The Besties - The Besties Podcast 54 - The awkward episode

Episode Date: April 27, 2013

Griffin couldn't help himself. Drunk off back to back wins, the Brother McElroy brought one of the most awkward topics to date. This business. I believe we discussed the topic with the greatest amount of grace and respect afforded a podcast that occassionally stars a talking giraffe. Speaking of, a certain Long Island zoo animal made an unexpected experience, uncovering Microsoft's elaborate plan to run his uncle out of business. I talk Monaco. Justin talks Star Trek. And Frushtick talks talking blocks. All that and more on this week's Besties. 2:30 - Best Star Trek game of the month (Star Trek) 13:15 - Best acting by a rectangle (Thomas Was Alone) 20:20 - Half time: The Pizza Hut app and special guest 26:30 - Best REDACTED ever (Dragon's Crown) 39:50 - Best love letter to Bonanza Bros. (Monaco) 46:30 - The winner is... 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!

Let me bounce this question off you, though, because I just started playing Dark Arisen after your constant recommendation. And is there any way to tell before getting into a fight with a monster whether or not it is so strong that it will be able to just tear your dick right off and put it on the ground?

No, you just got to put your dick out there and hope for the best. Because I just got a mission to go fight some monsters in a well, and I jumped down the well, and before my feet touched the bottom of the well, my dick had been just destroyed. Is that a common special ability for the monsters?

Yeah. Once a monster gets above level 50, genital mutilation is the main arrow in their quiver. So they're like moils? How do you look at a monster in Dragon's Abma and go, are you the dick-ripping kind? I will tell you. No, it's very obvious.

Yeah, you're obviously the better choice. If he has a yarmulke and a small blade in his hand. Okay, well, now you're doing Jewish gags. Nobody's going to get those in the flyer stakes. That's true. See, I'm trying to broaden the horizons. But our demo is firmly in the bread basket. That's true. See, I'm trying to broaden the horizons. But our demo is firmly in the bread basket. Yep.

My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the week. Oh, you caught it. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the week. My name is Christopher Plant, and I know the best thing of the week. My name is Russ Frustig, and I know the best thing of the week. This is the Besties, where we talk about the very latest and greatest in culture. Frustik, shut up. Is Frustik sick? No, I'm just speaking very softly.

Okay. Are you recording in a library? No, I just thought it would be a nice change of pace to maybe dial it down a little bit. Are you dying? He asked, fingers crossed. Fingers crossed that you're not dying. That you're not dying. He said, fingers crossed.

Boy, howdy. What a week. What a week of games. It's been busy. Justin, can you start? Because I'm just so excited to hear you talk about your thing uh yeah the best star trek game of the month oh no is star trek the game of the month uh i mean i'm a politician i don't know if i i really i don't know if any other game that has the word star or trek are being released this month, because if so, this will almost certainly be usurped. Uh, but Star Trek, the game is,

is really, really, really, really terrible. It's really very bad. I remember seeing the announcement of this game. Was it last E3 that it was announced? I think so. I think maybe two E3s ago. It's been a while. It's a Namco bandai published joint right oh yeah and i used it as like this was when dark souls just came out and uh ace combat 6 just came out and i was like they're fucking turning it around and then this star trek trailer came out and i thought it looked kind of dope yeah it kind of looked okay yeah you know it it's it's really

the problems start conceptually i mean i'm not the world's biggest Star Trek fan, right? I've seen the movies. I've watched a good amount of Next Generation. I'm not like a hardcore fan. But like, I understand enough to know that the idea of a third person shooter where you're killing a bunch of people is like not Star Trek. I mean, Star Trek is about, I mean, it's, it's always,

I mean, since its inception, it's been about equality and pushing for like social justice and stuff. Not if you're a Klingon. Not, yeah. Well, I mean,

even they patched it up, but they built some bridges there. Yeah. And then they blew shit up. But this game, like if you look at Star Trek, the 25th anniversary, that is kind of like a cool adventure game where phasers were like a rarity.

This is a game where you're pitted against an alien race called the Gorn, who are from the classic show. Oh, really? With the cannon? What? Where he shoots the cannon and it kills the Gorn? Is that that one? I don't know.

