The Besties - The Besties Podcast 43 - Temple Run 2 and DMC: Devil May Cry

Episode Date: January 25, 2013

The march of The Besties continues! This week on The Besties, an old friend stops by for a visit and there's some examination of the latest free-to-play game burning up the charts. Oh yes, and Dante's resurrection is making some people grumpy. 03:00 - Temple Run 2 21:50 - Half Time: THQ 32:35 - DMC: Devil May Cry 48:20 - What's next? 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!

i lost 11 pounds guys shut your mouth how are you gonna buy tickets to that footy match now since january asshole uh since uh since january january one i've lost 11 pounds here's a fun fact justin weighed 11 pounds when he was born i don't know if he likes me yeah putting that stuff i lost a baby justin justin a baby justin fell off of justin you're that's is that a true fact which part you weighing 11 pounds when you were born he was yeah i was a big boy oh my god when i was born our doctor the doctor uh i believe valerian was his name said big baby big baby that's what he said because i was a big boy as it happens i was also an enormous baby were you i was i was huge last weekend at the enormous man adult baby convention yeah i want to keep the focus on my sorry i'm sorry yeah i don't want to take away from your

yeah it's a big achievement i've been waiting to share it with somebody what's your secret my secret not eat like a dirt bag yeah it was really like i really was especially towards the end of the holiday season there it was getting oh bro i was actually i was at your house no it got real up in there and that was like the big thing was and i've always tried to do i guess what you would call not crash diets but in the past i've typically gone with some sort of extreme method of weight loss. I actually did Atkins. Oh, yeah, no bread. Lost 70 pounds on Atkins. I did.

No, I didn't. He did. But then you wanted to kill yourself? Well, every day. It was a struggle to keep the gun barrel out of my mouth. But then he looked at a landscape painting of a field of wheat, and he gained 80 pounds. That was less than ideal.

So I yeah, I'm just trying to eat food that's good for you. Nutritional, you know. Yeah. Are you exercising as well? That's not going crazy. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know it too. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ French, and I know the best game of the week. Ladies and gentlemen, this is The Besties we're four of earth's best friends also happen to be polygon co-workers talk about the latest and greatest that in game releases and sometimes not latest and sometimes not even that great i like how you had to put an asterisk next to best like we are the best friends the world's best friends that also work together at Polygon. Together at Polygon, right. Of the people at Polygon, we are some of the best friends there.

So we're going to talk about the hot new titles this week. What have you guys been playing? What's good? What's hot? What's popping? What's fresh? I've been playing a lot, a lot of Temple Run 2. Yeah, I'm into that too.

Kind of fell into that whole temple run thing it's kind of funny because we've been basically complaining for the last year that like every other week ios has another shitty temple run clone coming out and now the shittiest temple run clone of them all well yeah it's just funny because they didn't change that much, but they changed enough that I just cannot put it down. Now, I'll be honest. I did not play the first Temple Run very much. Can you sort of quantify some of the big differences? Sure.

So in the first Temple Run, you're running through a temple. This one, pretty much the same deal. You're running through a temple. Thank you. Stop wasting my time. I'm getting older. You didn't want to mention the sameys. You're running through a temple. Thank you. Stop wasting my time. I'm getting older. You didn't want to mention the same-ies? Okay, so differences.

I don't need you to mention that it takes place in a goddamn temple, and your main mode of interacting with it is running. Different differences. I'm going to be really honest with Griffin, really quick. If you're worried about wasting your time and your life, Temple Run is not the game you should be playing. That's right. Yeah. Let me talk about what's different this time around first of all the temple was changed it's now like an asian themed temple and it's far more dangerous uh the graphics are also a lot better uh it looks like the original temple run was like super blocky and

designed to run on like an original iphone this. This is full Retina display graphics and looks quite good on an iPhone or an iPad. I use an iPhone 4, and it actually runs really smooth without a hitch. Yeah, they did a good job with scaling it. It's well optimized. And the other big thing they added was customizable perks. So before, you would fill up this meter as you collected coins,

and when you hit the top of the meter, you would just get a big score boost. Now you can actually pick what power-up you get when that meter fills up. So if you want it to be like a magnet or like an infinity run invisibility-like thing, you can do that. So there's more customization there.

And they added challenges and stuff. And it's free, which the original was not free when it launched. So that's pretty much top and bottom Temple Run 2. Did it have the gym system in it? I don't remember the gym system. The gym system. Is that like you win gym badges when you go to the different gyms in Pokemon? Yeah, that's basically the, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So. No. The gym. Gym. How do you say the word?. Okay. Yeah. So. No. Jim. Jim. How do you say the word? Jim.

