other things they want to play and

and i would say it is by the design of destiny but i do hear uh a lot of people who want to just keep playing destiny that they don't feel um a lot of reason to to keep grinding away and and and the important thing to note here is i think that that is largely the result of artificial progression being carved away from the game things like having to gather resources and up uh upgrade your weapons and things like that and ran and random rolls on on on weapons and armor which was the thing in destiny one where a gun would drop and be like oh these perks suck so this gun isn't good so i'm gonna keep i'm gonna keep trying to get the good one and destiny two all the guns are static they have the same perks uh across the board and so you get one and you've got it there's no need to like keep going back to try to get a better version of the one

you've got yeah um but there it feels like there's a lot there's a ton of stuff to do it's really like if you're looking at it from the perspective of i'm paying 60 for a game i think it gives like a ridiculous amount of value. If you're looking at it as this is the new game that I want to be playing all the time until there's new content for Destiny, I think that you might be a little bit frustrated by the fact that you will get to a point

where you're like, well, I feel like my time here is done. I think that that's healthy personally, but I know that that's not everybody's cup of tea uh i uh i one quick thing before we move on i want to do like two minutes on the raid so if you're unfamiliar the sort of big final piece of end game content that you do in, in destiny games is our raids. And these are six people, uh, uh, large,

long, I don't want to say even quest. They're basically huge dungeons that you have to take on with six people. They require a ton of collaboration. They require a lot of, uh, very high power. This is the thing that you're getting your,

your power higher for so you can do well in these raids. The new raid, Leviathan, for this game, the first one released for it, I think is... It is interesting in that it is much more mechanical than other raids have been. Pretty much every encounter in the raid

requires real, like, more mechanical than other raids have been pretty much every encounter in the raid requires um real like really understanding the mechanics of the fight there aren't a lot of times where just shooting your way out is an option you mechanically have to understand what's happening and i think that that's good in some regards one it makes them i think more interesting to do it requires more collaboration um it it inspires a lot of weird vernacular that everyone has to sort of agree on as you're going into it because bottom dogs bottom dogs yeah the last fight in the game has an area where people are teleported to um and some people remain behind we've heard that referred to everything from like home and away teams, shadow realm and throne room. They on the giant bomb stream, they call it spooky slide.

So like there's a lot of there's a lot of different nomenclature that has to be arrived on. And I think that that's really neat. The way that that inspires really forces collaboration used to be able to carry people through the raids. If a few people knew what they were doing, the rest of the people could kind of hang back and watch and learn and I think that that's interesting that that's not really the case anymore flip side of that there was a stated goal with this game that it would be something where like you would not if you are a more casual player you'd be able to see everything that destiny has to offer and I do think that by making them so mechanical,

the unintended side effect is, I think it would be very daunting to try to approach this as someone who did not understand the mechanics. Because I think that because they are so mechanical, because that's explaining and understanding those mechanics can slow things down so much. I've already felt a big resistance from people wanting to teach new people how to do the things in the way yeah it's and it's and it's not just the mechanics it is the fact that there

is in all of the encounters zero margin for error no joke all there the rate is four encounters there's three uh sort of challenge rooms that are every week they arrive in a random order in the final boss and in all of them if one person uh you know doesn't doesn't kill their their dog at the right time if one person screws up the rotation in the baths or if one person shoots the wrong target uh or you know fucks up something in the gauntlet or the wrong one person like doesn't call out their symbol in the callous fight in every single fight one person can lose the run for everybody and there is again no no no margin for error i mean i think that i if we're going to be literal i don't fully agree i've been on runs there's very very very little margin for error yes which makes it daunting because if you're a

new player you don't want to feel like oh oh, thanks for taking me through this, everybody. I'm really excited to try the raid. And the very first time everybody kills their dog and you don't and they lose a really good run because of you and you know it's because of you. Yeah. That is going to make people say like, OK, well, I'm not going to do that. We should mention. Good. Oh, that's also exacerbated by the fact that the raid has revive tokens.

