The Besties - The Besties Podcast 58 — The best of Xbox One

Episode Date: May 24, 2013

Throw us an Xbone, why don't you? We're not sure if you heard, maybe you didn't, but there's a new Xbox coming soon. Well, not soon, but this year, for sure. On The Besties this week, we dive deep and come back with the pearls. 07:30 - Best cell phone feature we're excited to use 17:25 - Best use of FMV that may not be 19:00 - Half time: Ghost dog 29:30 - Best news for publishers in the next generation 38:50 - Best feature that only Russ Frushtick cares about 47:30 - 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!

okay so there's a massive thunderstorm going on in new york city and it brings back memories of hurricane sandy great the great flood the great flood where uh it was not good but hopefully it won't be that bad this time that's where two two of every type of people that live in new york city had to get together in somebody's loft way up high in the sky to preserve you know the problem the problem uh was that neil pat Neil Patrick Harris didn't know what to do because that guy is one of a kind. One of a kind. Once in a generation talent.

I did not endure Hurricane Sandy. I did, however, participate in Winter Storm Nemo, which many question could actually have been more terrifying than sandy and probably people who are in it were braver they said you also got fucking shad racked by by derecho dave i i did i got the derecho pretty hard lost my power for 10 days that was rough so i'm a little bit of a storm expert myself uh based on what i've seen on tlc the primary impact of hurricane sandy was on uh bakeries and hair salons because there's a lot of rebuilding going on in those two specific areas that i've what are you trying to say about

new york i'm just seeing a lot of episodes, like a very special cake boss where he tries to dig out his cakes from his non-functioning freezer, that kind of thing. Well, I should mention that the storm has not stopped. So I guess this is not Hurricane Sandy. It's a miracle. Yeah, it's nice.

My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best thing of the past, I would say, at least four days. Let's be conservative about it. My name is Dave Tack, and I know the best thing of the week. My name is Ross Froschig, and I know the best game of the week. This is, of course, the besties, where we talk about everything that's happened in that week and try to pick from the rubble that week, whatever week that happens to be. Okay.

So could it be like... It could be any week. March 1982. Yeah. That's a month, but I get your idea. Tuesday, 1982. That's a day. You're not doing it.

Oh, crap. 4 p.m. All right. I'm already so mad at you. I'm sorry. I'm only going mad at you. I'm sorry. I'm only going four minutes. What? This week, no games.

Do you know why there's no games? Because they didn't show any games at the Xbox One press conference. And that's all we're talking about this week. It's a very special Besties where the next gen's not near, my friends. It's here. I think they hinted at games maybe being supported sure they they referenced that it would play games in at least two different instances yeah it's such a big deal because there hasn't been a new xbox for a long time and now it seems like

there will be one yeah um commentary let's before we get into our granular best things from the press conference i want to i'm curious about how it left all of us how did it leave you when it was done with you where where were you at physically i was physically not nearly as exhausted as i was after the playstation press conference what do as i was after the playstation press conference what do you mean by well the playstation press conference is also almost twice as long but that's what i mean is like it felt like a marathon whereas this felt like a very carefully constructed spike tv special it was it was crazily dense which was which was not so great for the news team because it was uh it required a lot of uh just bad writing just we did we did some of the worst writing just to slop it up there

i had to get it done so fast we just like put where we vomited the news into a bucket and then threw it on a the canvas it is our beautiful website the spell check button so far away i just post it you're talking about milliseconds though i know every every moment you gotta get that seo uh i just think from just from an entertainment like i can sit and watch a press conference and be sort of interested i think they crushed sony i'm not talking about feature set or anything like that i just think like i was watching, and they kept saying new things, and I didn't have to watch gameplay of Knack.

Sure. And as a, you know, the average sort of Joe the Plumber would have gotten a lot out of it, because Joe the Plumber probably really likes TV and football. Yeah. Probably really likes those things and can get super hyphy about it. I actually thought their press conference wasn't that bad, because i went into it knowing they weren't going to show a lot

of games they didn't explicitly say they weren't going to do that ahead of time but the fact that they were like we got a very games heavy e3 presentation waiting for you sort of intimated that yeah this one was going to follow the pattern of the past two xbox 360 mic e3 press conferences which were incredibly like smart glass and you know media partnership heavy yeah um for me it was everything that came after the press conference that was a total fucking oh that was a mess but i think we're getting probably into our best categories so maybe we should start it who wants to go first? Mine's dumb, so someone else do one. Should we do an overview? Is there anyone who doesn't know the details of this yet that would be listening to our program also?

