The Besties - The Besties Podcast 50 - Gears of War: Judgment and Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

Episode Date: March 22, 2013

Let's hear it for the supporting character! This week, we discuss two games based off the less popular sidekicks of major franchises. First, we have the Ballad of Baird, also known as Gears of War: Judgment. The fourth game in the Gears of War franchise has more of what you've come to expect from the franchise, which means hours of carefree body mutilation. Speaking of dead stuff, Justin leans over the campfire to tell us a scary story about the time he reviewed The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct. Sticking to the ghastly theme, we finish the show with a Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, the second game in a series about the lesser-loved plumber turned ghost hunter. Is Dark Moon the 3DS's killer app? Does anyone care about 3DS when we have Super Stickman Golf 2 on our cellphones? Does the video game industry have a morbid fascination with our mutual fleeting mortality? Find out on this week's Besties! 03:00 - Gears of War: Judgment 16:30 - Half Time - The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct 29:30 - Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon 46:00 - 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!

Did you guys get a lot of snow? No, I didn't get any snow. It snowed yesterday and now it's gorgeous. What is going on? I know. Well, what temperature do you have there? I think it's El Nino. It's like 55 degrees probably. It's not gorgeous. It's nice though.

Well, it's cold. Yeah. I just completely took your world apart. I just, I don't know. You went from thinking it was a nice day to looking outside thinking, oh, fuck this day. It's bright, though. That earns several degrees. It is bright.

And, Russ, I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and the things that make you happy aren't really that great. I'm just saying, like, the things that you really love in this world are actually pretty shitty. Yeah, I'm beginning to notice that, too. love in this world are actually pretty shitty yeah i'm beginning to notice that too this uh the smell of your mother's perfume that you remember so fondly is she and your father got ready for a night out um it didn't smell that good yeah no that sense memory you have is actually wrong you think sorry the you're thinking of gasoline you were thinking of gasoline the smell of freshly baked cookies no not very impressive more like freshly baked freshly baked dookies is more like it why don't people call them dookies more we can bring that back that's

a weight loss that's a weight loss tip for you if you call cookies dookies you'll want to eat them less i would hope if you call cookies dookies i would hope that you would want to eat them never again at least in public. my name is just mack roy and i know the best game of the week my name is griffin i got caught in a stretch i'm griffin i play games my name is chris plant and i live in new york city my name is ross first egg and i know the best game of the week it's the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest and hottest and sexiest games. And we put them together and we make a little pie.

A little pie. And out of games. And then this week on the besties, we got Gears of War. Rashomon. Gears of War Rashomon Gears of War back again we got you forgot you don't even remember

Luigi Mansion and Walking Dead the games are here and they're hot and ready to go to be digested sexy ass games these are some sexy-ass games. These are some games that people played.

Let's get into the boring one, Gears of War Judgment. Yeah, I've got a lot of thoughts on this game, but I wanted to start it out reminding us all that Chris Plant had a snobby art school college experience. So the only way that I was able to convey to him what gears of war judgment was about was by calling it basically rosh it's true because you see you play as baird but truly you're tajamaru the rapist of guys delicate huh i'm so fucking dumb can you fucking tell me what you're talking about please the star of roshamon, I heard the words that you said, but I can't, I have no association.

Okay, so basically, Rashomon is a very famous film and story. Can you talk more about Gears, though, than the book? No, no, no, you gotta know what this is, because it'll explain Gears in a much better way than Gears does. Otherwise, he can't justify his college education and all the money he spent. I'm a visual learner, though, not an auditory one. Or like, John Travolta is in the military and then like they tell the story like three different ways stripes it's not old dogs sure yeah i think it is old dogs or sorry wild hogs oh i'm sorry no it's cold cold logs cowboy uh space cowboys

so in this game can you feel the hand of of of uh writer tom bissell oh gosh oh let me actually before we start talking about tom this is a legitimate question no okay but i'm gonna i'm gonna before we start talking about him in particular i do want to give you everyone the rundown of the story so uh you're commanding the role of bairdd to start off the game. And the overarching plot, which has a lot of deep ins and outs and a lot of subtext, is basically there's a giant spider and you need a big missile to blow him up.

