The Besties - The Besties Podcast 56 - The backhanded compliment

Episode Date: May 10, 2013

Mr. Dave Tach fills in for the absent Griffin McElroy this week. His dulcet tones could melt an ice cap, but are they enough to warm our hearts in Brother M's absence? This episode's a hodgepodge, in which the good is bad, the bad is good and Kickstarter is mediocre. We discuss a handful of video gaming anomalies, like "good bad" games and good games with bad titles. We debate whether rough edges are beauty marks or flaws waiting to be smoothed. We also rap on the reality of Kickstarter projects and the practicality of AAA licensing deals. Whether you prefer one to the other, it's clear that all the money and creative freedom in the world can't guarantee a great game. Also, we talk Canada. Did you know Vancouver is the perfect city? All that and more on this week's Besties. 2:10 - Best reason to be wary of supporting games on Kickstarter (Star Command) 14:30 - Best worst game of the week (Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut) 29:30 - Half time: Chris goes to Canada 33:30 - Best game with worst title (Mars: War Logs) 43:40 - Best billion dollar partnership for things I probably won't end up caring about (The EA/Disney Star Wars contract) 52:10 - 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!

uh we'll probably just have to to donate that one i've done it in a car before maybe feel good you get a picture of the people using the car really no you don't it's like when you donate like a puppy to a farm you can see it like frolicking they totally do yeah you get it and you get a nice handwritten note from the person it's like i'm gonna use this to drive to i don't know can you request like only premium gas i can you can request only premium users you can say please only premium drivers need apply i want you i don't want to i want you to drive like the stig and i want you to dress like him too and always wear a helmet when you drive my beloved my beloved kia sofia my beloved 1998 Kia Sophia. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the week.

Oh, yeah. Should have figured that out. No, no, no. Go ahead. We're doing it live. We're just going to roll with it? Yeah. I'm not going to edit this.

I'm the one editing it. I didn't edit any of this. If you're listening to this now, know that you're getting it raw, Doc. You are getting it so crystal cut, clean cut, clean cut, pure besties straight from the mountain shaker into you because there's no editing happening here.

Go for it, Dave Tagg. Someone say your name! Surprise! My name is Dave Tagg and I know the best thing of the week. My name is Chris Plant and I know when the best thing of the week. My name is Chris Plant, and I know when to say my name at the right time. My

name is Ross Froschig, and I know the best game of the week. This is the Besties, where we talk about the latest, greatest, best, brightest, all the good stuff coming down the pike to you, the gamer, the game aficionado. Who wants to start things off this week? Who's got a really big best thing?

I think Freshstick does. Well, I have a thing that I think some folks are talking about. I don't know if it's a big thing. So my thing is the best reason to be wary of supporting games on kickstarter and that is uh star command so a few years ago i think this is 2011 a few folks uh got together and put up a trailer for a game that they were thinking about making called star command essentially it was a starship management game uh wherein you uh you know pick you high you hire members for your starship they

fly around the galaxy they fight aliens you like upgrade different compartments for your ship stuff like that if it sounds familiar to fdl uh conceptually it's a pretty similar game um but this game uh you know went went up on kickstarter and uh got a lot of support its first time around i think they raised about 36 000 uh they they realized they were making a bigger game than that so ended up ended up having a second round for kickstarter uh which raised about 150 000 so we're talking about a pretty good chunk of change here. And it took a while, but the first version of the game, the iOS version, has finally released. And it's not super good, I'm sorry to say.

I have been playing this a good amount too, so you are in friendly company here okay so so here's the basic issue is that just like there's a lot of like game design issues just it's hard to understand all the rules when you start playing moving guys around the screen is a nightmare like you have to tap you want to start with a general pitch oh yeah sorry i thought i did that already but the you know you're managing a starship it's like again if you've played ftl the basic premise is almost identical um there's just like a lot of core mechanics about like how you move guys around your ship and how you assign guys to certain rooms that is so unnecessarily complex and often slow and often not fun at all uh that just drags down the whole experience and it's a bummer because i i was really looking forward to this game there isn't a game like ftl on mobile devices um so i really

had a lot of high hopes for this unfortunately it's it's just not, it's just sort of a mess. And what the, I should mention that the Kickstarter was for the Mac and the PC version. And the intention is to sort of, this is sort of like a basic level of content that they're looking at. And then the Mac and the PC version will be like the more fleshed out feature wide version. And that's what was kickstarted but it just sort of tells us you know if you're dealing with people that are indie developers and obviously there are many many talented indie developers but all you're going off of is a trailer you have no idea what the end outcome is going to be you have no idea about