I never watched it. Does it look like a lizard? Yeah, it's like a lizard. Yeah, okay. So apparently in the original show, Captainirk uh played by william shatner handcrafts a cannon as in a like physical shooting cannonballs thing out of like wood and rocks and such and shoots it into the body of a lizard man and it's sort of like a memorable moment okay so imagine that memorable moment repeated 300 000 times uh and uh for about 12 hours and there's your video game so like there's that it's like that

conceptually it's crazy like it has nothing there's no i mean there's like there's exploration only that you can point your tricorder at things and get experience points like it's not i know yeah i know uh there's an upgrade for you you can you can fire your phaser on kill with right trigger and you can fire on stun with right bumper uh and there's an upgrade to your stun setting that knocks out every enemy with a single shot oh very handy so that's good that doesn't mess anything up so are you only fighting the gorn are you fighting others well you're fighting the gorn or are you fighting others? Well, you're fighting the Gorn and you're also fighting

crew members that have been infected by the Gorn. Okay. How do you get infected by sleeping with them? They already have the character models lying around so they just like... Right. Did they... How do you get infected by a lizard? They stab you with a giant needle. Oof. Do they just get scaly and shit?

Their eyes get yellow and then they try to kill you and the whole time they're trying to kill you they say things like, please don't shoot back I have a family! I'm doing this against my will! Pretty harsh. Did they say this? Bummer. That's what they say. That's not a goof.

Those are the things they say. That's horrifying. There's an enterprise level where you're like, you know, you're piloting the most iconic vessel in all of science fiction. And it is a turret sequence where you're just like targeting enemies and firing at them. And it's so bad. They do it for like a level and it's never, it's like never acknowledged that that happened. Like it's not a mechanic they crafted and repeated.

It's just like checked off a bullet point of the list. So it sounds to me like this is a game that any Star Trek fan would love. Yeah. So far it doesn't, like, is the shooting shitty? Is there, what's, so far you've described a game that sort of doesn't match the Star Trek aesthetic, but I don't know why it deserved that harsh, harsh three you stamped on it. The whole thing is

so... First off, it's repetitive. You're just shooting dudes. College is duty. Yeah, okay. Everything is broken. That's the other thing about it. Everything is broken. For instance, I'm going to give you a few good ones. There's a prompt early in the game

there's a prompt for how to do a stealth attack. You sneak up behind a dude and and you know tap X to but like there's no reason you would ever want to sneak up behind somebody because you can stun them and then just walk up to them and incapacitate them. If you do that when the prompt is up that explains how to incapacitate somebody without stunning you do that, when the prompt is up that explains how to incapacitate somebody without stunning them, that prompt just stays there. Because you didn't do it.

It just stays on the screen. They're punishing you. I had to turn the game off and turn it back on to make that prompt go away. There is one point where you are having to... Kirk is injured and Sp you are having to, like, Kirk is injured and Spock is trying to help him.

So Kirk is, like, on Spock's arm, so you're controlling both of them. And the controls are nightmarish because they didn't animate turning. So it's like, you can turn forward and you can't back up at all. You hit back

and it's like, I don't know what you're talking about so that those controls are like terrible you're moving at negative speed uh and the uh the woman from the ship who's giving you an instruction says uh use your tricorder i've highlighted the exit that you cannot take out your tricorder while you're holding kirk that is is a non-starter and so because you can't take out your tricorder you don't know where you're holding kirk that is is a non-starter and so because you can't take out your tricorder you don't know where you're supposed to go so i'm in this giant room hauling kirk at about like 0.2 miles per hour while lizards shoot at me and i have no idea where i'm going i'm just wandering around this level and there are several times like that where the game would just like break at one point my mission indicator was pointing me at a point like 300 meters behind me the way i just came and it wouldn't fix itself

until i turned the game off and turned it back on that sounds like an arg that sounds like maybe they incorporated those sort of elements as an arg where it's like physical you know i mean like a physical folk game like in order to complete this mission you actually have to do something in real life and that real life thing is ejecting the disc who's to say technology always works you know like right in this fantastic world i mean you can't trust technology you have to trust human instinct that's that's the star trek angle you know what would have been awesome is if at the end of the game, Q popped up and said, get it. And then the game ended. There, that's for a few.

Oh, and the ending is great. The ending's literally like, Kirk's like, get us out of here. And then the screen goes to black and the credits start. Oh, my God. There's no, like, I don't know. Sequel. DLC. Yeah.