So in each encounter, every player has one token that they can use to revive somebody. So if one player is maybe new, not sure what they're doing, and they're dying a lot, that becomes very obvious and very detrimental very quickly. Also, just one more note on that before we move on i got a games the raid is rated at uh supposedly 260 to 280 is like the range of it which is your power level um if if you start the rate at 260 you'll be fine by the end of it if you're in that range of 260 to 280 by by the end of the raid, you'll be getting destroyed. You really do need, especially if you're the only person who's a lower level, I think you

could probably get by. But if most of your team is in that range, you are just not going to have the juice to get it done. And I think that's kind of a misleading thing that could be fixed. I want to hit on that too really quick before we get to games because i i really really like this game but the artificial capping and artificial strengthening by way of your power ranking is infuriating and the idea that one you essentially can't play raids until you devote a tremendous, a tremendous amount of time to the game. And then even once you do get there, that you are lesser than your peers simply by virtue of you not committing more time to the game.

I find it like kind of disgusting. disgusting and i find that it feels to me and this is very very much my cynical mind that it is so much of activision success right now in in the success of mmos is measured on metrics how many hours can we keep somebody involved because at a certain point they're more likely to spend money and by locking away the thing that everybody talks about it forces people into the metrics that they want as a company and i think i think that's like upsetting because on one hand people are like wow we got all this free content and it's like no you didn't it's it is you you played the amount that they need to meet a certain metric that they're going to sell ads against that they think that they can get you to spend money against and they are putting content back not because the player isn't ready for it

but because it is a it feels like a business decision and i i think that is just infuriating let me address yeah okay yeah okay let me address i don't think first Yeah. Okay. Let me address. I don't think, first of all, there's a lot of, a lot of things to unpack. First of all, um, technically if you are two 80 or two 81, you have pretty much the same advantage as someone that is level light level 300.

So Justin's right. Like you really shouldn't be under two 80 to finish the raid, but I don't think you need to be max light level to finish the raid. So there's that talking about the um monetary decisions and and and making a game a certain length to encourage people to spend money um people will disagree with me on this but i think um the destiny monetization systems in destiny 2 right now are pretty fucking tame yeah considering where they could be there are some gameplay uh impacting uh things that you could buy it's it's it's it's mods for your weapons which you can get from a billion other places for effectively there aren't yeah uh i i

i think it's i i disagree with it being a business decision. I think that this is just the model of these games and literally any MMO where there there has to be a final like check on your ability to work something for you to work towards. Because my complaint is that there's not enough of that stuff in Destiny 2 because I am one of those players who has played it several hours a day every day since it came out and only now I'm starting to fall off a little bit because I have two characters at the highest light or power level that you can possibly get to right now and one who's like one armor piece away from also being that as of last Friday I have collected all the exotic weapons in the game like I am one of those people who has hit the point where there is nothing left for me to do and because there's there's some of those things have been removed which i did not mind when i was leveling up things like random rolls on weapons um and my biggest complaint with progression is armor and that uh all are there's not that many like

interact there's no interesting perks or uh modifiers on your armor and so there's not a real reason to once you hit max light to like go and try to like collect a whole set or go get the the raid has unique pieces of armor and weapons right and all the armor looks really cool but there's not really a reason to go out and get that stuff um and in in destiny one that was different there would be pieces of armor that would give you perks that would help you out in certain parts of the raid. Like if you had the boots from Oryx, then you would move faster in the final boss fight against Oryx, for example.

Um, there isn't stuff like that in, in Destiny 2. And so I do, I don't really feel this need to like go, go play anymore because this is a game about like playing the stuff that is there that is going to like help you out or get you new stuff or get you better stuff and i'm i there's i've hit the i've hit the ceiling and there wasn't really so much there was a ceiling in destiny one but if you wanted to talk about it in the literal sense it was like you know getting the best roll on all these weapons and getting the you know the armor that's gonna have the stat uh bonuses that you need to like max out and because all that stuff is gone in destiny 2 like i i just i got nothing left there's also like a lot of stuff that got cut um that uh made destiny 1 a lot better

that i have no idea why it's not in this game for instance uh you have a vault where you can store all your items and it's not sort of segmented. There's not like a weapon vault and an armor vault to like help you, you know, sort your items a lot better. It's just one big pile of shit that sucks to go through. And then there's things where like there are activities where once they stop being rewarding for you, no matter what, just gonna stop doing them and one of those things one of those things that becomes irrelevant pretty much instantly is strikes which was my favorite thing in destiny one it's the thing i spent my most time doing is these like uh little usually like 20 to 30 minute uh missions um that would go through and they would usually be pretty rewarding

and there's not really much of a reason to do it once you hit a certain break point. In Destiny 1, there were strike playlists where by the end of the experience of Destiny 1, after all the updates and expansions had come out, they would have like a, you know, a scoring metric to them. So where if you did really well, you'd get better loot.