execution whether it's fun how much uh you know talent is on the team how much effort they're putting in how much of that money is actually going to game development again i'm not saying that anyone screwed anyone on this but i think a lot of people just see a trailer on kickstarter and are like hey that's amazing and don't realize that there's really no guarantee that the final product is going to be anything like the thing that was initially pitched to you on kickstarter and there's no legal like bearing on the people that put these kickstarters up they get the money and they could very well just like if they want to go to tahiti and then you know what no one's no one has any legal action to take against these

people yeah it's very strange the the game itself i i played it for a few hours hoping for much like yourself for some sort of ftl like experience and though it it is in many ways like ftl i mean you have uh rooms on your ship tied to certain systems and you have to staff them and um i what it feels like is they got spooked by FTL or were actively trying to distance themselves from that game design. And they've added layers on that are just completely unnecessary. where in some of your weapons rooms and in your shield regeneration room and your dodge room, it's not enough for the room to actually charge up. You have to do a separate action. You have to tap that room and try not to tap the crew member in the room.

You have to tap that room and start generating ammo. at generating ammo um and you need ammo before you can fight use this thing and you can deplete it and there's no it's just this there was already an elegant design for this it's like the room charges over time and um there there's other weirdness like there's a little mini game you have to play to see how many of your shots connect um and it feels like super slapped together and yeah it's really not good and not well done and it doesn't make a lot of sense it doesn't look like they even made the game like thought about making a game for touch devices like it looks like they made a pc game and then like at the last minute we're like oh shit how are we going to make this work on touch or not we're just going to sort of throw it in there and hope for the best because you can't like tapping guys like god forbid two guys are standing next to each other

you're you're effed like there's no way to tap an individual person this is just i want to run some speculation by you okay i've been thinking about just with kickstarter versus you know traditional development yeah it felt like when the Kickstarter boom happened, the idea was traditional. I think it's still happening. Sure. It is for Zach Braff. Great.

And so many other people we can talk about. When it started, it felt like it was trying to distance itself from the development model of, okay, there are these wealthy people and they give us guidelines and notes and we have to kind of meet their demands and if you just give us this money we can go out and do the creative stuff we've always wanted to do and you'll get this amazing result but i'm starting to feel like kickstarter has become almost the exact same thing where the only thing that's changed is

instead of like one publisher who has a set of notes and a certain amount of expectations you suddenly have hundreds if not thousands of mini publishers who are each of your backers who now expect the game to meet its original deadline which when does a game do that they expect it to be exactly what was promised on day one and which gives you no creative freedom to you know iterate or just totally scrap a bad idea when you realize it's bad it feels like all these pressures have just returned uh in a different you know form and i don't know how beneficial that is yeah it also i would say doesn't like you know people sort of slag on big developers big publishers uh and that's a lot of the reason why people go to kickstarter

but there are benefits like there are like levels of quality assurance testing that go through uh if you're in you know publishing a game um that a lot of these indie developers won't necessarily have the benefit of going through obviously they a lot of these indie developers won't necessarily have the benefit of going through obviously they a lot of them will do qa but they probably not to the extent that they would if they were under a major publisher um i would also say that i think when it comes to companies like double fine company uh developers whose work you're familiar with uh that's very proven and tested, it's a safer bet. They're not going to screw people over.

But you never know. With folks that are still trying to do something new, it really is a big risk. And sometimes that risk pays off. See FTL. Those guys had basically not made a game before. And then Star Command, which is sort of the dark end of that, and obviously the Star Command journey is not over yet because the PC version's not out,

but it's a pretty big risk, and you definitely want to take a minute before you throw down money for a trailer that kind of looks cool. So do you think Star Command's a mess that can be fixed, or is this just not a great game? I don't know how you feel, Justin. My take on it is that just about every design decision that has been made so far is really going in the wrong direction. I basically have no, I don't have confidence in it the best way i put it is this

if they thought that this was good like if they thought that they were making the right decisions because a lot of it's not sloppiness it's just bad design just is it feels bad and it is is it feels wrong and the the you know the design decisions that they made um it's not just like sloppiness or threadbare like you can do an ios game that's threadbare from a design perspective and not have it be you know unpleasant to play and and that is how i would describe star command it is fairly infuriating to play the difficulty curve is like all over the place i mean it is nuts um and uh it is just not an enjoyable experience i mean maybe on on the pc maybe they have some of these maybe some of these systems that seem arbitrary and weird on the touch version are are um you know maybe they're all refined on the pc version but judging by this is like a metric for judging their uh design skills and acumen like i don't

agree with hardly any of the decisions that they've made any point at which they deviate from ftl i pretty much am very sad so i i don't know i don't have much faith yeah and we shouldn't petition people to obviously clone other people's or copy other people's game mechanics um but yeah i mean i would say if you're not gonna copy what ftl you got to at least come up with something that's as good, if not better. And they definitely came up with something that was considerably worse. I mean, you don't clone,

you iterate, you refine, you blend. This is tacking on. I mean, this, this is kludgy, like systems grafted on to things that are already working.