It's really bad. I mean, to, to give you some perspective, like we didn't get sent this game. No one got sent this game. It didn't unlock for, uh, reviewers,

um, on steam before the release. Like they were really hoping to squeeze out a few sales. I think before, uh, before word got out because it is it is a turd have you seen the television commercials uh yes they're atrocious they're the ones where kirk is fighting the gorn and they do that yeah where you cheap out and you pay only

for standard definition commercials during like hd tv. So you're watching like a basketball game, like, you know, gorgeous HD, and then it cuts to a commercial and it's like this grainy, hideous looking monstrosity of a commercial for a video game and all the text is blurry and they're like, I'm sorry that they don't have enough money to put up a fucking 4K TV spot for you. I got to get my hd i guess it's uh yeah so that's i mean i it's just it doesn't seem like it would be how no i take it back it would be hard to make a decent licensed star trek game that's what i want to know it's called ftl it's available on steam right now that would have been better than this i'll tell you the other

problem that they're up against and i completely get this is that there was already a great star trek game and it was called mass effect i mean that's yeah that's your great star trek game if i mean and if they had just cribbed that sure but no one will ever invest that kind of money into a licensed game because they don't need to right also they're on the time crunch if they're trying to tie it into a movie or something i i i completely but that but even with that like that movie's not going to be out for a month or so also there's no benefit like mass effect ea owns that property they invest heavily into it because they want to own it why would you want to put that much money into something that somebody else owns exactly so like that's always going to be the problem with licensed games.

You know you're going to sell X amount of units with the license, so why invest more into it? Your return on your investment is not going to be worthwhile. Justin, more importantly, how many funny accent gags are there in the game? What do you mean? importantly, how many funny accent gags are there in the game? What do you mean? Because I know almost every Star Trek joke

surrounds around making fun of Chekov and his funny accent, so I'm curious whether any... There are no... Maybe one in the movie did. It's called Nuclear Wessels. Griffin, the most famous Star Trek line ever. There is a tendency, I would say uh it for the game to do this thing where

a character will say something completely obvious like it looks like we're gonna have to shoot these guys and then the other character will point out what an obvious thing that was to say they do this no joke eight at least eight times before i stopped counting because it was so it was like okay again that so that's what we're doing again because no one actually decided to write like dialogue for good point brainiac yeah exactly that's exactly i think a very astute captain like okay i get it yeah well let's talk about something nice yeah it stinks uh i would like to talk about shapes as a matter of fact i'd like to talk about my best thing of the week which is the best acting by a rectangle brought to you by thomas was alone has anyone played thomas was alone i haven't i've

you know i'm always hard up for a ps vita game it's just it doesn't i i don't know why it hasn't really sung to me yet i will tell you why have you started you have you not played it at all i haven't played it at all all i've seen is like screenshots screenshot no i've seen video of it played and like it just kind of looks like a floaty it looks like the a really hardcore platformer puzzler that just doesn't i don't know i don't know yeah it's me so here's the thing no when you look at screenshots of this game all you see are these 2d squares and shapes we all know uh justin hates 2d everything um this game relies on 2d graphics and it's sort it looks frankly like in screenshot

form pretty dull um but the way it plays out uh griffin's right it's essentially a platform puzzle game and you're controlling different sized squares with different attributes so one square might be tall and skinny and can jump that's really more of a rectangle, but can jump a lot higher and farther than the others. And you sort of use these shapes to navigate the environment and solve puzzles. So they're like boxes? Yeah, they're boxes, essentially, different sized boxes. Now while this is going on, there's a constant narration or dialogue going on, almost like Portal or something of that nature,

where you're hearing a story being told from the perspective of these boxes. For example, the game starts, and you're playing as this red rectangle named Thomas. Pretty sure he's red. I'm colorblind, but I assume he's red. Named Thomas. And they say, like, well, it's voiced in a british accent uh

and he says well thomas was alone today and he was very sad about that and then slowly but surely you as you meet different squares each of them has their own personality and like there's the snarky square and let's confidence square now how did these boxes talk without mouths so they're not talking so much as the narrator is saying well thomas was thinking that red rectangle is a fucking jerk so the boxes aren't actually acting because they're not talking no they are acting how are they acting because they are you know in the way that you might have a narrator of a silent movie but all the silent movie actors are still acting how they don't have any limbs or right emotions no extreme and yet without limbs and emotions by the way that's very offensive

because people without limbs still have emotions they manage just few fewer emotions they manage to exude a certain level of personality that one would not expect from different sized rectangles and squares you think that maybe you're just projecting your feelings onto boxes i think maybe these projected these boxes are projecting onto me in what manner explain yourself immediately do you just say things and like not worry if they're true do i or do the boxes he obviously is addressing you i don't even know what are my thoughts and what are the boxes thoughts at this point jesus this game got into you impacted me so deeply they should call it fresh dickic is Alone. Well, that's just life. It's just every day. That's what life is

called. I wake up every morning and I say that. I was alone. Oh. Well, funny you should say that, because I was playing this on Vita on my couch, and my girlfriend is watching TV and not really paying attention. Yeah, you like that? Yeah, girlfriend! I have to own a TV!