And there were playlists. So if you kept playing strikes in the playlist, you'd keep getting better and better gear because there was like a buff for like chaining your strike clears together that's gone here and so there's like i i loved strikes in s1 i just don't play them anymore because it's like yeah it's kind of pointless it does feel like you know between um console generations when like the new madden comes out I realize it's kind of a time based thing but it does feel like the there's a lot of functionality that happened late in the generation of Destiny that I loved uh Strike like specific rewards is another example like there's a bunch that they added in like Rise of Iron that I thought was just great and the impression I get

or private matches is also not in destiny 2 yet it just i get the impression that they there was just a lot of triage happening towards the end of destiny 2 and i earnestly do believe a lot of this stuff will make it back into the game for sure but it's but it's a bummer to like have that reversion on certain aspects and you're right like i don't run strikes apart from the the nightfall even though they're a lot of fun because it isn't quite where it should be so i i think the game even by december uh we'll have an uh one of the expansions will be out by then in theory um i think will be pretty drastically different um in the way that destiny one vanilla was pretty drastically different by december um but yeah i think that look i'm not i think all of these are 100 valid complaints and

if they don't come through and fix a lot of this stuff it's a real bummer and it detracts but i also pointing to what justin said earlier like i played hundreds of hours of Destiny 1. And there is something really kind of nice and freeing of the feeling that I'm like, I don't need to play tons of Crucible to get this perfect roll on a hacksaw pulse rifle that I really want because I'm like happy with where my gear is and I can go off and play other games and do other stuff. Sure. But if, again, if you're looking for a game that you're going to play day in day out week in week week out it does not necessarily have that long tail built into destiny right now uh but i'm like i i also love having a game where i am excited for

the the future of it and i am not i there is no game right now that i am as bought in as i am in destiny 2 like i've played it tons and tons and tons of hours and you know i have have worked to get all my characters up to max light and now i am like ready for the next thing to come to come out and i i know that that is like a complaint among the most hardcore players of destiny 2 like there's nothing for me to do now um but like justin said earlier like i played it i played it every day for several hours a day and probably put a couple hundred hours into it. Um, that's good. That's good for me.

And there's a shit ton of games, you know, that have come out and are about to come out. And, um, I am, I am, I am, I bounced off the first Destiny because it went too far in the other direction, like way too far in the other direction. And I'm like, I have adored the time that I've spent. Also, like they have already added stuff in to, the game added in some hooks to bring you back. Like the faction rally that came out this week, the the trials, the nine I had a lot of fun with once I found a group that was like really, really good at it. And I hope that that's the direction they go instead of like keeping you hooked by making you go out and, you know, get the perfect rolls on weapons or get, you know, some dumb shard that you need to upgrade your weapons. Like keep giving me more event based stuff.

And I have every that Bungie has earned my trust in this department that they will continue to do stuff like this to get me going. Yeah. you to to do stuff like this to to get me going um yeah stuff like the black spindle which there's nothing like that in destiny 2 right now but there was a quest in the first destiny that you just had to like find it was like a secret exotic weapon that required like this incredibly difficult thing you had to do uh to get it and like once they start rolling stuff like that out into the game like there's there's no shortage of ways that they can just keep adding on to this, like, foundation that it is impossible to argue is a weaker foundation than Destiny 1 was. I want to circle back real quick to something that Plant said. Like, I hear the—you had some pretty strong language about the, like, I guess morality of the the design is that enough to sort of put you

off 100 i i i i find a lot of the culture around it um not ideal like i the thing that i would recommend to people is like everybody here who's talking keeps mentioning that you're playing like hours of this game a day which makes us i think especially is like adults um with like responsibilities fortunate i guess i think that like a lot of people cease to have that opportunity at a certain point and i what i find frustrating about the culture around Destiny is what you'll find across the internet is here's how to max your character. Don't spend any of these items until you get to this point in the game. And what we haven't talked about at all is the game. Like, the first 25 hours, there's a game there that is, like, a pretty good game. It's a game there that is like a pretty good game it's a fucking great game that you're

encouraged largely in the community to completely gas through nobody wants to actually play it with you uh there aren't really good incentives for playing it with you um and and like again like not using your items for example until a certain point actually kind of ruins the balance of that game to make it less enjoyable. And I think that's what's frustrating is, again, by gating these things. I get it. I totally get what you mean by you have to have something to work towards. Otherwise, you know, then what?