And then you get the missile and then you blow him up. You know what I like about Baird? Is that he looks like a beeped up version of Seth Green in Can't Hardly Wait. Because of the goggles. I always thought he looked like uh sid from final fantasy 7 and i like because of the goggles that's the same well

and the spiky blonde hair um and just do the general attitude um i like to pretend it's the same character and then i'll like i'll write i'll like write some fiction about that and then i'll put it on the internet yeah yeah maybe you've read some of my works no um most of them are just like baird slash sid and but then they like they fuck something to do with sid spear then i have like sid slash sonic like sid's usually in it sonic is also usually and i got a lot of sid slash sonic yeah it's hard is that the one where they eat each other's chili dogs yeah in a manner of speaking does sonic like taking in his tails oh get out of town come on get out of town we're over here talking about real life i thought we were talking about uh gears of war judgment so how was the how is the game so i actually i feel a little bit torn about it because so the campaign the story is a fucking joke frankly like it's you know i never thought the gear stories were all that good and this one

reaches new levels of absurdity and lameness it's just like as straightforward a story as you could possibly imagine uh but the gameplay that they added um is essentially they added this whole scoring system where you're constantly being uh rated based on your performance as you play through the campaign um and so you see these scores uh sort of like you're increasing your star meter essentially and you can increase that faster by adding variables to each little section so for example uh they're called declassified missions and if you take a declassified missions for a given section it might cause fog to roll in and then you can't see very far around you or it might cause more enemies to show up that explode or so on and so forth so they add a bunch of new variables to each of the missions

that are optional but generally you know make you play in a kind of interesting way what i thought was missing was one of the things that i think gears does very well is like these insanely grand scenes where like you're on an airship and other airships are grappling onto your airship and they're sliding down and like the stuff that we saw in tomb raider essentially those crazy set pieces are like a mainstay of gears this gears game has 0.0 of those set pieces really it's like every single that's like all the gears 3 was I know. Every single level is like very standard cover, you know, practically like square environments. Like it's super, super straightforward, which feels like a step in the wrong direction. And honestly, like a lot of this feels like, oh, we only had a year to make this game.

Let's make a relatively simple one. I don't know we only had a year to make this game. Let's make a relatively simple one. I don't know how long it took them to make this game, but you compare this game to, like, Bulletstorm, which people can fly worked on before this, and that game, I think, is tremendous and super original and, like, really set itself apart, whereas this game feels, essentially, like halo odst which is to say a lot of people liked really i lots of people like that yeah okay odst is actually my favorite

you guys you are out of your mind it's got that jazz music oh yeah i can play jazz music i can have a a friend of mine come over and toot on a sax while i play halo 4 yeah but suffice it to say uh i actually really enjoy tom bissell's writing but i didn't really get any of it in this game like nothing stood out to me as like good writing following his kind of it's been a humbling pr tour i feel like for him uh even his most recent interview for the new york times was just admitting that when he wrote extra lives that book that came out a few years ago that he was of the opinion that a good writer could just show up at a video game studio and turn a game around and make it interesting and now he recognizes that that's not true yeah i mean i'd be curious to know like how late into

the process he was brought in and whether he had any control of story elements. Supposedly, he had considerably more control than a writer is normally afforded with a video game. But essentially, if he wanted to... It wasn't just him. There was another writer. I think the writing is fine. I don't think it's not mind-blowing.

When you say writing, let's make it clear are you talking about dialogue are you talking about i'm i'm talking about dialogue and clarity which those are like the low bars which i measure video games writing on and i think it's i can track what is happening in the story which sets it above but if what is happening in the story is essentially there's a missile and they need it to blow up a giant spider i don't think that's too hard to convey to make it simple is still i appreciate that more than the latter which is this is actually about eastern philosophy and if you read the three comic books that came out beforehand you'd know that he's actually your sister and yeah whatever that we should mention the uh it is just when when we

joke about rashomon the idea is that it's a it's a military tribunal that's happening while the war is still raging and you get four versions of sort of the same story and there's a lot of interesting playing on the idea of how when people tell stories uh they're not always necessarily true or just precise and that's where that classified or is it declassified that's how it's called that what's interesting about that idea is that the story itself is slightly changing when you choose those missions it's like oh i remembered uh actually there were this many this type of enemies there i'd forgotten that or actually there was a hammer of dawn strike