So, she looks over and she's like why are you even playing this game and then she hears the narration is half interested and then i screw up and like the red rectangle falls accidentally into some water and she gasps in horror like something horrible has happened to the red rectangle and that honestly says a lot about how much emotional investment one develops with these stupid squares and rectangles i mean you've obviously shared with your girlfriend your your intense love of shapes your intense we've already been there why do you think i'm working for this site i'm a huge fan of shapes to be fair his girlfriend is an art scholar so she has an

unusual high amount of interest in shapes and color i thought you're gonna say his i thought you're gonna say your girlfriend is a rhombus and i would be like that's insane i'm really more of a trapezoid it doesn't it just looks kind it just i don't know i think the jumping download the demo okay i'll do that there's a demo and and if you don't like honestly i i was not super into it when I first started playing, but the tone of it and the way, like, honestly, like, it reminds me a lot of Portal in the sense that Portal, the mechanic of Portal,

especially in Portal 1, is not super, super interesting until towards the end of the game. And that feels like this as well, where it really starts ramping up. Like, the basics are very basic, but you're propelled by the writing which is good and you're also propelled by like you know just like they do like cool environmental stuff and cool a really good ambient soundtrack and my honestly

like green rectangle i don't know what is going to happen to that guy but i'm worried about him like i'm really felt like in that game to me have you ever like you know when you talk on the phone sometimes you like doodle like you enjoy having the conversation but you still kind of like doodle to keep your hands busy like the what do you mean by doodle like when i'm like doodle like like i'm doodling like right now like i'm doodling like a scribble when i like in the bathroom when i'm doodling conversing with somebody i give them the fullness of my attention that's like that's like talking one no but when i'm when i'm on the phone with someone all i'm doing is doodling with my hand yeah yeah you're doodle god he's making a jerk off joke are you okay so when you know how you doodle okay so it was pretty good i thank you

that's what the game reminds me of like the puzzles i don't feel like ever get very complex did you finish the whole game uh i got probably like 75 percent of the way through and oh did you do i need to do i need to finish it the story the story was very interesting but ultimately i got bored okay i mean that's what i say and that's what i would say for the game is i never felt challenged so eventually is like nifty as the story was, it just kind of fell to the wayside. How many of those trophies did you get? I played it on PC. Oh, so no trophies. You would have been way more challenged if you got all the trophies.

Honestly, I think it's really groovy. And especially on the Vita, which is slowly but surely getting a larger lineup, but right now it's still pretty dry in terms of releases. What was that? I think somebody's at the door. One second. Should we pause here? Why is he at the door?

His door is literally right next to his computer. Hey, that's not the door. I'm opening the door. I haven't even got to my chair. That's not your door? Oh, my God. i haven't even that's not that's not your door oh my god that's the window buddy you don't know what the window looks like typically we have the good fortune of having these guests visit like specifically in halftime this is i think the first time that one's just sort of showed up hey it's a good time it's always a good time for me

you know who i am yeah i'm gonna i know? Yeah, I know who the fuck you are. It's me. It's New York Giraffe. Hey, besties. How you doing? Hey, Russ, are you not upset that New York Giraffe just interrupted you? No, it's totally cool. I don't mind that at all.

Honestly, we're buds. Yeah, are you? Yeah, me, New York Giraffe. Me and Russ are the best of friends. Wait, you two used to be in a show choir together, right? No. Maybe you two could sing one of your famous songs. Sing one of your songs and make sure that you really nail

the harmonies. What else is going to be drinking water while I sing? How was that? Besties, I'm sorry to derail whatever you guys were talking about with the shapes and such. I want to talk about something. It's very near and dear to my heart. whatever you guys were talking about with the shapes and such. I want to talk about

something. It's very near and dear to my heart. Have you guys heard about this Pizza Hut app on the Xbox? There's so many problems. Pizza wouldn't be a thing that giraffes eat. How would a giraffe use an Xbox controller?

What are you trying to say? I can't eat pizza just because I'm a giraffe? No. well what kind of pizza not only racist but fully incorrect not only can i eat pizza my uncle on long island makes pizza okay is your uncle also giraffe based of course he's giraffe based he's my uncle okay enjoy it's a good and why else why else do you think he lives on long island well i thought you maybe you were... I don't want to get fucking too sensitive on this show, but I thought you were adopted since you speak English like a human being. You know what I mean?