Is that too narrow of a section of the Venn diagram? Yeah, that person doesn't exist, I don't think, unfortunately. I mean, what's there to say? It's called the Xbox One. It's got some heady specs. It's so dank. It's called the xbox one it's got some heady specs it's so dank got some dank specs it'll uh i'll hook up to your cable box and so you won't have to change inputs to watch your cable tv and it can uh multitask so if you're playing a game and you want to watch tv you just sort of snap that right on there and

then it has a lot of different power states like these are the only things that i got excited about the fact that it has like a rest state that you can boot from instantly like that's kind of neat i'm down with that um it can apparently save your state of the game you're playing at any time so if you just want to you know power it off and go do something else it'll save it right there you don't think it's like like the veto or essentially like if you want to use like an app you can like pause it but it's not like saving permanently yeah i don't think because that would disrupt some of the like you know dark souls is almost entirely built around the fact that saves are few and far between. Well, I'm pretty sure they're not designing the Xbox console to support Dark Souls functionality.

No, but they wouldn't usurp not just Dark Souls, but, you know, there's a lot of games that don't allow you to save anywhere you want for very specific reasons. Punch out? Yes, precisely. Eureka. Now, I think we're deep enough into specific details now that we can open up with our best competitors. Dave Tack. Yes, sir.

You're our guest. I'd like you to talk about what you think is best about the Xbox. We actually sort of just touched on it there. I think it's the best sort of cell phone feature that I'm excited to use, which is that sort of Insta-save, Insta-switching feature. And I think in large part it's because I've grown so used to my console being slow at this point. It's not slow. I don't know.

When you say slow, you mean like it takes a while to turn it on and do shit with it compared to a cursor? That is correct. It's like 30 to 45 seconds to get to a point where I could actually move a cursor, which is ridiculous. Right. It's nuts, but it's also, I think, because when they designed these things,

they had no idea that this is what they'd be doing. And eight years later, they've jammed so much stuff into it that it's just, it's been maxed out. Yeah, I do like going back and looking at that original dashboard. Oh, my God. The days of the blades are long gone. Unbelievable. Right. I'm totally down with that

because I do love, like that's what I love about the 3DS. I just open it up and it's right there. That's what I love about the Vita too. But the pitch that I don't multitask really on any electronic device

I own except for my computer. Sure, I will have multiple apps open on my ipad but that's not really multitasking like I'm not really using two of those at once um the the pitch of like you can be playing a game and then if you want to watch tv it's just like want to watch tv it's just like zim zam magic magic connect spell and then it changes to tv like that's it that that just doesn't hold much water for me because it's like i if i want to watch tv i'll watch tv like i don't i don't understand why one would need a such a smooth transition between media consumption because i that's's what happens, I don't know, sometimes I'm like crafting something that takes a while and I watch TV in the meantime.

But does it, that's my question, does it save the state of the game? That's what it seems to be. What they told us was that it, let's see here, it essentially effectively saves, not like an actual in-game save. But think of it like iOS. When you leave an app and it, like Russ said, essentially pauses the game. Yeah, but on iOS, if you run too many apps, you'll, like, lose your state.

I don't think it runs iOS. Oh, my God. I was making an analogy oh he burned you he burned your shit up that's a goof that's what i did there it was funny they have to have i mean they gotta come up with something right right they gotta put something in it i like the idea of saving everything like i think that's cool i just i feel like both the consoles right now are lacking that feature that and i mean we we came up with, like, these best ofs, and, like, I think we all kind of went for little things, because I don't feel like either box, right, I mean, obviously they're going to play next generation games, and as such will be exciting, and we're going to buy them as a result, but, like, I don't feel like either one has, like, that big idea or, you know that that really gets me excited just to to have it as a rule like i just feel like it's an iterative they're both so surprisingly iterative considering um you know how long it's been since we had the last console generation am i am i alone

in that no i actually i think you are okay well he's, he's not, though. Damn it. Go ahead, Dave. Go ahead, Dave Tagg. The thing is, these are the first. This and PS4, to a lesser extent, the Wii U. They're the first new consoles to be released since basically the iPhone or the smartphone and tablet revolution. And a lot of the features that we're seeing in the new consoles weren't born on consoles they're just doing things that we've come to expect from other devices yeah and i don't it doesn't make it a ton less exciting to me i don't i don't know how much time i'm going to spend like putting skype on the side of my screen and watching tv on the other but if i can