You ever see the episode of doug where his dad makes him a kite and it's very simple and and just a diamond shape red kite and doug is embarrassed because all the other kids have like really souped up kites that look amazing yeah and doug tapes on like wings and and streamers and stuff like that. Fucking Doug. Doug does that to make it look cool, but then his kite's terrible. And his dad said, well, actually, this is a fighter kite. It's designed like this, you know, so it can do all these sick tricks and stuff.

And he pulls off the wings and pulls off the streamers, and it flies perfectly. And it's, like, best in show or whatever of kites. FTL is sort of like that fighter kite and Star Command is more like the kite that Doug made where, yeah, there are things grafted onto it that would ostensibly make it cooler or better, but really all it's doing is getting in the way and impeding what is a pretty righteously uh designed game now it's a really good place to end that segment

it is a really good place i'm not gonna end it right there i'm gonna ask another follow-up question do you think doug went into the laundry and got totally clean underwear before becoming quail man or do you think he was like yeah i'll just turn it inside out? It was worth it. It was worth it that you went back. That's good. Do you guys want to listen to Killer Tofu?

No, I think I'm okay. We can't pay for the rights to Killer Tofu. Dave, I heard you need more allowance, and to get it, you would have to tell us about your best thing of the week. Oh, I have the best worst game of the week, which is Deadly Premonition, the director's cut, which I played, and the review should be up pretty soon, or maybe is up by the time you're listening to this.

Did you complete it? Did you play to completion? Oh, I sure did. Did you play with the move? I did not. Did it have move support? I don't know. It sure is.

I might have made that up. Move and 3D support. It was move support? I don't know. It sure is. I'm going to make that up. Move and 3D support. Oh, my God. Those are real things. I never played Deadly Premonition. Do you know of it? Yeah. So I understand.

I've seen like brief scenes on YouTube. So I understand like it's got laughable voice acting and like a campy, what's it called? Twin Peaks style story. And that's about all I know. That is more or less the game. It is, I guess the high level concept is that it's an open world survival horror game. But there is not a ton of horror, not a ton of action. Not a ton of horror.

Not a ton of action. And in the near 20 hours that I spent with it, mostly what I did was sort of walk around the world and meet the inhabitants of this little town called Greenvale, which is, like you said, kind of got this northwestern twin peaks alan wake style uh you're this he plays this detective who goes there to investigate a murder which turns into a string of murders which turns into everybody in the town is a suspect um and it you know to You know, to be honest with you, it was I really liked the game by the end. But as a string of things to say, here's what's really good about it. Well, there isn't really a ton of string of things on that string.

It has a it looks more or less like it was designed for the PlayStation 2. That acting is pretty rough. There are parts in the game that even with the director's cut are still broken. I ran into a couple of places where it was pretty obvious like they had meant to add, say, trees into the environment, but they weren't actually there. Trees are tough. Trees aren't anybody. They had the invisible walls there, see, but there were no trees. Well, maybe that's what the director cut.

He cut the trees out. I get it. Cut the trees. Now now there's a lot of fondness for this game on the internet i know people are rather fond so do you think it's just a matter of ha ha ha look how bad this is and that's why people like it well what's actually interesting yes and no part of that is is certainly that it is kind of bad but almost kind of but like the winner of the you know world's ugliest dog contest something about the uh the flaws make it cute um and that's what that's what happened with like i i started i didn't really know what was going on and then a few hours in I realized I was having fun because bizarre as the world is

strange as the game is uh strange as the characters talk affected as everybody is in the game uh it's actually fun to just go around and sort of poke at every little corner of this place there's a that you mentioned a video on the internet. It's probably the one where you're in the diner and the man wearing a gas mask, sitting in a wheelchair who speaks and whispers to his assistant who translates it in rhyme, orders what's called a sinner sandwich, which is the turkey and cereal and jam. Hold on a second. Yeah, go ahead.

Where do I procure this sandwich? Is that a real sandwich? If you want it to be, you just bake it together. No, but like in our world, is that like an actual sandwich that people are aware of? I think it's just in the game. Oh, okay. Now I'm kind of disappointed because that sounds amazing. If you have turkey and you have cereal yeah and jam you could make one do they specify which cereal

no generic cereal i don't think there is such a thing it's actually uh c3pos the star wars cereal from the mid 80s oh okay i can i can get a hold a whole tendo cereal it's a nintendo power cereal system right a blend of one-fourth zelda to three-fourths mario cereal god now i would i would literally not an exaggeration drive in my car to one of your houses and stab one of you in the throat for a bowl of what i just described holy shit shit, would I eat that cereal so hard. Mama, mama. Oh, Justin. Oh, golly gee, I'm overweight.

