The Besties - The Besties Podcast 46 - Crysis 3 and Bit.Trip Runner 2

Episode Date: February 22, 2013

The Besties enter the next generation! This week on The Besties, we talk about the mysterious ghost man living above Griffin's garage. If you think that's grim, just wait till you hear our recap of the PlayStation 4 launch event. Justin does his best to turn our frowns upside down, but is that enough? One of this week's games already looks like it belongs on a next-generation console — and basically demands a next-generation PC. The other game has a long title and a beat we can dance to. Let us know your opinions of this week's games in the comments. And convince Justin why Proteus is good now, before it's too late. 04:30 - Crysis 3 20:30 - Half Time / PlayStation 4 announcement talk 40:00 - Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien 49:30 - What's next? Proteus and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance 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!

So Griffin, you have a garage in your backyard that you don't have access to? It's not, well, yeah. It's a, it's not my backyard. I have a backyard backyard. And then there's a fence, thank Christ, separating the two units. But then there's a garage unit with a person living above it, whom I have never met. Rachel says that she met him once, but I think that's kind of like a ghost story. So would you say he's like

the old man in home alone essentially he's a young man he he looks about my age but here's what's weird the only time i see him is when he walks like down our driveway to escape the the compound that we've uh endangered him inside uh and he he walks down and i see him through the windows and every here's what's crazy every time see him, he's wearing the same thing. What? He's wearing khakis with a long-sleeve white Oxford shirt that looks like it's really big on him. It looks almost like a— Like a linen shirt?

Like a chef's jacket or something. But does it look like he's, like, chilling in a Caribbean? Well, it's funny you mentioned that because he is wearing some sort of fedora and he's also wearing circular uh sunglasses sort of like the ones that the devil wears in uh oh brother where art thou okay and this is no kidding i've never seen him i've seen him probably 30 times never seen him wearing anything else it looks like he's a professional john hammond from jurassic park cosplayer that's what it sounds like would you so it's your fiance does your fiance like has she physically touched him in any way

she took the well she better not have what she was taking the trash around and then she turned the corner and like there he there he was and they had a conversation and she said hi can you tell me what your name is and why you wear the same clothes all the time and he said dinosaurs and then he spoke backwards for a while that's that oh dna that's frightening so he could be a ghost we're not ruling that out i think he is a ghost and i think that he probably committed or was murdered in some horrible way while wearing a long oxford shirt i don't know if this is true but in texas people don't go to heaven they just become ghosts right that's true yeah because you know why because there ain't no heaven like the the lone star state the stars are so big and bright all

conversation between me and griffin about ghosts are trademark. My brother, my brother, my brother. Sorry. I just had to clarify. Tax purposes. Hello, everybody. My name is Justin Macro, and I'm the host of Best Game of the Week. Hi, my name is Griffin McElroy and I too played a game this week. Hi, my name is Chris Plant and I played those games. My name is Russ Frustick and I wrote the best game of the week. Here on the Besties we talk about the latest and greatest in gaming. We pit them against each other in a sort of mortal combat to find out which one reigns supreme.

I still say that, even though we don't do it. No, we really don't. It's a vestige of our old format. This is a vestige. It's a vestigial liner that I still do. What's the current game of the week tell us chris so this week we're talking about crisis 3 and a game that has a lot in common with that uh bit trip runner have you guys noticed how like we do those pairing maybe it's just because

that's just sort of the nature of the industry and people don't want to put put their games up against direct competition but we always do this very distinct if it was wine and cheese it would be a very shitty pairing yeah yeah i don't know it could i'm not i don't know enough about uh wine but you know it could go well with cracker jacks yeah you never know man sometimes i like to take a like a dark rich merlot and a box of cracker jacks yeah and just go to town and i like to chuckle at the riddles oh yeah those are fun i love a good joke those time does fly those riddles get way funnier when you are double wine fucked when you are just slam jammed for For sure Z's. Here on the besties we do

I said that shit about games. Let's just fucking rip into it. Let's do Crysis. Crysis 3 In Crysis 3 here's the here is the best way I can surmise the story thus far. In every

video game you are a man in a robotic cyber suit. In Crisis 3, they twist it by really getting rid of the last vestige of humanity or character, and you are basically just a cyber suit now. It's like the Jackie Chan movie, movie the tuxedo yeah right except yes exactly except but that had a man in the tuxedo yeah there's no man there's like a ghost basically he's like a ghost in the machine if you will okay a ghost ex machina um named prophet is that his given name and he would well it's dylan prophet so uh uh i mean it's inscrutable there were some aliens do you know story perspective there were some aliens they were on earth prophet merged with a guy named alcatraz yeah so actually i

played crisis 2 so i'm gonna i'm gonna tell you what I know from Crysis 2. And you can try to pick it up from there. The events of Crysis 2 involve you playing as a guy named Alcatraz. Who's wearing this suit. And you're fighting against this corporation. That's trying to do something with the aliens. Who cares? Sell.