do it really fast that makes me happy so just the idea of insta boot is great like it's it's going to be as quick to start a game or start an app or to start anything uh you know as it is to tap an icon on my phone so what you're describing sounds to that's how i feel about the um the playstation um is essentially they showed what was very much the playstation 4 you know it does better graphics uh better controller but essentially the only like new feature that they put out there was like you could share game clips with your friends and like watch other people play over cloud and stuff like that i'm sorry microsoft on the other hand put forth a total revisioning of what like a game

console is like what the focus is for a game console and in this particular case tv yeah which is to say tv right absolutely and they're basically turning it into that thing that plugs into the hotel tv right you can get your pay-per-view yeah you learn about where what the pool hours are um no i mean you look at like when when we had the generational switch from from 360 to ps3 obviously hd massive you mean ps2 to ps3 yeah i'm sorry ps2 ps3 xbox xbox 360 that generation the generation 7 depending on how you want to number them but the 7th or 8th generation we had uh first off blu-ray on ps3 which was which was awesome because we had a lot bigger storage space there and the ability to play those movies.

So, like, right there in the box, like, that's that big, big feature that most people had not had in their living room before. Well, and also online. And also the fucking dankest graphics. Well, I'm trying to put graphics aside because we are going to get new dank graphics. That's, like, not what I'm talking about here. The leap in dankness, though, is not going to be nearly.

I'm saying we make the leaped hd we have bigger storage we have uh these massive uh uh the well not massive at the beginning but hard drives that allow you to download games make that a reality for the first time in the console i actually i only have a four gigabyte arcade unit so i have no idea what you're talking about oh trust me on this one i mean these are big, big things that really could change the landscape and did and like were enough to get you excited about the console that you're buying outside of the fact that it was just the next thing that played games. And like, I don't, maybe Sony has something more to talk about with like streaming.

And I think streaming is a big possibility there that could be the you know sort of the big hook but outside of better graphics uh from a game perspective I don't I don't really see anything that's like getting me excited or not not just getting me excited but like it had to happen you know that we had to have these new consoles and even the graphics Griffin as which you mentioned like i the the leap from the the current generation to the next generation in terms of graphics is not going to be like it was before it's not going to be the jump to from sd to hd it's just not right you remember like the first time you played assassin's creed and you sort of you know climbed up some tower

looked around. At least I remember doing that. Is that how you're supposed to get around? I kept getting stuck on the ground. You're supposed to climb in that game? Which, Assassin's Creed? Yeah. No.

I was just walking on the ground. I kept getting scared of all the horses. Yeah. I would just run away from them as fast as I possibly could. Okay. Some real ass-looking horses. Remember how awesome the horses looked? The horses looked great, too.

I mean, yeah. There were things that that could... My point is, there were things that you could do in the game that you couldn't... You could see why you needed the next gen for that. Right. Like, beyond graphics. All of the people walking around saying the four lines of dialogue that had been recorded uh you know all of that kind of stuff so that was a joke i think we're still i think we're still

gonna get shit like that from this generation like obviously we're still gonna get shit like that i just i do not think it is going to come from the the graphics department i think a lot of that has to do with the fact that these console generations are not happening so far apart that PC gaming has like already shown us how fucking good these graphics are going to get. And even when these new consoles come out, they are still not going to look as great as the highest end PC does. I think it's going to come from other feature sets. It's going to come from other technology that they put in there i think it's going to come from you know having these massive massive massive server banks for clouds that lets you have dedicated servers for every single multiplayer game and let you play you know 300 player matches and sustain these you know mmo-esque features and the online multiplayer components of console games

that really haven't shown any strength or validity in that department ever before like that's the kind of stuff that's going to be able to change the game but we're not really we haven't been shown that we haven't shown that and that's what i'm really hoping when we get to e3 uh what i'm hoping for um is that we can figure out what it is in games that we couldn't do before that we're able to do now. And that's sort of central to my best of the week. Mine is the best use of FMV that may in fact not be FMV. And that is Quantum Break, the new game coming to Xbox One from Remedy,

which is the developer you'll know behind the original developer high max pain and also alan wake so so before you delve into this i'm curious if you could just obviously i think everyone that listens to this podcast knows how much justin loves fmv but i don't think everyone knows specifically what like counts as fmv so like generally i just view fmv as like it's not in engine it's right it's out of engine but also does it have to be live action for it to be mv in my opinion for in my traditional definition it has to be fmv people try to tell me about like has to be live action you mean it has to be yeah it has to be live action to be fmv it can't be cartoons i'm i'm not interested in cartoons i want to see real ass bad actors uh it's in doing their performing what oh my god i played tender loving care on the