You know why it's called Long Island. I'm more educated than others. We're not all just eating grass off trees. Guys, guys, you do know why it's called Long Island. I do, but I'm going to let you have the pleasure of saying why. Yeah, everybody knows. It was uh founded by uh giraffe immigrants and it was named after the length of their necks yeah thank you so you might be confused because long island goes sideways but it actually originally was vertical up and down for giraffe neck it moved away because of the glaciers okay sure i will yes okay um tell me anyway my

my uncle enzo who owns a pizza place out long island that's racist but go on has has been making pizza for years and and pizza hut comes in here and is like hey we're gonna own all the xbox marketplace yeah with all the pizza sales you think they we're going to own all the Xbox marketplace. Yeah. With all the pizza sales. You think they have the rights to sell all the pizza on everyone's Xboxes when my uncle Enzo is slaving away at this pizza hut? Non-pizza hut establishment? I mean, it is tragic because we do forget sometimes that giraffes are still slaves. Well, not. I mean, maybe subjectively they are. I wouldn't say literally.

To zoos. Yeah, but, you know, that's optional. Listen. We don't have to live in zoos. I fail to believe that there is. We can just hop over them. How is there any competition between Pizza Hut pizza sold digitally through a Digibox and the floppy, sloppy, good, homemade New York taste?

I completely agree with you. There is no competition for a pizza made by a giraffe. No one could compete with that. Yeah. But you're saying that there should be, you're saying there's a monopoly on Xbox Live right now. Absolutely. There needs to be. They actually pulled monopoly from the store.

This is what happened. My Uncle Enzo, also a giraffe I should mention in case you didn't know. Okay. You did mention it. Originally spent about eight years making a website for his pizza place. He'd spent a long time because let's be honest, hooves not ideal for keyboards. No. But he made one.

What's the name of the place sorry the name of the place is myspace.com slash giraffe pizza enzo's place pizza enzo's place dot org dot oh there's a dot org you didn't tell me the dot org yeah oh oh man my space is undergoing maintenance so i can't check the validity I'm going to go ahead and go out on a limb and say it's true. So what I'm hearing now is that no one uses MySpace anymore. Well, Justin Timberlake just bought it. They're bringing it back, but it's a music platform now. Yeah, and pizza. It's not pizza. I don't think Justin Timberlake would open a pizza website.

Well, what about Mark Wahlberg opened a burger place so let's be honest who knows it's true trans media yeah absolutely trans giraffe media is what i'm talking about anyway i just wanted to say it's bullshit i don't like it buy enzo's pizza screw pizza hut screw xbox let me just and like i don't know vitas are pretty cool i like that shape game why don't we why don't i've been making pizza pie you guys hear that what was that it's a it sounds like a low-flying airplane oh it gave me a nice haircut look at that okay anyway i gotta go i gotta help out help out what spreading the i'm doing street teaming for enzo okay so if you you want a pizza coupon come down to union square i'll be giving them out here's the thing they'll bring a stepladder because my head is tall

how will we know uh it's you i'll be the giraffe okay thank you new york giraffe thanks new york giraffe for coming audio it's besties all right all right miss you um do you guys want to know my best thing of the week yeah i do yeah i'm super nervous to talk about uh the About the best, the best Juggos ever. And it's Dragon Crown. Has a character in it. Are you guys familiar with Dragon Crown? No, absolutely not. What is Dragon Crown?

It's a new Vanillaware game. It's a side-scrolling brawler. Wait, is that the name of a company? Vanillaware? Yeah, they did Odin Sphere. They did Odin Sphere. They did Muramasa. Oh, I like Muramasa.

Yeah, you did that's vanilla ware homes yeah um there's a character who's causing quite a stir um called the sorceress there's like six playable characters in the game and like it look here's the thing it looks dope like it looks incredibly cool the game does what kind of game is it it looks kind of like the old dnd size scrolling brawlers like a fantasy rpg brawler but with that same painterly art style that that vanilla does and also it's on ps3 and vita so like people are kind of like i think uh that kind of game would work really really well on the vita and it looks super great but there's a character in the game the sorceress who um gosh russ if you haven't seen this it's gonna be hard to i guess i haven't use a use a analog like what sides we talking about

oh i don't want to do this what don't you want to do i don't want you to try to compare the size of president you don't think i can do it in a benign manner? Imagine the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Oh, God. But only parts of it are puffed? Which parts? So this is... I've just dropped an image in Skype.