What motivates people to participate in the grind? But then kind of my like flip side of that is, you know, I'm still playing Spelunky every all the time, because it's a good game. And sometimes I feel like with this game, what we're talking about is I really just want a mindless grind that I can do that hits just enough of a balance, I can like talk with my friends on a daily basis while i play video games which if that's the thing that's great but if that's the thing then i wish this game made it so that i could play with my friends like i have played a lot of destiny i

think i have been able to play with with my peers twice because even though i am level 263 or 264 i'm like not good enough and that's wild to me that i have invested so much time in a game had to like skip some of the best parts because like the culture around it is whatever it is and sure yeah that's true i think you're what they're actually suffering from though is residual residual behavior from destiny one yeah like destiny one taught you like churn destiny one taught you don't waste time on the story because it's bad right and like find ways to min max your progression time because that's literally all there is to to do i mean it's it's just that right it didn't account for like some of these things are fun and i think what you're maybe running into plant is that some of those changes have been made but the player base is still not it is wild to follow the sort of like hardcore

fan reaction to this game because it has been this arc of one how do i get max everything as quick as possible you know building on that like still lingering uh psychology from from the first destiny and then a week afterwards there's nothing to do in destiny i've done everything and it's like yeah well you just intentionally did that and you can bring that to yourself you can break out of that too like i like i said like i've hit essentially max light on two of my characters and because there's no random roles and there's no like i've gotten all the exotics so there's not much there's nothing really for me to continue to uh pursue uh when i when i hop on at night which again is a lot more of a infrequent occurrence just because i i

there's not a whole lot of stuff for me to to do some of i've been having a lot of fun just like hopping into a fire team with my friends who are you know playing through public events trying to get stuff or um you know running other stuff with those folks i guess my complaint is because like strikes are now irrelevant and there's there's not a lot of mid-level activities that plant and i could do together there's only really the the the the raid uh at this point for plant which like nightfalls and then pvp yeah well i'm not a huge pvp player but um there i wish there was more stuff where now that i'm max light i could do to like help out my friends because right now it's just like grinding public events trying to get exotics there's like weird break points there's weird in

the typical mmo parlance's hell levels uh where where it's just like well if you can't get past if you can't get from 265 to 280 like that, that takes a while and there's not a lot of great options for you to, to do that. Um, but yeah, like I've broken out of that cycle for the most point by virtue of the fact that I beat it, I overcame the cycle and hit the, hit the end of it. I hit the max on everything. And now only now I'm like actually enjoying playing the game without that carrot in front of me and and that carrot requires you to do some very very specific stuff and essentially ignore everything else and and i've i i enjoy playing that stuff now but it did require me to play a couple hundred hours of only going after that carrot and only playing the

specific stuff that benefits me sure i also i think the way to think about it i don't think it's by the way ditto jesus i don't think good work i don't think that it's a um you're at 60 let's get good i don't think it's a design problem necessarily um maybe it's a presentation problem in terms of like guiding people to the right spots i think the issue is really it's a humanity problem it's a it's a presentation problem in terms of like guiding people to the right spots. I think the issue is really, it's a humanity problem. It's a gamer culture problem, as Plant sort of alluded to. And gamer culture is not just, you know, I'm going to play 1,200 hours and mainline my way through this game to get to the end game content.

It's also Chris Plant who can only play, let's say, one hour every couple days. And the problem is you're trying to design a game and this is not a knock on bungie i'm just saying how difficult it is you're trying to design a game that appeals to both of those groups and for me i certainly probably lean towards the more hardcore of the group but i'm not the extreme so the fact that i in the back of my head are like like i play with a bunch of guys that are like much more extreme hardcore than i am in the back of my head i'm like well i need to sort of stay in their general realm so i can still experience this end game stuff but then again that leaves someone like Plant who's more casual out to,

ideally, in an ideal world, you would find other casual players to experience this content with at your own pace. That being said, I think specifically for the raid, which has always been like a very intense, super hard thing, I like, if you had six pretty casual players playing the raid,

I think no one would get through it. Now we should mention, because we addressed it earlier but we never really dug uh dove into it was the guided games feature which bungee included where if you are a player like plant like you could uh ostensibly hop into guided games and then find a group that is willing to to take you through the game uh take you through either the nightfall or or the raid and so that is in there it doesn't make the raid any less tried that like i have not no i haven't tried it i've heard it takes about 45 minutes or at least it did take about 45 minutes to get into a group which makes sense considering you're you can only do guided games with five other people which is to say like there can only be one noob as it were

in this group so it i mean it's 45 minutes. But that's going to get better. Like, a lot of the stuff we're talking about also is a symptom of the fact. Wait, wait, wait. I want to hear what else Russ has heard. I was going to also say, it's kind of a bummer, as far as I understand it, even though I haven't tried it myself. There's no, like, I'm going to queue up for this and then do my own shit. You basically just sit and stare at a menu.