ipad by the way which would have been my best of oh my god that is a dope treat if you've never seen that a psychosexual erotic thriller uh John Hurt as a psychoanalyst. John Hurt's up in it fucking all the women. He asks you questions about your psyche, and the movie contorts to please your psyche, I think. Oh, God. At one point, he says, have you ever looked in awe at a horse's penis? That is an actual line from this game. Little did John Hurt know that just by playing an from this game little did john hurt know that just

by playing an fmv game you were already at full chub yeah uh so i love fmv and quantum break looks like it is integrating some sort of full motion video into the experience i don't know exactly what they weren't clear about it uh it is a game where apparently time is somehow messed up, I guess. It's broken somehow. Page one of the script, interior day. Time's all messed up. Well, have you seen... Looks like time's all fucked to shit.

We better get on it. Have you seen the show Touch? Anyone? No. With Kiefer Sutherland? I know that it stars Kie stars keeper southernland and a little boy and it's called touch so imagine touch but with a girl and that's i do all the time there you go i did through most of my formative years for certain um so i i what i would be

interested to see is this is if this is some sort of, like, transmedia property where, you know, like, has some video elements. Because that was another part of the announcement was they talked about Xbox Entertainment making some just purely video-based stuff, which I think would be really interesting. Alan Wake had that. Yeah, Alan Wake did. Remedy has always utilized F&B. They used it in remedy has always utilized f and b they used it in the max pain games and they used it in alan wake but they also had that uh they had that twin peaks ask web series that's actually super super good like one of the what was it called night springs bright bright falls bright falls um it was that was like actually genuinely very good and like it served as a

great extension of of the the franchise in the world that that alan wake was set in like if they did more stuff like that i think that would be pretty dope what if quantum break opens up like in the opening credits at the end it says based on the novel by alan wake i would lose my mind that would be amazing they just came out and did a video where they were like uh the the studio lead was like talking to the fans about why they weren't doing alan wake 2 and it's like dog i watched that trailer there were a shit ton of like inanimate objects floating around covered in dark masses and like chasing human beings around like it's it's fucking alan wake too what did he

say what was his explanation they're gonna make it when the time is right also known as they sold six copies yeah his summary it was basically in summary like sorry guys but like i need to eat like i have a wife and kid to feed like i i need money and you guys didn't give me any of that last time. I need money for this funny accent. I can't walk around. Whoa. What? Did you just hear that? Let's die. That's what I get for making a dumb joke.

Anyway, Owlwake's on sale for five bucks. Yeah, you should. It's on Steam and Xbox, I think. It is a triumph. It's a good game for five bucks. I don't know.'t wow was that the most exciting game that they i mean they showed off they showed off ghosts which looks pretty tight love that puppy chris grant was in the newsroom chat room yesterday just fucking spitting some

dope heat about business ideas the dopest business ideas activision take this have it use that connect 2.0 let us scan in our own personal pets to fill the role of the call of duty ghost dog wait ghost dog is in it clearly no not what i mean let me scan in my sweet my sweet kitty cat let me scan in forest whitaker uh i think that's a good idea i would pay i would pay money i would microtransact that i would give i would give at least i would give maybe 600 microsoft points yeah what what what other ideas did he have that that was really the only one was just a microtransact to scan in my dog or my cat i don't have a dog but i would buy one to scan it into ghosts i would do that in a uh in a

a car racing game that would be a lot of fun what what happened with scanning yourself into into games scanning yourself onto a skateboard design well no even scanning like your face yeah i know that was the dopest and tony hawk no perfect dark had it did it yeah perfect dark was like the first game that ever had it rainbow six vegas was super kind of creepy actually watching yourself get like murked by terrorists and then it's your dead it's your own dead face there on the ground yeah i don't know what what happened to facial mapping. It seems like we should have the tech to do that. Well, it was all terrible.