This is not a porno... This is not a porno fan drawing. This is what we're working with here. Is that in-game graphics? That's in-game. I mean, it's not. I think that's the official art that they sent out. This particular image is not great because it looks like she's holding her staff with her butt cheeks,

which I do not think is a feature in the game. Here's the thing. So Jason Schreier wrote a post of kataku fame wrote a post um when they released a japanese trailer focusing on the sorceress the sorceress has enormous breasts that are almost entirely uncovered i would say the top man i don't know four fifths of her breasts are uncovered but there's no i guess her nipple is on the bottom of them this is the most titillating episode of the besties ever yeah so when this character was revealed shry wrote a post uh saying as you can see the sorceress was designed by a 14 year old boy uh the headline of the post is also game developers really need to stop letting

teenage boys design their characters so shots fired right i think it's safe to say that shots were fired there yeah shots are fired the artist uh of the game uh a guy named george kamatani uh responded on facebook saying it seems mr jason trier of kitaku is pleased with neither the sorceress nor Amazon. The Amazon's another playable female character in the game whose proportions are pretty whack, but not nearly as like hyper-sexualized as this. Sure.

He adds the art direction, which he likes, was prepared. And he attaches this to an image of three, what appear to be naked, like super burly dwarves uh sort of embracing each other from behind ah yes so his response was maybe sure i would like this my questions on this are multifold number one obviously homophobic gross number two did he just draw this for the gag because i was wondering a long way around to zing somebody so the dwarf is another playable character in the game so it's like so he had his assets around yeah um but it was i mean yeah it was i guess shots fired back but in like kind of like a way way way grosser yeah way um i mean so like if i'm

an artist to play devil's advocate for a second if i'm an artist and someone says wow my work is basically like lame and that of a 14 year old boy i would be offended i'm not saying uh jason wasn't right to say that but i would certainly be offended. Now, yeah, it does exhibit the maturity of a 14-year-old to then come back and be like, dude, you're gay. Yeah, he's since apologized. He sent him a message that translated to, while the picture of the dwarves was meant to be a lighthearted joke after it became bigger than I thought it would, I reflected on the rashness of it. I am sorry.

I have no hard feelings about the article. Not, I'm sorry I called you gay because you don't like these huge, huge jugs. Yeah. What's troubling is the, not this dude's reaction. Well, yes, this dude's reaction was troubling. But also the community at large has had like some pretty upsetting reactions to this um i remember first seeing this this post uh jc fletcher wrote something up a joystick about the trailer when it first came out he didn't call them um you know a teenage boy uh but he did say that

it was kind of troubling and and sort of injured his perception of the game which he's been psyched about to this point and there were some commenters in there saying i i think you're protesting too much like why don't you like these jugs you must be gay and try the same thing i said something on twitter about how the internet was kind of like weird uncles because they're like why don't you like these huge jugs and somebody called me somebody called me a gay slur on the Twitter. Wow. Oh, no. You would think that somebody using a gay slur on Twitter would have shut down for a

while to investigate that. Hey, we got an alert. We're in sector four. Someone used a gay slur. I don't know. It is obviously such a huge prominent problem of just rampant, crazy sexism in the industry that you, usually the other, the devil's advocate side of this can try and put together a fucking coherent sentence to explain their dumb position. But like, this one's just like, you don't like these tits? Gay? Like like it's fucking banana cakes to me that there is that loud of a voice on the internet saying this and it's

like it's like fans of the of this super indie studio that like their fans love their games and somehow that love of this indie studio it's like if, it's like if fans of like Super Brothers or Cappy or Double Fine were also like, what's wrong? You don't like super time force gay? Like that's what we're talking about. It's become perverted. But a lot of that I would say is propelled by his response,

which is like if members of this studio itself are responding in that manner it sort of helps other people along doesn't it i guess i suppose you know i'm not you know they're all morons but obviously like here's that's a studio you dig here's what schreier intimated and i am totally on the same page as him because i i remember seeing early trailers for this game thinking like this looks boss this looks like a totally rad game it would be great on a portable platform caveat if i was fucking on the bus and saw me somebody saw me playing with with this woman with enormous uncover breasts flopping almost independent of one another i would be fucking humiliated.