and we had to get out of there in two minutes and what's really good about those that don't that doesn't exist in the curious games until now is they actually give stakes uh for every single scene instead of being like well here's another hallway just keep moving forward usually that tiny little bit of dialogue is like here's why and not only that it gives you because of the scoring mechanic it gives you a reason to care about all of the things that you're doing at any given moment it's not just like like if there's only one guy left in previous gears games you would like just fuck around and not even worry about it but here you're like oh i need to get another headshot to complete this mission and it sort of adds an extra layer layer of like interest and strategy to the combat so i like that like i thought that was a really smart idea do you guys feel like and this this

could just be the circles that i i dwell in but do you feel like there is a resounding sense of apathy for this game? Yes. That it is not getting people fired up whatsoever? Yeah, I think everyone realizes what this game is, which is to say Microsoft realized how long it would be until the next Gears game came out after 3. And they're like, no, no, no, that will not do. How can we get one out in a year and a half and yeah i'm careful to speculate like that i i i also don't know if there's apathy i'd really wait to see what the sales are because i didn't think it was that popular and its sales were

i mean insane i would just say apathy in comparison to what like an actual sequel i think the bigger thing is the type of people who are very jazzed about video games right now have a number of other things to be much more excited about which is a tomb raider reboot a bioshock infinite and the absolute gobs of indie games that have been coming out over the past two months so i feel like there just hasn't been a lot of room for people to get excited about something that is i just when i finished gears three which was a fucking long campaign yeah like i just didn't have any more interest i could see them maybe releasing something like this between two and three or between one and two but after three

and its conclusion is half-baked as it was like i just and it's not just narrative it's just i shot fucking a billion locusts already like i have done that so many times in every conceivable way like the scoring stuff sounds cool but that just sounds like yeah i don't know that just sounds like a mode on a game i've already played it's essentially the same feeling that i had with regards to the mass effect 3 dlc i try not to set a double standard when it comes to gears because i like i play call of duty every year and of course i only enjoy it for about a month before you know fucking everybody is like cyborgs at it but i i and and i i'm not saying there's any more variation there than

there is in in gears i just i don't know i guess it's just it's i guess i'm frustrated because it these guys just made what i thought was one of the most inventive and like subversively uh interesting first-person shooters yep in bullet storm like and and a lot of people never got past the outs outer layer of bullet storm which was just that sort of like the marketing bro the market yeah the market which is bro dude explosion when when the game itself was actually kind of a i don't know not a satire of that. That's giving it too much credit, but it was definitely subversive though. It was definitely a subversive game and it was interesting.

And it was like, and then for them to make, I mean, it's just, I cannot think of anything less interesting to use this guy's talent on. Like I cannot think of anything less inspiring than listen, we got a brand. We can't, we don't want to do another marcus

venus game let's get like really out there and find the other white dude in this team and just really blow it out and it's like oh i know people like gears cool but like something in i mean i was done with gears halfway through gears three i didn't finish gears 3 i thought it was a snooze and a half so obviously i am biased in whether or not i think gears is a good application of the talents of these guys who just made this game i really like but i i just it's so i don't know it bums me so hard that that this is what they're working on yeah to dig into the writing really quick comparing those two i don't know who wrote Bulletstorm. Remender. I forget.

He wasn't involved in this game. He's a comic book writer. But that writing, it was so trashy, but there were moments of just brilliance. It was actually funny a lot of of the time which is unusual uh it was a little offensive but there's a moment towards the end of the game where i don't know if you remember this but there's a bomb that you're trying to prevent from detonating and you like stop it and then go on to fight some boss and then you just wind up in the exact same room with the exact same bomb and there's a self-aware moment where

they're like oh crap we just have to do this again like it was such a slam on itself in video games i don't know i i just loved that um let's let's move on let's i don't i'm just i'm even bored with the combo let's talk about something really happy like walking dead i love that show oh you mean the telltale game i love yeah this is the awesome telltale game right how is walking i played walking dead it's how is clementine great great great she is better than ever i i really i think walking dead is great walking is a great game why are we bringing it up uh the only way this survival instinct game would be better is if the first thing you do is shoot Clark Dunham. Oh, Survival Instinct?

No, that's a bad game. That's different. Let's make it clear that this is our halftime because I don't want people saying, I thought you were only going to talk about the best games. This is not the best game. This is not. This is what I did yesterday at 8.30 a.m. I drove to Walmart and I bought Survival Instinct.