I know, but like things are better now. Things are better. You don't have to do, I think for the original, I think it was Tony Hawk Underground you could do it. You had to take a picture of yourself on a digital camera which used a floppy drive because it was 1990 81 um tuesday it was tuesday on that year and you had to take a picture of your face and then email it to some server and then it would ping you back with a link that you would have to put

into the game manually and now you can just like you just scan your face with that connect 2.0 so many possibilities yeah how about it connect to how about you know what else was really cool that they didn't show up this is the kind of shit we were talking about earlier about like cool gameplay shit that they just didn't talk about um and we didn't even know about it until we interviewed them afterwards the controller the guide button in the middle of the controller, doesn't have that little ring around it telling you what player you are. And so Brian was like, why is that? And the guy said, because Connect 2.0 will be able to face map everybody

that signs on to it. It will be able to, and the controller has an IR output. The Connect will be able to tell who is using what controller. Okay, so they could do this like that. I remember when the Kinect first launched, the original Kinect first launched, they were like, you walk in front of the screen and you wave at it and it knows exactly who you are

and it never worked, not once. Mine can do that. Really? It still does it? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So that shit you just said was all wrong well maybe it's because i live in a small new york apartment yeah or maybe it's just because your looks are fading really quickly and it can't even i'm like the picture of dorian gray the skin is just like sloughing off yeah that might be cheekbones oh that's my handsome beard

but i in that that's kind of dope like you don't have to like oh hold on turn your controller off and let me unplug the battery pack and then plug mine back in yeah if that works 100 of the time i think that's cool but the second it's not like isn't consistent then it's a nightmare and now you have no way to like control who's player one yeah well except you to take his face off. Yeah. Replace it with your own face. Like Ghost Dog.

And you definitely do have to have your Kinect plugged in all the time. There's no... They have said that it always has to be in. It always has to be watching you. Yeah, that's colossally obnoxious. All the time. Like, there's no excuse for that. So to recap, your console never turns off,

and it's always watching and listening to you. And also, it's super horny. It's super, super horny. It's DTF constantly. It's DTWYF, which is even worse. Sorry, what's WYF? Down to Watch You Fuck. Oh, okay, gotcha.

It wants to upload that to its own private servers, and then when the fucking Skynet becomes self-aware, it's going to be a sexpocalypse. All of my sites are going to feature lots of JPEGs of my naked form. I know that none of us picked it, but I use GameSt stuff's kind of crazy right the reason i didn't pick that is because i like we just don't fucking know what's up and it was a total do they not know what is this is what i think it's gonna be and i'm pretty confident

to recap if you did not see what happened on on the day of basically you had phil harrison and the at xbox support account saying wildly different things actually contradicting each other first of all who said that that uh the xbox support account was even a reliable source to begin with it's a bunch of guys that were trained to use twitter uh it is a guinness world record for the most responsive yeah it's actually super good phil harrison came out said there would be a fee if you wanted to play a game second hand 100 percent friend well no at first he didn't say that when first he talked to to wired actually it wasn't harrison at first wired had that story said they reached out to a microsoft representative i don't think they named who it was said that there would be a fee that you would pay and that's how it would work then xbox support said there wouldn't be a fee then kataki published an interview with phil

harrison where he said there would be a fee close to the price of the full game um and i don't remember what the next backpedal was there but we reached out to microsoft and a microsoft representative told us that that was just a potential scenario. So like they also said like a bunch of obnoxious shit. Like the story for today is that we're showing off this entertainment all in one solution for your living room. And it's like, actually, you don't get to decide what the story is today because this is fucking bananas. Yeah, they don't seem to have everything buttoned up. bananas yeah they don't seem to have everything buttoned up that harrison interview in particular like he's i don't know it seemed like he wasn't media trained at all or not even prepared yeah

because it's not like questions not like he's been doing this for fucking right 15 to 30 years like did he walk in there not expecting someone was going to ask about always on and used games yeah his his statement on always on is that it's not going to be always on no but it will do online checks every 24 hours or else you can't you can't play your games like what are you fucking doing guys it's it's a little bonkers anyway that's why i didn't want to talk about it is because it's yeah there's just a lot of unknowns at the moment i will talk about my thing though go for it tell me mine is the best news for video game publishers of the best news for for video game publishers in in the next console generation and that is that indies cannot self-publish on xbox one so you're necessary still so you're

necessary you're you're essential and a process the the very purpose of which is to circumvent you so so that's great news for you guys so what do you think is the rationale that micah honest to god i've been thinking here's here's the only thing i can think and and microsoft may have a valid point here is that when i think of of all of the digital sales platforms that exist, Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, Google Play, iOS, I always, and this may or may not be true, but I think of Xbox Live Arcade as being the most quality controlled, the one that if you take up the average sum, the mean of the quality of all the games on that