And like, that was something he said in his post, and people were like, well, that sounds like your problem, not that you're so afraid of public perception, but like, ah, do we gotta have it in this game? It's like... Guys, when I download Mad Men on my laptop and watch it on the plane, I'm like ashamed whenever a sex scene comes up. Right, I watched the girl with the dragon

tattoo on a plane and the whole time my elderly couple sitting next to me i was like uh i'm just gonna turn my screen off for the for the nude scenes what i think is interesting about the complaint though or the attack from the people who are like why do you not like this gay is the idea that like a gay person couldn't still be put off by the idea of this freakishly misproportioned creature being on their game that they have to play in public like right as if that person couldn't have an opinion that's uh way more thought than they definitely put into that one i don't think they were like well i'm gonna get in the head of a gay person would they think this is cool or

no probably not i mean here's the problem with this right if if he's if schreier does the post and then the artist answers back with this the artist can apologize all he wants but like you can't ungross that all right you can't like like i can't like not think that he's like that yeah yeah you know it's not like oh hey i overreacted like no can i what's his name mel gibson it's the mel gibson let me break off a couple of the crazier comments in the kataku section he wasn't implying that he's gay he just made overly muscular muscular and exaggerated men along with the overly muscular and also exaggerated women uh horse shit like fucking horse shit like did you not read the text accompanying the burly dwarf pic does it feel good being a vicarious victim i'm just curious because you seem to be wallowing in it like like yeah i don't know guys not not good not a good situation is our games not like

is it not bad enough that we don't let women in games and when we do we don't buy them that like is that not bad enough without turning them into carnival toys i don't look i i mean in in all honesty i don't we we should be careful because like it's it's immature and lame but like i don't want to tell someone you can't make a out of proportion whatever right but it's but it still bums me out when i you know i see it but i don't want to like ban you know anything i'm not talking about like yeah it's just like with the violence in all i mean the over-the-top violence i i complained about with bioshock where it's like why does it have to always be the furthest possible extreme the longer we keep getting video games like i feel like the longer these things are made the

more extreme everyone pushes it to the point where it's just gross and not it's putting people off well i think that's the let's let's i think this is also a very special case where this is a gorgeous looking game that looks really fun and it's also portable so you do have more of a public perception to think about like as crazy as that is like you have to think about like if i take this on the road like there will be people seeing me play it to have something in this gorgeous fun looking game that is like kind of a fucking eyesore that is also at the same time kind of humiliating yeah it's it's just a bummer all around yeah completely uh it's you know it's how i feel when i find out that like an awesome game is loaded up with in-app purchasing

it's like well that's too bad i won't be playing that now it's just like a missed opportunity of like you know tone and you know you make a different decision and suddenly your game is a lot more approachable for a lot more people. I will say, though, that more and more this seems, I wouldn't say it's an aberration because it's obviously still common, but it's getting less and less common over time. Like we mentioned Elizabeth, who is, while not like wholly realistic, obviously stylized, is not like an obscene no female character she does have a size negative eight ways like okay that's a fair point actually and

she gets like she sexes it up halfway through the game um okay yeah that's yeah we should talk about that in our next segment because there are also some rad come up there are also some rad counter arguments to shari's point uh that all have to do with like the the equivalence of female and male uh like sexual organs and like oh no erogenous zones oh no are you arguing that the to be hypersexualized, the dwarf needs a huge penis then for parody? That seems more like the sorceress having a massive labia. That's exactly what it's like, you fucking dildo. Yeah.

Ugh. Wow. Anyway. You guys want to hear my best thing in the week? Please. Anything. Okay. So my best love letter to Bonanza Brothers is a little thing.

It's not really a sentence, but. Okay. The best love letter to Bonanza Brothers is Monaco. Do you guys remember Bonanza Brothers? No. Why? Is that the one with the bubbles that you have to is it the bubbles you have to run around and pop no that's that's bubble pop wait is that the one where there's like cubes

and a little like weird alien guy and he hops around on the cubes no that's cubert oh yeah that's cubert is it the one with the the the wizard lady with the huge cans. No, that's dragon something. Crown. Sure. Tell us about Bonanza Brothers. I'm mostly just sad. Bonanza Brothers was like my favorite Sega Genesis game.

Oh, that's why I didn't play it. And I thought everybody else maybe played it. And then I thought like, like you know i'd have friends who shared the things i liked but what i found out recently is nobody played this game like at all yeah i've never heard of it my entire life i don't think your sample size is that big so that's sad how many people have you asked oh i've asked you know like at least twitter okay bonanza brothers is it's like blues brothers meets a beats like spy versus spy meets like a monaco okay you and somebody else one's a fat dude and one's a skinny dude you go into this 2d buildings and you sneak from uh room to room avoiding the cops or security guards and stealing stuff and then making your escape by helicopter or whatever else.