You're the worst. See, I don't know if you know this about Russ, but he makes fun of the way everyone else sounds with their regional dialects. Right. Because it's hilarious. Okay. When I say Jim, gem. Gem.

Jim. Gem. Gem. You should say it like Jim from The Office. Remember that handsome guy from The Office? When you pick up the gems. Was that system in the first Temple Run? I don't remember.

Picking up coins and stuff? No. Oh, the jewels. Gems. The gems. The gems. That's new. They added that for this one.

It feels to me, and I didn't play that much of the original Temple Run either, but that they were like, two days after Temple Run 1 came out, they were like, ah, fuck, we should have put some sweet microtransaction hooks in here. I was going to say, when it first came out, I don't think anyone had any idea that the free-to-play thing was going to happen.

So that sort of happened later on in development. But there's definitely a lot more like this time you're not paying for like extra lives like as you die you make a decision oh i'm going to spend gems to revive myself that's the thing like i when i started playing i was like i this is one of those free-to-play microtransaction based games where i'm not going to spend any money. And then the first time that I made it, like, 2,500 meters, or that's not very far, but I made it, like, pretty far, and then I died. I was like, oh, fuck, I've got to buy some of these things. And it scared me.

Well, what's nice is that they're very generous. Like, you get a bunch of them, and it doesn't feel like you need to really spend real money. I actually have a— i have not bought anything but um i i i think that it's actually one of the problems i have with it is the idea of being able to buy your way back in if you if you die because i think that for a especially for a score chase game like this that sort of um invalidates some of the purity of it for me. It reminds me almost of – it's similar to a problem I had with Chip Chain. Well, Jetpack Joyride and Chip Chain.

Well, Chip Chain had the – and this also kind of has that system in that um it scales the more you spin the gem the gems to respawn it only costs one the first time you die and it'll you know rewind time a little bit and give you you know a little bit of invincibility and the second time it costs two gems and so on and so forth so it really does discourage i don't know if there's a cap to it i've only gotten up to like four gyms and then stop spending it but chip chain does the same thing where chip chain says you can only use this one particular card like two or three times and then you're locked out i think the big bummer of free-to-play ios games is that some of the best arcade style games you know like the days of yore when you would chase high scores, are coming out on this platform, but they're tied to monetary systems that make it impossible to compete unless you're willing to continue to dish out cash, which is basically like an arcade.

Basically, if you want to get the high score, you need to be putting in quarters every time. Or a lot of time. Essentially, like, in this game, i think you can compete and get the high score so the issue is no there i don't think there is a cap for like how many times you can buy back in but it doubles every time so eventually you're gonna need like 64 gems to revive yourself so theoretically if you're really good at the game you're gonna be like okay this is my high score one i'm gonna spend every goddamn gem i have to beat everyone else and that is obviously contrary to the spirit of classic arcade games but what are you gonna do i mean i don't i i also think it's kind of weird that the um so as you're running you have different

sort of uh there's a lot of metrics to keep track of you have a uh the bar that fills up uh sorry your power up bar that fills up as you run and then you have a uh a distance that pops up every once in a while and then you have a number of coins that you've collected uh and and and also you can keep track of the number of gems that's not surfaced uh how many gems you've collected in a run and it's like there's a lot of i don't understand exactly like why there's a score when i'm already tracking like my number of coins and my distance it just seems like a lot of information to to keep track of well the high score like yeah i was going to say the high score is reliant on your like multiplier and stuff like that and that's what keeps the longevity there's a multiplier yeah a score multiplier that like every time you complete an objective in the game this was in the original

temple run but every time you complete objective like uh will run 50 meters without getting any coins you get one increase to your multiplier so that will um eventually like someone that's playing the game for the hundredth time is at a huge advantage compared to someone that's playing the game for the hundredth time is at a huge advantage compared to someone that's playing for the first time because the hundredth time person has a multiplier that's like way crazier it's and here's the other problem that was in tiny wings by the way that's an additional multiplier that you buy with in-game coins and it is extremely expensive yeah you either have to play a ton to unlock it or just buy it out yeah this this is my this is my problem and why i'm probably not gonna play temple run 2 anymore and like why i just can't get i can't get jizzed about endless runners and it's because you they're endless and

you can't beat them and that's an issue issue for me, because 100% of the time, except for maybe like, I think Jetpack Joyride was pretty good about it, but like most of the time, like shit like that is, the only draw that the game has, the only draw that the Endless Runner game has, is maybe it'll hook you,