Yeah, sure. Why not? And then at the end. The guy in the suit Alcatraz essentially dies. And Prophet takes over his whole body. so it was the hero from crisis one who right no from crisis one who blows his brains out at the beginning of crisis two exactly and then somehow manages a man manages to come back because he's in he's been in the suit the whole time and no one really thinks oh poor alcatraz you kind of got sucked up by this other guy who was already here.

Like, bummer. And now I guess you're a prophet again. Here's the thing about Crysis, and particularly Crysis 3, is I think that God himself, whatever the almighty being is, he knows what the perfect video game would look like. And he passed this down to the people at crytek what was this through a holy game of telephone so it was a pure when god had it it was a pure idea it was bible it got step by step it just it got more and more crazy they're like

oh it takes place in manhattan no it takes place in Manhattan in the future. And it's war-torn, and it's covered in trees, and there are robots and aliens, and also maybe dinosaurs. And you have powers. You have shield power, but you also have invisible power, and you also have jump power. power it's like every single thing that is the essential cliche video game had somehow been stuffed into this one uh all-encompassing thing yeah it doesn't it doesn't need story because it's just pure pure crazy shooting madness okay which doesn't make it really any good well important question because i feel like everyone thinks crisis uh visually astounding is that still the case with crisis 3 yeah that's really good so justin are you justin are you playing it on 360 or pc i played it on 360 actually great so we have a parody i looked at some comparisons and uh i i am more personally and this is a personal thing, but I'm personally more bothered by frame rate than I am by effects and resolution and stuff.

And looking at some of the video comparisons online, it looked like the 360, while not as photorealistic as PC, was running at a consistent frame rate that i didn't have to futz too much over i have not had any of those problems on pc but because you spent a ton of money on your pc a minority but no i mean i've heard problems coming from people who have much nicer pcs than i do i don't know what's great is nvidia has that new program that does all the, uh, figuring out of what settings you should use and custom settings for you, which everyone, of course, bad mouth on the internet because heaven forbid you have any help with your PC.

Uh, but like I clicked okay on that and it pretty much set everything to high and it fiddled with the custom settings and it runs perfect. I also, the game wasn't on Steam yet. And so I didn't want to, I didn't want to buy it on Steam when it would be, I didn't want to buy it on Origin

when I could get it for free on Steam later. I do not think, I do not think I would know how to install a game onto my computer. Not if you used Origin. I'll certainly not use Origin. Tell me about the shoots if you've never played a crisis game

imagine and this is going to sound dismissive imagine the most boring first person shooter you can the most vanilla boring just the basic idea of a first person shooter I mean basic Wolfenstein 3D

I mean like the most basic but then what if your dude had a button that gave him super armor had a button that turned him invisible cheats essentially so it's a basic fps but you can cheat and that's part of the game yeah right so you can and you can combine those powers in a interesting way, so you can sprint at super speeds and leap forward. It's just short of god mode, then. It's slightly. Todd mode. The problem with Crysis 3 so far is all of these— How much have you played, Chris?

What? How much have you played? Probably about two and a half hours. The problem with it so far is, one, a lot of that was just watching things with the intro. But two, in Crysis 2, it had a lot of verticality. You were going up and down through skyscrapers and broken highways and stuff. And all those powers are great when you have a long depth of field where you can look way into the distance and figure out what you're going to use these powers for you can you know kind of scale up above them and then drop

down on them uh but here i don't know if it's because it's rendering such a crazy elaborate world there's a lot of flat surfaces and the trick seems to be like well i guess i'll go invisible and go and punch him or i'll just use the armor and like eat some bullets and then spin him back out and I felt like that I kept getting in that scenario um yeah it it's weird I I feel like I've been playing for about three hours and uh I feel like I haven't gotten a great handle on how I like you'll enter into a scenario and you have a visor that you can scan um to to get sort of markers far cry-esque far cry yeah three-esque uh get markers for the enemy so you can keep track of them which I like I think that's cool um so you'll do that and you'll create like

sort of a plan of what you're gonna do um the the field of view on enemies is crazy they can see if you drop cloak for a second um and you're a football field away you're going to get spotted well isn't that sort of a balance for the fact that you can in fact turn invisible yeah yeah but it is but like in the same like you should at least know how far that vision cone goes. And the frustrating thing is there's a checkpoint system, but there's no way to restart at a checkpoint. So if you say, like, I'm going to attack this stealthily, and you get spotted by a dude, then you pretty much have to die.