You're not, though. Dave, I know I still am. I'm headed in the right direction. Dave, I remember from the last time I played this, I really grooved on the adventure exploration weirdness of the characters, the script script the dialogue like i dug all that of in a very big way what i did not dig very much were the segments of combat that were sort of uh i guess silent hill inspired resident evil inspired third person action sequences that

i kind of despised are those refined at all or any better? I didn't play the original version. And my understanding of this is that the controls have been completely redone. It felt the controls felt unremarkable. So they weren't bad. That would be a step up, honestly. They've changed a lot. It's you know, it's exactly what you think about.

Think of Resident Evil. You pull your gun. You discover that your feet have been bolted to the ground and and you aim right that's all it is the enemies aren't tough uh they're they're more like speed bumps than anything else but they're super creepy like wailing directly at you screaming about how they don't want to die when you kill them are they whales they are wailing so they're whalers so they hunt for whales directly at you right okay Screaming about how they don't want to die when you kill them. Are they whales? They are whaling. So they're whalers. So they hunt for whales directly at you.

Right. Okay. Right. Because you play as FBI agent Mr. Whale. Jim Wilson. But there's these, it's basically, the way that it's set up, they're basically like role-playing game style dungeons. There are hours of just messing around in the world without zombies and the story pushes you into these what are mostly buildings where you just fight for an hour or so push the story forward and then play through that and it's it's the combat's not great

i'm not saying that but it's that kind of interplay between this goofy world you get to play in and then when you decide it's time to go and you know fight some things you go do that sounds like pushes the story forward yeah it's that's more or less uh uh true the but that's where that's where the game becomes good where it's like this world is bizarre. Yeah. But actually a lot of fun to just play around in. And it works almost all the game until the final third or quarter where they just they tell you that they're going to dispense with the open world stuff. It's like no more side quests. We're going to go and we're going to finish the story. And it turns out that they're not very good at guiding you.

Oh, the story. I mean, it's just a lot of wandering around lost. No, it's it's it's all. Personally, I think in a game so bizarre, making the choice to do whatever you want at any given time is a lot of fun. If they funnel you for five hours or four hours or whatever it's felt like a long time uh toward the end that it's not so great um you know there's it takes away part of what makes it fun which is i'm going to go visit the old crazy lady who's obsessed with pots or the weirdo millionaire or go you know go get something to eat or whatever like it's it

that poking at the world is fun being sort of poked at as you go through the world is not one of the things that bothered me about the first or not the first this but when i played it um there were there's a a lot of events or items or things like that that you can't, that are there for a limited time during the day in a specific in-game time and kind of disappear, and you'd have no way of knowing about them otherwise. And I always felt that I would miss a lot

if I wasn't playing with an FAQ or something, which I know some people like that. I don't really like to play games twice if I can avoid it. So I kind of want to get everything the first time through. Is that was that something you ran into a lot or is that something that bothers you personally or? I would in something like this. I don't think I'd want to play it twice. I just kind of dive in and dive out.

So I I wouldn't begrudge anybody who just sat down with an faq and did that but that said the game uh it doesn't explain a lot but if you open the menus you will see there's a there's an early um side quest there's 50 side quests and all they are in the menu numbered and a lot of time, doing one side quest unlocks the next side quest and so on. And inside the menus, you'll find not only what the side quest is, but what you need to do, sort of when you need to do it, and what chapters. Because the game is, I don't know's it's like divided into acts and there's a bunch of chapters in each act and it'll tell you when they're available so something might be available in one through three and then six through nine and then you know 11 to 13 or whatever

so you know it's it's there if you want to poke around it although it's all it's also i found not necessary again i didn't play the sort of original non-director's cut version, but you earn money for all these side quests you do, money for basically everything you do, that you can use to upgrade weapons and things like that. I didn't buy basically anything. It's all optional. If you like the world and want to go do this stuff, knock yourself out. If you don't, well, you'd never make it that far if you didn't like the world.

Wow, that sounds particularly mediocre. It's fun. It's almost like, you know what I think it's like, to be honest with you? It's like Dark Souls in the sense that if you find a guy, if you play Dark Souls and you say Dark Souls and somebody's eyes light up because they love Dark Souls and you say Dark Souls and somebody's eyes light up because they love Dark Souls too then you can be Dark Souls pals and do 20 minutes on how cool

and freaking weird the game is I wouldn't begrudge a person in the world I love Dark Souls, I wouldn't begrudge anybody who didn't and I feel like Deadly Premonition is kind of the same it's a shared experience we all love Deadly Premonition we can talk about it.