that score chasing element to it, and that's like its biggest strength, and that's what it sells itself on, and then when they make it pay to win win if that is what you consider winning have beating your friend's high score like then it is don't make any you know there's no ifs ands or buts about it that's pay to win like i just no thanks like i no matter how good i get like i'm still gonna have to pony up more dough to do it i wouldn't say it's a dumb thing to say it's pay or play to win because you need uh you could just spend a shitload of time playing it and have an advantage too

yeah i don't know i maybe i haven't played enough of it to know if it's for sure like that like that was that's why i stopped playing um monsters ate my condo which i think playing and i talked about how like that one you have to use the score multiplier right from the top and like it's so unbelievably expensive that you just like you shell out money or you play for like an hour or two until you have enough money to pay for the one thing that gives you the one good run like that is just so not that's just not appealing to me anymore i think the difference between this and a lot of these that I've played is that it is actually, and I think

I would probably separate even Jetpack Joyride, is that it is fun to play. There's enough going on here, enough different sort of, you know, you slide underneath fire and then you jump over a rolling log and then you you know, you hop into a mine

cart and suddenly you like have to keep track of like where your path is and and and how many wheels you can have on the ground at any one time because the track keeps breaking and there's it's not like uh you know playing it is it kind of its own reward it's it's fun and not you don't have to get obsessed with you know distance too yeah i feel the same way i have i have fun playing it on you know i'm in a subway and just need to kill five minutes it's a fun game to do it with i i will say i found it almost impossible to play it on on an ipad i got it on ipad first and then i had to switch to too big it is it's too big like because you have to tilt it pretty drastically to like move from one end of the court to the other

not i mean not on the the iphone because the iphone you don't have it also works on an ipad mini for what it's worth yeah that might be better and also like you have to swipe and like if you just have your hand in the corner of the screen holding the ipad and like it's not going to detect it some of the time when you yeah just sort of swipe there in the corner you need bigger which is kind of a bummer like i don't i really don't play any games on my iphone really at all griffin you should really go to the gym oh man like why that why do you say these things um how was um can we can we move on uh yeah actually i just got it do you think do you think you're gonna keep playing temple run 2 or do you think it's now that besties now that we've discussed it you're just gonna you're gonna i might still play it but i do want to say i just got a text message

and someone is on their way up to my apartment i'm a little worried about it are you safe did you guys hear that are you okay Did you hear it? Russ, can you hear us? I feel like we might not be safe. Hello, besties. Is that who I think it is? Oh, yes. It is I, Jean-Baptiste. Jean-Baptiste, what an odd...

Now, this is a... Jean-Baptiste, if you're not aware, is a... A dead? A world... A dead? world-renowned indie developer. Visionary. I have a question. Where is Raz? He is here.

I have moved him away from the mic. He is very sore. Like a small dog? Yes. I am keeping him away with my foot okay i am not very happy you were dead though we buried you rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated we put you in the ground i saw saw the body. Did you? Oh, man. Who did we bury?

Who did we bury? That's the real question. I'm not very happy. What brings you to our show? What are you upset about? I'm very sad. This game you talk about The Temple Run 2 This is my game. Ah. This is my game ah this is my game this is not who made this game because this is this has jean baptiste signature in the lower right hand corner

jean jean yes can i call you jean yes or okay um you know that if if you made a game called temple run 2 which was basically temple run after temple run came out the company that made temple run can still make temple run too you understand that you can't just i i did not make a game called temple run 2 oh what did you that would be silly he asked well my game is more thoughtful about life experience so in in my game you are a man and you are running through a um temple so to speak sure but instead of running i apologize for saying running because that is not accurate instead of running you're at a slow jog okay it's more of a trot really what now what is the name of this of this title it is called temple trot temple trot okay temple trot 2 so i i don't remember temple trot 1 yeah i

actually there was no temple trot 1 interesting it's straight to 2 because godfather 2 is my favorite movie so i thought it's the best it is widely regarded as the best one this would be my uh just skip to 2 it empire strikes back is better Skip to two. Can you give me just a brief, because I'm all about the, I don't know if we haven't met before, but I'm all about the gameplay. Sure. What are we talking about here? Well, you're lightly jogging or trotting through a temple, and there are gems that you collect. Like gems? Like a workout gem?

Yes. So you are collecting cards that let you into different gems around the world. And you can use those bathrooms in the gems to shower or work out, whatever you like.

Well, people don't usually work out in the showers of public gems, but that's beside the point. If you're jogging already through the temple... Trotting! If you're fucking trotting, why do you need to go to a gym also to get healthy? When you are in the gym, you are running.