Yeah, you pretty much have to die. Or, you know, so it seems like it seems like it's open-ended but there were a lot of times where i felt like i wasn't doing it right i guess i also wonder how much of those sort of problems with you know weird ai have to do with how much it's pushing out graphically because this was kind of a problem that we saw with far cry 3 too where the enemies did all these crazy uh tactics and would flank you and do all this fancy stuff on the pc where you know it had the extra horsepower and didn't have to worry just about the graphics but on xbox they would just kind of run in a wall or run away or look down at the ground while you know they did stuff on the xbox. Yeah, comparatively it was...

Oh, you're such a snob. They were fine on the Xbox version. Give him a PC for a few months. Says the guy who did not play it on a PC. Um, I, uh, I think, now that I'm in, like, when you get in the hang of a scenario, when you can kind of let go of the idea

that, like, okay, I'm gonna come up with a plan of attack, and it's misleading. I wish it was more focused on go of the idea that like, okay, I'm going to come up with a plan of attack. And it's misleading. I wish it was more focused on sort of free form. Because if you have the opportunity for stealth, a lot of, like Dishonored is a good example of where you have the opportunity for stealth, but if it goes sideways, you don't necessarily feel like you've messed up.

I mean, you feel like, okay, time to convert my strategy. And Crysis doesn't feel that way. I mean, like, every sort of cue that you have, you have a voice saying, get more reinforcements! You have a light flashing red. You have dudes filling the screen. Like, every cue is, you

messed up. You are bad. It really hurts coming out after Far Cry 3 and Dishonored, which I think are two of the best examples of that sort of gameplay where it's you know a borderline open world where you can create the strategy you want and know exactly what you're going to do before you do it and then see it play out now i'm curious so how big are these environments that we're talking about are they would you say they're comparable to crisis 2 it's the comparisons

are weird they're bigger i would say they're wider but they also just mix up like the beginning of the game starts you in corridors which if there's one thing crisis as a game just shouldn't do is put you inside it always struggles there and that it decides to do that first off is like a bit of you know a sign that this isn't going to go as well as you'd hope um but it but i i do want to say it does look really good especially after being at the playstation 4 event last night where i think it rivals if not looks better than everything we saw it does you were watching you were watching it on some pretty shitty projectors or or on a stream that's true but why would those games look any better i mean no here's here's the situation there's no way

the ps4 will ever outpower a pc because they need to sell it for $400. They can't sell it for $2,000. So they need to use current middle ground hardware to make it a reasonable cost. And the end result is, yeah, it's going to look comparable to high-end PCs now, essentially. Have you guys messed around with multiplayer? That's the only exposure I've had to this game

is I played the multiplayer Hunter mode. Was it fun? I really liked it, yeah. Because I really did not like multiplayer in Crisis 2. I felt really tacked on. Did it have the Hunter mode? No, it didn't. It's basically like Predator or like

Flood mode in uh in halo where you have one player who can turn invisible and oh yeah hunting down the players and then everybody else is trying to hide and as you get killed you get transferred over to the that's fun to the other team um yeah it's it was it was super fun i mean it is basically exactly like zombie mode but um it felt more like uh felt more like predator i dug that i didn't play any of the the regular multiplayer though i don't know i was i was psyched for this game i guess just based on the the positive impression i had of that that multiplayer mode but from what i've heard it just sounds kind of easy like it sounds like a super easy kind of brainless shooter.

I think they relied, like, that's honestly been the case with all the Crysis games, that they sort of rely on the fact that it's pushing the edges graphically. But the games themselves have been fine, but never spectacular. Certainly not the first one, which had a lot of problems. The second one was just a fine shooter that looked really good. i feel like they don't really go far enough with the powers i wish that uh it was a little more a lot of the game is built around how you how you use the powers in conjunction with each other i wish they were a little more slowly introduced because it's it's a little uh daunting to suddenly have like oh you have, oh, you have armor to think about,

you have cloaking to think about, you have jumping to think about, and it doesn't teach, not teach, I mean, there's a training section you go through that teaches you how they work, but I feel like if they introduced them a little slower, then you would be forced to make them learn how they work together through repetition.

And I feel like throwing them all at you at once is just inviting you to come up with one sort of strategy that works for you. Exactly, just stick with it. Is there a character advancement system where you're earning skill points that you're spending? Yeah, you can upgrade some powers and you can upgrade your weapons but i mean that's been in all crisis games yeah yeah it's like a weird it's almost like i guess perks is a better way and and it's got a uh you basically have a

set of four that you can have equipped at any one time um so you unlock new ones but it's all about finding a combination that works with your play style uh and i just wish it had been introduced in such a way that would let you sort of build that play style over a long period of time uh rather i mean like i got stuck on the first like one of the first large encounters that you have because i just had no idea of how to approach the situation you know i mean you're pretty much supposed to shoot the guys usually yeah i guess you just shoot them with bullets yeah pretty much i should sometimes can i sorry i don't mean to but sometimes arrows sometimes oh most of the time arrows once which are basically i guess they're just ancient bullets.