But I wouldn't say it's for everybody. That's for sure. You know what else I love? Chris Plant. Chris Plant just got back from Canada. A trip to Canada. Yeah. I just bought Deadly Premonition.

Damn it. Is that what you just did? Were you on Amazon buying that game? I just bought it right now. What is wrong with you? It's cheap. It's good. You've already played this game.

It's clearly mediocre. Do you have time for this? There are so many good games out. I get bored easily. My job is not particularly taxing. How is playing a game you've already played a way to solve boredom easily? You didn't finish it, did you? Sorry, what? You didn't finish it, did you, it? No, that's why I'm going back in because I got like 10 hours

Like I said, I really liked it and if they fix it hours if they hours I liked I said I just said I liked it dad I don't I don't I I do not I don't think I'll ever understand this there are so many good games out and just other good things in the world that the idea of pursuing mediocrity it just it does okay but like my brain want to dissolve but like pursuing mediocrity is completely unfair and and uh there are different degrees to which things can engage us and like part of my problem with really great game design is that it is by and large built to sort of disengage the critical part of your mind. It's one of the hardest things I think about being a game critic is that if you're in a really good game, it disengages the parts of your mind that think critically or are challenged or anything like that. A lot of good game design is about disconnecting your brain so you can connect your synapses

with whatever is going on in the world. The system, exactly. And part of the appeal, I think, of games like this is that it doesn't... The fact that it is A, artistically challenging and interesting and not

all the rough edges smoothed off. And the fact that the design systems are not completely flawless, that can create an experience that's really, can engage you more as a player and not just engage you more, but create an experience that stays with you longer. So, so many games are so smooth, there's nothing to grab onto.

And I think that like games like this, that maybe aren't perfect and maybe do have some rough edges are the ones that you can hold on to better because it's an experience. It maybe engages you more deeply than a flawless game that is just about synapse. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about. There are things about... You don't want to be a crazy person and say this game is awesome because it's broken. But there's some part of me that if I ever played the first Halo and it didn't do that little stutter thing as it loaded

the levels in the background or the, you know, the doors flew open, I would kind of miss that. And it feels like that to me. I agree with that more than mediocrity. I think you're talking about two different things. I think because it's broken is the right, I mean, there's a righteous appeal to that. I think mediocrity is a very different thing than rough edges i think i was the only one calling it mediocrity necessarily okay and i haven't actually played the game uh i yeah you should good convo play how was canada you've been up there like twice in the past few months right yeah you were i've been i've been to the two different canadas i think there might be a third comparing contrast toronto and vancouver montreal closer like europe vancouver further away the best city ever wow it's it is it is it's beautiful i've never seen is vancouver always further away no matter where you are? No. So if you're in Seattle, it's closer. Oh, weird. Yeah.

So Vancouver, you land, right, in this beautiful airport. And then you get off of the highway and you see these, like, it looks like three cities. And all of them, I don't know how this was done, but all the buildings look like they're like maybe 10 years old tops, and they're all beautiful glass buildings. And none of them are tall enough to get in the way of this gorgeous mountain skyline. And there's water everywhere. Everything is perfectly clean. There is no homeless people. I guess everybody has jobs.

The taxes are incredibly high, but you get health care. Or the walls are made of homeless people? I guess everybody has jobs. The taxes are incredibly high, but you get health care. Or the walls are made of homeless people. I mean, it could be either one of those. There was purposeful graffiti in a few places, and some of them had skeletons in it. Because even the graffiti there looked like it was commissioned by the government. Yeah, our cars run on the blood of homeless people. That's a small price to pay. That's Canada's motto, actually.

I recently spent some time in the Pacific Northwest myself. Beautiful area. It is. Do you mean in deadly premonition? Yeah. Okay, good. All right, good. Next.

That's pretty much it. We'll have a story about something from there soon. Really soon. Does it involve a series of murders in a small town? Yes. So it started out with one murder, and I was a killer of whales. Yes!

My boat docked, and then as the investigation proceeded, more murders happened. Were there invisible trees there? There were. Were you there? Nope. Okay, wait.

Oh, my gosh. I apologize to this person if he listens to our podcast because I forgot his name. But at the end of the trip, as I'm, like, about to get on the airplane, I get a tweet to me. And it says, hello, Chris Plant. I saw you the other day in vancouver you were getting into a black suv and that was it i i was like this is true why did you not say hi one because i would love to meet you uh but two very strange to be in a totally foreign city uh and and have people recognize you uh from afar and then tweeted at

you we live in a strange age two days later by the way yeah yeah like he kind of chewed on it like he was like maybe it couldn't have been it could not have been the the most boring person i was it alan thick it was i get so angry when someone says they saw me but didn't say hi because what you've really done is robbed me of the chance to feel famous especially especially if i'm around other people especially specifically not famous people hachi machi does that ever go down smooth uh i have this thing that i do because i'm not very good with faces. I'm pretty good at it, I think. But generally, when someone approaches me and goes, hey, Russ, I will, you know, front a little bit and pretend like I know who they are,

because it's possible that I do. And that happened a couple times during GDC. And they'd be like, hey, Russ. And I'd be like, whoa, what's up, dude? And they'd be like, you don't know me. And I'd feel weird. See, I do the opposite. I just act like I don't know whoever says hello to me because it makes me feel, you know, big shot.

