The Besties - The Besties Podcast 35

Episode Date: November 16, 2012

The Besties are back in fine form, discussing the merits of Michael Crichton and examining the mysteries of frogs and fractions. There's also some talk about a little-known game called Black Ops 2 and some Halo 4 fatigue begins to set in. 03:00 - Halo 4 and Black Ops 2 29:20 - Chip Chain 35:27- Halftime: Griffin hates his cat 40:15 - Frog Fractions 44:45 - THE DECISION Theme song by Ian Dorsch Get the show: Download MP3" Subscribe to the podcast (RSS) Subscribe on iTunes 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!

Can we do an experiment really quick? Okay, I'm gonna count to three, and on three, on three, everyone say their favorite Michael Crichton book. Okay. Okay? One, two, Andromeda Strand. Congo. The movie.

Jurassic Park, obviously. What are you even talking about? Everyone all disagrees. Obviously, wait, wait, obviously Jurassic Park. Are you guys high? I think it goes in order of the one with Antonio Banderas as the Viking. Okay, that's not a book. Okay, that's 13th Warrior.

And that's a movie. And it is a book. It's a movie. But you guys are fucking crazy. Jurassic Park opened the door to an incredible world where man and thunder lizard walk hand in hand in Talon. What are you talking about it's not jurassic park it's like you guys have you guys even read the novelization of the movie clueless it's his finest work the people have it goes down in history as the best novelization of

any movie ever to star alicia silverstone i do want to just say one thing about Congo. There involves a laser gun that is used to shoot primordial gorillas. Also, Amy like. Amy like. And Amy tickle. I'm good gorilla. If we switched out one of the four

of us with a talking gorilla, would it be a better show? And by would it, I mean yes, of course. Is there a difference between a talking gorilla would it be a better show and by would it I mean yes of course is there a difference between a talking gorilla and Russ Frosch gorilla gorilla Amy Amy gorilla tickle My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and you started while I had a big gulp of sweet coffee in my mouth.

My name is Chris Plant, and I come after Griffin. My name is Russ Frustick, and I know the best game of the week. For this episode, we've switched out Russ Frustick with a theremin. Welcome to the besties, where we pit the top games of the week against each other and make them battle in a Mortal Kombat style tournament.

At which point, the end of it, the only one that is still a game is the winner. Can we write you something? Can we write you some sort of fucking preamble for the show? The rhythm of my patter makes it sound rehearsed and then it's like it feels like the the hundred times the wright brothers tried to take off before it actually worked like you can see it's like it's working it's working it's working no no oh wait nope nope um our current game of the week or i guess of the year is Halo 4, and let me just say... Wait, wait, not of the year. Well, it's the reigning champ so far.

For the week. Well, no. It doesn't go week by week. We've retired plenty of games for the Hall of Fame, which are going to come back at the end of the year. Yeah, let's just not confuse the audience. Right now, it's Halo 4, and let me just say,

after further play of both it and Need for Speed Most Wanted, which it dethroned, I feel like I made a horrible, horrible a horrible horrible yeah you made a huge mistake because because i've i've played so much for need for speed it's so much better guys it's a way way way better game than halo is you're saying need for speed is way way better yeah significantly like way better i feel so bad for deciding to kick it out here's the thing about uh halo it has a car but also guns whereas need for speed just has cars you know what you know what i would like to bring up about uh how halo won it won because russ hasn't played it and justin said more people like it yeah that was those were our two arguments is it too late to petition to reverse

the win well let me ask you something do you guys remember when uh marissa tomei won the oscar for my cousin vinny and people thought it was a total like bullshit scam sure yeah but no one was like oh we got to go back and change it everyone just sort of lived with the decision well but i've so i've played a lot more Halo 4, though, and I finished the campaign, and I played some of the Spartan Ops, and I played a lot more multiplayer, and I just have had so much more fun

with Most Wanted. Let's not worry about Most Wanted, because it had its shot and it lost. We have to live with that decision. But let's talk about how our feelings about Halo 4 have changed, because I've got to be honest, I was into it

pretty deep, but I think it was actually the release of Black Ops, which we'll talk about, but I don't know, the wheels really came off for me. I didn't feel that compulsion to push through the campaign. see i so i finished

the campaign i don't want to hear any spoilers okay i won't spoil it but it was fine is there a large robot robot man in it that's well i mean there's like a robo suit that you get in yeah but that part was cool that's that part's neat i guess i i it's it was a fine campaign really it was but it wasn't like everyone championed it as this like narrative evolution over the rest of the series well that's not much of a leap to be honest well to be well it's not even though i i don't think like i get what they were trying to do at some points and like the relationship between cortana and Master Chief, like, they did finally explore some of that, and that was okay.