Arrows are getting big now. We got arrows in Tomb Raider. We got arrows in Crisis 3. I think arrows were E3 last year. I think E3 this year is Civil Unrest. I think Civil Unrest. Oh, yeah. The government is watching you fight back.

Check it. Well, we already have Infamous. We already have Biosho have uh shock well i guess watch dogs got post postal um let's there's a i mean let's talk about let's get to halftime because i feel like this is what people were expecting the entire can i say yeah we're yeah sorry justin one more thing uh the bow i actually want to make a point about the bow, is you can use the bow stealthed and it doesn't break stealth and that, I think, is a

bad, I think that's a bad scene. Because I think that that is begging, that reinforces that, like, just stay cloaked thing. Yeah. Because then it's like, you can hit a guy with an arrow, sneak over to his corpse, get the arrow, pick the arrow up and fire it and

another guy it is like not inviting uh you to experiment it's like you're making a blood museum yeah and you're just collecting you're collecting a little bit from everybody on the same arrow but like even like even if you don't kill that soldier he's now got hepatitis so that's unfortunate um but yeah no griffin makes a good point i'm sure a lot of people are waiting to listen to this halftime which obviously there's only one thing we could possibly talk about and that's this week's episode of good wife what'd you guys think i can't believe that she decided to be a bad wife i know like you think in the title she'd like stick to being a good wife yeah um can we please talk about ps4 yeah i think it's gonna get i think it's gonna get raw in here

you think it's gonna get what i think it's gonna get raw i think it's gonna be nasty yeah like eddie murphy let's just here this is i know we're all struggling to find a place to start i would give it i would give it like a i would give it like a 7.5 are we talking about the presentation of the console the presentation oh boy so i feel pretty strongly about the presentation uh i would say just a numerical score okay you just want a number yeah between between zero and i'd give it a five a five what wow ch. Chris Plant? I would give the presentation like a nine because they made a lot of lemonade out of what I think was mostly lemons in terms of what they had to offer. There was a lot of not substance and a lot of promises and big pie-in-the-sky talk. Yeah. Justin, what do you think?

I thought it was an interesting lookin i'm just a number is really all i'm eight and eight eight eight point eight reviewers tilt nine fun factor fun factor nine awesome no i really did like of of i this is actually so i was around for the wii u launch obviously but this is the first time that i i think i've been around for a an actual console announcement and i think that compared to some of the other press conferences that i've gone to just for you know the the annual e3 um bombast like that there was no point in the thing where i felt like embarrassed for the people that were on stage which i can really only say for maybe a handful of press conferences I've ever gone to.

So they had that going for, um, I thought some of the games looked pretty dope. I think that they could have done a better job of sort of presenting what the console is capable of during those games, especially during the first party games, which really didn't do other than kill zone, which,

you know, showed off some graphics. Like I wanted to see more about drive club's social functionality i wanted to see the share thing being actually used inside of a game i guess they did that for for knack i just i don't get this is what i don't get you've got an audience i was watching the stream numbers when it started up about two million people watching this feed and how you bring those 2 million people in is with a very dry first presentation followed by Mark Cerny, who goes on to talk about eight GG,

DR, MMF, Ram, and how the chip architecture is better than the last chip architecture. And suddenly that's, it's huge. I understand, but who is it huge to? architecture is better than the last ship architecture. It's huge. I understand. But who is it huge to? It's huge to developers. You have to have

a knowledge of how awful the cell technology was. You have to realize, Russ, the people who are actually tuning in to watch this probably care about it. If you're on a Wednesday night, you know what i'm going to spend the night doing chris plant i watching this announcement worked in the this industry

i've been writing about this industry for 10 years and i don't care about it to be honest kind of a problem you should it doesn't it's juicy i think it should be juicy i think it shows when clearly i think everyone will agree that the ps3 technically if you put the specs down on paper was more powerful than 360 in the end did that matter no folding it folding at home folding at home precisely so clearly people's lives were changed but apart from that two things i want to say it's crazy to me that they started with like heavy heavy tech stuff and the second thing crazy to me that they started with knack that's the very first game down where you're going to show is a game that a does not look all that good it looks like it could probably

run on a ps3 and b is like i mean as griffin said in the show last night what did you compare attack or uh blinks the time cat blinks the time sweeper i'm sorry blinks the time sweeper i really uh i i think that the uh we're it's an interesting point in history where if you're there were hundreds of thousands of people watching that stream at home and i don't think that web streaming where it is right now is capable of i mean like the difference in fidelity between ps2 to ps3 yeah versus the ps3 to ps4 it's not the leap into the hd era that the ps3 was so i don't think you're you know i i don't think it's going to be as obvious i'll put it put it this way i'm a streaming person did it did knack look amazing in the in the no no but when i watched when i was watching the new stream and i watched the the kill zone footage