platform xbox live arcade is leagues ahead of yes everybody else but at on the other hand it also has far fewer games i would say than any other platform yeah which is not great when we say that uh indie developers need a publisher to put games on xbox it either has to be microsoft game studios or an improved publisher okay so how does it work on psn for example uh on psn uh it's not a fucking free fall free for all it's not like ios uh you have to and they have changed how they do things to to make things much more indie friendly from when the ps3 first came out but uh you have to uh basically be granted permission to release your game on the playstation network but they are incredibly like lenient for for who they

allow to do that okay but is it just a matter of like there being less like checks along the line like you're not constantly having to meet with microsoft to like see progress on your game or i don't know how that works yeah um but i do know on playstation network you can self-publish you just have to get permission from from from sony um on xbox you have to partner with a publisher no matter what and that if you don't know that system is already crazy and broken like you already have people who are trading those tokens

yeah right who are trading to get the opportunity to publish a game on there it's nuts and it's not a system that is working well at all and it's so sort of like backward to me and so sort of not where things are going. It seems really crazy.

Could you make like a shell company? And like, I'm Russ Frustic Productions. It's doubtful that it would be one of their approved publishers. I don't actually know who is going to be. I have a really nice suit. I don't know who is on that list, but I do, like you see casualties of it all

the time like uh the uh stranger's wrath right didn't didn't just had water just couldn't get a publisher didn't want to get a publisher from their approved list and said well i guess we're not and it also increases the number of uh you know obviously they have to pay out the publisher pay out microsoft right now they're they are adding another you know drain on on their revenue that just doesn't fucking need to be there like what possible purpose could there be for a publisher if the independent developer has lowered their overhead to a point where they don't need to seek outside funds, they don't need any outside help promoting or marketing their game, which is a totally viable scenario. And then you're fucking releasing it digitally. It's not like you need to pay somebody to print the discs.

There are so many instances where a publisher just isn't necessary. And they are making it a requirement and the only reason i can see that is to maintain their quality control instead of just letting it be an open market and then have a form of curation that that makes these games successful but sony has quality control too it's just not as stringent right but sony also has a number of different storefronts like it has playstation mobile which say what you will right is a billion times better and more supported than xbox live indie games yes which you can only release in xbox live indie games on the xna platform which they're not going to fucking support anymore yeah like they have they have shown a uh systemic

pattern of just not giving a shit because they don't think that that indie games are moving the needle and i mean numerically it's not i mean you know you're talking about the smaller indie look trust me i love indie games it's even small tiny indie game no one ever heard of i love them but are they keeping sonyloat? Not really. No one's like, I mean, they're good. They're keeping software flowing, but no one's like making tons of money off of these. And maybe it's just Microsoft being,

well, you know, we'll just like not, I don't really want to worry about being nice to, you know, thousands of indies. We'll just pick the six we like and we'll work with them. And that'll be that. That's the thing. Like they bank entirely on these huge mega monster hits for the platform and that's fine but you can have those in the indie world if you like how many how many million sellers do you

think there have been for xbox live arcade and then compare that to how many million sellers you think there have been for ios and i know that there's a lot more of that hardware out there but i also think it has something to do with the fact that a lot of those companies are like, oh, fuck that, we're not going to port our games over to Xbox. Well, and pricing and free-to-play and all that stuff. There's a lot of factors there. I would say the one-to-one comparison would be PSN versus Xbox, but...

Yeah. Anyway, yeah. I don't think we'll ever get those numbers together. No, probably not. And even if we did, like, Minecraft probably fucking throws the whole thing off yeah i don't know it's just it's just crazy to me that like on the other end of the spectrum sony is doing everything in their power to court to court indie devs from like loosening up who they give permission to release psn games to

to like the having the pub fund going out to fucking showing off the witness at their at their reveal press conference like they are they are obviously so much better in tune with with how great indie games are and and how the wind is blowing and and i don't know microsoft just seems like they either don't give a shit or they just don't have a clue yeah i i i think it's just a matter of a priority thing and they this is one area they either don't give a shit or they just don't have a clue. Yeah, I think it's just a matter of a priority thing. And this is one area that they don't want to change tack. But the fact of the matter is, this is something that they could change over just a couple months. Like one day they could wake up and be like, you know what, we're going to try to do with indies now in a year or two.