You are running fast. Running and jumping and sliding under different obstacles okay and collecting coins and jewels and gems but not you're like you're robbing the gym you're robbing people no yes well yes and no it's more about health exercise and robbing people okay, it's more about health, exercise, and robbing people. Okay, so it's an Xer game is what you're describing. Precisely, yes. Is it Kinect enabled, it sounds like? It is Kinect enabled, but only my Kinect.

It is spelled with a C. I do not like Microsoft Kinect. They stole my idea Yeah it seems to be a recurring theme For you Jean-Baptiste It is a daily crime I must live through Can I inquire Because I know that you You have some money right

Like you have something You have to have some money I have francs Well I think you missed I think you have to have some money i have franks okay well that's her i think you missed i think you had to exchange those i tried to spend them but they will not take them i have many many franks would you like franks for dollars nah i'm good okay i'm pretty set what i'm saying is maybe you can find uh someone who will take those franks and is also a patent and copyright

lawyer maybe you maybe you could look into that and then we would never have to hear from you again i can uh get the games pulled and my games replaced by them and all their money and you can just live you can live off that you could go to space like like richard garriott and you can die in space online i went to space before richard garriott how was it up there in space okay well thank you for hearing my plight besties yeah uh yeah yeah well i will be off we didn't have much choice no you did not good talk good talk jp oh god that guy that guy right he's always butting in yeah can you lock your can you lock your door it's locked it is well can but i mean before we start recording the next vesties like it's already too late to prevent the one that just happened on sale yeah the issue is i have my key in one of those uh rocks and it's pretty obvious like it's i forgot and i wrote key on the rock so people

generally know but you can like you know you can like throw that away or something yeah he texted you that he was coming he was coming up yeah but then he used the the the stone key yeah well i didn't the door was locked He needed to get in. The funny thing about breaking into someone's house is usually you don't text them before you do it. Yeah. You had forewarning. You could have burned your apartment down before he got in there. That's true.

I could have done that. I didn't think about that. Next time. Next time. How was everyone's week? It was kind of wild yesterday. We nintendo and then thq oh yeah yesterday was bonkers we just talk about that let's talk about that thq because like there there is so much biz let's talk about this if the four of us pooled our money together

and i haven't looked into this go on but could we pool our money together and buy the 50 cent blood on the sand license here is why i'm concerned about that and i'm gonna i'm shooting you really straight okay yeah you use that time hop joint on your iphone yeah go with me here i don't know what that means time hop is like it's like a thing that tells you what you were doing on social media like a year ago or right so my time hop goes off yesterday and it's like hey do you remember a year ago today when you tweeted that 50 cent blood on the sand was still 59.99 on xbox live marketplace i was like i don't remember that but that game is still super expensive, I found out. So my concern is that maybe that's why we didn't hear anything about it yesterday.

Because that's like the most expensive thing THQ has to offer. Maybe, but it's also... They haven't opened the market to their IPs yet. It's just their studios. Oh, that must be the problem. That's what's going on. And that's why they would want to wait, because they know's not true uh what that thing you said is not true uh they sold they sold the evolve ip and that wasn't they sold saints row well right but saints row

came he's saying that independent ip saints row came as part of the package deal with volition right evolve isn't evolve asolve is a third-party contract made by Turtle Rock. But they didn't sell Turtle Rock. Turtle Rock wasn't there. Oh, maybe because it hasn't come out yet? Maybe it's existing IPs? Yeah, it's their upcoming IP. I think it's their back catalog titles that we're concerned about.

And, yeah, those still have to be... So, like, Darksiders and other ones that they made. Hopefully somebody's going to fucking pick up Vigil. That's the craziest. I feel bad. But I mean, basically their problem is that they're so far from releasing their next game.

And it's so early in development that it's such a crapshoot whether it would succeed. And also their past two titles were exceptional. And also not like super smash hits. Yeah, it didn't set the world on fire. But what we're talking about now isn't particularly funny. But the idea of the four of us buying the 50 cent blood on the sand, I feel like that's got less. I can buy the $60 digital version maybe if we pull our money together. I have something funny to say.