um it looked it looked fine it looked obviously you know at least a little bit better than than games that are on the ps3 right now when we got the direct feed trailer that i watched it like fucking blew me away it looks so much better yeah i haven't seen that yet it's crazy how much better it looks um so i think that that's that is hard to get across and i if i were them i wouldn't have leaned quite so much on check out the visuals because ultimately the visuals aren't new like we've been talking about this entire episode crisis 3 on a high-end pc like it already looks next gen what's what's confusing is why they didn't show off some of the other um social features why they why they didn't have somebody on stage press the power button and then press it again to show how it flash starts and stops well there's no power

button to press right i guess that's true but that's still like that was the biggest feature for me to be able to just done i just wanted a game that the game itself looked like next gen like what you're actually doing in the game looks like something i cannot do right now i mean i wouldn't say that watchdogs is that game but i feel like that's the closest thing we've seen to a next gen game i know i i talk about this game endlessly so i apologize but i i hooked up just cause 2 with like the maxed out and all this other jazz i know russ hates me but i hooked it up to my tv and i was playing it on this large screen and realized i could see across this map that is like four times bigger than grand theft auto and see specific places and fly to them and that to me was crazy and that it felt like

something i definitely can't do on any console like i i don't know i i just don't understand why there isn't anything like that where it has that wow factor of how are they putting so much onto the screen that's how i felt with when i first saw watchdogs at e3 last year that's how i felt was like i've never seen anything like this i don't know the first party certainly didn't show off what I wanted to see. And even some of the third, but Watch Dogs was, I feel like, the only actual gameplay demonstration that really wowed me. And it wasn't even as good as that E3 trailer.

That's true. It wasn't. This, I mean, we have you to, this is not me. This is not me coming down on the PS4 saying i actually i did i really did think it was a good presentation it's just i think that they could have they hit i feel like they hit all the right notes but i feel like the most important thing that people want coming out of these things is the games and with the console announcement you have the unique opportunity to not only announce these games but to use those games as an apparatus to showcase the features of the console announcement, you have the unique opportunity to not only announce these games, but to use those games as an apparatus to showcase the features of the console.

And I actually, I do think that they showed off, you know, of the nine games they showed off, none look like stinkers. You know what I mean? Like they all, if those are, if those are like, it's not going to be this, but if those are the nine launch titles for the PS4, that's a fucking killer line. But there's not there's no system seller though you would say that certainly didn't and not just a system seller because some of them will be system sellers i it's the it's the idea that you we didn't see a gameplay it's what i plan was saying we didn't see that gameplay experience that you cannot have right now yeah here's what it didn't show it didn't show the 3D camera working with the colored light

on the back of the controller that detects apparently. Well, it didn't show anything. That was the other problem, and that's why I'm very skeptical about these promises that they made. I would love to have seen them come out and say, here's how it works, here's the machine, and here's actually doing some of these things. And with Sony, until I see that,

I will not give them credit for any of these ideas, because that's all they are. In their defense, the presentation was already two hours long, which, by the end of it, I had peed my pants twice. They had to get out early. The timing was so good yeah like i can kind of understand why they wouldn't want to wait another two months till some of these plans are more concrete and like as a teaser i think it worked great like it you know it got you thinking

about it i'll be thinking about it like first off that controller looks fucking out that was my favorite part that was my controller looks great that's not a that's not a petty thing no it's the reason i played more super nintendo games than genesis games and it's the reason i played more xbox games than ps3 games yep i like the controllers better i think that share i think the share looking great the share thing like may not seem like such a great idea but like the more i think about it the more i can see myself using that yeah my my problem is when e3 comes around or whenever microsoft has their announcement now they have a few very distinct advantages number one being whatever they have that's better than sony they can

promote in that form so it's we have this and it's this much better than yeah sony and also microsoft loves spending that cash on exclusives. And they will come out and say, you know, we're the only ones who are offering you this, this, and this. But at the same time, let me come out and remind everybody. Like, I'm not, obviously not coming down on one side or the other. I'm just, I beg everybody who says, like, okay, now let's wait for Microsoft to blow them out of the water.