So, like, anal or what? Hollow anal, yes. Anal. Things got really rampant in there. But, like, the thing that I pointed out last week about how they sort of introduced this main antagonist it's like not that guy again when i had no idea what and who the fuck this guy is someone sent us a link to like a trailer it was part of like the marketing campaign and he was introduced there

is that true there was there was this there was also an infographic that some site did where they basically run you through the whole history of the universe i even read that and i still had no idea it wasn't just him it was like several characters in the story several plot points like several locations like if you are not a total halo nerd and like i read the infographic and one of the halo books and i still had no goddamn idea what was going on like you if that is where you are with your story, you done fucked up somewhere. It seems weird that there was so much Halo legacy brought over for this that is supposed to be the beginning of a new trailer. Everyone thought it was going to be a reboot,

not to mention the fact he teleports across the galaxy at the end of Halo 3. Why is he suddenly running into the same people over and over again and also the big thing about halo 3 was there's finally a truce between the humans and the covenant and then like there's covenant on your ship at the beginning of halo 4 that you shoot and cortana's like well i guess these guys are bad it's like that's how you fucking because he doesn't know about the truce Master Chief or Katana Because that happened back on Earth I guess I know that's not true because Master Chief says

I thought we were at peace with these guys And then they go a lot can change in four years And it's like oh okay Apparently not Do you think the grunts are small children? Yeah I think that's it Here's the issue is that, and it's like, all these new, they introduce a new race, the Prometheus guys. But all their weapons are just sort of like different versions of the weapons that you already got.

It's like, that's not super exciting. I don't know. It left me feeling kind of cold. The multiplayer is still fun in that frantic party game sort of way. But I think that they're going to run into a big problem with... I mean, I've had this personal issue where I was playing Halo 4, I was enjoying it. But then when the audiences are split between Call of Duty and Halo 4, it's like... They're coming out so close to one another i don't know which which one to to i'm gonna go time i don't want to be left well no but i don't want to be i'm not saying for

not for the xbox i think they'll be in yeah i think there'll be an audience for both of them what i'm saying is that like when it's that that cultural zeitgeist that you want to be on board with when a big game is released like you want to be playing the same game as everybody else because that stuff is is nomadic you know it will move on beyond the game i i don't know which one i need to play to keep up with to you know i don't know which way the people i typically play with justin is justin is sheeple is what he's saying right exactly what are we playing like just tell me what we're playing i shop at hot topic and i only play hardcore multiplayer braid just tell me what just tell

me what we're playing um and also like the multiplayer like progression stuff in halo 4 has left me a little cold too because like I don't know I've it's been like 10 levels since I've unlocked anything that I found even remotely useful I'm using the same yeah oh that's another thing yeah I'm not looking forward to towards any of the upgrades well and that's the thing there are some things that I'm looking forward to and they're like 30 levels off so it's like well I guess I could play and level up to whatever level I need to get to to get this one thing way in the future i want but there's like a bunch of cruft in the middle that like i just couldn't give less of a shit about larry and by the way i did i fucked up

last week because there are challenges in halo 4 which aren't surfaced well at all like and i know they're i know that like halo 4's success or failure should not necessarily be defined by how well it compares to Call of Duty. But I don't play a lot of multiplayer shooters. For me, that constant reward stream you're getting with Call of Duty,

it makes it pretty hard to go back to Halo when there's... I mean, other than the fact that it's enjoyable to play, it's not hitting that dopamine center for me like that's like call of duty i think there are two problems that are happening though i think one halo 4 has a problem of going halfway on the call of duty boat i feel like yeah interesting yeah it's you know it's it lets you do the loadout but not really anything you want uh the rule set isn't really there it doesn't let you kill things

instantly which i think is part of the dopamine feel for call of duty but the second part is blops 2 is a facebook game i i really enjoyed it when i played it last night but those when you kill something now you have emblems that take up like the top third of the screen show up i mean let's let's let's go yeah whoa whoa i think we're getting way ahead of ourselves yeah let's transition let's let's talk about blops 2 let's start with multiplayer because it'll you know that's a pretty smooth transition i think it's kind of cheap to just say that the reason the progression in blops 2 is great because it just hits your dopamine centers i know it's great for a lot of reasons but it does that really well

it does that really well but i think that moreover why i really really really like playing call of duty multiplayer is because it turns on a dime like you it is we're talking about like hundreds of a second between when you and another dude see each other and you shoot one another there are so many mechanics at play in there and the way that you find the upper hand is you know preparation and strategy but also with your build and your build is designed for you know how you come out on top in those split second things yeah and you can really feel it like when you put on a perk that lets you draw your weapon faster you know why you won that shoot out and not only that, because they added,

so for those who aren't familiar with, they added this system that they're calling Pick 10, which is essentially where before customizing your character class in Call of Duty was a pretty straightforward process. You essentially had, you know, a primary weapon slot, a secondary weapon slot, three perks, a grenade, a grenade.