It's not like for the lifetime of the Xbox One console, this is going to be law. I mean, it might be, but it's not necessarily. They did say, so the story where this surfaced was a Shaq News interview with Redmond Game Studios and Platforms General Manager Matt Booty, which is pretty good. And he said, I would also expect that for this new generation that we're going to continue to explore new business models

and new ways of surfacing content. So like, I guess it's not out of the picture that they could change their mind about this. Right, but if you look at who they brought on stage, it was Call of Duty and it was EA. You know, and they showed FIFA and Mac.

E3 is going to be a better indication. E3 is going to be the crucible for like so but uh but sony did sony did bring on jonathan blow and if you don't think that that was a symbolic gesture as much as it was anything else yeah it was but sony's press conference was was both hardware and software whereas microsoft was almost entirely like but focus but get outside of get outside of the the mindset of just talking about the announcement of these two consoles look at the companies as a whole when when sony talks about the ps3 exclusive that characterize their console possibly for the entire generation but definitely for the past year what game do they turn to uh buzz yes buzz the trivia game no they turn to journey journey is like the fucking feather in

their cap and yes that is also because they didn't release too many exclusive games last year but like they obviously know that indie games aren't just some diversion and they're not even just like a way to trick gamers into thinking that your platform is the true games the the where true gamers play like they know that it is a a viable commercial model well do they did journey sell consoles is a better question again i don't have the numbers but if it didn't that's why microsoft is doing what it's doing which is to say and from a business perspective they don't care because it's not going to make an impact. But can they really champion this message of it's the all-in-one box unless you wanted to play indie games on it?

Yes, because they have marketing people that are championing that. They can champion whatever they want. It doesn't matter if it rings true or false. Is the Pizza Hut app going to be on it? I goddamn hope so. Well, let's talk about our last thing. Okay, our last thing is the

i forget how i phrased it as the best oh yeah the best thing that no one else cares about cloud achievements oh man you were right that is dumb uh yeah closer everybody it's gonna can we just do dave's again we're gonna close this one out with cloud achievement no i like i like the idea of cloud achievement explain to me what it is, because you just said two words that I just couldn't hear. Okay, so right now, when a game comes out on Xbox 360, you're essentially, you have to assign 1,000 gamer score points or 60 achievements to that game. And in terms of the back end, it's tied to that game release.

So if they ever want to add new achievements or mess like rename achievements or if an achievement is broken and can't be unlocked by anyone the only way to fix that is to do a title update as an example uh battle block theater which is out right now a pretty major release uh has one achievement that no one can get it's it's actually bugged and the only way to fix that is a title update which can take three months or whatever and also ten thousand dollars and also ten thousand dollars well i don't know for battle block they're probably fine they do have millions and millions of dollars so but for other people it's an issue so essentially what they're doing is removing achievements from being tied physically to the game's release and making them fully controlled by

the publisher of the game so uh if call of duty adds you know one week wants to do like a special you know whatever get 10 headshots this week achievement they can do that in a blink of an eye whereas before it would take way longer and be more expensive but doesn't that kind of devalue the whole idea of achievements though it depends how no no it doesn't kind of it absolutely okay 100 utterly got a shadow of a fucking doubt in values something that is already utterly without value they've done the impossible okay that is the killer app of xbox is it bends reality around itself and devalues a thing without value okay so here's the thing is that it depends how much they do it if a game comes out and it has a thousand human points and then in the next week they add four thousand more achievement points

i completely agree with you but if you if you fucking on gears of war five unlock the you know the diet sprite kill of the week achievement and then that's on your fucking profile forever dog like a fucking dark mark that how i would just i would have to change my name i would have to go into witness protection to get out of that shit i just think that it achievements are already so goofy i think they're dumb but i do think i i do you don't think they're dumb you love them like a mother loves her infant child i know here's the way i look at achievements, and I think it's important that people acknowledge that I have some maybe quasi-basis in logic. Achievements, the way I look at them, are like books on a shelf.

When you look at a shelf of books, you remember, oh, I remember when I read Lord of the Rings Two Towers. That was a pretty good book. Remember that time when Sauron fell or something? I don't know. So for me, it's more like a shelf of books that have bookmarks stuck in them

close to the very beginning of the book that show how very few achievements I get in my videos. Why close to the very beginning? Well, I mean, okay, it's usually about halfway through. I would say my average number of achievement points I get for any thousand point game is like 300 to 400 tops. Yeah, so I'm more of a completionist.