Let's remember those two or three microsoft e3 press conferences they've done where like you come out expecting like halo 5 and they come out like you can make a koala bear dance with a connect and it's the worst ever like i i really i'm genuinely worried that when they come out with next gen fucking an hour and a half of that presentation is going to be kudos to Noda making a, a baby lamb jerk off with connect with the bottom of the shoe. Yeah. Like no joke. This is,

this is, we're here to talk to you about all the bowling, live bowling, streaming TV experience. Like I could not care less. Couldn't care less. I don't think that's what's going to happen no they've been doing that because they haven't they haven't been able to talk yeah they

haven't been able to talk about the other did you catch when mark sarno was like i'm in i've been in the game for five years like this is where i've been like i've been doing this so yeah like i can understand why they haven't you know the market hasn't you know yeah they haven't had much to the end of the 360 show because they're like, we can't tell you what we're doing. But I would also say that I think Microsoft, like, we all scoff at the kudos shit. But that's the sort of stuff that gets in USA Today and whatever, the mainstream publications. And Microsoft, say what you will about their press conferences, knows how to reach out to the mainstream audience and get them to write about their product whereas this event last night was not a mainstream event the headline for that usa today article would be like guy fieri's brother shows off new connect technology oh can i talk about kudos to noto for a second? Yeah. I edited a piece yesterday. No, let's not talk about this.

Is this offensive? No, it's not. It was offensive to me. Tell me now. Okay. Okay. Plant did this piece yesterday about why you should be careful about believing everything Sodi says at a press conference, which is great and in the in chat he says uh and remember that bit where pseudo talked about uh uh

fight night and i and i saw i clicked the video and i was like it was kudos to know to talking about i said oh it must have been i didn't even think about it must have been a typo and then i get into his piece and chris has twice in the piece named this gentleman pseudo-Kanoda T S U D O alternate reality kudos to Noda it really is like it was as though if you were gonna make like a parody film about kudos Noda that is the character you create is pseudo-Kanoda you know what's funny is that Chris plan asked me how to spell that name yesterday and I don't remember what I told him. No, this motherfucker.

And then I Googled it, and there were a lot of results, including a Flickr stream of pseudo-Konoda photos. Yeah, I highlighted it in the article and wrote nope as a comment. And then I go back to the article, and it's still that way a half hour later. And then I say to him directly, I say, hey, article and it's still that way a half hour later and then I say to him directly I say hey pseudo canoda is not a dude and he's like okay and then like 20 minutes later he comes back to me and says pseudo canoda is the right spelling right no and then when he puts the thing the article into our layout thing it still says pseudo canoda like I had to go in there myself and hand change it.

I was waiting for him to go back in. I'm like, well, that doesn't look right. I'm going to edit it again. It's a common mistake. I just Googled it, and I got Sudoku was the answer that I got back. Yeah, Chris did make a great point in that piece, though. Like, there were many things in the ps3 reveal that were lies they were not like it's not like they didn't come from which and maybe that's why they

were so general like chris what do you think was the worst i'm trying to think of like the i think the two hd screens at the same time in one of screens, not only could it be used to play the game in extra widescreen, but it could run additional apps that would support the game, like eight-person video chat or something. Or it would, like, if you're driving, this is where your actual dashboard would be, and you could turn on the radio or something. So my guess is that the one thing that's going to be, like, not really used at all is that game streaming.

I don't think they'll be able to support that, like, oh, you can stream your feed out to everyone at all times. No way. For every game. I think it might be supported by a couple first-party games, and then no other developers will support it. Also, the whole Vita, what is it? Remote play. What do they call it where you can cross play or whatever remote play what happened to that with the ps3 we heard about that it's a goddamn like

it's a fucking joke man i paid like i paid like five bucks to grab the little big planet cross controller dlc doesn't work just flat out doesn't work like it does not remember lair we were like told that so many games would do that Years ago There are games that do that I'm sure there are some games Guys I have a quick challenge for you Okay hit me Within the next six months

Name one Vita game that is coming out One One Vita game That is coming out in the next six months that downloadable or retail anything yeah that was a trick question oh my god is that wait a minute unbelievable i just checked the release schedule and the next game listed for release on vita is april 30th that can't be right and what game is it this is sacrifice this console has been out for over a year sacrifice is pretty big it comes out in april and then what other game is coming

out this console has been out for a year and there are literally i'm not even it's not a figurative thing literally no games coming out in the next two months it's amazing really i'm trying to think i'm i'm like looking i'm actually now i've like and it kills me because i love the hardware i know it kills me i used my the way that i used to justify my purchase which is this is the most fucked up thing ever but i used to be like well at least the 3ds doesn't have many games either but i don't know if you guys have watched the past like four nintendo directs when they've like we've got four zelda games coming out like they've actually been killing it lately i'm i'm surprised i mean i'm not surprised they had they already spent two hours last night on a single console which they didn't even show like i don't think they could waste much time on the vita but

i am surprised that they forget wasting time during the press conference put a press release there's literally no games coming out yeah like well yeah okay yes you're right for the next few months if they get the one of the things they touched on last night was uh the idea of streaming your ps4 games to your ps vita and playing them. Which, like, first off, that seems weird because It's essentially what Nintendo does now. Well, yeah, it seems weird, though, because there are two triggers on the touchscreen.