It was $50. So $10 off? That's not bad 10 bucks off so it was 40 on amazon get it um this is a gross gross cat have you ever have you ever have you ever played walking dead and thought this is pretty good but i wish instead of one of the few interesting minority characters in any video game ever i wish i was a neo-nazi because that is the experience the walking dead survival instinct delivers to you it is a first-person shooter, I guess, not really a shooter, where you are Daryl trying to rescue Merle, your brother, Merle Dixon. Man, those fucking parents couldn't do anything with that. Is Daryl the gentleman with the crossbow? Yes, Daryl's the one with the crossbow.

Were their parents like wild boars, and it's just the noises that they make? So I wrote a whole review. I'm sure you guys have read it at this point. So why don't you, instead of me just like going on and on about this game, what questions do you have for me? How is the crossbow gameplay? Okay, so the crossbow is introduced about two-thirds into the game. You get the crossbow and no bullshit, I found eight arrows.

Well, you can just keep taking them out of the zombie's head, right? You can, and that's actually an effective, like, that's what you kind of have to do. But, like, you're not going to always hit a zombie, and sometimes you're going to fly over a roof or whatever. Or you're going to have to run because sometimes you're just getting swarmed with zombies. Speaking of which, when you get swarmed with zombies you uh you they grab you and then you hover your cursor over their head and pull right sugar and it instantly kills them but then they you just get grabbed by the very next zombie so uh you just get passed from zombie to zombie and it's actually the most effective way to kill a crowd of zombies so the secret

this game is like oh my god i'm getting chased by zombies round them up into a big herd of zombies and then stand in the middle let it wash over you it's like you're at a wedding and you're doing like a dance circle yes exactly they're like go justin go justin go while you're stabbing them in the head um so that stinks the crossbow is actually kind of, I kind of liked the, the mechanic of, it's kind of a neat mechanic of like, I'm going to kill this guy and this guy and this guy, but I have to remember like what I did with my ammo. Like I have to go back and retrieve all of it.

Um, that's kind of interesting. The problem with the, the, like the combat part, there's lots of problems the problem with the combat part is that you there are three levels of like weapon damage of melee weapon damage right light medium and and heavy um and the only way to kill someone with a firearm is to put the reticle on their head and then shoot so you do that with a uh that's choose the crossbow or the shotgun or the rifle or the pistol i mean it's like it's all the same that's what you do that is the thing that you do but this is a first person shooter right like the way you're describing it is almost like like the shitty aiming in the walking dead telltale game but i mean the aiming

is is not the problem it's it's the fact that so that if you use a firearm, let's say I have like a semi automatic rifle. Right. Let's say I have a bolt action rifle. I put I pointed a zombie's head. Yeah. Then I fire it and hopefully we'll hit the zombie. Firearms work from an unpredictable distance. So they work from different distances. So you'd never know sort of how that's's true to life though of course it is uh and then but but like

once you do it you in theory pull a horde of zombies so which once you're in that situation no weapon is really effective other than letting yourself get grabbed by a crowd problem with it is the melee weapons are, have a much bigger reticle. And all you have to do is get it near the head of the zombie and then pull the right trigger. So that takes two hits with a lead pipe, which you find about a second level or so.

And that takes one hit with a fire ax, which I found about halfway through. So basically it was just a fire axe simulator where i was a third person fire axer first person fire axer where i just went from got due to do chopping their head off very methodically guns also attract the zombies right so like there's double there's double yeah no no there's double incentive there's double and there's not a lot of ammo um and if you are behind a zombie then you can do a stealth kill on them so so a lot of times the best the best play for a single zombie that has spotted

you is to wait till they get close shove them then run around behind them and pull off the stealth move to execute them um there's the the interesting like the thing that's frustrating about it is that it's just clearly underfunded and rushed and not something that they put that not terminal reality i'm sure they could have done better with more resources let me give you an example of an interesting idea the game is about a journey south so you stop at uh you at major cities or whatever along the way. And usually it's to get a new car because yours is busted up or to pick someone up or to get supplies or whatever. So you go south. There's actually branching paths.

So on your way down, you can choose one way or the other. It's all going the same direction. But if you replay, you can do a different level. And there's a gas meter for your car that you're driving, and you can actually find gas in the levels. So if you drive on backwoods, you use more gas, but there's a higher chance that you'll stop to scavenge.