Everyone was very sad yesterday and obviously i am sad for uh i am sad for the people who lost their jobs that's not that's not funny and i want to say up front that i'm sad for them but thq as a company there was a lot of like the the interesting thing that was absent from that like thq basically like dying on the table uh is it thq was not a very good company well was there anyone like bemoaning no one was this this publisher has been around since 1991 and it no one like it was never good that is not ever that's not true at all the things you're saying are false what what i'm not saying they didn't have i'm not saying they didn't have good game do you do you remember back when they came out in 2007 and 2008 and and we're like we are not going to make shitty licensed games exclusively

anymore yep we're gonna start doing dope shit and then soon thereafter they did red faction armageddon wait armageddon was that the dope no the the um one before it gorilla oh man good you're right they kept it together for one game but here's the franchise and saints for the third which was possibly my favorite game that came out i'm not saying they didn't make good games i'm saying it's the point i'm trying to get across is that this is they have been an entity for 20 years now and like no one has there's not like an attachment or even like really much of an identity yeah it's not like to this company it's not like nintendo power when nintendo power went under and everyone was like oh i remember getting my first nintendo power no one's like oh that one classic thq game i played

in 1994 memories like no one has fond i think what i'm saying though is that this is a company that exclusively published like shitty to mediocre licensed games or ports that would like nobody or ports yeah that like nobody liked but because it had spongebob on the cover it would sell enough to help them get by and eventually they said we're sick and tired of just being a company that releases games that aren't respected by the industry and by the community at large so like it's not enough for us to just get by we want to start you know taking some risks with some of the ips that we have and come up with some new ips and they did and like maybe some of them weren't awesome but like the fact that they were willing to do that yeah the only i think that i think that strategy was paying off for them until they made like one or two the weird thing about the state is that for the good games that they they managed to come out with they they always they had a tendency to bet big on on the flop well i think

you know they bet big on heart home front which was a turd they bet big on you draw well they bet the biggest on you what were you saying plan yeah to go off to off what griffin's saying it's it's not entirely different than what they were doing before even when they had these new ips because they just flipped the kind of path that the trajectory of a property has used to be oh here's wrestling or here's spongebob and we're making a game off of it but around 2006 they had the idea of okay we'll make the game but before it's even finished we'll sell the comic book and we'll sell the tv show and you're right they bet big but the idea was still to kind of do something similar where it was like hey we're not just going to buy these

properties anymore we're going to be where those properties start and people will start buying from us. And that whole, you know, like transmedia idea that was really big in the mid 2000s. Such a bad idea. It just, it pushed back so hard on them. So they stopped doing what made them money and just made them a stable company and started doing something that was maybe people look back and say it was ahead of their time but definitely did not work for them at all and man remember the red faction tv series or tv that they that they released maybe months they really said around the same time as armageddon and they're like well we're fucking red factions done like that was a good expenditure of our money the blob the blob had the same thing i mean

almost all their properties had some form i mean the blob like i mean i liked to develop too a lot i wrote a great review on joystick for justin but remember they wanted every property to have that kind of you know cachet you know what they did you know property they did really well by and i'm curious as to if anyone's gonna pick it up is uh uh stuntman stuntman ignition in my mind like that's a great game it's hard to make a game that's better than like it's so that game is a perfect ass game and like that's just because they bought it from atari who didn't know what the fuck to do with it and then they made it awesome and they never did anything with it again i can see that coming back on ios or something i have a big idea

shoot let's take that money that we were saving for 50 cent let's buy stuntman ignition let's remake it in ultra hd remix to ignition oh yeah that's good i don't think i'm not sure that thq has the rights to 50 cents blown in the sand because if it's like zynga bought it and turned it into like i don't know a horse breeding game but 50 cent was in it i think 50 i think 50 cent could object to the use of his name and likeness i think that could be a problem can you imagine what sort of pitch what's our snow job they must have given to patrice to get him to like sign on to this ship that was apparently the whole time like hemorrhaging well i think the pitch was we're gonna make you not have to make the same game over and over again. Yeah, you could do whatever.

It was a blank check to do whatever we wanted. Like, why wouldn't you sign up? Yeah, literally. It was a blank check. It wasn't actually signed. Just don't cash it. We are going to need until the weekend to cover that. You could just hold off on cashing your blank check.

Oh, THQ. I'm getting bummed let's yeah the good thing is most of the studios got picked up in some capacity yeah capacity and world liberty redundancies like of course probably you betcha i i and the only thing and i i don't mean to like mock thq obviously it it produced a lot of good stuff i just I think it's so weird to have a studio that makes it, that lives for so long, but doesn't really find an identity. And maybe that's like the legacy of THQ really,

is that it's sort of schizophrenic, you know, trying to find its place. What's ultimately heartbreaking is like, I feel like THQ had like like, reached its zenith. Like, they were, maybe not, that's not fair, because they probably could have gone even higher. But, like, the games that they had in development sounded dope. Like, whatever Patrice was working on, like, that sounded cool. Whatever Turtle Rock was working on, like, another cooperative action game from the people who made Left 4 Dead.