It won't be pressure sensitive, the triggers, but it'll probably do what the PS1 Classics do, which is if you touch the left side of the rear pad for L2 and the right side of the rear pad for R2. Guys, fresh is off here. MLB the show. Dead or Alive 5+.

Port. And then in... Oh, my God. June 25th. Is that this year? June this year? June 25th of this year. A new Muramasa is coming out, and I love Muramasa. I'm actually excited for that.

Tearaway? I don't know if that has released it. Guacamelee? That'll come out soon. There's a Killzone in September. These aren't dated, but there's a... I just wanted to remind us all where the Vita is right now and how sad it is.

Yeah, it's a little weird. Anyway, let's talk about something a little happier. Runner. Runner 2. Bit.Trip Runner 2. Well, no. It's Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2.

Actually, the full title is Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2. Oh, actually, the full title is Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2, Future Heaven Rhythm Alien. Legend of Rhythm Alien. Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, yes. Future Sex Love Sounds? Yeah. I would also say, before we get going,

that this features the triumphant return of one and only Charles Martinet, voice of Super Mario. He's the announcer for the title of the game, which you cannot skip. Thanks, Chuck. Thanks, Chuck. I love you like a brother, but I don't want to hear you every fucking time I turn the game on, Chuck. Yeah. Yeah, he does a great job.

That's the voice of Mario. He does a great job keeping me from playing the game for 10 seconds. Okay, so Bitch Rope Runner, the first bitchy runner is uh sort of retro inspired uh i mean it is a runner is the name of the the genre uh so he's running from left to right and avoiding things well okay first one is a very hard sort of uh unrelenting uh fast difficult platform but it's more to it than that. It's not just a platformer. The whole hook of it was the fact that it's a platformer

with a rhythm game mashup. So essentially, every time you're jumping or sliding under something, it's to the beat of the song that's playing in the background. Right. I don't like retro aesthetics very much at all. So that was very – it's very cool and happy for me to reveal. It makes me

happy that Runner 2 has a modern look because they spent some money on graphics. Three dimensional. Thanks. Three dimensional. Runner looks great. The environments are fantastic. The user interface, like the menus and level select

that's like fun to navigate um and the music is like when you get a good vibe going the music gets so jovial uh that and triumphant you really feel like you're doing something even though in the grand scheme of things it's not a yeah no video game is a good use of your time chris plant how it break it down for us for if you if you're just coming to runner two because i feel like justin might have jumped sort of midway into the experience you could say he jumped slid and busted you're first arriving to charles martinez bit trip runner presents rhythm alien future tech two times Devil's Cartel. What would you say,

like, how would you sort of, what's the elevator pitch to this game? It is an endless runner in which you play as a black pylon. It's not an endless runner. You fucked up the first fucking line. It's a running game where you don't control the running.

You're always, you're perpetually, it's a perpetual runner. And you have to jump slide or knock through obstacles or sometimes all those at the same time uh and there are objects that you can collect to get high scores uh in alternate paths you can take to unlock objects uh it's very very simple uh but very difficult as you progress. Yeah, I don't think it's – I was surprised at how – I didn't think – I thought it was simple because you start off and all you're worrying about is just jumping over stuff. But after the first world, it really gets complicated.

I actually – it took me a while to kind of get into it. My first problem was that I tried playing it on my MacBook Air. I put it on my Air. it looks fine you do a controller helps but it looks fine on the air but i felt like the frame rate is is not it is not ideal oh i ran it i'm on a 2012 air and it ran fine for the record it's not it's not choppy or anything like that but like it it falls behind just like a millisecond and because everything does have sort of the rhythmic nature, it completely ruins it. Because sometimes there's a quick sequence of four steps

that you have to jump off, and there was a level I literally just couldn't get past on the air because I would have to time my jumps a half beat ahead of time. Like syncopation. But then I switched to my pc another thing i would say is that you should play it on the hardest difficulty because um it just i feel like the music is is better and it's more rewarding like when i was playing on normal whenever i would die like right before a checkpoint and have to play like the same 30 seconds over again it was kind

of a bummer yeah but then once i turned the the heat up a little bit it i sort of got like every time you die it's like oh okay so that's another thing in the pattern that i have to remember and i see i like it more rewarding i i i don't like the harder difficulty for that reason i don't like games where i feel like i'm memorizing a pattern like simon and i felt with this game on the normal difficulty the first half was maybe a smidge too easy but i felt like i was learning the language of it in the review i compare it to like learning how to read music and yeah by the end the levels were much more difficult but i kind of learned how to read that and i could play through it and maybe one or two or three goes but it felt like just difficult enough that I was like right on the edge of my seat the entire way through you could