And what that means is, you'll randomly stop, you'll end up in this small zombie-infested area, and you can run around and grab all the supplies that you can find. That's what scavenging is. Can you define

scavenge for me? No, no, no. It's important that you understand this. So, you can also take highways. Highways use Can you define scavenge? No, no, no. It's important that you understand this. Okay? So you can also take highways. Highways use less gas, but there's less chance that you'll stop to scavenge and more chance that your car will break down. Yeah. If your car breaks down, you stop in a small area that's full of zombies

and littered with supplies. You grab as many supplies as you can and also make sure you grab the part for your broken down car if you run out of gas you stop in a small area full of zombies you grab as many supplies as you can and you also make sure you get gas so these are either way it's all supermarket sweep like no matter yeah and they're often the same maps. So, like, if you run out of gas, you stop and get more supplies. If you take the highways instead of the back roads, then you won't get to scavenge, but your car breaks down, which is literally the exact same thing. The only difference is you have to find the one part you need, which your compass points you directly to, and then return to your car.

With scavenging, you can return to your car at any time. That's it. Okay. It's practically all the same thing. And even this, sorry, you also get, you can also rescue survivors in the middle levels, and they are, they'll follow along with you, and at the beginning of the following level, after you save them, you can send them out at the beginning of the level to find you gas or food or ammo.

We've already discussed why ammo and gas are useless, so I was sending them to food, which you need to replenish your health. It's actually just sports drinks and MREs. That's all the Dixon boys get into. So you send them to go find you more sports drinks and mres that sounds accurate though that sounds it is talking monster we talking you can what are we talking about no no it's just like like lime gatorade so you you uh you can send them out

you can actually arm them with a weapon and then you see a percentage chance that they'll come back alive if they come back alive their their energy will be low and the way you fill it is gatorade gatorade and mre so so basically thanks for this shit you just found i guess it would be great if you want to just eat that and live longer yeah but do they level up no no nothing like that no no and if they die your weapon's's gone forever. But they have different characteristics. Some are riskier, and you can send a whole party of people to do something, and that actually lowers the danger.

Will one of them go home and accidentally start a prostitution ring in his parents' house? No. What? I'd imagine the riskiest person would do that. Oh, God. No, none of that happens. And then fuck on a train. I'd imagine the riskiest person would do that Oh god No none of that happened

And then fuck on a train It's got those interesting ideas It's just like I said It's like I said in the review There are mechanics but there's no systems Like nothing works together Like nothing's I don't know.

It also has kind of an interesting thing where if you beat the game with certain qualifiers, like sometimes it's having one survivor still alive or a certain survivor, then you can get different unlocks like infinite ammo or move faster or whatever for your next playthrough. So when you want to dip back in it does it does it tie it does it act how much of like a story supplement to the tv show is it is

it because it like i remember playing lost viadomus which was largely a giant turd but then at the end of it you're like oh there's a there's a few lost secrets in here that I'll be able to talk to my friends about because of the secrets. Nothing like that in Walking Dead? I can't tell you the ending. Okay. But if I did. Why can't you tell us the ending? Okay.

Give me one minute to spoil the ending for you if you're listening right now. It is not a very good ending. So he hears about evacuation choppers. Daryl does. it to spoil the ending for you if you're listening right now it is not a very good ending so he hears about evacuation choppers daryl does merle has been mia except for two levels i do not and he is not in those levels for the first one he has a fever and for the second one he's on a roof merle has been a completely afk there's two evacuation choppers and they're they're taking off right and they're sworn with zombies and merle pulls up to the where the evacuation chopper is in like a giant humvee with a mounted assault rifle on the top and you shoot a thousand zombies and he's like

daryl's like thank you merle you saved me and daryl hops on this helicopter to be evacuated and merle pulls him off the helicopter and says i don't know it looked like the pilot was turning so i'm looking out for you and then they both get in the car and drive away that's like that's like the last episode of house pretty much the same thing it's really not that far off it's that's the end of the game you don't learn there's no characterization the only i mean there there are some very sparse in-game conversations with people um and and really like the i guess the least interesting thing about from a character perspective is that the walking dead for these two characters daryl specifically has

really been about how he changed from a piece of shit into someone more caring so this is a whole game where by definition he can't evolve so he's just kind of a piece of shit and merle's also a piece of shit and enjoy your game i guess yeah so it's just redneck Rampage, basically. If only it were, Griffin. If only it were. Well, that is disheartening. Yeah. It's shitty and desperate. Let's talk about a better game. Let's talk about Ghosts.