And it's really cool. It was like an unusual cooperative stealth game at a time when those didn't really exist. And now Monaco is out and it is like that to the extreme where you can now play with four different people and they each have their own special powers and there are dozens if not hundreds of uh systems that you have to use to steal everything and get out alive it's very cool really i just want to talk about bonanza brothers i have a lot of trouble talking about monaco because it's so stupendously complex that yeah it's it's very like gameplay centric play it um it also seems like one of those games it's hard to be critical about because it has like its legion

of diehard fans because it's been in the works for such a long time well i mean we we found a way in our review there is it's certainly not the most glowing review i've read yeah well you yeah you get attacked for it though i i think what there's so many systems in the game and there's so many different ways to play it depending on what character you use i i genuinely can see how you could have an experience with the game and somebody else could have a totally different experience with the game and come out with wildly different reviews especially i there's a character called the Mole in it that can break through walls, and it essentially destroys the entire flow of the game,

as Russ and I found out while shooting our Today I Played. And when we were using that character, I hated the game. I mean, I didn't understand the levels yet, and everything felt like it was just screwing us. It's fair to say if you go in having not played it at all and knowing very little about it your first hour with the game probably won't be a ton of fun the learning curve is like ridiculously steep and they really don't do a great job explaining the systems you basically

have to die a lot to figure them out i think once you're playing more and you understand like oh these are the special abilities for each character these are what icons mean like the game is very representational like you're supposed to know what a plug icon means or whatever uh once you start learning what all the things are i was having more fun but it's just like such a brutal first introduction to the game that... Is it just two players? No, it's up to four. But you can play solo as well.

You think that's the ideal way of doing it? Or you think four is, like, the ideal? Four is the ideal if you can communicate. That's the thing. I watched the two of you play, and, like, there was so much shit happening on screen. I don't know how you kept it all straight. More often than not, you didn't.

And I think the more people you add, the more chaotic it gets. That's the thing. screen i don't know how you kept it all straight more often than not than you didn't and i think the more people you add the more chaotic it gets the thing like it seems incongruous to me to have a a stealth puzzle heist game but also there's more shit going on than a fucking fast game of geometry wars like that that doesn't i don't know i i i expected the game to be a little bit slower, a little bit more meticulous than, from what I, I haven't played it yet, but from what I can tell from trailers, it doesn't. I mean, if you're good at it, it's very meticulous. And essentially, if you have, like, an elite squad of, like, guys that you play with all the time, I'm sure people within moments of the game's release were planning out, like, intricate strategies on intricate strategies on how to handle each room and stuff like that. But most people will just pop it in and give it a shot and will feel probably pretty frustrated

in the first hour or so. I think an important thing to learn is getting caught, unlike most stealth games, getting caught does not mean you should restart the level. There often like there are a lot of ways to like escape and re-hide and stuff like that but it's it's really tough to jump into yeah i started liking it over time though but uh yeah yeah i'll get into it i've wanted to i've always wanted to play a game like this. I've always thought that multiplayer heist games was like a pretty untapped, unrealized market. Yeah, I think the big recommendation I would give is if you're going to try it, play it solo for like the first six or seven missions.

And that's a very good way to sort of learn everything without having to worry about what your friends are up to. Case in point, Chris Plant, when we're trying to be sneaky decides instead to just sort of sprint ahead and punch a dog in the face okay here's the thing about this game though is everything happens so fast you have no idea what the other person is doing it only happens fast because you're sprinting around everywhere like fresh dick to look and see that you've been caught and to assume that you did a boo-boo when the reality is you may have done a boo-boo. Yeah, that seems likely. I, yeah.

I don't know what to think about it. I just feel like it's a game made for competitive play, even though it's not a competitive, like a, you know, one-on-one type of game. It just feels like you have to spend so much time learning the game if you actually want to enjoy the game. Which isn't bad.

I mean, it's just overwhelming. I've got a piece. So let's just close this out. Thank you guys so much for listening. Who had the best thing, though? It's important. Oh, yeah. I think Griffin did. Yeah, I think

Griffin. Griffin wins every week. Patrick! Every week, Griffin wins. He's like the bowls, 94 bowls in here. Well, that's because I find important issues to bring and to talk about. I don't even remember where Oh, yeah, the boob thing. I won last time.

You didn't. No, it was Griffin last time. Jesus, really? And the week before. Well, this has been the best days where we talk about stuff, I guess. And we have a website, too. It's polygon.com, at polygon on Twitter,

Facebook slash polygon, YouTube slash polygon, polygon.com, dot tumblr.com. We did it today. I played a Monaco. What's yours is mine. What's mine is ours. It's on polygon.com. You we did it today I played a Monaco what's yours is mine what's mine is ours it's on

polygon.com you can find it there if you want to look at that watch that and make sure you subscribe to us on iTunes give us a review there if you don't mind and join us again next Friday for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's

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