I just treat everybody like a person. I get through okay. That's a weird idea. Hey, speaking of weird ideas, I want to talk about a weird game that I've been playing. My best of the week is best game with worst title. Oh, boy. Because this game is called Mars War Logs, which is bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. I like the first part, I think, is Mars is okay.

What is a war log? It sounds like he pooped in a trough. A helmet. If you remember the classic scene from Lord of the Rings when Gandalf is destroying a bridge and saying you should not pass, he is fighting a warlock is what that is. No. No, that's a Balrog. It's a Balrog. Okay, so the designer of God of War 2. Logs of War.

Logs of War is named Corey Warlock. and that is bar log bar log okay i don't know what a war a war log is referring to the fact that we are in the middle on mars we're in the middle of wars over uh water um and this is a third person uh melee combat RPG, uh, where I, the, the closest comparison I can give you is sort of like, uh, it's, uh,

sort of a cross between Chronicles of Riddick and Mass Effect. Um, there's a lot of, uh, you, you, you play a character and you can sort of decide, uh,

his reputation from, from dialogue choices. But the first vast portion of the game, you're trying to escape from a prison colony with the assistance of another prisoner named Innocence. In this world, one of the major companies give everybody, I believe they're all in this area or region called Aurora, and everybody has virtue names. So a name based on your most prominent virtuous characteristic. Are they named as babies? I don't know. I don't exactly know how it happens. Everybody gets one of these names.

I'm sorry. What system is this on? This is currently a PC game that you can get on Steam for, I think, $20 or $10 or $20. Okay. And it is coming to Xbox 360 and PS3 eventually. So it's made by Spiders, which is a French developer that's worked on some of the Sherlock Holmes game.

The scripting is not great. And by script, I mean the dialogue is not great. The performances are even worse. Really just not... It sounds like it's read by people who speak yet do not comprehend the English language. Oh, so like a David Cage game. Yeah, except the mechanics of playing it are actually really enjoyable. So melee combat, you have sort of a basic melee attack.

You create – you find weapons weapons largely improvised weapons like i've been playing the game for eight hours now i have the best weapon i found and it is a copper pipe that you basically augment with uh crafting supplies that you find throughout the world um you can uh put electricity on them or spikes or or change the grip to make it a little easier to use. There is one projectile weapon, and it is a nail gun. So you are very much sort of like at the bottom rung of this world, and you're just sort of scraping to get by all the time. In fact, the primary system of currency is called serum, and you actually, A, use that to create health packs so anytime you create

a health pack you're actually using your form of money and two you can extract money from enemies that you beat but it kills them and hurts your reputation so there's a lot of really interesting choices like that. The combat is actually super fun. For the first large part of the game, you're mainly using your melee weapons, and you have powers that you can map to the different buttons on the controller.

I play with the controller, but you have powers you can map to different buttons on your controller or keyboard. And your main staple power for the beginning of the game is throwing sand at enemies eyes so like uh it's very mobile combat you're rolling around a lot try you do more damage behind enemies so you're you're trying to to get to get behind them and and attack them so you can do more damage there and a lot of time that that involves you know throwing sand in their eyes and then uh behind them to attack. But it feels really good. It's a lot of fun to play, and the dialogue,

the story is actually kind of interesting. The world they've created is more interesting, I think, than the story and characters populating it. But there's lots of other RPG elements, like there's perks you can take and feats that augment your skills permanently and different skills that you could upgrade um and uh the the system of the game actually like it introduces a massive uh second system of uh tech-based magic powers basically um and it

doesn't introduce them to like halfway through the game so it's very strange the whole the whole feel of everything sort of shifts uh halfway through um i've been really i i it kind of came out of nowhere for me because i i hadn't really heard much about it but um it's it's really neat there's all the all the systems you could want from rpg grafted onto these um really solid melee combat mechanics there's a lot of there's a lot to to want in the quest design area it's a lot of like go to this place and and do this thing but i enjoyed the combat enough that i i didn't mind so much so it sounds like dead island am i crazy i heard yeah that's not a terrible comparison I think the the big difference between this and Dead Island for me is that the the combat uh is actually really I mean it is actually a lot of

fun at first there's depth to it uh deciding like the best combo of powers and weapons that you can use in a given situation is is cool you're also constantly constantly strapped for resources. Like, to the point where you're breaking down vital things that you desperately need in the hopes that you can get the last shard of bone you need to upgrade your armor to something that is not that great anyway and still looks like

something that... Every outfit in the game makes you look like a person that would power the cars in Vancouver. Wow. Is it true that you can use the nail gun to intimidate people? I heard something about this. You can intimidate them and then take them to the row homes and then leave their bodies in the empty row homes. Oh, my God.