Like, yup, that sounds pretty good, too. And, like, I'm sure Saints Row 4 was going to be baller darksiders 2 is fantastic and like i'm sure whatever vigil is working on is great like they finally had this direction and they had like jason rubin who was like so enthusiastic about all this stuff and had all these big plans and was so supportive and then like in like the matter of two weeks going from like okay things are shitty but we're gonna you know keep things together by selling to this company and then we can sort of adjust from there to like literally overnight a judge ruling no that's not going to happen basically your company is about to get

devoured by vultures like that's fucking hard that's legitimately like one of the saddest stories that's happened since I've been covering games. Except actually that gamer with no feet was pretty sad too. Yeah. Okay. Next. What's the next game we're talking about? Talking about DMC.

Devil May Cry. DMC. Devil gets a haircut. People don't like it. I can't. Can you guys explain it to me? As far as I can tell from reading comments is that his hair is different and that the frame rate is like 58 frames per second or some shit.

Like, what is it? What is it? What? What? Why do people not? They say the frame rate's different so they can't get the good combos. Okay, so people are going to, because I would say 58 frames per second is pretty damn good. Down from 60.

Wait, what was it, 30? They like that 30 FPS. What's the good frames that people like? 60. They like 60. People like 60. People like 60, but that's hard. That one's hard to do.

So I think most people go for 30, which is crazy, because that's like half the frames. I think sub 30 people have issues. I think that this new DMC, from what I know, which is nothing, is that it's 28 or 27. If only someone in this group knew more than how many frames per second the game runs at. Oh, so this game. Do you guys want me to tell you about it? Lovely. Yeah, why not?

I'd like to keep talking about the frame rate. I'm going to talk about this game as somebody who didn't really play much of the original. So, I don't know. Everyone who... That's what people want to hear. That's what they want to hear because... That's what the enraged masses want so you play as dante and you are the child of the devil no no you're not oh my gosh i'm so sorry please oh you just spoiled the ending so no no you're the child of a demon and an angel, which makes you a Nephilim.

Yep. And, okay, so the story of the game is you find this out, and you've been living in a trailer in the middle of a fun house, like a carnival, on the docks. Which, how, like, can you get creepier than being a guy who lives naked most of the time in, like, a ratty trailer near where all of the time in a ratty trailer near where all of the children in your city hang out. Is he really naked, or is he just wearing underwear?

Well, the first time you meet him, he's naked, and then he falls into his clothes. Oh, I saw it. Yeah, Kotaku made me watch that. Kotaku was like, does he have a dick or not? He falls into his clothes. We freeze-framed it right on his dick where it isn't i was like why are we doing this mystery with us no wiener uh so yeah so what you what you do is you're the nephilim

and you need to fight this demon guy who has sex with like an old woman uh because he's bad and basically the gist of this story from what gather, is he runs the banks of the world. And at the beginning of the game, he goes, I'm about to... Wait, he runs the banks? Do I know him? He runs all the banks. Oh, God. And he's on the phone, right? That was a Jewish joke.

Yeah, I got it. Okay, so he's on the phone, and he's like, if you don't give me what I want, then I will destroy the world's economy. Have a good night, Mr. President. Wait, he was talking to Dante when he said this? No, no, he's on the phone. And he realized he's talking to the American president. Oh, okay. And then the old woman goes,

The old woman goes, Is the world your bitch? Like I'm your bitch? This is the president, too, talking? This is just the beginning. So then you find out that your brother, Gabriel, I think. Please don't crucify me if that's wrong. Virgil.

Virgil. Oh, thank you. Whatever, an angel. You're welcome. So he is the leader of Anonymous, and you have to stop the banks which control a fox news affiliate and that's one major bad guy and then have you ever seen that slurm episode from futurama yeah oh yeah you have to fight that because the soda is brainwashing us and it is produced the way slurm is pretty well so they just fucking like everything but the kitchen sink thematically

speaking it's futurama they live yeah oh yeah and and there's all these things are written on the wall that i guess only you can see it sounds like someone whoever wrote this was a big fan of reddit because this is basically every reddit topic ever with fox news uh addictive soda and anonymous now i i apologize because i the one like really good the game is fine if you i i'm not really into like these type of beat beat them up so i'm probably not the person you should you know make your buying decision off of if you already like these type of games but uh one thing i will say and this is a spoiler so whatever cut ahead if you want to. There is a fighting sequence in this game where you jump into a television and then you walk around on giant news graphics. Like, you know, like the actual graphics themselves that slide across the screen in the newscast.

And then you jump through that into the equivalent of like the Matrix room with all the televisions. And then you jump through that into the equivalent of, like, the Matrix room with all the televisions. And you fight the holographic representation of the newscaster, you know, talking into camera. Okay, weird. And that is great. That's when the game hits its peak. Everything I've played in, like, the demos, like, do seem to have that cool. Like, there's this one cool segment where a news chopper is filming you. Close to the beginning of the game, a news chopper is filming you from above.