So now what you can do is leave one of those slots open and then spend that point in another slot so for example i can leave a slot open uh as my secondary gun i don't bring in like a pistol and instead uh give myself another perk is like the basic way to think about it so what that adds is this extra level that's never really been there of like precisely crafting a character to your play style, which has never – I don't think really any shooter right now is doing anything close to that. I mean there are other shooters that are doing things like it, but not to this level like esoteric i think one of the reasons call of duty is so addictive especially like the leveling up and granting stuff is because every time you level up there is the potential to get a gun or a perk that is slightly even more suited to your play style so eventually you've just got like i mean you know it's been described as a card game which is apparently how they

originally designed it but you've got like 50 cards sitting in front of you and you're deciding okay these are the ones that i'm going to use and you're trying to like max out just these certain avenues that you know okay i'm really good with light machine guns and uh rocket launchers and then screw everything else and it's it honestly it feels like an rpg that and for our shooter it has it has been since like modern warfare like yeah but more it feels more like honestly like in a lot of the call of duty games i was essentially like pick one loadout that worked for everything and this was like my ideal loadout and i never changed it and now i find myself like depending on the mode that i'm playing depending on the map constantly changing my loadouts to totally drastically different things.

Because I feel like people who don't play Call of Duty don't really understand. I think people look at Call of Duty and they look at Halo, and they see Halo and it has ghosts and these crazy armor abilities and warthogs. By ghosts you mean the cars? Well, they see all this shit. There's so much shit. Yes, he does not mean literal ghosts floating around the battlefield. Why did you hit me with the needle?

There's so much shit that you can do in Halo, right? There's jetpacks and all this crazy stuff. And in Call of Duty, to the outside observer, I feel like they think it's just shooting. Like you're just killing guys. But I feel like Call of Duty actually has way more situational things that pop up that you deal with in very, very, very small but important ways with how you prepare your loadouts. And in some ways, that is more important than the loadouts in Halo 4. Because in Halo 4, if you have a jetpack, then you know that you can get above a guy. But in Call of Duty, if you have the one perk that makes it so that your footsteps aren't very loud,

there's so many different situations where you can use that. It's actually, for me, who, again, not a hardcore multiplayer shooter player. I think that Halo 4 may initially seem better for the more casual shooter fan, but for me, I find that playing Call of Duty actually feels more like a learning experience for me. I can pick a basic weapon set, and every time I die, I feel like i learn a little fraction of something okay i learned i learned about this with halo it can feel a bit calvin ball at times right like yeah you're you think you know the rule set for capture the flag and then what the fuck there's a guy in a floating tank that is just sitting outside our base murdering us and like i don't feel like i'm learning anything i feel like i get lucky more in halo and that's fun well part of that is just sitting outside of our base, murdering us. I don't feel like I'm learning anything. I feel like I get

lucky more in Halo, and that's fun. Part of that is also what we talked about last week, about in Halo, if you find the rocket launcher, you are systematically a little bit further ahead than everybody else. Of course there are ways to still die while

you have it. It's not like God mode or anything. Call of Duty doesn't have shit that you find on the map, though, that is like, well, now this is the uber weapon. Even if you find a turret on the map, somebody's going to snipe you in the face. It's almost useless. A comparison I like to make for the two is, I feel like Halo, think about when you watch sports replays,

or, you know, top plays, if you don't imagine that you do when you watch when you watch football right the best plays are almost by accident like it's always like oh he threw it like 80 yards and it bounced off a defender's head and it landed in his hands and he had one foot in the end zone and there are these miracles of physics you know like you couldn't replicate them and i feel like that's. Whenever I see a great YouTube video of Halo, it's like, yeah, I blew up this warthog and it hit a traffic cone and that hit the guy in the head and killed him.

It was badass. Well, that happens in Call of Duty 2. Sure, sure. But what's happening moment to moment in Halo, I feel like is, how can I use the environment and the physics and all this weird crap to kill people and kind of adjust the rules and do these amazing feats that are probably not replicable. And what I

feel like Call of Duty is like, and I know I'm going to eat crap for this, but it's more like soccer where it's a game of finesse, where what is happening is it's happening in the seconds, like Griffin said. It's happening the second two people see each other and the like very slight adjustments they make to win that battle and a battle in call of duty it happens in about two seconds you know either you move fast enough or you use one of your four abilities quick enough to take the person out whether it be stabbing or throwing a grenade or throwing whatever other special thing you have i feel like one is much more a game of the moment to moment and not about all this goofy shit so i'm recapping what you say but putting it and just to like just to be clear for

people who are listening and like screaming at their ipods right now i i'm not expressing what i think is a deficiency of halo um it's what i enjoy more about call of duty i really do it it really is two different audiences um and like i said last week for me it boils down to the fact that it takes two bullets to kill a guy in call of duty and it takes you know seven to eight to kill a guy in halo unless you you know get sweet headshots or something like that like for me I do. Yeah, you get all the dopest headshots all the time and 100 points. But what I... Like, I just... I like the gameplay loop of...