He's making a wire reference. Stop it, Chris Plant. Stop it, please. Does anyone have serious questions about this game that you never heard of? Oh my god, I thought I did, but my mind just went blank from that. What do I have to play it on?

I played it on my PC. I already told you this. I'm not going to answer that again. I already answered both of these questions, so you weren't listening. That's hurtful. I'm going to be honest. You said something like you're like copper pipe, and then you can have the nail gun, and then that's it. And then you started crafting that can't miss wire joke. I was like, okay, let's get this together, Chris.

I meant to tell you guys the lead character does not use his virtue name exclusively so your lead character is literally named and I'm not making this up Roy Temperance no as his last name his full name is Roy Temperance which is fantastic

wow it doesn't seem like a very interesting um lead character there's no he's he's a total total dullard uh he does deliver great dialogue like there's one line when he goes to break up a this colony of uh addicts that have taken up residence in this workshop he says uh i'm the delivery man and i'm just here to deliver some kicks to some assholes. That doesn't seem to imply temperance. There's very little temperance going on. But anyway, that's Mars Warlocks.

I have been having a lot of fun with it. There are problems, obviously, but I think it's really interesting. Chris Point, bring it. Yeah, mine is the best billion-dollar partnership for things I probably won't end up caring that much about, and that is the double deal between Disney and subsequently Star Wars with EAa for and i quote the comp the console the console games the core the core console games is what this arrangement is console include doesn't include casual or uh

social games which i can't imagine making a contract on these like terms that i what the hell does that mean like it means they've got a lucrative contract with somebody else yeah disney wants to make social games elsewhere if i if i had to guess based on knowing what i know of disney's relationship with the video game business it's video game it's disney hedging its bets that it will be able to find revenue streams outside of console games because it has yet to be able to create a decent business there well and that's all well it had a decent business and it threw it away for a gajillion dollar deal with a crappy studio um but whatever that i disney is a disaster when it comes to video games and and

thank god they've partnered up with ea who clearly knows what's going on in the future yeah i i i this deal is like at first i was like bummed because i was like i like star wars right i think i do uh and then i realized i don't when was the last time i really carry like honestly cared about anything star wars let alone a star wars video game i like the first um star killer game what was that called jedi what are you talking about no were you the bad guy from like four years ago oh no force unleashed i like the first one it wasn't great but it was pretty good it it just seems like two companies that make things designed purely to make money? Like, in the most cynical sense. Like,

I can't think of anything I mean, outside of, you know, the new thing from Criterion that EA does anymore that I would call, like, creative at all. Um... Can you think of anything? EA?

Yeah. Well, looking at the the past like just the past 12 months or so you got battlefield 3 stuff uh yeah army of two was like the fourth one of the third one of those uh more mass effect more mass effect more city um football i would say you know based on their lineup it sounds pretty much like they're on par with like indie developers i think in terms of originality and breaking new ground yeah i think that's fair to say i think that that i think you're right plant but let me hit you with this okay i don't think that it's a company that necessarily trades in poor quality which is encouraging because what by definition we're talking about new i mean it's an old license but obviously the definition of mediocrity like most ea games

define the word mediocrity you know how you're talking about rough edges and like you know using critical capacity i think that's why rough edges is a better word than mediocrity because i would reserve mediocrity for the majority of ea games where it's like they're smooth as a baby's bottom and they have nothing to say they will offend no one and if you like video games quote unquote you will probably find them sufficient part of that is because the game because they have been so they've leaned so heavily on sequels and with this new arrangement like they're not going to be able to do that so they will have to come up with some i mean yeah maybe it will be able to lean on movies well sure but like no but they're not going to make well they might make movie games but it opens the realm to do something akin to a force unleashed which is to say delving into what

could be a new area of the star wars franchise whether they end up doing that or not yeah who knows i i think you're probably being a little i mean trust me i'm the first to admit that a lot of ea's releases are not exactly breaking any new ground but i would agree with justin that from a quality perspective they are you know they're above they're above like activision cash-ins on like uh you know abc yeah i wouldn't describe them as cashing games i would agree that they're safe. They feel tested in terms of like get a room full of people. What will make them all happy? Let's make that game.