Let's talk about Spectres. Warren Spectre. What's he up to? But no, that's a good joke. No, let's talk about Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon. So who else has played it who's i played it i haven't played it but i have a lot of questions about it okay well let me let me set it up first um we'll go we'll go sort of pros and cons because i think that's the best way

to talk about it um mechanically like the controls they they've added a lot of stuff they haven't even added a lot of stuff they've added a few things that have completely turned it around like in the first game you did you have to shine your flashlight on the ghost before you sucked them up i don't think i never played the first game okay so okay well then maybe god maybe i need to go back even further so in the first game first game, you were told that you won this mansion in a contest that you didn't enter. You went to it. Wait, I was told this or Luigi was told this? Luigi was.

You go to it and she gets crazy because there's ghosts up in it. Yeah. And there were several types of ghosts. The basic gameplay was there were these boss ghosts that were the denizens of the mansion who had more like human characteristics like you would go into a nursery and there would be a baby ghost and you had to figure out what you needed to do to make that baby ghost catchable like maybe you had to shake one of his toys and no god it's already a ghost all right you can't kill it again um so like you had to pick up one of its toys and hit the hit the baby

ghost with it and you could enter into the fight or like there's a ghost that is obsessed with itself in the mirror and you like open a window so like a gust of wind starts blowing her hair around she gets up to close the window and then she's she's like vulnerable to be vacuumed wind affects ghosts yeah it's you know let's can we okay i'm sorry i'm talking about that all day getting stuck in the nitty-gritty so there was that there were booze that were hidden all what like whiskey and vodka oh god are you sorry do you mean like just the sound like like if you open a door you find no he means boo the ghost the ghost oh boohoo the mario ghost oh wow

there were those hidden all over that you had to find um which you had like a little radar thing on your game boy color which was your radar in the game um and then there were just sort of general monster ghosts that would just sort of attack you in the hallway um and then there were just sort of general monster ghosts that would just sort of attack you in the hallway that you had to suck up that didn't involve like much much puzzling um and so in in luigi's mansion dark moon there is a much much much much bigger emphasis on that last kind of ghost it's's just, like, the monster ghost that jumps up, and you have to be quick on the trigger to, to vacuum it, um, which works, because the, instead of just, like, aiming and vacuuming, and then pulling away from the ghost to kill it, you now have, like, a few other things you have to do. Like, you have a strobe light on your, uh, flashlight that you carry around. You

have to, like, flash the ghost to stun it and then you can vacuum it down or you can charge it and stun like a whole room full of ghosts if you aim well and then vacuum them all down um basically is mario in this game i'm not gonna tell you that this is a colossal spoiler um griffin i think you should lay out the storyline though because i think people are really curious why he's back in the mansion well that's the thing there is like almost no setup for it there is this there's a dark moon that keeps all the ghosts like docile it's not a literal moon it's moon shaped yeah but it's not like the moon it casts some light but it's not the moon uh king boo comes breaks that shit and then you have to

go find all the pieces of it and luigi like there's no like i want a mansion like the professor from the first game is just like hey get the fuck back here there's ghosts again yeah and then you go and then you do that um basically like if i were to summarize what it is like what it means as a sequel it like the action adventure blend of the first game it i feel like it leaned a little heavier on the adventure and the puzzling and sort of the cerebral figuring out how to catch the ghosts in this one it's just more on the action side and there's still puzzles there's still like some of the boss fights are really clever um but mostly it's about they will throw five ghosts at you and you have to catch them without dying like i don't think i ever died

in the first game in this one several times like there's a pretty big difficulty spike how canadian does it feel it doesn't there's not an overabundance of canadian i would say of all of the mario characters luigi is probably the most canadian sure sure seems like a fair um they're like it really i don't want to undersell this point because like the first game was really clunky like the controls were um and in this one like that combination of you know having to flash the thing and then vacuum it down and while you're doing that and while you're pulling them in, like avoiding the other three ghosts in the room, because they're almost always are, um,

it, it works and like, it feels great. And a lot of that was engineered for the game's multiplayer component. Yeah. Um, which is, is,

is pretty fun. Like it's, it's basically the same experience as the core game. It's, you know, you're walking around a bunch of rooms. There's a, you know,

often a lot of ghosts that you have to take down with the help of your friends. And like, it works and maybe it would not have worked if it was sort of more of that cerebral experience at the first game. Yeah. Well, the multiplayer is probably what I spent the most time with.