still be reactionary yeah yeah it felt like I was playing the game not learning the game I I sort of come at it from the same way that I came at like Guitar Hero and Rock Band where like I would I would play on expert just because like it was harder was harder, but it kind of, it just feels, the feel of it is better. And it feels more rewarding when you do get, like, a perfect score. And it feels, I guess I could be talking about any difficulty setting for any game ever. But I just got into more of a flow because when you're playing on the hardest difficulty, there's no, like, stretches of the level where you're not doing anything like you are constantly jumping or sliding or jump sliding or dancing or blocking or kicking or or springboarding like you are you have to like channel these things together and when you get in like the groove like i don't know i just i couldn't get in the groove in the

other difficulty settings uh on the higher difficulties, does that just essentially just increase the tempo? It doesn't increase the tempo, it just increases the objects. Like, every, if you think of, like, the level as being in, like, measures, like, every measure has four things in it. Like, there's just no, there's no rests. You are constantly, constantly doing it. Yeah, the example I would give is in Super Easy, there's a gold token and you have to jump up or you just can even duck to hit it, right? In Normal, you have to duck to hit it.

And if you don't duck, you'll run into some obstacle that'll send you back to the beginning. Gotcha. And in Hard, you slide under the obstacle and then the second you slide under it, you jump and grab the token and you immediately go back into a slide to grab or to hide from the next obstacle like so hard it's like aladdin essentially it's just non it's just non-stop it's non-stop and it's like twitch i mean you have to really nail everything but it's not just twitch because

i feel like that intimates that rhythm isn't a part of it because it is like once you get in the rhythm you just it's just how quickly can your brain react and like if you're into the rhythm you know when to interpret like when to use the button that you have interpreted is the button that you'll need to use to get past the obstacle or get the coin like it's it's just like quick muscle muscle memory reflexes. Yeah, when I say twitch, I mean how fast your fingers are actually moving. You're moving like a twitch. What I found cool was that, so in the first level, you're pretty much getting down with the rhythm. The second

world, it's more about nailing the rhyme, and then by the third world, it's all about bobsled time. So I found that really appealing. It's such a joy to play it's it's it's very pleasant i do wish it was on the ipad really i don't know that they would be able to do the precision like with swiping and stuff i don't know that you'd have the same level of precision

i wouldn't do swiping i would do virtual controls oh and those the worst super crate box doesn't super crate box really turned me around on those because i've i've always loathed uh virtual controls and and that worked really well i think this would be a great uh well it figures it would be a great vita game um but bearing the vita it would be uh you know i I would say XBLA is a good option. It is coming out on XBLA, right? I think it's XBLA and PSN, yeah. If it's coming out on PSN, bring that shiz to PS Vita.

We're all starving over here. Please, we're dying for games. The other thing I like about this game, though, is that it's a game that is inspired by retro games that doesn't just rip them off and leave it at that. And that's like a problem i've had in the past with some of these uh i would call them like retro wannabes were like hey we

loved tapper and we loved zelda and we loved this so let's just do those kind of okay and it has a fun it has a fun sense of humor to it too that is not like cloying it's like there's there's a pickle there's like a i don't know how to describe it there's there's just a man there's an anthropomorphic fancy pickle and like he's just kind of chills in the background or you can play as him as a playable character and he's drunk for some reason i don't get why he's drunk yeah it's but the game's not like bacon get it like tonally i think it it feels a lot like super meat boy even even the gameplay which goes to what plant was saying which was obviously inspired by classic gaming but brings very much brings like modern sensibilities to the table yeah also i think super meat boy is a playable

character he's in like the opening cinematic yeah i don't know if he's playable he was playable in the first one i wasn't able to unlock him so i don't know if he's playable. He was playable in the first one. I wasn't able to unlock him, so I don't know. Well, maybe you need better skills. Do you need me to come over to your house and help you? Yes. What's up for next week? Oh, boy. Oh, we know what's up for next week.

We do. We're ahead of schedule. We are talking about Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. Metal Gear. And we're going to talk about Proteus. Oh, man. That's going to be a combo that does not make me any friends. You will not want to miss this one.

You ever see one man take a dump on two men? This is going to happen. Yeah, I'm excited. Should be fun. That's pretty good. Just need some chivos. Look forward to that. T be fun. Nah, it's pretty good. Just need some Chivos. Look forward to that. Tune in. Catch it.

Right now, if you missed any of the PlayStation 4 news that we've been chatting about, you can go to Polygon.com and gobble it all up. You'll find many features, collections of information, videos, all kinds of good stuff. There's a new video series that we just kicked off today. Or, sorry, yesterday, by the time you listened to this called Good Cop, Bad Cop starring our own Russ Frushtick and Chris Plant. They're sort of

a new take on previews so make sure you check that out. And we hope you'll go to iTunes and review our podcast if you like it. Maybe share with somebody. Subscribe to it. it would be amazing. Uh,

and, uh, make sure you join us again next Friday for the besties. Shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games? Besties!