And your perspective is from the news chopper. They actually cut that sequence from this boss fight. Excellent. Excellent. Great. Is that in the full game? I haven't seen it yet. That's when you do this boss fight. Here's kind of something about these type of games that I've noticed, I guess just games in general, is the art design or the ideas of the art design is so great.

Like, one of the levels is upside down because you're in the reflection of a tower, and you're trying to get to the tower. You're, like, underwater. And that sounds awesome to me, you're like underwater uh and that that sounds awesome to me you know like an entire city upside down but for the most part all the buildings are just like scaffolding so they don't look a whole lot different upside down than they do right side up and the way you know you're upside down more often than not is that the the wooden boxes that

would be on the floor are now on the ceiling that's well and i mean there's a train on the ceiling too like that happens oh yeah that does happen like what do you i don't understand the complaint of like he's just saying that they're empty and and the upside down city isn't realistic enough for me well it's not vibrant enough look much more interesting to me if it actually felt like i was going through it was like a full living room on the ceiling living city which is a complaint i have with like shimmy like shimmy but upside down well no just you're in cities in so many games and they feel like they have never been lived in at all and it's like why why am i fighting for this why you want something to put your to fix your free reactive eyes on yeah I just want to feel like I'm actually fighting for a real place,

not like this is another room in which I do my combos. So upside down Inaba is what you want, which you could just hold your PS Vita upside down. That's a good idea. I'm about maybe five hours into this game. I am uniquely unskilled at these sorts of titles like i am i i am really incompetent like anything where it's like stringing together combos and and i think i have a similar problem to this as i do to uh as you do with like stealth

games where anything that's sort of scoring your progress as you go, even when I get through an encounter, I always feel like I didn't... It's sort of this constant stream of negative feedback. I constantly feel like I let the game down by not being sick enough. It's hard to feel awesome when the game is like, D, D, D for for shooting at the end of every level like just like let me go into a menu and see how shitty i'm doing why do you have to

slam it in my face well then you're just putting it off because you get to the end of the game like yeah i did it and it's like double f shithead it's very demeaning can anyone tell me of the two people who've played it from what i understand the reason that everybody hates this game it has to come down to one or two things either it's because he looks different or the character is different and the storytelling is different and it's like i played all the devil may cry games he was not that great a character like his whole thing is that he would kill guys and be like jackpot like i couldn't get into the original games because of the character because i found him so insufferable hey satan

come get a taste of sword pizza like that's that's not very good actually the the this game is a little bit like there there are many it's ninja theory who have made some really great story based enslaved well let me try again they've made really great they've made one really great story based game if you could ignore some of the things that are in the game right uh but and and so like there's definitely a a they have a consistent tone um and though they have some great lines uh there are some lines that are like not good at all like i do not know how they made it past qa really uh well qa wouldn't qa qa wouldn't uh you've got a bug report this line where he says jackpot he says do you want to slice a sword pizza?

That's really bad. No, it's not even that clever. It's like there's a lot of like they say, someone says, you're Dante, son of Sparta. And he's like, yeah, but I prefer Dante, the demon killer. Got a nice ring to it, don you think cowabunga so he's still like a smart alecky asshole he has so many puns it's not smart aleck it's puns it's like so he's like an elevator falls and he's like going down he's spider-man eat my shorts and but then in another moment he has this huge fight in a church and he kills a bunch of people.

And then he flies out the stained glass window and smashes it. And when he lands on the ground, his lady partners, they're waiting for him. And he said, oh, that took forever. Church. I like that one. It's funny because he doesn't like going to church there's like a joke right like and the other time but other times it's like who's getting on my stab moped to stab stabston lower new stabston the best part about that

church joke is he turns to the character in the game for approval like it's like church and then there's like a pause on her like okay give it did you get that yeah will you keep stabbing things if i laugh i will say i'm sounding like probably too negative on it because it is fun uh it's a fun like brainless kill things the boss fights great. They're not quick time events. You're actually hitting things, but they still look cinematic, which is pretty impressive. Yeah, right. And the weapons get crazy insane, which is, I guess, kind of the problem for me with these games. Maybe it would be better on, like, a second playthrough is they get better once you have everything unlocked.