So I finish just about every game that I play. I finish them. But finishing a game doesn't mean getting all the achievements, you psychopath. Sometimes it does. You mad man. I realize that it's silly, but I don't know. I like the prospect of like what I'm thinking the way that i think of it is like look at a game like dishonored dishonored has like a bunch of ways to play through it

and i like the idea of like three months in them being like hey we added this new power maybe see how you can get through the game using this power and okay here and it's free like how can you complain about what's essentially free content? Because I will... Okay, let's just pump the brakes there on content. Because, okay, no, it's not content. That's a lie. Achievements are sort of... That's intellectual dishonesty that I will not allow it on the besties.

The problem I have with this, and the reason I wasn't more excited about it, is that there are one or two possibilities here either a they make an achievement easier to get or harder to get both of which invalidate that achievement or they add achievements which leads to uh the the de-inflation, the deflation, if you will, of the value of achievement scores. So like this thing that was already like sort of silly and meaningless becomes like, because if you don't think they're like the moment, like someone's going to throw in that as a selling point,

like we have 4,000 achievement points you can get, like that that completely devalues the system i don't see how you keep that number constant and also be able to make changes to achievements on the fly also what does that world you work your dick off unlocking all the chivos in in gears of war 7 locust Humper and then you finish it after spending hundreds of hours getting that one elusive chief that you needed to complete the set and then the next

day you wake up and there's a title update and there's 30 new ones. Well that's why I do like what Sony does which is decouples the Platinum Trophy from DLC so you can get the Platinum Trophy and it doesn't like remove your completionist achievement when the new dlc gets added whereas on the xbox when new achievements get added and

you're at 100 you just drop down to 90 sure so i guess you guys have convinced me and now i'm dreading it hey dave tack yeah this is your first uh your first year as a games journalist. I think E3 will actually be right around your specific year point. Yes, sir. What was it like for you watching this console announcement? This is your first one, because obviously no one counts the Wii U. What have you thought about it so far? How's the experience been for you?

There was the PlayStation 4 too. I mean in total. I mean with both of them. Yeah. It's interesting to look at it from the sort of perspective of somebody who's covering it because you learn. I felt like I used to know a lot about the industry, like more than normal people before I started.

And then I started and I realized how little I knew compared to the people I worked with. Don't you ever fucking forget it, motherfucker. Right. Because I'm learning all the time. I always got my rear view up. You check it for dave tax and the thing is like it's so much fun to see the bigger stories play out um you know you you you

hear a little bit we're working on a rumors post right now where we're checking to see what over the last year year and a half what everybody thought was going to come out what these leaked memos were going to be or you know what these leaked memos were going to be, or, you know, what these leaked memos said were going to happen, what people in the know said were going to happen. And that's what I love about this thing, where everybody knew. You know, we were sitting around at the loft last year during E3 wondering if anybody was going to announce a console.

And here we are almost a year later, and we finally got that. This story's been blowing up, and it finally popped. And I think it's super exciting now that we actually have the thing to talk about. We actually have the console to dig in, to find out about, to learn all of that stuff that we've been wondering about for so long so uh i love it and please don't fire me because i like this job a lot done perfect i mean you you're done no oh no but leave your blogger with uh samantha on the way up my blogger your blogging device it's like a phaser but it blogs like a phaser, but it blogs. It's like a phaser, but you just pointed at press releases and transmogrify them into news.

Into clicks. This has been the best of the week. And we're going to pick a winner real quick. I really think that Griffin had a strong interest. What do you guys think? I'll pick a winner this week. You ready for this? The PlayStation 4.

Sony crony. Whoa. No, I think Sony. Sony crony. Whoa. No, I think Sony. I think Griffin probably won. He rips off that mask to reveal he was Kaz Harai the whole time. Griffin's multiple

wins have been sponsored by Sony this entire time. This has been the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest and best and brightest of the video game industry. Thank you for joining us. I'm sorry about whoever has the really noisy room. It's been irritating

me the whole time too, so just know that you're not alone. You can join us again next Friday where we'll talk about a wider array of topics one would assume, unless another console is announced in that meantime. Make sure you visit us on Polygon. We've got a brand new article page.

All our news articles look sexier than ever with all kinds of cool new functionality, so you don't want to miss that. If you get this chance, go to iTunes, give us a subscription and a review and a critique from your heart. We would appreciate that. You can follow us on at Polygon,

YouTube slash Polygon, YouTube slash Polygon, Facebook slash Polygon, Polygon.com, .tumblr.com, and probably Grindr somewhere. And make sure to join us again next Friday for the besties! Shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's

best things besties