Holy shit, I found a guy and he's not looking at me. I'm about to get a sweet kill. Be honest, though. Just Counter-Strike, right? Just Counter-Strike? What? It's the only one, right? But Counter-Strike does not have the character customization stuff that this does.

Not even close. Yeah, I'm being a jackass. Oh, okay. People would argue that it's extremely tactical as well. But I do want to mention, because there are two-thirds of this game that we haven't even talked about. And I do want to briefly talk about the campaign and zombies mode. Because there, I would imagine, are a lot of people out there that only play the single player campaign. So there's some disagreement online.

Are there really people out there who only play the single player campaign in Call of Duty? I honestly believe there are. It's like in the way that I'm going to go see a Michael Bay movie every year. That first mission is what happens. Wait, are we talking? Okay, like I just played the first mission the kill all of africa mission like i if you turn off the the the hard ass uh music i am massacring black people yeah i am hanging off the side of a truck and massacring black people that are running away

it's resident evil five times a thousand it's resident evil five thousand it's it's rough and rough like it would be pretty gross regardless yeah but like i don't know there's something about me like handsome ass white dude hanging on the side of a truck just mowing people down who are who are sprinting this is from your history books so you can't judge them. Yeah. This is history. This is history that I apparently was a key player in. If you want to wiki it, it's from the War of Angola, and you're fighting in that war, which is not pleasant. But I would say. I know it's not pleasant, but they don't do anything.

To contextualize it. There's a way where they're like, where there's maybe just one person who's like what are you doing you are murdering so many people and they're just running running at you no what the problem is is that they don't contextualize it at all it's the beginning of the game it doesn't really feed into anything else it could be any crazy violent event. And what they chose was the thinning of a herd of people running across just this great lawn. I don't know if I feel comfortable calling them a herd. Yeah. That's how it treats them.

That's how it treats them. You know that scene in The Lion King? That is how it treats human beings. Which scene? The scene where... I don't want to spoil it, but his dad dies. I love the scene where they eat all the bugs yeah that was good i like that no it did and it and being on the savannah does not help it looks like a deleted scene from planet earth like and now white guy on a truck is stalking his

prey watch the herd turn that's how they treat it i i would agree with you there is more than the first level though and i would say that it does not get much better there are a couple levels that i really really liked in the campaign but literally a couple two levels i've played has been pretty neat but again i'm early but there's some cool like uh the the part climbing stuff the cliff the cliff swinging was a very cool moment that like hardly ever happens again in the entire game uh well i mean it doesn't need i don't need more cliff climbing but like things on that level do not happen very often i have never made it through i've played i think every call of duty game since modern warfare i've never made it through a treyarch campaign oh i thought black ops one was terrific and that's

sort of the other thing is that like black ops 1 i had like a lot of really interesting story turns and the whole time i'm playing this game i'm not going to spoil anything but the whole time i'm playing this game i'm waiting for like some crazy ass m night shamalan style twist or something to make the storyline more interesting than what they're presenting and it never happens there's no like they had the whole numbers thing in black ops 1 it hardly ever comes up they mentioned it briefly once but there was so much rich history there that to move on so quickly all i can think of was to make this game a future game the only rationale i can think of instead of just continuing with like rich history of CIA black ops stuff, was for marketing reasons so that they could beat the old Infinity Ward guys

to market with their shooter that is coming out whenever. And honestly, that's what it feels like, because the story is so jammed into the future setting. It just drives me nuts. It sort of seems like military fanfic or something yeah yeah absolutely it feels like like a low grade what if we were at war with china and russia and the internet and then there's the whole strike force stuff which is a mess uh because your ai control and then real quick i just want to mention zombies for people that love zombies have loved

the like old zombies modes in past games it's essentially the same stuff like it's cool and the map's very cool and you're doing neat stuff you're like building tools and stuff like that but the gameplay you know with waves of zombies coming in and you're building barricades it works exactly the same as it ever has the only difference is there's a bus now. And for me, I've never been, like, super drawn to the zombies mode. And I was hoping for, like, some sort of progression system where I'm unlocking new weapons every time I play or doing something like that. There's none of that. There's no progression in zombies. And it just feels like a wasted opportunity.

Yeah, transit. That's what I'm talking about. They build transit as, like, this, oh, this is a game changer. Like you've got this bus, it's this huge open world. And essentially all it is is this bus is on an automatic loop between four very small maps. And you just like keep going around the loop and you get off the bus and you shoot some zombies. And then sometimes you get back on the bus. And there's like a story that you can follow.