Yeah. Because the beginning is so tedious it's just you have like a sword and you and you bash things over and over and over again you can barely jump let's um let's prep for next week let's come up with the game plan that was our segue that was a smooth segue i just don't want to talk about fucking dmc anymore his hair is different and i can't i don't give a shit it's not a game that i'm gonna be playing his hair used to go down and it was silver and it was awesome and they broke it it is a little bit like do we not have enough video game protagonists that look like this guy like could we not have one person who looks but okay like like the original dante was so original like what do you mean i mean i'm saying like a 20 something dude with like short dark hair and a leather jacket like as opposed to like a tall white guy with long white hair

and mysterious features who carries a giant ass sword around like name one other than sephiroth go fuck you got me um would this be fun if i read metacritic user reviews perhaps let's let the users weigh in we never let them sort of have their say zero zero points i can't believe i paid 60 for this piece of garbage playing this game on dante must die mode was about as hard as dmc4 on easy oh my god i play games to be challenged not to hold my hand i could have forgiven this only if the story wasn't such a predictable bore if you want to if you want to be i do not understand i play games to be challenged one out of ten dmc devil may cry is a shameless reboot to a great franchise this game has obscene violence and even a sex scene in

it ninja theory claim it's a shakespeare-esque game but in reality it's a pitiful game i can't believe it has a sex scene in it i can't i mean it sounded like he was describing every other devil may cry game it has violence and a sex scene and it's shakespearean okay here we go this is what i was talking about earlier zero out of ten the game is a complete train wreak absolute garbage from beginning to end the characters are idiotic the game is a complete train wreak absolute garbage from beginning to end the characters are idiotic the writing is cheesy the gameplay is slow and boring and the frame rate is locked at 30 frames per second i had more fun unclogging my toilet than playing this game well maybe you shouldn't take such big dumps how many frames per second though is the unclogging the toilet

is it it's seriously like there's not as many frames, and so you can't get those good, sweet combos? Is that really an issue that I just will never understand? In defense of these maniacs, I will say that when I play Call of Duty and when I play Battlefield, I can tell the difference because Call of Duty runs at 60 frames per second, and Battlefield runs at 30. But that's 60 goddamn frames per second that's like a shit so maybe the other devil may cry games were at 60 and maybe i don't know i don't know

we're not talking about like fucking super like pixel by pixel hit boxes in in you know marvel versus capcom 3 like it's a fucking beat him up so i don't yeah no i mean i get it the fans are saying playing this game is like jamming a rod through your urethra and having it come out your anus basically i can see like i think the difference is like all the games that we just mentioned being like frames per second intensive they're all competitive and dmc doesn't have a multiplayer mode does it no but it has like probably has leaderboards that no one pays attention to except for six people. But all these people left fucking reviews on Metacritic.

There's so many. There's three of them. There's six. Almost all zeros. You're fucking killing me, guys. Sounds like a good rental. People say that. Where are you renting?

Who is renting? I go to Hollywood hollywood video subscription sure you gots to gamefly i got nino cooney day one day it came out big mistake you don't know that i do i read the polygon review it's a 6.5 that's not a bad review it's not a good one i i let's let's figure out what we are going to play so you're going to play nino cooney That'll be fun. I'll get that on you. I'm also reviewing.

Shit, guys. Can I talk about something that other people haven't played? I know that's breaking the rules, but I'm worried that we're not going to be able to talk about the cave. Oh, no. Let's talk about it next week. Okay. Is somebody else going to play it, though? Probably not.

Fuck no. Based on your description. So should I maybe just talk about it for a little bit? is somebody else gonna play it though probably not no based on your description so should i maybe just talk about it for a little bit well i mean the show's already going pretty long yeah let's you can you can throw it at the end of next week we'll keep bumping it uh no we don't have a ton to go over next week someone will have to explain to me after the show why we decided to talk about temple run 2 instead of like a real game. Because a bunch of us had actually played it.

Yeah. For gamers. Next week, I'm going to try and get to Ni No Kuni. Has anyone else played it? Oh, yeah. I played it at preview events. I can actually talk about it. Okay.

I'm also going to... I have to review Anti-Chamber, which I know we want to talk about. Oh, yes. And Plant is going to play Anti-Chamber. I think I want to play Strike Suit Zero. I'd like it if someone else would play the cave. What is Strike Suit Zero?

That's a new mech. It's a space mech indie game, isn't it? Space mech indie game. It looks fucking dope. Yeah, it looks pretty good. Is it starring Big Bad Voodoo Daddy? Sorry, no. It stars the cherry poppin okay i didn't know what kind of zoot it was i really don't want to do this show with you anymore uh so so we'll play those games and

and maybe i'll commit someone else to play the cave if you got any suggesties drop those suggesties right in the comments. Oh, yeah, or tweet us. Or tweet them. Either way. We'll get to it. And we'll take care of that next week and so much more. So be sure to join us for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games? besties