That's a bummer. A lot of this is symptomatic of the fact that this game is new and everybody is really excited to keep playing and get the highest stuff. That first week was wild because the raid came out week two, and so there was this really high-tension race of, like, okay, well, don't turn in your milestones. Don't start this quest.

Don't turn in these things until you hit this cap or else you're not going to be able to get to 280 in week two and be ready for the raid like that that race is still even though you know a lot of this stuff is out now it's still in effect and i think it's going to get better as sort of the experience goes on and there's more stuff to do and there's not this like pressure to like max out right now beyond stupid i think it's beyond stupid that they release the raid a week after release it should be a hell put it out a month after release like if it came out now i think everyone would be like like they'll take a little break and then they'll be real excited

because there's new content and it stretches things out and it lets people that are more casual into the right light level yeah and it's not a race like it it de-emphasizes the insanity that happens at launch during a game in an unhealthy way that i did not necessarily enjoy as much as i could have if i had taken my time and explored more stuff and uh done more different kinds of activities instead of just like one or two very very specific activities required to get you there and while that's nice that was the it's most intense form that first week i again like i think that that is still in effect and i think it's i think it's gonna get i think it's gonna get better um it is nice it's just a bummer it's

just a bummer because the raid's the best shit in the game like raiding in d1 and right the raid in destiny 2 it's still even though there are some problems with destiny 2's raid we didn't talk about like some of the bugs that make uh specifically that final boss fight like really fucking frustrating um i still really really enjoy the raids and it's a bummer that only like the top you know two percent of players ever actually like play and complete it i think actually 10 is the is yeah it's probably up to 10 now it does increase over time obviously i uh it's just funny that like everyone in the world that plays destiny gets to experience the stress and unhappiness that comes from having to review a game in two days.

That's like, like I was, I reviewed destiny with submit and the fact that I was like grinding, grinding, grinding to get to the raid because I had to, because the review, but so was everyone else. Cause they felt like they needed to play the rate at launch.

Yeah. So it's just kind of funny, a little sneak peek into what it's like to race through a game even when you don't necessarily want let's let's wrap up because i gotta i gotta head out here in a few minutes but for for my money like even though it has problems like destiny 2 is like still some of my favorite time playing games this this year so i think it's definitely the the winner yeah yeah i think destiny 2 for sure uh last month the game that won was my game echo uh lone echo uh but i i and well i thought that game was really really cool uh and had a lot of really interesting stuff going on and if you have an

oculus you should go get it i i think destiny 2 is my my jam for sure and and and this is the end of the quarter right uh october november december is the final quarter yeah so uh yeah this is this oh wait no so lone echo did lone echo win the last yeah it won the last one this is for september we're talking september right now so this is the last game of of third quarter right august september is the right right got it okay so do we need to pick of the a winner of the quarter we have stupid exercise we have no destiny is the winner of the quarter because it beat the reigning champ. So currently we have, if memory serves, we have The Legend of Zelda, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and Destiny 2. What a fucking year, y'all.

Oh. Wasn't insane. Yeah, pretty brutal. Yeah, what's October looking like, everybody? Oh, yeah, there's not really anything coming out in October so we're fine. Yeah, New Mario, the Shadow of War, Assassin's Creed.

I just love that Mario and Zelda are going to face off in a game of the year thing. It's wild. And they both might lose to PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Yeah, we'll see. Juice, take us out. Do the thing you usually do. Take us to orbit us out take us out take us to do the thing you usually do well take us to orbit folks let me take you to orbit thank you so much for listening

to the besties you can find more about all of these games and believe it or not other games at polygon.com uh we would love it if you would um uh rate and review our show on itunes if you enjoy it that is a great way of sharing it. And maybe like tweet about it or something, just to let people know that we're here toiling in obscurity, just hoping for you to spread the good word. We would very much appreciate that. But that is going to do it for us for this week.

So for my co-hosts, my name is Justin McElroy. Thank you for listening to the besties. We'll be back with you again next month because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Best games! Besties!