But it's not anything super in-depth or different from what we've seen in the past. And it just left me, like, really bummed. Like, I was really hoping for more. Can we talk about stealth really quick? Because this is one other thing that I think is a problem for a lot of video games this fall. And, Justin, you've always despised stealth. And I felt like you kind of maybe turned a corner with Dishonored. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, they really made that loop work for me. I think it was making me so powerful in the environment, and also having a—it worked, I think, because they had two loops that both worked that you could switch to without feeling like a failure. I totally agree. And I think what I – I kind of came to the same opinion while playing Black Ops. And it's something that happened also in Assassin's Creed 3 where stealth in most games that isn't a stealth game is now moved from point A to point B slowly. Like, it's not actually stealth. It's like we have a cutscene we'd like to play in front of you.

Move to point A to point B when we say. If you do it before that, we'll make you watch the cutscene again. And, like, that at this point is, like, unacceptable. And I think the stealth games that work really well, like you said, Dish like unacceptable and i think the stealth games that work really well like you said dishonored and mark of the ninja is another good example agency yeah tons of options for how you're going to go about being stealthy there are a few points in black ops 2 where it's just like oh there's a helicopter looking for you oh it saw you you didn't go the right way we thought you were going gonna go and like i i had to restart a mission like 15 times because i kept doing the same thing and that's just bad game design it's

lazy lazy game design i feel this might be like an unpopular opinion though and i'm not like defending i haven't been crazy about what i've played at the other parts of call of duty black ops 2 either but like for me that game has always been multiplayer. Modern Warfare 2, I think I'd finished the campaign once and then played close to 100 hours of the multiplayer. For me, that might as well have been a multiplayer-only game. And I kind of feel the same way about Black Ops 2, so it's hard for me to knock it

for having these shitty other parts when, like, my focus on it has always been on this one mode. Yeah, I mean, you're essentially talking about, like, oh, you treat the multiplayer as the real game and then the rest is just icing on the cake. And whether it's shitty icing or not, it's still icing. And I think they even acknowledge that because there's an option on the main menu when you're choosing between the three modes to make one of them like the the default mode when you load the default mode that loads up when you turn the game on they've had that for a couple years now uh i think that's just they acknowledge the fact that like after you've played through the campaign once or maybe even twice there's no reason to ever do it again and most well moreover it sounds like i mean i only play for multiplayer plant it sounds like you used to only play for single player like they acknowledge that it is

yeah like essentially three different games like that's what made writing the review so impossible it was like an enormous review because every section is essentially its own review i can't imagine having to do that because like for me call of Duty multiplayer is like one of my sort of definitive fall gaming experiences like I look forward to getting that game and all of my old friends that I used to play games with and don't you know either live in the same state as anymore or just don't play games with anymore like we get together at least for like a few weeks and you know get our Call of Duty on yeah it's hard for me to like I have so much affection for that part of the game that I don't think I could you know review it and say well these other two parts are shitty but it's hard for me to like i have so much affection for that part of the game that i don't think i could you know review it and say well these other two parts are shitty but it's cool

because the multi is so good i think it's good to talk about three different games though and to hold it up to all three standards because a lot of multiplayer people roll out some statistic i don't know what it is it's something like 25 of people actually finish the single player so it's like obviously people are coming from multiplayer. But when you're the highest selling game of all time, 25% is still more than almost every other game that's being sold. Yeah, you're still talking about like 10 million people. Yeah, and if they're making, I mean, it's really just a bonus

for the people who buy the games as a whole. You know, like the amount of money that they have to lose by not making a good single player game is still substantial yeah it's like yeah there is an expectation for them to deliver that also and and they did it with black ops 1 the multi i thought the campaign in black ops 1 was really good and it's just a shame that they took such a step back oh guys let's talk about this awful chain game. Oh, you're out of your mind. Lay it down, Gmo. I'm completely ignorant of this game.

I've never played Drop 7 and thought, you know what would be good? As if there was microtransactions. Hey, how about we don't start with negative? How about we start with... Oh, sorry. Let's start with positive. So it's a game, and it's free. Can I talk about the game? It's called chip chain

and not a good start but keep let me ask you something where did you hear about chip chain i heard about on the ios gaming roundup on polygon.com yeah yeah did you write one of those russ or was that one of those that you were too lazy to write no i did i do them almost every 95 percent of them i write okay i was just checking sure um by the way if you are a fan of ios and uh and you don't read that feature you really should check it out it goes every wednesday every wednesday at around and it highlights all the good stuff coming out i really do use it as my ios watch list is the official name so you can just google it so yeah i check it out every week so um chip chain you're you're you're what we're talking about is like a board uh it's like a grid and i think it's either like seven by seven or eight by eight and you have uh poker chips that have numbers on them one

through um you know however high up you can go um and so you put chips on the board and for every chip that you place on the board the dealer also places a chip of a random value at a random place um so while you're sort of doing your strategies you also have to chip of a random value at a random place. So while you're sort of doing your strategies, you also have to sort of deal with this chaotic element. And when you put three chips of the same number touching each other on the board, when you tap one of them, it stacks all those chips up where you tapped, and it increases the value of the chip by one.