And I liked it. It almost had that space team, some like space teamy feel to it just because there was a lot of like well shouting like oh my god i'm in this room i'm stuck in a rug so while you're talking about that there are the online multiplayer there is online multiplayer and local multiplayer and also the local multiplayer has download play so if you're the only one with the cartridge you can share it with other people which i actually tried and it works really well yeah um the online multiplayer has no voice chat as far as i can tell unless i was missing the voice chat button which i i'm almost certain i did not um and it basically makes it impossible you have four commands that you can press that makes luigi shout like hey or help

and those are like it needs like a come the fuck over here like that's what i specifically i think i wrote that in my first review draft was i would happily exchange the hey button for hey you fucking idiot i'm over here there's a mode called rush mode so there's a hunter mode which is basically like the core game. Like you have to kill or, sorry, vacuum all the ghosts on that floor and then move on, and then there's the occasional boss, and you have to work together. Then there's a mode called Rush Mode where you have 30 seconds

to run around an entire floor of this mansion looking for the exit. And you can find, if you kill all the ghosts in a room, you get a 10 second expansion so basically all four players need to run in opposite directions find the exit like while they're running still you know vacuuming up ghosts so they can extend the time and then everybody has to get to the exit before time runs out i played this maybe four or five times never made it past the first no it's always because three people make right but you played it in the same room with people yeah and even then it was difficult yeah well you could grab somebody by the hair and say fucking look where i am look where i am we had three people all standing on the exit by the hair

three people all standing on the exit all three of us shouting hey hey help and like the guy just like fucking didn't get it like waited in the next room until time ran out it was the most frustrating thing ever also online multi doesn't have persistent lobbies so once a game ends you have to go find a game again it's kind of fun when you're playing with when the game's not released yet it's also it's also more fun when the round you just played lasted 30 goddamn seconds. But all things considered, like, the multi didn't feel as much like an unnecessary appendage as I thought. And I can see how the game was sort of tailored to allow it,

and, like, that sacrifice was not completely unjustified. Yeah, I think I would say that there's basically no reason to play online, but for local multiplayer, it's quite good. Well, some of them, like the hunter mode works fine online. Like sometimes it sucks. Yeah, but even then it's like a lot of the fun of it is like coordinating with people and you really can't coordinate online. Yeah.

So to, one of the other things that has made that that like you can tell they tailored the game was they they it's all mission based now which i guess is because that kind of compartmentalized game works better on a portable on a handheld um it's probably also a lot easier to develop i would imagine maybe but the missions are all 20 to 30 minutes long which is not bite-sized by any means unless you take a shitload of time to chew your food like it's the missions are long and but but what sucks and and let me be clear because the first game had like these mandatory points where you had to go back to the lab and empty out your vacuum and do all this stuff but they were not nearly this frequent but more importantly it's not the stopping and starting that sucks it's the fact that the missions themselves are the most like frustrating they

have taken every cue from the book of bad game design like there are so many fetch quests there are escort missions there is towards the end of the game a instant fail timed mission that is like the difficulty spikes a thousand percent out of nowhere and like made me want to probably stop playing the game and tell arthur like i just wasn't going to review it like it it gets really hairy not only that but like it's so fucking repetitive every there's like every chapter if will, takes place in a different level, and there are five or six or four different missions inside that level. In each one of those chapters, there will be a point where you have to find, like, a crank or a key

or these parts of a windmill to open up the door to the next area. You will find it it in the very next mission ghost will fucking steal it ghost will fucking steal it and then you have to go back and get that thing again that happens literally in every chapter and by the sixth chapter like you get a key and you're like well bye friend like it was fun having you but i know a ghost or a dog or i'll drop you in a grate or like something is going to happen where i'm just gonna have to track it down again yeah luigi is is pretty clumsy, I would say. Yeah, but and ghosts are dicks and like they'll steal your shit.

But fucking put it in your pocket. That's really all you have to do. But ghosts can just reach through your pocket. I guess. Yeah, that's true. That's a fact. Yeah. Yeah.