But, I mean, I don't know. I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily. I just don't know who else, like who do you want that franchise to go to? I don't know that Star Wars is the the thing is the franchise that needs to make me uncomfortable or or push the genre forward like i would be happy because it's been a while just to have a neat like good competent star wars game i don't know what that is and i don't know if ea could make it um but you know like that would be interesting if they think if ea is the company that builds franchises and sequelizes things then give me a good game that you can build franchises and sequels around.

I mean, and then I'll complain when you've made the eighth of them. Here's the thing that's bad about exclusivity if you're someone who likes video games. What an exclusivity deal does is it eliminates competition. They're writing a big check so their games don't have to be better than other games that use the same license because no one else can it's it's they they ended competition with football games uh and they are doing that with star wars games um the and that check will somehow impact production costs so part of that game is agreeing to that check that's already been cashed right there's a check

that's been redrawing a budget that you do not benefit from whatsoever and in fact you are actively hurt by as a consumer that does not go into making the game any better so like that part of the line item of like star wars games has already been been taken up like it's money that they can't devote to development and that like extends to everything that's not just like with with video games like exclusivity deals like this are bad for consumers because they eliminate competition but if someone was so like that's why i say that just to say that like i don't i don't think it's the right thing to uh to sign an exclusivity deal especially for consumers but if if disney was to sign an exclusivity deal like this with a company for the star wars license who is there

another publisher that could feasibly take on this license exclusively that you would have preferred i would take ubisoft in a heartbeat. Just because it's creative-led, which, I mean, is ironic to say this week after the Patrice stuff. But at least I think if it had gone there, there would have been the chance that a game is given out to a creative lead and it's created from the ground up there. Now I'm just being... I admit how profoundly cynical this is going to sound.

I think now the arrangement is more like, well, we have people who make Battlefield games, and Battlefront's popular, so let's just get one of the Star Wars Battlefield type of games, and let's get a Star Wars racing type of game, and then let's get the movie games, and just go from there. I think we'll see star wars

games in the mold of ea because that's safe right i mean they already know how to make those games and make them well and and like and like dave said that's not necessarily i'm not saying it's entirely bad it's not what i prefer but it will make everyone a lot of money it will make a lot of star wars fans very happy because they won't be crappy. This isn't like if Activision got the brand where who knows what could have happened with it. They'll probably be, you know, I'm sure on websites they'll get AIDS.

If I'm remembering it correctly, DICE is one of the studios that should be working on the Star Wars games. And once upon a time they did make Mirror's Edge. And look what happened to them for doing that. They were punished. It was sent to the Phantom Zone.

Right, but this is the back door into Mirror's Edge 2. Oh, okay. They should have just said that in the announcement. This will allow us to finally make Mirror's Edge 2. We don't know why, but trust us. Bubble Fett sliding down the star lamp. That sounds good. Anyway, best thing down the star lamp. That sounds good.

I'd do that. Anyway, best thing of the week is EA, I guess. Oh, gosh. Is there any of our besties this week that were backdoor complaints about shit? This was a bit of a negative week. I hope I didn't come off as negative about mine. No, no, you were good. There's a big part in my heart for that game and i want to apologize to ea because people people i i do

i do want to say this well i like i said i clearly do not enjoy i don't love a lot of the games i think they're all enjoyable in their own right but more importantly they will release games and their studios i think will some of them will stay open after they release them which disney interactive could never say so if if they came across a split second you know in terms of well obviously won't be that but it'll be something star wars i they would make more of them and uh they would kind of try to reward their staff instead of being like great job uh get the hell out of our office so i i'd rather see that than see, you know, people work for Disney Interactive and get the kibosh.

I think Griffin won this week. Yeah, kind of give it to Griffin, really, if you think about it. Yeah, I think. If I could, I'm here instead of Griffin. Griffin wins. I think practice. I know you guys are going to be really hurt, but I would agree. I think Griffin probably wins.

I think Griffin won. Yeah, good job, Griffin. Congratulations. Good job, Griffin. Congratulations. Griffin in absentia. We're thinking about you, buddy. That's going to do it for this week on the Besties. Thank you to our very special guest, Dave Tack, reporter at Polygon. Polygon is also a website.

It's not just a hub for podcasts. It's a website. You can find it at Polygon.com, at Polygon,com at Polygon, Facebook slash Polygon, YouTube slash Polygon, Polygon.com dot Tumblr dot com. And so go there, read some things. You got this great Human Angle

video series going on right now that you'll really like. It examines the people behind the games. Cosplayers this week. Cosplayers this week. Alexis is great this week. Yeah, very good. Head on over and check that out. Make sure you join us again next Friday for the besties.

Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best things? Besties!