So doing this, you create chains of chips, right? So you can tap like three ones together right next to a two and then it becomes a two and adds on to the two chain and you keep it going and you get uh combos for for continuing your chain um and the numbers keep going up and up so while you're also doing this you're collecting cards and the cards can do things like add one to the value of a chip or subtract one from the value of a chip or copy a chip or lets you pick up a chip from one place on the board and place it somewhere else so you have to use those cards to sort of maximize your combo as best you can um and that's really all there is to it uh the whole time you're earning levels and every time you level up you get a certain number of gems which are sort of the in-game currency

and I actually bought it's the first game I can really think of where I actually bought a microtransaction because it's totally free to play but there's only two of the four game modes on offer on any given day unless you make a pretty big in-game purchase and the only way i could afford that was to to buy some gems for like a buck or something like that um so yeah that's the whole game there's different modes there's like a short mode where you have a

certain number of chips there's a daily mode where everybody has the same chips um and you'll have to try and get the highest score that you can with those chips. And there's like a long form mode with no limit whatsoever and a timed mode. And it's really good. It's one of those good casual games that lends itself to, there's like a casual way to play it, and there's also a very hardcore way to play it. And yeah, I haven't had to make any microtransactions other than that first one i sort of get enough gems that the i think the big spending draw in the

game is that you can buy cards while playing for gems um and so far they haven't become so expensive that i can't you know that i have to shell out money to do it but you kind of have to do that if you want to make make high high combos and points i'm actually number like i was like 19 on the global leaderboard for one of the modes and i did that without spending any additional money other than that first purchase so it's it's possible questions i was gonna say uh because i really like this game too and i can't i honestly don't understand why chris plant would have any issue with it right it's so it's like it is a lot like drop seven yeah and everyone loves drop seven chris plant i i don't like seeing like buy cards while i'm playing it because then i just want to buy infinite cards you can't uh once you buy like two of any type of

card then that card becomes sold out for the rest of the game and so it's not like you can i mean i don't play it with buying cards like i just use the cards because they give you cards for making combos so i just and there's other there's other i should mention there's other upgrades that you can buy so like when you start the game the highest chip value you can get up to is like a nine chip which is like really tough to get to because if you're not using cards that means you have to like match a bunch of ones up to twos up to threes and so on and like it's it's exponentially harder the higher you go um but then you can also buy like the 10 chip and the 11 chip and the 12 chip and then you can start using those in the game um and you can buy things like extra

slots for your cards you can buy things like you can extend the length of the standard short game to something longer and uh i mean even these aren't aren't so expensive that you can't you know pick them up through leveling or through making this one-time purchase of like tons and tons of gems i mean the real problem is probably that i played it for 15 minutes well yeah that'd be the issue but like here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna i'm gonna say that we should use it to dethrone halo 4 because that's apparently as much time as i need to dethrone a game and then i'm gonna come back next week and i'm gonna regret what I said, and I'm going to turn on everything I said previously. Listen. If I could turn back time,

if I find a way, then I would make most wanted. We've lost the thread. What's been going on in your guys life anything interesting are you guys thankful for anything is this our thanksgiving episode I guess I am pretty thankful

next week is thanksgiving next week is our thanksgiving episode so we can't fucking be thankful for anything except for a holiday one week a year is the only time you're thankful are you guys taking anything for granted this week yeah before thanksgiving is the only time you're thankful. Are you guys taking anything for granted this week?

Yeah, before Thanksgiving. I don't know. I fucking hate my cat. I don't know what I'm doing. What? I just don't know. Your cute little cat named Toby? Cecil. You renamed the cat again?

You can't change the cat's name. How many times? You're a flip-flopper guys you are you are fucking out of your god are you guys on pcp do you not pay attention when we talk about our cats i honestly is this a different cat i don't even know justin's cat was named toby until he figured out that it didn't have a dick because he's an idiot. So he named it Cecilia or some shit. Amelia, but go on. Now my cat was named Cecil from the jump and always has been. And he's been like my special guy for a long time. But he just came into the room while we were recording and like tried to climb up my leg.

Like it was some sort of banister. That's nice though. No, it's not because he's not declawed and it fucking hurt a lot can i but griffin let me tell you i'm on the flip side of that my uh amelia will have nothing to do if you try to get close to her she runs you can't she's terrified i won't i try to like pick her up or anything She will not. You can't pet her. If she feels you coming towards her, she's like, oh, dip. Peace.

Going to eat your food that you bought with money, human money. My cat's jam is putting his whole head in any cup of fluid that you have sitting around. I will pour myself a tall frosty glass of iced root beer. And I will set it down on the table and i will like look out the window at a squirrel and i'll look back and cecil will have his whole head in the root beer like looking for fish i like you i like that you and the cat have the same pastimes of looking out the window at squirrels what now griffin let me ask you a question let me let me ask you a secret do you when the cat has that going on and you like get out of here do you

ever just like dust that bad boy off and finish it no no no once it gets once it gets root beer that keeps the stuff in there that's not going anywhere it locks it in it's that sediment is not floating to the bottom in that scenario. That is only one of many things that Cecil does now that I absolutely hate. Let's talk about some other shit. He climbs on top of my flat screen television. Like, that's going to happen one to two more times before it falls and kills you. Like, wow. How big is this cat that he can tip over?