By the way, if Griffin and I are discussing ghosts, DM, DM, DM. Again, trademark my brother, my brother, me, 2013. It's a little thing, I guess, because ultimately you're still completing missions and catching ghosts no matter what. You just want some reason to be. Some variation, yeah. Not only that, the ghosts themselves have no character whatsoever, which is probably the most disheartening part to me i just wish that they would go like tie into the like nintendo pantheon more it's not that it's it's so the first game like i mentioned like you go into the nursery and there's a baby

ghost and you have to solve the puzzle of the nursery to figure out how to catch the baby ghost right and then there's there's the mom ghost and then there's like the puzzle of the nursery to figure out how to catch the baby ghost, right? And then there's the mom ghost, and then there's, like, the, you know, whatever, the grandpa ghost. There are these different ghost characters, and what they are and what their setting is, like, informs what you have to do to solve their puzzle to catch them. In this, the bosses are like identical they are these poltergeists that take over these different menacing objects that you then have to defeat and like the bosses are all different let me be clear like the boss fights are all different some of them are like legit puzzles some of them are just like pattern recognition and then figuring

out how to beat them but there's not that sense of like it's not as engrossing it's not like okay i'm in a ballroom like there are these two dancer ghosts i have to catch what do i do with that which i guess like it does again it doesn't sound like a little thing it just like takes away from a lot of the the charm and the atmosphere thinking a lot less it's more you're just reacting. Yeah, it's like the first game was this, it was a lot more puzzle-driven. And in this game, it's much more action-driven. And though they have fixed it in every conceivable way, they didn't pay attention to what was so great

about the first game, which was how atmospheric it was and how memorable it was like yeah and i think that that the biggest shame is regardless of how you know competent the multiplayer is and how it's been tailored for this multiplayer platform and how great the action is i don't think when the game was announced at whatever e3 or gamescom last year i don't think when the game was announced people got e3 or gamescom last year i don't think when the game was announced people got excited because they were like oh well maybe they'll fix the ghost combat this time around you know what i mean they got excited because like the first game was this

really charming not terrible side story in the mario universe that had like just so much character yeah and i i think that a lot of that is lost here. Maybe because they didn't have to adapt it to English this time. Do you think? What do you mean? What? Well, the first game was developed in Japan, right? Right.

It was probably sent through Treehouse, and Treehouse does all sorts of weird storytelling things. Are you sure about that? Because this was Canada. Was Treehouse doing that back in you know 2000 well not only that has been doing that since the gb i don't think it's even relevant because like it's not like the game i don't think localization would have changed certainly not how the game plays that's how no treehouse they do localization they do the dialogue and all that stuff

the story i will say like there's some of that there's some of that stuff like the boos all have the word boo in their name somehow and they all have like the best boo puns like ever um like some of that shines through but like it's not it's really isn't an issue of localization because like there are no ghost characters to you're saying these the ghosts don't have enough soul right that's really good that's really good like i feel like i'm splitting hairs i'm like i feel like this is a kind of criticism that people fucking hate because i'm actually saying that they fixed a lot of things about the game while like i didn't get better i didn't get as symptom it's not that it's it could be better it's that they sat they give you that that nintendo feeling right like right a little a little squeeze on your heart i it's just it's not as memorable as the first gamecube game was which like won't mean a lot of things like it

won't mean much to people but i i i feel like that's what set the original luigi's mansion apart and that people are going to like if you were a fan of luigi's mansion i feel like i don't know you're gonna miss that you're gonna miss that charm for lack of a better word does it have any waluigi no no i don't have the spoilers god why would i play this game it does have a dog that's a ghost um that will revive you if you find a golden bone which um you you have to sometimes because some of the missions are so fucking hard you guys yeah i've got a golden bone right here all right can we end the show i don't want to hear please honest talking yep yep okay so here's the deal uh Chris Plant and I, well, Justin and Griffin are heading up to PAX East this weekend. Yeah, if you're there

and come on, say hi. Saturday at 12.30, Sunday at 12.30, Arachnid. I'll be there discussing games journalism in the first one. Snore. And then I'll be hanging out with Gamers for Jobs on Sunday,

talking about why we game, even though we're old men. 12.30, Arachnid. Yeah. If you're in Arachnid and it's 12.30 and I'm not there, it's Friday. Whereas in this podcast, it's not Friday. That's a shit way to tell time, by the way. You've got to come up with something better than that. Chris Plant and I will be at

GDC all next week. Bioshock's out next week, but I don't think we're going to talk about it next week, because we really want to get deep in it. That's next week, and by that, we don't know, but it'll be what you've come to expect. Yeah, so make sure to

join us again then on Friday Night for the Besties! Because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best game? Besties!