He's enormous. He's seven months old, and he's, like, the size of a full-grown cat. Compared to Justin's enormous cat that he's enormous he's seven months old and he's like the size of a full-grown cat compared to justin's enormous cat because he's not fat he's like long okay long cat i'm glad we got my fat cat into this week's uh penultimate episode of press reset oh yeah no i saw the footage and i was every time i see that cat i'm astounded it's a living being it is have you thought about not feeding it ham exclusively well here here's the here's the problem with with uh with this cat is that net i had i had cj on like a low-cal diet which is cool but now is cj the cat cj is the fat one

and now but like i have to feed amelia too and kittens can't eat that low cow stuff so now there's just like this other bowl cj's like ah dip thanks man like an upstairs bowl this is nice second breakfast yeah second breakfast i don't have to i don't have to trot my ass downstairs for noon z's i can just dip in here and then and then uh uh cj will come when the bowl is empty be like i don't know that little cat i think ate all its food again looks it looks so hungry you should feed it again i i know i've watched as amelia looks on in like sadness and just stares as cj eats her whole bowl and then like dips out i i um so i i don't know how to get cj back on a regimen just put put uh the food like in a bathroom with amelia and then

just like give her like an hour to eat the food alone well couldn't you just put cj's food at the end of a treadmill and then just turn the treadmill on? Or at the top of a mountain. That's pretty good. I actually like that. On the top of a very large pile. Yeah, well, have a big pile of food and make your way to the bottom to find her bowl. So she learns her lesson. Listen, I love cats as much as the next guy, but I want to talk to you guys about the game that I got obsessed with yesterday.

And it's called Frog Frat say it right that's right fraction frog fractions uh it's made by twin beard studios it's a flash game man i don't how do you how do you how do you do this how do you talk i want to tell you guys about the i think if i just say my experience of it a little bit, like what the experience of playing it was. Are you going to spoil it? Because if you're going to spoil it, people should know. Frog Fractions, the game is, that you begin playing, is about a little frog on a lily pad that has a long extending tongue. And each time it hits a, there are three pieces of fruit that it owns.

And each time you hit a bug trying to eat your fruit with your long tongue, it produces a fraction, and that fraction is added to your score. Wait, we're talking math? To teach kids about fractions. So this is a math game? There are upgrades, power-ups, if you will, like lock-on targeting and a static cling tongue. And lots of Call of Duty-style unlocks that you can get as you play the game. You buy them by collecting pieces of fruit that fall down. And Griffin...

I said, Griffin, you have to play this game and he played for he said like 20 minutes uh and said man i just lost a bunch of time playing that and i said you didn't find the game that that wasn't the game it's like a it's like a dan brown when i played i played for no exaggeration 45 minutes and didn't find the way to progress i don't understand um you you i i think you can give a one great clue that i don't think is a spoiler is look underwater. Yeah. Just look underwater. Really?

In a frog game where you're looking for fish, you have to look underwater? That's a surprise. You won't be able to do it right away. Here's one that we can talk about. One of the upgrades that you unlock in like the third or fourth round, it uninstalls the lock-on targeting

that you probably chose as your first upgrade because ladies don't dig cyborgs right because ladies don't dig cyborgs and then it actually will continue to let you buy other upgrades each one with unique text about buying a locking and unlocking the lock like upgrading and uninstalling the lock on targeting. You can do it like 30 times. And each time there's new text. And then it becomes clear that there are two people who are putting these upgrades out for purchase.

There's one person who thinks you should have lock on targeting and one person who thinks it spoils the experience. And they will continue to banter back and forth in the item upgrades. Okay, so what this sounds like. This is still not the game. This is not the game. And I'm not going to spoil this movie for people that haven't seen it, but this sounds a lot like Cabin in the Woods.

Where there's something going on and then underneath that there's another layer. That is not a terrible description, actually. But that's not what it is at all. It is closer to UHF. Yes. It is somewhere between Weird Al's magnum opus, UHF, and the petite charm of the bourgeoisie. Frog Fractions is a free game. You can, we'll link it in this post of the besties if you,

if you want to do it that way, or you can just Google it and find it. I really don't want to say more about it, but playing it was like a very unusual experience. It is, it is unlike most things that I have, unlike anything really i've played before so oh shit wait a minute i want to talk there's one other thing that i have to talk about i finished the fifth episode of walking oh no no no no no no we cannot are you sure but we just can't no it is it's out on the 20th But we can't talk about it because I'm so far behind

and I just want to play them all in a row and enjoy myself. Let's circle back around because Walking Dead is in the Hall of Fame. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It is a serious contender for Game of the Year. Honestly, I think we can talk about all of it when we get to December and we have the Hall of Fame time. I don't think there's a need to go episode by episode because invariably you're going to be talking spoilers yeah can i make a suggestion to you russ i would

i wouldn't play it all back to back why i i think it is i think that that would be a pretty emotionally grueling experience i'm gonna be honest based on what i've heard so far because i've literally only played like an hour of the first episode, and I loved what I played, I just haven't had time to go back to it. The issue is I'm currently in the same mindset as Game of Thrones, which I'm reading as well, where everyone's like, it's this emotionally grueling experience, which essentially means any character that I love will probably die. That's all I'm thinking while people are telling me this. And it bums me out because I want to be surprised when these things happen. But now I have no attachments to any characters because I'm like, well, he's probably going to die. Or she's probably going to die.

No, I mean more because the intensity of the experience. Like you're – you are constantly on edge. And like it feels like two to three hours where you can't exhale. Okay, so this is the thing, though. I really, really like crystal meth, so I'm used to that experience. Like, I know that. Okay, good. So it should be fine.

All right, make sure you dip into it, though, and polish that off before the end of the game. It has a real chance of game of the year. A real chance of game of the year a real chance we don't we don't need to spoil anything but if you want to be a part of game of the year discussions come this december you need to play all of the walking dead episodes because in my mind's eye like it is gonna be a fucking juggernaut like it's gonna be tough to beat it is gonna be very tough to be um from telltale but for now who would have thought yeah from telltale right who would have thought who would have for now cobblops 2 i think is a better game than halo well i think need for spirit is a better game

but is it but is cod pops 2 a better game than Frog Fractions? Hmm, interesting. It's interesting to think about. I can't comment on this because obviously I haven't played Frog Fractions, but... You don't play Frog Fractions. Frog Fractions plays you. So it is the game of the week. Call of Duty, I think we can give it to Call of Duty. I will say, just to reiterate, the multiplayer in this Call of Duty, I think, is the best multiplayer they've done so far. Yeah.

I would agree. It's just based on the pick 10 stuff. And they added, like, some really cool support where they encourage, like, people to, like, support teammates by, like, granting you killstreaks just by, like, shooting stuff down and, like, helping out the team. you kill streaks just by like shooting stuff down and like helping out the team so typically though when we get rid of like when we have two big games back to back there's a temptation to say well we'll consider them both it sounds like no one has any love for halo it's not it's not that halo's it's not that it's not a bad game it's just like i prefer call of duty and for me like when it gets to the end of the year if both of these games are in the Hall of Fame, I would still probably prefer Call of Duty.

Right, these feel close enough that it seems like there isn't much reason to keep Halo around. Because, I mean, I can't imagine a scenario where it couldn't, like where Black Ops 2 wouldn't come out on top of Halo. So it seems like we should just dethrone halo and replace with black before we do that a better question should we bring back assassin's creed 3 can we okay did you finish it it's the worst can we dip the worst can we dip back in like extra bonus okay super short but super short you know i thought that the introduction

was bad the eight hours were you before you actually get to do anything was bad the rest of the game might be worse there is not a single story mission apart from the boat stuff that i actually enjoyed playing this coming from a guy that actually dug assassin's creed one kind of loved assassin's creed 2 love brotherhood like it is the worst assassin's creed i haven't played revelations but it is really it's worth the revelation revelations yeah right it they essentially took everything that you love about assassin's creed threw it in the trash and replaced it with a lot of riding a horse through a forest. It's bad. It is baffling. It's bafflingly unenjoyable.

So I'm sorry, people that like that game, but you're wrong. Which one of the four of us is going to bite the bullet and pick up Call of Duty Black Ops Declassified for the Vita to talk about for Jest? Oh, Activision is probably going to send it because I reviewed Call of Duty Black Ops, and I think they're just sending me all the Call of Duty versions. Enjoy. I mean, it'll only take you an hour, so no worries. Yeah, that'll be fun. I'll bring it next week.

Next week is going to be fucking crazy, guys. I think it'll mostly be Wii U stuff next week. Wii U stuff, Planetside 2 is out next week. Persona 4 Golden is out next week. Is Hitman out next week? Oh man, Hitman. It's going to be... Oh, Far Cry 3?

December. That's December. But Hitman I think is out next week. Next week is going to be good. Getting heated. But make sure you join us for that. Until then, you can our our text-based words on uh on polygon.com there's also a an ongoing video series called cooperatives or just cooperatives uh featuring our own chris plant and russ fresh tick where they spend a few minutes on

video talking about a a new release uh what's what's on tap this week guys we actually did nintendo ledge sorry perfect perfect we're biting your uh style but thanks for chomping my flave uh and make sure you join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games besties Besties!